Memo shows Iraq, Iran tried to contact bin Laden

The Taliban claimed in a 1997 meeting with U.S. officials that it had blocked attempts by both Iraq and Iran to contact Osama bin Laden, according to a previously confidential State Department memo made public yesterday.

The memo says that the assistant secretary of state, Karl Inderfurth, was told on Dec. 7, 1997, by the Taliban’s acting minister of mines and industry, Armad Jan, that his government “had stopped allowing [bin Laden] to give public interviews and had frustrated Iranian and Iraqi efforts to contact him.”

Contacted yesterday, Mr. Inderfurth said he did not believe the Taliban claim was credible at the time, and that he had no recollection of Taliban officials mentioning Iraqi or Iranian attempts to meet bin Laden in the following 19 meetings he would attend with the de facto Afghan regime for the next four years.

“I never saw any evidence in anything I was doing where there were any Iraqi connections,” said Mr. Inderfurth, who was the Clinton administration’s senior State Department official for South Asia.

“The Iraqis were not to my knowledge, players in the Afghan conflict. Almost every other country in the region was.”

The memo, however, discloses a previously unreported link, or at least an Iraqi attempt to establish a link, with bin Laden, the mastermind of the September 11 attacks on the United States.

The document was published by the National Security Archives, an independent institute located at George Washington University. It specializes in using the Freedom of Information Act and other legal means to obtain previously classified material for public release.

The Taliban conveyed its 1997 message to the State Department in the context of a broader pitch to improve ties with Washington.

During the meeting, the Taliban representatives requested agricultural assistance, recommended the United States reopen its embassy in Kabul and said they had been instructed by Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar to present a paper that opened with these words:

“The Islamic State of Afghanistan wants friendly relations with the U.S. and all countries of the world based on mutual respect and non-interference.”

In February 2003, prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell laid out evidence of an Iraq link to bin Laden, claiming that Iraqi intelligence agents had provided training in document forgery to al Qaeda.

He also spoke of links between the terrorist group and Iraq that went back to the early 1990s when bin Laden took refuge in Sudan.

In that presentation, Mr. Powell said, “A senior defector, one of Saddam’s former intelligence chiefs in Europe, says Saddam sent his agents to Afghanistan sometime in the mid-1990s to provide training to al Qaeda members on document forgery.”

The Taliban’s claim that they had been aware of and sought to stop Iraqi efforts to contact bin Laden now appears to back up Mr. Powell’s Feb. 5 presentation.

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