Terror Watch: More Questions on Missing Imam

A radical imam allegedly abducted by CIA agents in Italy shortly before the U.S. invasion of Iraq was identified as a key figure in a jihadi network supplying foreign fighters for Ansar Al-Islam--a terror group that the Bush administration was then seeking to link to Saddam Hussein's government, according to Italian court records.

The court records laying out the Italian case against Egyptian-born cleric Mostafa Hassan Nasr Osama, or Abu Omar, suggest possible motives for an otherwise puzzling CIA operation that has created new tensions between U.S. and European counterterrorism officials. An Italian judge last week ordered the arrest of 13 purported CIA operatives on kidnapping charges and requested that Interpol, the international police agency, provide assistance in tracking them down.

The CIA has steadfastly refused to comment on any aspect of the case, much less discuss why the agency would have undertaken such a snatch operation--known as an "extraordinary rendition"--on the soil of a major European ally. But court records in the case show that the Italian police had assembled a large mass of evidence tying Abu Omar to Ansar Al-Islam, the Al Qaeda-linked group based in the Kurdish region in northern Iraq. Administration officials say Ansar was being protected by Saddam and run by lieutenants of the notorious terrorist Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi.

The alleged abduction of Abu Omar on the streets of Milan took place on Feb. 17, 2003, just one month before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It was also two weeks after Secretary of State Colin Powell had, in his speech to the United Nations Security Council, invoked Ansar Al-Islam as the linchpin of the administration's case linking Saddam to Al Qaeda. Abu Omar, the abducted cleric, was flown to Egypt after his kidnapping, according to Italian court records that include the aircraft numbers of the rendition flights. He later phoned home to his wife and another imam in Milan and claimed that he had been tortured in an effort to turn him into a spy for the United States.

Although much about the alleged CIA operation remains shrouded in secrecy, the Italian court records and the timing of the alleged snatch suggest that it may have been driven by the agency's interest in quickly getting new information about what Abu Omar knew about Ansar Al-Islam, either to bolster the administration's argument in support of the invasion or to disrupt a terrorist network inside Iraq that would be fighting U.S. forces once the invasion began, according to some former CIA officials.

"There definitely seems to be a connection here to Iraq," says Robert Baer, a former CIA case officer who specialized in Middle East terrorism. "We either wanted to find out information about Zarqawi's connections to Saddam or to protect the troops. "I don't think they knew what they were going to get."