CIA, allied security services keeping track of Iraqi agents

The CIA and security services from several U.S. allies around the world are prepared to arrest Iraqi agents, their associates and known anti-American terrorists to prevent possible attacks against U.S. citizens, embassies or other facilities if the United States launches a war against Iraq, according to senior Bush administration officials.

"We and our allies are bracing for a terrorist offensive, and we are keeping track of Iraqi intelligence officers around the world," one senior U.S. intelligence official said.

Foreign intelligence services already are tracking individuals known to be in touch with Iraqi agents, and they have interrogated some of these individuals as well as some Iraqi expatriates, the official said.

U.S. allies also are on alert for signs that Iraqi President Saddam Hussain has sent agents abroad to arm Iraqis or terrorist groups with conventional, chemical or biological weapons, officials said. They said some of the weapons may already be in place outside Iraq's borders.

Administration officials said the campaign is underway in countries across the Middle East and Europe as well as in parts of Asia and Africa where Iraqis or anti-Western terrorist groups are believed to be active.

They said the operation is not in response to any specific threats but is based on U.S. intelligence estimates that Saddam might respond to a U.S. invasion by ordering attacks against American targets in either the United States or in foreign countries.

In the run-up to war, the FBI has been searching for several thousand illegal Iraqi immigrants who have gone missing while visiting the United States, officials said last month.

Although the majority of Iraqi immigrants are viewed as being sympathetic to the United States, federal authorities are concerned that others are more likely to be Iraqi agents or to be allied with terrorist groups.

CIA Director George Tenet told Congress in October that U.S. intelligence agencies believed Hussain, if convinced a war was inevitable, "probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions."

In a letter to Senator Bob Graham then chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Tenet said Saddam "might decide that the extreme step of assisting terrorists in conducting a WMD (weapons of mass destruction) attack against the United States would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him."

The CIA analysis is based on the experience of the Gulf War in 1991. When U.S.-led forces began their air attacks against Baghdad, one of Iraq's intelligence agencies attempted unsuccessfully to carry out terrorist bombings against U.S. embassies and other facilities, including targets in Manila, Bangkok and Jakarta, according to U.S. intelligence assessments.

According to these assessments, Hussain sent pairs of agents to many countries where they were to pick up explosives or weapons that had already been sent abroad.

The CIA's Counterterrorism Centre put into operation a plan in 1991 very similar to today's in which U.S. and other intelligence services identified and watched Iraqis and their allies.

After the war, former CIA director William Webster said, "At our request, these teams were picked up; they were interrogated; they were arrested where there was cause to do so; and when there were no legal grounds for arrest, they were deported."

A U.S. intelligence official said last week that the administration expects Saddam "to try to do this again, and we can't expect to be as successful this time as we were in 1991. We were lucky then and their agents can't be as inept as they were then."

Another intelligence official said the CIA "would be very surprised if Saddam didn't attempt a terrorist offensive this time when he did (during the Gulf War) when his regime was not in dire straits."

Webster said that in 1991, Iraqi intelligence operatives carried sequentially numbered passports so that after the first few were identified and questioned, it was easy to locate others in different countries and pick them up. As a result, Webster said, "The number of terrorist incidents was very small."

Two terrorists in the Philippines blew themselves up trying to plant a bomb outside the U.S. cultural centre in 1991. Another bomb was found before it could be detonated outside the breakfast room of the U.S. ambassador's residence in Jakarta.