I'm no conspiracy freak, but every once in a while you get that creepy feeling

Within minutes of the blast, Ramzi Yousef, in jail in New York City for the Bojinka plot, sent out a message to his external contacts through what he thought was a secure line. The FBI, however, had been using a mob informant to get Yousef's confidence and was listening in on Yousef's communications, which were typically in Arabic.

The FBI interpreters, however, could not understand the message. They sent it to the NSA, which in turn sent it to the Defense Language Institute. I have had two independent sources within the NSA confirm this. The message read: "What had to be done, has been done, TWA 800" (last two words unintelligible). It was in Baluchi.

"I KNOW THE F***ING TRUTH," the one confirming source e-mailed me, using caps and self-edited profanity to express her outrage. "I WAS THERE. I SAW THE REAL-TIME, INTELLIGENCE, DISTRIBUTED TO SELECT PERSONNEL WITHIN THE AGENCY, AND DISCUSSED IT WITH A LINGUIST/ANALYST WHO ALSO SAW IT." She added in lower case, "The '800' victims' families and the public deserve to know the truth."

If Yousef were, in fact, part of a larger cadre of trained Baluch operatives employed by Iraq, several pieces of the puzzle begin to fall into place. For one, the scale of the operation no longer seems beyond Yousef's reach. For another, Osama bin Laden's failure to take credit for it becomes understandable. Saddam would not have publicly done so either – at least not in Iraq's name – knowing the hell that such a boast would have provoked.