<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">
Prague Revisited
The evidence of an Iraq/al-Qaida connection hasn't gone away.

This month, I went to Prague to meet with Czech officials who had directly handled the pre-9/11 expulsion of a senior Iraqi diplomat, a case that would became known as the Prague Connection. Because it goes to the heart of the issue of whether Saddam Hussein might have played a role in the attack on the World Trade Center, this controversy has continued to rage, without any satisfying conclusion, for more than two years.

The background: On April 21, 2001, the CIA's liaison officer at the U.S. Embassy in Prague was briefed by the Czech counterintelligence service (known by its Czech acronym, BIS) about an extraordinary development in a spy case that concerned both the United States and the Czech Republic. The subject of the briefing was Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, the consul at Iraq's embassy in Prague.

The reason there had been joint Czech-American interest in the case traced back to the December 1998 when al-Ani's predecessor at the Iraq Embassy, Jabir Salim, defected from his post. In his debriefings, Salim said that he had been supplied with $150,000 by Baghdad to prepare a car-bombing of an American target, the Prague headquarters of Radio Free Europe. (This bombing never took place because Salim could not recruit a bomber.)
</font>