Robert Baer - Blow the house down

The blue-ribbon commission that investigated 9/11 did finger Iran, at least to a degree. Iranian intelligence assisted some of the hijackers transiting Iran to Afghanistan, making sure their passports were not stamped. Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the mastermind behind the slaughter, had a cozy relationship with Iran, too. KSM, as he's known in intelligence circles, stashed his family there back when he was wanted by the United States for trying to assassinate President Clinton and blow up twelve U.S. airliners over the Pacific. When three of the future hijackers flew from Beirut to Iran in 2000, a particularly nasty Hizballah operative with close ties to Iran was on the same plane.

All that's in the 9/11 report, as is the fact that KSM apparently wasn't a member of Al-Qaeda. In the commission's word: "KSM states he refused to swear a formal oath of allegiance to bin Laden, thereby retaining a last vestige of his cherished autonomy." Did he then have an "allegiance" to Iran? The commission doesn't offer an opinion, only recommending that

Iran's role in 9/11 be studied further. It should. But what's striking in the 9/11 commission's report is the same thing that was striking in the indictments for the embassy bombings and Khobar Towers: No Iranian-or even the Hizballah operative traveling on the plane with the 9/11 hijackers-is named.

Stack up the intelligence we had against Saddam Hussein next to what we had on Iran, especially if we go all the way back to the Tehran embassy takeover in 1979, and it's obvious that the United States went to war against the wrong country in March 2003. Why? I don't pretend to know for sure, but maybe the answer has something to do with a grand balance-of-power scheme: Depose Saddam and give Iraq to the Shia, sow conflict between the Shia and Sunni across the Middle East, and drive a fatal wedge between the Indo-European Persians and the Semite Arabs. Divide and conquer-an ancient strategy.

Amid the blind stumblings of the Iraq war, the evidence for a master plan is thin, but there is some. In 1996, a group of neocons who would go on to become architects of the Iraq invasion wrote a paper entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm." It's mostly drivel, but in one telling part the paper calls for bringing down Saddam and containing Syria, all of which has come to pass. Once again, though, there was no plan for Iran. It's as if the neocons like the country just the way it is.

Or maybe the far left has it right: The White House warmongerers are all about power and money, especially oil money. After all, Exxon's revenues soared to over $100 billion a quarter in 2005, and even Dick Cheney's Halliburton climbed out of the red in the wake of the Iraq war.

Whatever the actual truth, the absence of convincing evidence leaves the field open to a fictional one. That's what I try to get at in Blow the House Down. Like any fictional truth, this one stands, I hope, on a firm foundation of reality. Aside from the above indictment of Iran, here are the facts I've drawn from:

• The FBI forced John O'Neill into retirement by giving his personnel file to the New York Times. O'Neill died on September 11. He was last seen running towards the South Tower, where his office was on the thirty-fourth floor.

• Freddie Woodruff's murder remains open on FBI books. The Bureau is unsure whether he was murdered or died from a stray round.

• Two Saudi officials-one suspected of being a Saudi intelligence agent- were in contact with two of the hijackers in California almost two years before 9/11.

• John Millis was assigned to Peshawar in the late eighties, at the same time bin Laden was living there. On June 2, 2000, Millis was suspended as House intelligence committee staff director. He committed suicide the same day.

• One of Beirut AP correspondent Terry Anderson's captors spoke with a French accent and claimed to have attended the American University of Beirut.

• Another American abducted in Lebanon, Father Lawrence Martin Jenco, told investigators after his release that one of his captors had blue eyes and red hair.

• In October 2000, the Kuwaitis detained two of the 9/11 hijackers transiting from Iran. The record of their interrogation has never been made public.

• The character of Prince Al Sabah is based on a real Gulf prince who tried to warn the United States that KSM planned to use commercial airliners in suicide operations inside the United States.

• The Securities and Exchange Commission and the FBI found no evidence that anyone benefited financially from 9/11, but experts acknowledge that the use of encrypted trades, fiduciary agents, and multiple accounts makes it nearly impossible to determine whether anyone has benefited from foreknowledge of a disaster like 9/11.

• By January 2000, the CIA knew two bin Laden terrorists and future hijackers had entered the United States and taken up residence in California. The CIA failed to tell the FBI until August 2001. The 9/11 Commission concluded that had the FBI arrested the two on material witness warrants-both men were involved in the attack on the U.S.S. Cole-9/11 might never have happened.