Terror Watch: No Clue

Investigators appear to be making little progress in identifying who put together and carried out the suicide-bombing attack last week on United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, frustrating both U.S. and U.N. officials.

Despite a claim of "responsibility" published by at least one Islamic Web site (myislah.org), U.S. and U.N. investigators say they have no way of authenticating the message. Officials also have little more than theories about who might have carried out the bombing plot, which some investigators call "professional," well organized and well financed. In fact, the list of theoretical suspects might even be growing.

The latest speculation: that commercially minded bandits with no political or ideological commitment may have teamed up with religious militants or former Baathists to conduct the attack. This theory has been added to the already confusing list of possible explanations because investigators say they fear well-organized criminal gangs are becoming an increasing security threat in Iraq. Such gangs may have access to potent caches of arms that disappeared when large sections of Saddam's security forces melted into their surroundings as American troops bore down on Baghdad last spring.

One Bush administration official who visited postwar Iraq said that the kinds of stolen weapons now available on Iraq's black market include everything from pistols and rifles to bombs and rocket-propelled grenades. Investigators have said the bomb that exploded outside the U.N.'s Baghdad headquarters apparently was composed not of homemade or plastic explosives but from munitions apparently looted from Saddam's arsenals.

Investigators are fairly certain there was a political or religious motive behind the U.N. bombing and that the possible involvement of bandits or organized crime in the attack would principally have been to supply munitions. But they remain puzzled about the motive for the attack, which killed the senior U.N. representative in Baghdad, Sergio de Mello, and 22 other U.N. staffers and bystanders.

Initial suspicion centered on either Saddam diehards or Jihadi fighters who allegedly have been infiltrating Iraq from nearby Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran as part of their religious crusade against infidels. Both groups might view U.N. personnel as collaborators with U.S. forces. And the Baathist connection was heightened by the revelation that the U.N. compound employed the same security guards that guarded its offices before the war, and that many of these were suspected to have been informants for Saddam's intelligence services.

But little additional evidence has so far turned up of a Baath connection to the attack and hard evidence of a connection to Al Qaeda or other Jihadi groups--apart from Internet claims--has also been slow to accumulate. And U.N. sources say that at this point they also cannot rule out the possibility that the attack was a manifestation of some kind of power struggle inside Iraq's awakening Shiite community. "There are no good leads," said one official in Washington who is monitoring the investigation. Another Washington official said it was possible that investigators may not learn who mounted the attack until some claim of responsibility is authenticated.

U.S. and U.N. officials say that one of their worst fears is that the attack was carried out by some amorphous, ad-hoc conspiracy in which Baathists, Jihadis and even bandit elements--or some permutation thereof--coalesced for long enough to plan and execute the operation, and then quickly dispersed. Some officials also acknowledge that the slow progress of the investigation is an indication of the difficulties that U.S. and allied forces in Iraq are having in gathering intelligence, particularly in Baghdad. They say U.S. investigators and operatives have had to take harsh security measures to protect themselves from crime and other attacks and that the protective measures have only further isolated them from contact with ordinary Iraqis.

DEAR SIRS ...

One of the most telling documents to surface so far among the large pile--reportedly several thousand pages--of material that has been made public by the British inquiry into the apparent suicide of a government weapons expert is a letter dated July 8 from an anonymous intelligence official to the deputy chief of intelligence at Britain's Ministry of Defense.

In the letter, the unnamed official said that he was "so concerned about the manner in which intelligence assessments for which I had some responsibility were being presented" in a now-notorious anti-Saddam "dossier" published by Tony Blair's government a year ago that he wrote to one of his superiors "recording and explaining my reservations." Despite this written record, the letter goes on, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told a committee of Parliament that "there had been no formal complaint from members of the security and intelligence services about the ... dossier." The anonymous official said he assumed that Straw simply was unaware of his written complaint, but wondered what he should do now that the issue of possible dissent over Iraq inside the intelligence services was becoming a public issue.

Despite intense media interest, the identity of the author of the July 8 letter has not surfaced, though British media reports have called some attention to the letter. It is one of the hardest piece of evidence to surface on either side of the Atlantic that professional intelligence analysts were queasy about possible exaggeration or misuse of data in pro-war statements, speeches and white papers prepared by the Blair and Bush governments. No similar such written complaint has surfaced from inside U.S. civilian or military intelligence agencies. (So far, the British government also has managed to keep secret the July 8 letter-writer's original, and no doubt far more explicit, complaint to his bosses).

The British inquiry, launched by Tony Blair after the suicide of Dr. David Kelly, an expert on Iraqi unconventional weapons programs who had been fingered by the government as a source for an anti-Blair story on the BBC, has put the British government in the rare position of being much quicker than its American counterparts to disclose intimate and revealing documents about its internal machinations over the war in Iraq. The inquiry's Web site (the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk) is loaded with the kind of fly-on-the-wall minutes of government meetings and e-mail discussions among top spin doctors and functionaries that in Britain normally do not see the light of day until at least 30 years after the event. In one form or another, the Bush administration made its own use of some of the contentions material at the center of the British investigation. But so far, the GOP-controlled Congress shows little interest in emulating Britain's example of public disclosure.