"Hamid Reza Zakeri"
Mystery Witness to Talk of Iran

JOHN CREWDSON / Chicago Tribune 30jan04

A man who says he was an Iranian intelligence agent is scheduled to testify at a terror trial in Hamburg. He claims he warned the CIA about the 9/11 attacks, but some say he can't be trusted.

BERLIN—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 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.

Abdelghani Mzoudi

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--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 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'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 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.

source: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0401300181jan30,1,7464340,print.story 30jan04