9/11 Panel Links Al Qaeda, Iran

But the Sept. 11 commission's findings regarding Khobar Towers, if confirmed, would deepen the known relationship between al Qaeda, Iran and Hezbollah. A commission staff report issued June 16 said that in addition to evidence that the attack had been carried out by Saudi Hezbollah with assistance from Iran, "intelligence obtained shortly after the bombing . . . also supported suspicions of bin Laden's involvement.

"There were reports in the months preceding the attack that bin Laden was seeking to facilitate a shipment of explosives to Saudi Arabia. On the day of the attack, bin Laden was congratulated" by al Qaeda militants, the report says.

The report recounts some of the previously alleged contacts between al Qaeda and Iran or Hezbollah and concludes, "We have seen strong but indirect evidence that [bin Laden's] organization did in fact play some as yet unknown role in the Khobar attack."

The report also says that several years before the Khobar attack, "bin Laden's representatives and Iranian officials had discussed putting aside Shia-Sunni divisions to cooperate against the common enemy." A group of al Qaeda representatives then traveled to Iran and to Hezbollah training camps in Lebanon for "training in explosives, intelligence and security," the report says.

Bin Laden himself, the report added, "showed particular interest in Hezbollah's truck bombing tactics in Lebanon in 1983 that killed 241 U.S. Marines."

Flynt L. Leverett, a Middle East expert in the Clinton and Bush administrations who is now a Brookings Institution scholar, said active cooperation between al Qaeda and Iran "cannot be ruled out as wholly implausible."

"There are going to be serious structural limits to how much al Qaeda and Iran might cooperate," Leverett said. "Within those limits, though, there is some room for very tactical and self-serving cooperation between al Qaeda and some parts of Iranian intelligence." Leverett cited as an example the allegations that Iran had harbored al Qaeda operatives fleeing Afghanistan.

But Daniel Benjamin, a national security official in the Clinton administration, said he was "still skeptical" of any link between al Qaeda and Khobar, arguing that the evidence shows "that Saudi Hezbollah was very much a creature of some in Iran."

"I don't quite see the need that this operation had for assistance from al Qaeda," Benjamin said. "Second of all, my understanding of the larger relationship between Iran and al Qaeda suggests that while there were plenty of contacts, many more than there were with Iraq, it was never clear they developed a serious cooperative relationship."

Research editor Margot Williams contributed to this report.