Terrorism? Sudan Gave Us No Help

One of the mistakes all too frequently made by the outside world is to assume that because the regime in Sudan is bad it is incapable of fooling the good guys.

The regime, however, has been anything but ineffective. Quite the contrary, it is frequently brilliant, always clever and too often successfully manipulative. Its most successful ploy has been to turn on its head the adage “actions speak louder than words.”

“We stand for peace,” the government says. According to Khartoum, the government wants nothing more than to end the civil war that has killed more than 2 million civilians and turned southern Sudan into a permanent, destitute relief center. What Sudanese officials fail to mention is that they overthrew an elected government in 1989 just hours before it was to sign a peace agreement.

“We are not terrorists,” they say. What they fail to mention is that they invited Osama bin Laden not only to live in Sudan but to establish a financial architecture there. What they fail to mention is that they created terrorist training camps and deployed soldiers against their neighbors and Western targets. What they fail to mention is that they harbored terrorists involved in an assassination attempt against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the bombing of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998 and a thwarted plot to bomb the United Nations.

The only definitive step Khartoum ever took against terrorism--asking Bin Laden to leave the country in 1996--came about not out of a desire to thwart Bin Laden’s intentions but because Sudan wanted to avoid further sanctions.

The Sudanese government appears to still hope that words speak louder than actions. Now the story is that the Sudanese government had massive intelligence files on the Al Qaeda network that it wanted to give to the U.S. over the four years beginning in 1996 and that the State Department refused to take them, thus denying the U.S. important information. This is as inaccurate as it is illogical.

The facts are these: On countless occasions, the Sudanese government--eager to get off the terrorism list and end its international isolation--told the Clinton administration that it did not support terrorism.

On countless occasions--in Khartoum, Addis Ababa, Washington, New York, Virginia--U.S. officials asked the Sudanese to provide information or take other actions. They failed to produce.

Some critics of the Clinton administration are now saying that in 1997 and 1998 Sudan desperately wanted to hand over intelligence files that would point to those who were later behind the embassy bombings. The State Department, it is claimed, turned down the offer because of its hostility toward Khartoum.

Khartoum has distorted reality. In 1997 and 1998, Bin Laden was in Afghanistan, but some of his operatives were still in Sudan. Terrorist training camps still were spewing out soldiers. High-level officials from Al Qaeda and other networks still moved freely in and out of Khartoum, including to conferences hosted by the government with the aim of creating an international alliance against the West.

Yet Khartoum never handed over--or offered to hand over--any files on Al Qaeda to diplomats traveling regularly to Khartoum, to the FBI, to the CIA or to anyone in Washington. It defies common sense that the U.S. would refuse terrorist information from Khartoum or anyone else.

If this intelligence was valuable, and the terrorists within Sudan dangerous, why didn’t Khartoum detain them? If this information was so timely, why did Khartoum wait until three months after the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center to make it public?

The answers are easy to discern. Sudan is still on the official terrorism list and therefore a potential target in the U.S.-led war against terrorism. What more convenient way to “rehabilitate” itself than by a retroactive conversation?

Since mid-2000, the U.S. has had an official team of counter-terrorism experts in Khartoum. Again, nothing concrete was provided to them. And apparently nothing was given to the Bush administration before Sept. 11.

I hope Sudan is changing--not only because it is in our national security interests but also because the Sudanese people deserve better than to live under a regime that champions terror.

What is clearly not true, however, is that Sudan wanted to prevent acts of terror during the Clinton administration and that the U.S. refused to play ball. Throughout, and with remarkable consistency, Sudan’s actions spoke louder than words.

It is sad that, for many, Sudan’s words alone appear sufficient.

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Gayle Smith was special assistant to the president for African affairs at the National Security Council under President Clinton.