Evidence Points to Iraq Plot on Bush, U.S. Says : Mideast: Some advisers recommend extraditing suspects arrested in Kuwait. Others counsel retribution against Baghdad.

The Clinton Administration has obtained what it regards as credible evidence that the government of Iraq tried to assassinate former President George Bush three weeks ago, and President Clinton’s top advisers are divided on how to respond, Administration officials disclosed Friday.

Clinton, who has been briefed on the evidence, dispatched a team of Secret Service and FBI counterterrorist investigators early this week to Kuwait city, where Bush made a triumphal visit April 14-16 to celebrate the allied victory in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

During the visit and afterward, the Kuwaiti government arrested 16 people, including 11 Iraqi nationals, and seized hundreds of pounds of explosives and what it described as “special technical equipment.” The 16 suspects and another Iraqi still at large have been charged with conspiracy to kill Bush and execute other “acts of terrorism, sabotage, infiltration and robbery.”

They never came close to the American entourage, and it is unclear what led to their arrest.

The emerging links to the Baghdad government, which are not considered definitive, were disclosed by a U.S. official who said he favors stern reprisals against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and fears that the Administration will be distracted by its domestic agenda and the competing demands of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Other sources said the Administration is split. Some Justice Department officials, they said, are urging that the suspects be extradited to the United States to face criminal charges. Other officials, who are said to include Deputy National Security Adviser Samuel (Sandy) Berger, Defense Undersecretary-designate Frank G. Wisner and CIA Director R. James Woolsey, are arguing that an attempt on a former President’s life requires direct retribution against the responsible government.

U.S. officials said Friday they are not relying primarily on the Kuwaiti government for proof of the alleged attempt against Bush. They said a CIA team preceded the FBI and Secret Service in Kuwait city, and they described four main types of evidence.

The circumstances alone, they said, raise suspicions about Iraqi government involvement. The explosives were carried last month from Iraq into Kuwait’s northern Jahara province in two cars stolen in 1990 during Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait and still bearing Kuwaiti license tags, the Kuwaiti government reported. U.S. officials said the transit of an estimated 550 pounds of explosives through Iraq’s second-most-heavily militarized region would have been difficult without official sanction.

Second, the suspects were in possession when arrested of high-technology equipment, which Administration officials declined Friday to specify. A source close to Bush said the former President has been briefed on the suspects and they were “described as being way too sophisticated, involving things too sophisticated to be just some crazies with a complaint against the President.”

Third, in what one official described as “the core” of the case, the investigators have made some progress in “looking at the explosives they were planning to use, tracing them to the source.”

The fourth type of evidence involves statements obtained by Kuwaiti security services. Mohammed al Sabah, the new Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington, said in an interview Friday that the suspected ringleader, Raad Assadi, confessed under interrogation to being “a colonel in the Iraqi secret intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, stationed in Basra.”

U.S. investigators had not yet interviewed the suspects as of late Friday, but a senior official said the Administration is placing “extremely high priority” on “getting our own access to these people” and expected to do so within 48 hours.