Washington ? The brief official note that came from Baghdad to the health ministry of a quasi-friendly European nation a few weeks ago was polite in tone, chilling in content. Iraq’s health service director wanted to know: Could you provide information and help to treat an anthrax outbreak?

No answer went back to Baghdad. Instead, the European government reported the Iraqi inquiry to the State Department and asked its own questions: Could the note represent a genuine request for help for an outbreak that had already occurred? Or was it a veiled warning of a weapon that invading American forces would meet?

“There is no way of knowing, and that may be the point,” said an official who described the note’s contents to me. “The Iraqis are very adept at using disguised threats. But it is also conceivable that their efforts to weaponize anthrax have created a problem at home. There is no way to be sure.”

We do not expect terrorists or brutal dictators to be subtle or ambiguous. So we underestimate Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and the rest. We expect to find not only a smoking gun, but bloody fingerprints on it after a terrorist outrage. But evidence accumulates that today’s masters of terror expect Americans to expect just that and labor to deny such evidence to them.

As the Bush administration has made ever more translucent its intent to go to war rather than let Iraq keep biological and chemical arsenals and develop a nuclear bomb, controversy has escalated over Iraq’s links to international terrorism and to bin Laden’s al-Qaida in particular.

Much of the controversy is unnecessary or intentionally diversionary. The links become clear with a little digging. You miss them only if you have a strong need not to know what Iraq’s terrorist trainers and their Palestinian, Yemeni and other cut-outs and false-flaggers have been doing and hiding.

Here is one publicly available description that rebuts the once-popular view at the CIA that Iraq has not been in the international terrorist business since a thwarted plot in 1993 against former President George H.W. Bush:

“Page after page (of secret Iraqi documents) revealed plans for terrorist operations. … A requisition to the army asked for Iranian land mines so that the high explosive could be removed and used in booby traps overseas the purpose being to dupe any forensic examiner into concluding that the culprit was Iran not Iraq. There were designs for mines configured as toys. Plans for ambushing moving convoys. A primer on how to wiretap. Document after document outlined an international program of terror.”

The source of this description of a June 1996 discovery of what the author calls an Iraqi “school for terrorists and terrorism” is none other than Scott Ritter, now the star of antiwar rallies but once a fiercely dedicated U.N. arms inspector. You will find it on page 121 of his informative 1999 book titled “Endgame.”

False-flagging planting clues that finger another nation is a sophisticated espionage art. Saddam & Co. have spent the past 12 years planning and acting to get their enemies without getting got themselves. They have had billions of dollars available from oil smuggling to pour into a campaign of destruction, deception and denial.

But what about al-Qaida? When I heard President Bush declare in his Oct. 7 speech in Cincinnati that Iraq had trained al-Qaida members in bomb-making, poisons and deadly gasses, I went asking the all-purpose reporter’s question: Sez who? The answer: Sez the CIA, when pressed to the mat.

“The president’s speech was cleared line by line by several levels of the CIA, including the director George Tenet.” So says a senior, knowledgeable U.S. official. “There is no doubt about its accuracy.”

Two senior officials who work closely with Bush (who thus may have axes to grind) and two working-level spook types no longer in his pay (and without discernible axes) confirm that about the time Ritter was pawing through Iraqi documents at the Abu Ghraib military camp, the CIA was getting reliable reports about bin Laden’s terror operations then headquartered in Khartoum. One top-secret report stood out: It detailed how Iraq had provided a Palestinian bomb-making expert to bin Laden and then hid that link. That nugget worked its way into a presidential speech a mere six years later.

“We’ve never said Saddam masterminded Sept. 11,” observes a senior official. But Bush’s case that Baghdad played a central role in establishing and running the infrastructure of international terrorism that contributed to Sept. 11 is undeniable. Unless, that is, there is a need not to know.

Jim Hoagland is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.