Mubarak Quoted as Calling Radical Cleric in U.S. a CIA Agent

A radical Egyptian cleric whose followers are charged in the World Trade Center bombing is a paid CIA agent, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was quoted as saying in a government newspaper.

The assertion challenges the U.S. government’s version of how Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman obtained a U.S. visa in 1990 despite his presence on a State Department list of people ineligible for U.S. visits.

“The sheik has been a CIA agent since his days in Afghanistan. . . . He still earns a salary,” Mubarak told newspaper editors, columnists and intellectuals at a meeting in Cairo on Wednesday. “The visa he got was not issued by mistake. It is because of the services he did.”

The U.S. government’s version is that the American Embassy in Sudan that issued the sheik’s visa didn’t notice the blind cleric’s name on a list of undesirables.

In New York, Abdul Rahman’s attorney, Barbara Nelson, said of Mubarak’s claim: “That would be news to me. . . . He has said he never worked for the CIA.”

And Secretary of State Warren Christopher told Cable News Network: “I’ve checked around town on that, and I feel quite confident that he has not” been a U.S. government employee.