Here's the rest of the Dwyer-NYT article about Zubaidi......>>>>Francis Brooke, an adviser to Mr. Chalabi in Washington, said yesterday that Mr. Zubaidi had been an effective agent but maintained that he had never raised concerns about the credibility of the defectors. "Sounds to me like the guy is a loony," Mr. Brooke said. "Who knows who he is working for now? He was working closely for us. He never indicated anything to me like that. It's completely inconsistent with any other knowledge I have of how things worked."
Mr. Zubaidi said he decided to speak out not because of bad feelings against individuals, but to correct the record. "I'm not trying to defame those people, although they betrayed the cause," Mr. Zubaidi said. "Now they are bearing the consequences. I'm a witness. This is something for history."
Mr. Brooke said the I.N.C.'s quest to obtain information on outlawed weapons in Iraq became more pressing after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. On Sept. 20, 2001, with the Pentagon hallways still reeking of smoke and disaster, Mr. Chalabi met with the Defense Policy Board, a group of private citizens that advises the secretary of defense. The clear consensus was that Mr. Hussein had to be removed from power in Iraq, in the interests of stabilizing the region and thwarting his support for terrorists, according to Mr. Brooke, who accompanied Mr. Chalabi to the Pentagon.
For the Iraqi National Congress, which was created in 1992 with United States financial support, the attacks presented an opportunity to define their cause - overthrowing Saddam Hussein - within the newly redrawn agenda of the United States.
Mr. Brooke, an American citizen who works in Washington, said he moved quickly to seek fresh details from the group's agents on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. "I say to everybody, and that includes everybody in my intelligence network, now is a real good time for information on those two subjects," Mr. Brooke said. He instructed them, he said, to "highlight it, put it in red and send it to me right away."
Mr. Zubaidi said he and his associates got that message. "My role during the process was to bring in the person, to write reports of what he said, and to give my personal information and opinion about what they were saying."
Among the first, and most important, defectors was Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a civil engineer who left Iraq in November 2001 and made his way to Syria. There, Mr. Zubaidi said, he had a chance encounter with one of Mr. Zubaidi's associates in a travel agency, and they struck up a conversation. Mr. Saeed had run into legal problems with Iraqi officials, he said, and was eager to move his family to Australia, where his brother lives.
Over a period of weeks, Mr. Zubaidi said, Mr. Saeed disclosed that he had contracts with the government's Military Industrial Organization that involved building and repairing concrete shelters and wells, which he believed were for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. He provided several hundred pages of documents, and had gone to school with an I.N.C. official who vouched for him.
Mr. Saeed, while financially comfortable, needed logistical help getting out of the Middle East because of problems with his travel documents, Mr. Zubaidi said. Mr. Saeed paid his family's way to Bangkok, according to Mr. Zubaidi.
He was accompanied by Mr. Zubaidi's associate, who was interviewed in Damascus last week but asked that he not be named. After several days in Bangkok, two I.N.C. officials arrived from London and spent about a day with Mr. Saeed. Their purpose, Mr. Brooke said, was to put the defector at ease before interviews with a reporter from The Times and a freelance television journalist who had worked occasionally for the I.N.C. but was filming Mr. Saeed for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
During his sessions with reporters, Mr. Saeed mentioned for the first time the facility underneath the hospital, according to both Mr. Zubaidi and his associate. Like other defectors, Mr. Saeed recounted his story to American intelligence agents. In Mr. Saeed's case, the White House specifically mentioned his account in a background paper that accompanied a speech by Mr. Bush.
Inspectors from the United States government tried to find the facility in the hospital that Mr. Saeed described but could not, according to David Kay, who was appointed by Mr. Bush to lead the search for outlawed weapons.
"It wasn't there, didn't pan out, so people took that to mean that nothing else he said was true," Mr. Kay said yesterday by telephone. He said that the war and uncontrolled looting created a "margin of error" about a number of suspected sites, but the hospital was not disturbed.
Mr. Musawi, one of the I.N.C. officials who prepared Mr. Saeed for his interview, said that he could not have coached Mr. Saeed because his information was far too technical. "What can you coach a chemical engineer who specializes in concrete sealing?" he asked.
Also in November 2001, Mr. Chalabi's group arranged for press interviews with an Iraqi Army lieutenant general to whom Mr. Zubaidi had spoken. A reporter for The Times flew to Beirut to meet with the general, Jamal al-Ghurairy, who said groups of Islamic terrorists were training on an airplane fuselage to simulate hijackings.
"We were training these people to attack installations important to the United States," Mr. Ghurairy said. During the interview, the general acknowledged his own involvement in the execution of thousands of Shiite Muslim rebels after the Persian Gulf war of 1991.
Before Mr. Ghurairy met with the reporter, Mr. Zubaidi had tried to get him to write out his account, but the general held out, according to a report provided by Mr. Zubaidi and dated Nov. 11, 2001. In that report, Mr. Zubaidi said that Mr. Ghurairy "played sick. He was being evasive so that he would get guarantees for facilitating his trip" to Europe or the United States.
Mr. Musawi, who had flown from London to Beirut to take part in the session, "assured him that we will secure their trip as soon as possible to any destination they want," the report stated.
Mr. Zubaidi did not have a high opinion of the general's probity. He wrote of Mr. Ghurairy, "He is an opportunist, cheap and manipulative. He has poetic interests and has a vivid imagination in making up stories."
In February 2002, a third defector, Harith Assaf, a major in the Iraqi intelligence service, was filmed by the CBS News program "60 Minutes" speaking about mobile biological weapons laboratories that he said were put into seven refrigerated trucks. Mr. Assaf also described a meeting between a member of the Iraqi government and Mr. bin Laden in Afghanistan.
When Mr. Zubaidi objected and tried to stop the interview, Mr. Musawi, who had come with the television crew from London, said he insisted that it continue. "I told him, 'It's not your call. I'm allowing the story to be told,' " Mr. Musawi said.
Mr. Zubaidi said that the major, Mr. Assaf, had not revealed the purported bin Laden meeting and the mobile laboratories during discussions that had begun three months earlier. His diary entry for Feb. 11, 2002, says: "After the interview, an argument with Nabil about their way of working, especially the connection with bin Laden." In a follow-up story in March 2004, "60 Minutes" reported that Mr. Assaf had been deemed unreliable by American intelligence. In addition, the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks has said that while there were reports of contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda, they did not appear to have "resulted in a collaborative relationship."
Mr. Musawi said the risk to the I.N.C. of coaching defectors was considerable, because it had enemies in Washington. If a story was quickly disproved, he said, "We would look pretty stupid."
Despite this, Mr. Kay said that during the hunt for weapons last year, a number of the defectors admitted they were lying after being put through a polygraph test. "Some of them claimed to have been coached by the I.N.C., and some of them claimed to have been coached on how to pass polygraphs," Mr. Kay said.
Mr. Zubaidi said, "I don't want to criticize U.S. agencies, but it's strange that the U.S. with all its powerful agencies, the C.I.A., could not manage to know the truth from the lies in these people."
Samar Aboul-Fotouh contributed reporting from Syria and Lebanon for this article.<<<<<<<<<<<<
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