Real terror culprit

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The September 11 commission found troubling new evidence Iran was closer to al Qaeda than was Iraq. More importantly, and through no fault of its own, the commission missed the biggest prize of all: Former Pakistani intelligence officers knew beforehand all about the September 11 attacks.

They even advised Osama bin Laden and his cohorts how to attack key targets in the United States with hijacked civilian aircraft. And bin Laden has been undergoing periodic dialysis treatment in a military hospital in Peshawar, capital of Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province adjacent to the Afghan border.

The information came to the commission's attention in a confidential report from Pakistan as its own report was coming off the presses. The information was supplied with the understanding the unimpeachable source would remain anonymous.

Pakistan still denies President Pervez Musharraf knew anything about the activities of A.Q. Khan, the country's top nuclear engineer who had spent the last 10 years building and running a one-stop global Wall-Mart for "rogue" nations. North Korea, Iran and Libya shopped for nuclear weapons at Mr. Khan's underground black market. Pakistan has also denied the allegations by a leading Pakistani in the confidential addendum to the September 11 commission report.

After U.S. and British intelligence painstakingly pieced together Mr. Khan's global nuclear proliferation endeavors, Deputy Secretary of State Rich Armitage was assigned last fall to convey the devastating news to Mr. Musharraf. Mr. Khan, a national icon for giving Pakistan its nuclear arsenal, was not arrested. Instead, Mr. Musharraf pardoned him in exchange for an abject apology on national television in English. No one in Pakistan believed Mr. Musharraf's claim he was totally in the dark about Mr. Khan's operation. Prior to seizing power in 1999, Mr. Musharraf was -- and still is -- Army chief of staff. For the past five years, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence chief has reported directly to Mr. Musharraf.

Osama bin Laden's principal Pakistani adviser before September 11, 2001, was retired Gen. Hamid Gul, a former ISI chief who, since the 2001 attacks, is "strategic adviser" to the coalition of six politico-religious parties that governs two of Pakistan's four provinces. Known as MMA, the coalition also occupies 20 percent of the seats in the federal assembly in Islamabad.

Hours after September 11, Gen. Gul publicly accused Israel's Mossad of fomenting the plot. Later, he said the U.S. Air Force must have been in on it since no warplanes were scrambled to shoot down the hijacked airliners.

Gen. Gul spent two weeks in Afghanistan immediately before September 11. He denied meeting bin Laden on that trip, but has always said he was an "admirer" of the al Qaeda leader. However, he did meet several times with Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban leader.

Since September 11, hardly a week goes by without Gen. Gul denouncing the United States in both the Urdu and English-language media.

In a conversation with this reporter in October 2001, Gen. Gul forecast a future Islamist nuclear power that would form a greater Islamic state with a fundamentalist Saudi Arabia after the monarchy falls.