White House denies faking letter to link Saddam to al-Qaida

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House and the CIA on Tuesday adamantly denied a report that the Bush administration concocted a fake letter purporting to show a link between Saddam Hussein’s regime and al-Qaida as a justification for the Iraq war.

The allegation was raised by Washington-based journalist Ron Suskind in a new book, “The Way of the World,” published Tuesday. The letter supposedly was written by Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, director of Iraqi intelligence under Saddam Hussein.

“The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001,” Suskind wrote. “It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al-Qaida, something the vice president’s office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link.”

Suskind said the letter’s existence had been reported before.

Denying the report, White House deputy press secretary Tony Fratto said, “The notion that the White House directed anyone to forge a letter from Habbush to Saddam Hussein is absurd.”

Fratto and former CIA Director George Tenet also rejected Suskind’s allegation that the U.S. had credible intelligence, before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, that Saddam did not possess weapons of mass destruction.

Fratto said U.S. and other intelligence agencies believed Saddam harbored such weapons and that Saddam had tried to make his neighbors believe he had them. In the end, no such weapons were found, undercutting Bush’s main reason to go to war.

“We know now that those estimates were wrong, but they were the estimates we all relied on,” Fratto said.

In his book, Suskind writes that Tenet gave Rob Richer, the CIA’s former head of the Near East division and deputy director of clandestine operations, the fake letter during a fall 2003 meeting. Suskind quotes Richer as saying, “George said something like, ‘Well, Marine, I’ve got a job for you, though you may not like it.’”

Suskind wrote that “Richer remembers looking down at the creamy White House stationery on which the assignment was written.” He quotes Richer as saying, “This was creating a deception.”