[FREE IRAN Project] In The Spirit Of Cyrus The Great

[TheGuardian]

German trial hears how Iranian agent warned US of impending al-Qaida attack
http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,11209,1130338,00.html
Ben Aris in Berlin
Saturday January 24, 2004
The Guardian
The United States was warned of impending September 11 terrorist attacks by an Iranian spy, but ignored him, German secret service agents testified yesterday in the trial of an alleged al-Qaida terrorist.
The spy, identified as Hamid Reza Zakeri, tried to warn the CIA after leaving Iran in 2001, but was not believed, two German officers who interviewed him told the Hamburg court.
Zakeri worked in the department of the Iranian secret services responsible for "carrying out terrorist attacks globally", one of the officers said.
Prosecutors called the spy as a surprise witness against a Moroccan man, Abdelghani Mzoudi, who is on trial for being a key aide to three of the September 11 hijackers.
He is said to have handled money, covered for absences by members of the al-Qaida cell based in Hamburg and trained in an Afghan al-Qaida camp himself.
He is charged with 3,066 counts of aiding and abetting murder, one for each of the victims of the New York and Washington suicide attacks.
Mzoudi is one of a clutch of suspected al-Qaida operatives being held around the world.
Iran said for the first time yesterday it was planning to try a dozen suspects who have been detained in the country.
The Bush administration, which has accused Iran of harbouring al-Qaida militants, countered by saying Tehran should send the suspects to their home countries for judgment.
The US has long suspected that the detainees slipped into Iran from neighbouring Afghanistan following the American-led invasion in 2001.
"We want to see action, and the action we want to see is that they turn over those al- Qaida members in their custody to their country of origin," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.
Western intelligence officials believe that among the Iran-held figures could be an Egyptian, Saif al-Adel, the security chief of Osama bin Laden's network.
A son of Bin Laden and a spokesman for the network chief could also be in Iran, Saudi sources said.
The testimony at the Hamburg trial could heap more embarrassment on the US state department and secret services, which have denied allegations that they were forewarned of the attacks.

The White House and US intelligence agencies have been plagued by accusations of a catastrophic failure since the four planes were hijacked to such devastating effect in 2001.

[Chicago Tribune]

Mystery witness to talk of Iran

Chicago Tribune and Yahoo Original Link: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/chitrib_ts/20040130/ts_chicagotrib/mysterywitnesstotalkofiran
By John Crewdson Tribune senior correspondent

The typed, one-page letter, in broken English, is addressed to the "Prezident of the United States of America Mr. J Bush."
In it the writer, who uses the name Hamid Reza Zakeri and claims to be a former Iranian intelligence agent, tells the president that he warned the CIA (news - web sites) less than two months before Sept. 11, 2001, that the Iranian government knew about a major terrorist action against the United States.
"But they did not believe me and did not operate," the letter says.
Zakeri, who will not divulge his real name, claims he faxed the letter to the White House in April 2002 but never got a reply. Now he is causing headaches for the CIA and other Western intelligence services, at least one of which says he cannot be trusted; for German prosecutors, who say he can, and for a court in Hamburg that is trying to decide the fate of a Moroccan charged with aiding the Sept. 11 hijackers.
The prospect of Zakeri's testimony before the Hamburg court provoked an angry reaction from the Iranian foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, who earlier this week dismissed Zakeri as "not honest" and his information as "fabricated."
Iranian diplomats here go further, asserting that their intelligence services have never had a relationship with Zakeri and pointing to what they say are subtle flaws in one of the documents that Zakeri says proves his service with the Iranian intelligence agency MOIS.
According to the newsmagazine Der Spiegel, the German federal police, who are frantically checking Zakeri's credentials in advance of his courtroom appearance, have confirmed that he is a former MOIS officer who developed relationships with German and French intelligence services after his defection in 2001.
After several days of vacillation, Zakeri said Thursday that he had decided to testify Friday at the trial of Abdelghani Mzoudi, the second person in Germany to be accused of assisting the Hamburg university students who participated in the Sept. 11 hijacking plot.
German courts can compel a witness to appear but not to testify. The five-judge panel was on the verge of delivering its verdict on Mzoudi last week when prosecutors requested a delay to allow them to present a new witness. Zakeri, who says he fears retaliation by Iran, agreed to appear after receiving assurances that his safety and anonymity would be preserved.
Claims about defendant
The court is interested in hearing Zakeri's claims--apparently not from firsthand knowledge but unnamed sources inside Iran--that Mzoudi "was involved in the logistics" of the Sept. 11 plot, an assertion that goes to the core of the prosecution's case against the 31-year-old former student.
Zakeri claims that Mzoudi spent three months in Iran before Sept. 11, 2001, and that while there he was in touch with a senior Al Qaeda figure, Saif al-Adel. Zakeri told the German federal police, the BKA, that he did not know why Mzoudi had been in Iran.
Mzoudi's lawyers, who deny their client's involvement in Sept. 11, will not say whether he ever visited Iran. Nor, they say, will Mzoudi answer that question if it is put to him by the court. Mzoudi has been silent throughout his six-month trial.
Whatever Zakeri claims to know about Mzoudi pales in its potential significance next to his assertion that top Iranian leaders forged a relationship with Al Qaeda dating at least to 1996 and that some Iranian leaders became aware of the Sept. 11 plot in early 2001.
Zakeri emerges at a delicate and promising moment in U.S.-Iranian relations, marked by this week's visit to Washington of the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations (news - web sites)--only the second such visit by an Iranian diplomat since the 1979 revolution that culminated in the seizure of the American Embassy in Tehran by ultrafundamentalist student revolutionaries.
In seeking to defuse Zakeri's upcoming appearance in Hamburg, Iran's government issued a statement reminding the world that Iran was among the first nations to condemn the Sept. 11 attacks and that its opposition to the Taliban prompted an attack on the Iranian Consulate in Afghanistan (news - web sites) in which 13 diplomats were killed.
"This is why mention of a relationship between Iran and Al Qaeda only confuses the public consciousness," the statement said, calling Zakeri's assertions "worthless rumors."
In a recent three-hour interview here, Zakeri, 40, a tall man who dresses well and speaks English, described in considerable detail what he said was a 17-year career with the Iranian intelligence services. That career, he said, included a clandestine posting to Ottawa, where he covered his intelligence activities by driving a taxi and running a pizza restaurant.
It was in Canada, Zakeri said, that he became enamored of life in the West and first "established links" with the CIA in 1992. Recalled to Iran, Zakeri said, he worked his way through a succession of jobs in foreign intelligence and security to his last position with a supersecret group known only as "the intelligence organization of the leader," the supreme Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
According to Zakeri, the Iranian leadership learned of the Sept. 11 plot during two meetings in Iran in January and May of 2001 with senior Al Qaeda figures, including Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s top aide, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and bin Laden's eldest son, Saad. Zakeri said he was assigned to handle security for the meetings and saw al-Zawahiri and Saad bin Laden.
Zakeri said he did not attend the meetings but learned later from his superior, whose code name was "Haddadian," that "a major Al Qaeda operation" against the U.S. had been the topic of discussion.
In July 2001, Zakeri said, he was told by Haddadian that the attack against the U.S. was to take place within a few weeks. When he asked for details, he said, Haddadian told him to "wait until Sept. 10, 2001."
An Iranian diplomat in Berlin who asked not to be identified said MOIS headquarters in Tehran denied ever employing anyone named "Haddadian." Soon after his talk with Haddadian, Zakeri said, he became concerned that the MOIS planned to "liquidate" him and fled to the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, followed within a few days by his wife.
Receptive at 1st
At the U.S. Embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan's capital, Zakeri said he gave the American ambassador and a CIA representative a five-page handwritten statement declaring that an attack by Al Qaeda against the U.S., supported by the Iranian government, was set for Sept. 10, 2001. He attributes the confusion in the date to a mistranslation of the Iranian calendar.
Zakeri said the Americans at first seemed receptive, with the CIA representative giving him money for food and clothing, and driving him in a Chevrolet Blazer to a "safe house" where he spent several days. Zakeri, who says Haddadian never told him details of the plot, said he insisted that the Americans record the five-page document as his "official statement."
During his stay in Baku, he said, a man named "George" arrived who said he was from CIA headquarters. Zakeri said his conversations with the Americans suddenly were broken off after "George" received a telephone call from Washington.
"The Americans don't want to admit that I gave them this report," Zakeri told the BKA in a six-hour interview last week, "because it would damage their reputation."
Zakeri said he faxed the letter to President Bush (news - web sites) shortly before he left Baku in May 2002. The CIA declined to comment on Zakeri's assertions, on the grounds that the Mzoudi case is still before the German court. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy in Baku also declined to comment, saying, "We never discuss intelligence matters."
The CIA has been sharply criticized by congressional investigators since the Sept. 11 attacks for intelligence lapses and failures to coordinate with other federal agencies, in one case failing to inform the State Department, immigration and customs officials to be on the lookout for two Al Qaeda operatives who died aboard one of the planes hijacked on Sept. 11.
Bruno Jost, a prosecutor who specializes in espionage cases, told the Hamburg court last week that, in his experience, Zakeri had been "largely credible so far." Jost based his assessment not on Zakeri's current assertions but on his help in an earlier case, the machine gun murders of dissident Iranian Kurds at a Greek restaurant in Berlin a decade ago.
What the German authorities have been able to establish about Zakeri's veracity--or lack of it--will be presented to the court Friday. But since Sept. 11, police and intelligence agencies in Europe and the U.S. have gathered independent evidence of links among Iranian intelligence, Al Qaeda and the Hamburg hijackers.
Those links date to the mid-1990s, according to Robert Baer, a longtime CIA officer who spent several years in the Middle East and says there is "incontrovertible evidence" of a 1996 meeting in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, between Osama bin Laden and a representative of the Iranian MOIS.
The Iranian connection with Al Qaeda surfaced again in Hamburg in 1997, when German intelligence was tipped off by its French counterpart that a Syrian immigrant named Mohammed Zammar, who later confessed to recruiting the Sept. 11 hijackers on behalf of bin Laden, had made repeated visits to Iran.
The logistics expert
In December 2000, as the hijack pilots from Hamburg were concluding their flight training in Florida, Ramzi Binalshibh, the self-described logistical coordinator of the Sept. 11 plot, applied for a visa at the Iranian Embassy in Berlin, BKA records show. Binalshibh entered Iran on Jan. 31, 2001.
The BKA does not know how long he stayed or whom he saw there. The next known sighting of Binalshibh was Feb. 28, when he and Mzoudi, the defendant in the current case, showed up to clean out the Hamburg apartment where lead hijack pilot Mohamed Atta, and later Mzoudi himself, lived during their student days.
When Binalshibh fled Hamburg for Afghanistan six days before the hijackings, he again passed through Iran, records show. A former Al Qaeda associate, Shadi Abdallah, who met Binalshibh in Afghanistan while working as a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, testified that Binalshibh told him of frequent visits to Iran using a false Iranian passport.
Ironically, it was a statement by Binalshibh after his capture in Pakistan on the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks that prompted the Hamburg judges to release Mzoudi from prison in December pending a verdict. According to Binalshibh, the only people in Hamburg who knew of the Sept. 11 plot were him, Atta and Atta's fellow hijack pilots, Marwan Al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah.

[Reuters]

Moroccan Got 9/11 Code Training in Iran - Defector
Reuters Source Link : http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20040130/wl_nm/security_germany_trial_dc_1

By Philip Blenkinsop
HAMBURG, Germany (Reuters) - A Moroccan accused of helping the September 11 suicide hijackers received training in encryption techniques at an al Qaeda camp in Iran in 1997, an Iranian defector said on Friday.
Hamid Reza Zakeri, the cover name of a man who says he worked in Iranian intelligence and defected in 2001, was testifying at Germany's second major trial of suspected members of al Qaeda's Hamburg cell.
He told the court that the defendant, Abdelghani Mzoudi -- suspected of handling money for the September 11 plotters and covering up for them -- had spent three months in Iran learning to master codes and was an integral part of the conspiracy.
It was not immediately clear how the alleged training was linked to the plot.
Mzoudi, 31, had been expected to be cleared of aiding and abetting the murder of several thousand people and being a member of a terrorist organization until the testimony from Zakeri suddenly surfaced last week.
In evidence heard last week from police interviews, Zakeri had said Iran's secret service had contact with Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s al Qaeda network ahead of the September 11 attacks.
He also told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday that bin Laden's son had personally forewarned Iranian leaders of the planned attacks on U.S. cities, because al Qaeda wanted Tehran's help in sheltering its members afterwards.
Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said earlier this week that the defector was not credible and had invented his story.
'CIA PLOY'
Zakeri, a tall, bearded man with thick hair and glasses, told the court on Friday much of his information came from a high-ranking source in Iran with whom he remained in contact. He acknowledged he had neither met nor seen Mzoudi personally.
As recently as December, he said, al Qaeda military chief Saif al-Adel and Iranian officials met, concerned about Mzoudi's release from custody last month. They believed it was part of a CIA ploy to lead the U.S. agency to al Qaeda figures.
"They came to the conclusion that Mzoudi would have to be killed by a letter bomb sent from Duesseldorf or Vienna, or if he was deported, that he could then be seized," Zakeri said.
His appearance may threaten Mzoudi's chances of acquittal, although Western intelligence sources have questioned his credibility, and his sometimes rambling testimony on Friday may not have helped prosecutors.
"It's difficult to follow you, Mr Zakeri," judge Klaus Ruehle said at one point during more than three hours of questioning.
Mzoudi's trial took a dramatic twist in December when new evidence from a secret source -- presumed to be captured al Qaeda leader Ramzi bin al-Shaibah -- said he was not part of the core Hamburg cell with prior knowledge of September 11.
The court declared Mzoudi was no longer "urgently suspected" and freed him from custody, although the trial continues.
Prosecutors say Mzoudi handled money for fellow plotters and covered up for them and that he also trained at an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan (news - web sites), although they have not mentioned Iran.
Defense lawyers argue Mzoudi did no more than help fellow Muslims living abroad, and say his paying of student fees and other bills was in no way central to the September 11 plot.
His trial is only the second anywhere of a September 11 suspect. His friend and fellow-Moroccan Mounir El Motassadeq was sentenced to 15 years in jail by the same Hamburg court last February, but is awaiting a ruling on an appeal.

[Deutsche Welle]

30.01.2004
Defector Testifies Against Terror Suspect

Source URL: http://www.dw-world.de/english/0,3367,1430_A_1100867_1_A,00.html

Mzoudi was a liaison to al Qaeda, witness said.
A man claiming to be a former Iranian spy testified Friday that Abdelghani Mzoudi, the second man to be tried for an alleged role in the Sept. 11 attacks, was involved in the preparations to hit the World Trade Center.
The witness, who goes by the alias Hamid Reza Zakeri, took the stand at the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court in Hamburg and claimed that Mzoudi, was "responsible for part of the organization" of the suicide attacks that destroyed the twin towers in New York and damaged the Pentagon. Zakeri testified Mzoudi acted as a liaison to the al Qaeda terror network and was responsible for receiving codes from operatives.

Mzoudi, a 31-year-old Moroccan national who at one time lived in Sept. 11 ringleader Mohammed Atta's apartment and signed his will, faces charges of more than three thousand counts of accessory to murder and of being a member of a terrorist organization. Only the second person to go on trial for the attacks, he is suspected of handling money for the Sept. 11 plotters and covering up for them.
Defense attorneys argue that Mzoudi did nothing but help fellow Muslims who were living abroad.
Zakeri, who claims he worked in Iranian intelligence and defected in 2001, told the court that he did not personally know Mzoudi nor had ever seen him. He said his information came from "reliable sources" in Iran, although he declined to name them. According to him, Mzoudi underwent a three-month training course in 1997 in an al Qaeda training camp in Iran where he learned encryption techniques.
Iranian connection
Perhaps even more dramatic was Zakeri's testimony that top Iranian officials enjoyed close relationships with al Qaeda leaders and that Iran was aware of preparations for Sept. 11. In earlier statements to German police, Zakeri said Osama Bin Laden's son met with high-ranking Iranian officials in May 2001 and informed them of the planned terrorist attacks.

From the witness stand on Friday, Zakeri told the court that Iran and al Qaeda had discussed a plan to kill Mzoudi last month, so that he could not reveal the Iranians' involvement in Sept. 11.
"They came to the conclusion that Mzoudi would have to be killed by a letter bomb sent from Düsseldorf or Vienna, or if he was deported, that he could then be seized," Zakeri said.
Credibility problem
Zakeri's appearance on Friday did little to relieve the wide-spread doubts about his credibility help by Western intelligence sources. His answers to most questions were evasive and rambling, according to those in the court. During more than three hours of testimony, Judge Rühle often had to ask Zakeri to repeat himself. At one point after several contradictions and incomprehensible answers, Rühle said: "I don't know if you are consciously being unclear."
Earlier this week, Iran's foreign minister, Kamal Kharazzi, described Zakeri as a "swindler" and said the claims of a connection between Iran and al Qaeda were without foundation.

Unpredictable trial
Mzoudi's trial, which started in August, has seen several dramatic twists and turns. In mid-December Judge Rühle suddenly released Mzoudi from custody, saying new information from an unnamed informant that could exonerate him. According to the information the court received, the informant testified that Mzoudi did not play a role in Sept. 11 and was not informed of the attacks as they were being planned. That information is believed to have come from Ramzi Binalshibh, a suspected al Qaeda operative who is in U.S. custody.
Although Mzoudi was no longer "urgently suspected," his trial continued after his release and he was required to attend or face possible re-arrest. However, most observers said the case against him had all but collapsed. On Jan 21, just one day before the expected acquittal was to be handed down, prosecutors brought forth Zakeri and secured a last-minute delay.
DW staff (jam)