"Mylroie complains that the C.I.A. seems to have been duped into believing that Al Qaeda is a loose-knit group of Islamic extremists, and that the agency's analysts have turned a collective blind eye to the evidence suggesting that Al Qaeda could well be a front organization for Iraqi intelligence. She believes that Iraq was behind almost every major terrorist attack of the past decade, dating back to the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993.

What has the C.I.A. overlooked that she hasn't? Here Mylroie slips, offering speculation in place of solid evidence. She suggests that key Qaeda leaders who have been captured by the United States may only be posing as Qaeda leaders: they could actually be Iraqi intelligence agents who are way, way undercover. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Al Qaeda's chief of operations and the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and who is now in American custody, may not really be Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. He could be an Iraqi intelligence agent secretly sent to run Al Qaeda by Saddam Hussein. Ramzi Yousef, the man behind the first World Trade Center bombing and a 1995 plot to blow up American airliners over the Pacific, who now sits in a federal prison, also may be an Iraqi agent. Both Mohammed and Yousef, who are related, are Kuwaitis originally from the Baluchistan region of Pakistan, and their papers and their identities could have been stolen for use by Iraqi intelligence agents during Baghdad's occupation of Kuwait in 1990. "

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