Mansoor Ijaz, now a New York City-based investment banker who traveled to Sudan more than a half dozen times in the mid-1990s, says he repeatedly relayed offers from the Sudanese government to the Clinton White House to share intelligence on bin Laden. In one case, the president of Sudan offered to arrest and extradite bin Laden and turn over information about global terrorist networks, Ijaz says.
The Clinton administration declined to take him up on the offer, Ijaz has argued in a Los Angeles Times commentary, in the pages of the January issue of the magazine Vanity Fair, and on national television shows.
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Ijaz, the son of Pakistani immigrants, has become a fixture on national television shows since Sept. 11. His late father was a physics professor at Virginia Tech and his mother still lives in Shawsville.
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Susan Rice, who served as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs from 1997 to 2000, said Friday that Sudanese officials never followed up with any substantive change in behavior. And they never gave U.S. officials any intelligence files, Rice said.
Ijaz is not alone in criticizing the Clinton administration for failing to engage Sudan.
Former Sudan ambassador Timothy Carney said in a phone interview Saturday that from 1996 to when he left his post in 1997 the dialogue between U.S. officials and the Sudanese government "petered out." The Clinton administration then rejected Carney's suggestions about how to re-engage the Sudanese, Carney said.
"The fact is, they were opening the doors, and we weren't taking them up on it," Carney told Vanity Fair. "The U.S. failed to reciprocate Sudan's willingness to engage us on serious questions of terrorism. We can speculate that this failure had serious implications - at the least for what happened at the U.S. embassies in 1998. In any case, the U.S. lost access to a mine of material on bin Laden and his organization."
Rice countered that diplomatic channels to Sudan were always open and that ambassadors, administration and FBI and CIA officials met repeatedly with Sudanese officials from 1994 to 2000. The White House was not looking for foreign policy assistance from Ijaz, a wealthy investor with business interests in oil-rich Sudan, Rice said.
"We did not need, nor would it have been appropriate for us to use a private citizen, particularly one with business interests," Rice said. She added that Ijaz did not disclose his business interests to administration officials when he met with them in 1996.
Ijaz disputed Rice's claim, arguing that when he met with Berger and Rice at the White House in 1996, he had "absolutely no business interests in Sudan whatsoever." The Washington Post reported in a 1997 story, however, that "Ijaz also acknowledged his commercial interests in effecting a reconciliation between the United States and Sudan."
In 1997, Arakis Energy Corp., a Canadian company with oil fields in Sudan, announced Ijaz's appointment to an advisory committee to the company's board. Ijaz said he did not get paid for the position.
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"More than one foreign government, including the Pakistanis, came to the United States government and said Mr. Ijaz was asserting that he was acting as an agent of the United States government," Berger said. "That was not true and we told them that. And my staff after that suggested that we should be careful in dealing with him."
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