Al-Qaeda Planted Evidence to Provoke Iraq Invasion, Spy Says

Nov. 17 (Bloomberg) -- A senior al-Qaeda operative deliberately planted information to lure the U.S. into invading Iraq, according to a double agent who said he spent years working inside the terror network.

The informer, a Moroccan who uses the pseudonym Omar Nasiri, made the assertion in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation's Newsnight program. His true identity wasn't disclosed and his face was hidden.

Nasiri said Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, a leading al-Qaeda figure who was captured by U.S. forces in late 2001, falsely told his interrogators that al-Qaeda was training Iraqis. U.S. officials subsequently suggested there were links between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein in the lead up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Al-Libi lied because he wanted to make a Muslim country the base for a jihad by provoking a U.S. invasion and he considered Iraq the best option, Nasiri said. Nasiri said he heard al-Libi outlining his belief that Iraq was the best country for the jihad in a meeting at a mosque months before his capture.

Nasiri said he was recruited by French intelligence in the 1990s to infiltrate the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria, or GIA. He said as part of his undercover work he was involved in planting a GIA car bomb which killed 40 people in Algiers.

He said his French spymasters then sent him to Afghanistan where he infiltrated al-Qaeda camps in Khalden and Darunta, learning to make cyanide and explosives before al-Qaeda sent him back to Europe as a sleeper. Nasiri said he then informed on radical Islamic clerics in London for French intelligence and the U.K.'s domestic spy agency MI5.
Bloomberg