When I worked in Africa as a foreign correspondent and journalist I never suspected that the Western World’s No 1 terrorist, bin Laden, would set up his first  terrorist undercover headquarters in the continent’s northern Sudan State, right under the noses of leading Western governments well before the bombing of New York’s Twin Towers and the subsequent Iraq War.

I first discovered this fact when I was given sight of a top-secret U.S. Government document written by the U.S. Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, the U.S. Departments of Defence and State and the International Strategic Studies Association.

This highly detailed 200 page dossier of intrigue was assembled in the year 2000 from over a thousand intelligence reports by Allied spy agencies more than a year before bin Laden showed his disastrous terrorist hand in New York on 11 September 2001.

While studying this particular intelligence tome , I was immediately drawn to warnings by the spy agencies that the Olympic Games in Sydney were mentioned as a possible bin Laden terrorist target against the West and that Iraq’s former dictator, Saddam Hussein, had sent —  among other plans — several  intelligence operatives as personal migrants  to Australia to set up a clandestine terrorist recruiting organisation here in this country.

With the current 2023 year being the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War involving both bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, my thoughts recently went back to what this all-important document foretold of future potential terrorist plots but which was unfortunately not originally regarded as a clarion call for urgent punitive action against bin Laden and his followers.

Immediately after its completion, the document I became privy to was handed to the office of the then President Bill Clinton who reportedly took political fright and had it stamped “Of Vital Secrecy” and despatched it to a high security vault never to be seen by other eyes — or so they thought.

Had the U.S. Government taken action at the time, there is a strong possibility that the Iraq War battleground death toll of 5,000 U.S. soldiers, at least 177,000 other national servicemen within the Western Coalition and one million Iraqis may have been prevented — or at least reduced.

After I had studied a copy of the heavily guarded report and had understood its implications with regard to Australia, I wrote the first of three letters to Prime Minister, John Howard, on 29 October 2002, providing the Government and ASIO with a wide range of documented information. In return, I received appreciative replies from the P.M.’s Assisting Minister, Gary Hardgrave, and the then Attorney-General, Daryl Williams.  My overall concern included the fact that certain Iraqi army officers had reportedly been granted protective political refugee status in Australia in 1991 — a fact which I also sent to various national newspapers at the time.

According to the secret document in my possession, the U.S. Departments of Defence and State received reliable reports that bin Laden had set up his headquarters in Africa by the early 1990s. This was before Saddam Hussein agreed to invite him to collaborate with him in Iraq in mounting terrorist attacks against the U.S. and the rest of the West. Between them, the two conspirators set intricate plans  for the major expansion of Mujahideen terrorist training methods and a joint strategy for a violent anti-U.S. and Western jihad throughout the Arab world and North and East Africa.

Western spies also reported back to Washington at the time that Saddam Hussein particularly needed bin Laden and his trained Islamists for their anti-Shiite zeal to counterbalance the growing Shiite revivalism against Saddam in the south of Iraq. In addition, Saddam had claimed that bin Laden’s known ideology would also limit the spread of unwanted Kurdish nationalism throughout his country.

It was agreed between the two men that, should bin Laden attack his Saudi Royal House enemies, Saddam Hussein would give him armed support.  Detailed plans were also made to assist bin Laden in all planned terrorist attacks on U.S. possessions anywhere in the world, including New York’s iconic Twin Towers.

It was at this stage that Saddam Hussein also offered bin Laden the controversial possibility of obtaining weapons of mass destruction in the future when and should they possibly became available through Iraqi science sources from former U.S.S.R. Communist officials. At this time, bin Laden was “actively preparing for his terrorist strikes against the West using chemical, bacteriological and possibly radiological weapons from a well- equipped compound concealed near Qandahar in Afghanistan.”

U.S. intelligence agents believed that additional work was being undertaken in special mobile chemical and biological agent  laboratories purchased from the former Yugoslavia in May 1998 and shipped out via Pakistan. Viruses causing deadly diseases, such as Ebola and Salmonella, were obtained in Russia, botulinum biotoxin was bought in the Czech Republic while samples of deadly anthrax were made available from North Korea.

In January 1999, Iraqi Intelligence Unit  999 activated old export-import companies held throughout Europe to cover the movement of bin Laden and Iraqi Government funds and heavily trained people intent on causing terror in the West. bin Laden also established a terrorist financing scheme from his Sudan headquarters to pay his many lieutenants in Africa, the Middle East and Europe, using money laundering techniques in recognition of their political activities in Britain, Spain, Germany, France, the U.S., Switzerland and elsewhere, and for the purchase of conventional weapons and explosives.

A second financial system was also established by bin Laden to pay terrorists in the West operating under the al-Qaida Foundation banner. This later outlawed body was originally run as a charity operating in Albania, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Netherlands, Britain, Romania, Russia, Turkey, Lebanon and the Gulf countries.

According to U.S. security sources, at the turn of the century bin Laden had US$500 million in the Sudan, US$200 million in the Yemen and US$50 million – US$100 million in private bank accounts in London,  Monaco and the Caribbean, all in non-Arab names.

In Africa, bin Laden aided and abetted a terrorist drive into Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Chad and Somalia with Zanzibar Island being set up for the export of weapons and terrorism into the rest of Africa and the Third World. He also sent terrorists into Egypt from the Sudan.

At about the same time in Australia, apart from planning —  unsuccessfully — to bomb the 2000 year Olympic Games in Sydney, he had connections with the banned Jamaat-i-Islamia in this country together with Lashksr-i-Tuiba, the Islamic Front of Jordan and the al-Dawa organisation.

In the words of the U.S. security document, bin Laden was at the core of international terrorism, virtually spanning the globe and had “devised a sinister and tangled web of terrorist-sponsoring States, intelligence chiefs and master terrorists.” This was, of course, until his final demise at the hands of U.S.  Marines while later hiding from the West in Pakistan.

My possession of the U.S. security document was finally highlighted when the former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair,  became embattled over his decision to send the U.K. into war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq alongside the rest of the Western Coalition , action which had led him to face threatened international law court prosecution. I was then asked to supply relevant extracts from the overall report to his office in London and was told by Mr Blair’s secretary that its contents might finally help to set his mind at rest.