Which Khan?

Author Ron Suskind appears to have hit the mark with his reporting in a newly published book about an abortive 2003 Al Qaeda plot to attack the New York City subway system with homemade cyanide bombs. But British and U.S. government officials, as well as two British national newspapers, are raising questions about another claim in Suskind's book. In it, the author said that U.K. authorities may have fumbled intelligence from U.S. investigators about a British suspect who subsequently led a team of suicide bombers who attacked London's public transport system last July 7.

In "The One Percent Doctrine," published this week by Simon and Schuster, and in subsequent media interviews, Suskind alleged that future London subway bomber Mohammed Siddique Khan, a U.K. citizen, was discovered in 2002 by U.S. authorities to have been in contact with extremists in America about a plot to blow up synagogues on the East Coast. Suskind alleges that Khan made at least two trips to the U.S. to finalize attack plans and says U.S. investigators in 2003 insisted that the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center inform British intelligence about Khan's alleged activities. Suskind claims that as a result of the intelligence they gathered on Khan, U.S. authorities put Khan on a "no fly" list two years before the London attacks.

Suskind's claims provoked a political uproar in London because they conflict with official stories U.K. authorities have told about their investigations into the July 7, 2005 London bombings. Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of M.I.5, Britain's counterintelligence agency (also known as the Security Service), told a parliamentary inquiry that her agency had no reason to regard Khan as a serious terrorist threat in the years and months before the subway bombings occurred.

And according to several U.S. and U.K. law-enforcement and counterterrorism officials who spoke to NEWSWEEK anonymously because of the sensitivity of the subject matter, Suskind's information about Khan visiting the United States, and about the CIA being pressed to warn the U.K. about him, is mistaken. The officials said that Suskind and his sources, who include a retired FBI agent who was one of the U.S. government's top Al Qaeda gumshoes, apparently confused the London bomber Mohammed Siddique Khan with another U.K.-based terror suspect named Mohammed Ajmal Khan. Suskind told NEWSWEEK Wednesday that he stands by his reporting as do his sources, who he rechecked with after questions were raised about the allegations in his book.

Suskind's book and its inflammatory allegations about Mohammed Siddique Khan were heavily promoted early this week by The Times of London , the daily newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. But over the last two days, two of The Times' competitors, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph , have published stories questioning Suskind's claims and reporting assertions by British intelligence sources that Suskind had in fact confused the stories of two suspects named Khan.

Earlier this year, the British government published two official reports on the background to last summer's London bombings which identified Mohammed Siddique Khan, a former teaching assistant from the northern English city of Leeds, as presumed ringleader of the July 7 attacks. These reports contained what appeared to be fairly comprehensive accounts of the activities and movements of Khan and the three other July 7 London suicide bombers. In dissecting Khan's background, the reports said that he traveled in 2003 and 2004 to Pakistan, that he may also have made earlier trips to that region, and that he also traveled to Saudi Arabia for the hajj in early 2003 and to Turkey in 2001 for his honeymoon. But the reports make no mention of any visits by Khan to the United States and an official familiar with British investigations into the London attacks told NEWSWEEK that no evidence had turned up indicating Khan had ever visited the U.S.