By Michael Drosnin

It was first serialised in the Mail and then became a worldwide bestseller ... the book claiming a secret code in the Bible predicted all the disasters in history including September 11. Now the author reveals his most stunning secret of all - that President Bush’s advisers studied the code’s prophecies before going to war on Iraq.

At the hight of preparations for the Iraq War, and as debate over the looming conflict raged at the United Nations, I received an urgent telephone call. "Can you come to Washington?" asked Dr. Linton Wells, director of the Pentagon’s intelligence nerve centre.

It was the morning of Sunday, February 9, 2003. Just two days earlier, the White House had put America on a "high terror alert". But as an author and journalist, I was extremely surprised by a call from a key member of my country’s invisible government.

Wells was the man who ran C3I - military shorthand for Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence. I knew him since my days as an investigative reporter on The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.

"What brings you out on a Sunday?" I asked him.

"The Deputy Secretary", said Wells, referring to his boss, Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz, the key White House adviser on Iraq who earlier this week narrowly escaped assassination in Baghdad.

"He just called me out of an important meeting in Colorado," Wells continued. "He asked me to arrange for you to brief the Pentagon. It’s the Bible code, right?"

It was six years since I had first disclosed the code’s existence in a book that caused a global sensation. Three months before Wells called me, in a sequel based on extensive research, I had published new evidence of its uncanny power to predict the turning points in world history.

"I don’t know," he said. "I just follow orders. But Wolfowitz did mention the chief of Mossad."

I had met General Meir Dagan, the head of Israel’s renowned intelligence agency, three times. Dagan took the warnings in the Bible code so seriously that he had urged Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to meet me.

"Who’ll be at the meeting?" I asked Wells.

"Admiral Jake Jacoby, Director of the Defence Intelligence Agency, and someone from the Operations Directorate of the Joint Chiefs of Staff," Wells said. "Of course, I’ll be there on behalf of Wolfowitz."

Wells had just named the entire top command of American military intelligence. As boss of the DIA, Admiral Lowell "Jake" Jacoby ran the biggest spy network inthe world, far bigger than the CIA, with spy satellites and listening stations keeping covert watch around the globe. For their part, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had authority over the army, navy and air force, and their Operations Directorate handled the most sensitive missions of all.

Wells himself orchestrated everything that came out of C3I, the heart of our entire military. It was clear the Pentagon was now taking the Bible code very seriously indeed.

"Can you be here next week?" asked Wells.

"I’ll be there," I said.

What followed is, by any standards, an extraordinary story.

Those, like me, who have come to believe there is overwhelming proof that the code is real, and that it reveals the clock to Armageddon is already ticking, may instead feel relief that those with the power to act on its warnings have finally woken up to its significance.

In fact, U.S. Intelligence had not called me in because the religious right pushed it, but because the code kept coming true. ...

But then came that terrible September morning - and everything changed.

Sure enough, it was there in the hidden text the 3,000-year-old verses. "Airplane" appeared in exactly the same place. "It caused to fall, knocked down" intersected with "airplane" and "Twin Towers". "Oh my God," I said aloud. "It’s real". ...

At 9am on Friday, February 21, 2003, I met the top ten leaders of U.S. military intelligence in a conference room in the inner circle reserved for the Office of the Secretary of Defence.

And it was there that I briefed them about the hidden messages in the Bible that warned we had only four years to work out how to avoid World War III and a nuclear catastrophe.

"At the request of Secretary Wolfowitz, I’ve come today to brief you about a code in the Bible that appears to reveal events that happened thousands of years after the Bible was written," I told the senior officials seated around a big confernce table, handling each of them a memo that described how the code worked.

"It was discovered by a famous Israeli mathematician and confirmed by a senior code-breaker at the U.S. National Security Agency," the memo stated. "I believe the code is real for a simple reason: it keeps coming true."

I gave the Pentagon officials computer print-outs that made the point dramatically, showing how the events of September 11 were encoded in detail in the Bible.

They were clearly impressed - and even more so when I told them the odds of such words appearing together were 10,000-1 against. ...

It was at this point that I faced the men before me - men who controlled all the military hardware and technical resources of the world’s one remaining superpower - and revealed the knowledge that had been weighing on me for many months.

"The main reason I’ve come to see you today," I said, "is that the code warns that we may face the ultimate danger - a nuclear war, staring in the Middle East - within four years."

It told them that the words "World War" and "Atomic Holocaust" and "End of Days" were all encoded with the same year, 2006 - against odds of at least 100,000-1. ...

"The Israeli mathematician who discovered the code said it could not happen by chance," I said. "It had to be intentionally encoded in the Bible. I’m certain the dangers it warns of can be prevented. The Bible code just reveals probabilities and what we do determines what actually happens."

"What does it say about Iraq?" asked Linton Wells, focusing on the immediate danger. "Good news," I said, handing him another encoded table. "It says that Saddam Hussein will fall in 2003. It’s encoded in the form of a question and answer: ‘Who is destroyed? Hussein’." Crossing his name, against very high odds, is the year 2003.

I showed Wells a more detailed version of the same code table. "There’s more," I told him. "It says Saddam will flee, but it also indicates that he will die. Again, it’s a question and answer. The words ‘Death. Who is destroyed? Hussein" intersect in the code table with the year 2003 andthe phrase ‘It was confirmed, he fled’. Elsewhere, the same thing is encoded again. ‘Hussein died’ is crossed with ‘the man who was forced to flee’ and ‘in his hideout’."

"So the outcome is already determined?" asked the man from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who arrived late.

"No," I said. "The Bible code is not a crystal ball. Nothing is set in stone. But it does provide detailed information you can check out."

I looked around the table. "However," I went on, "I don’t believe the real danger is Saddam Hussein - it’s Osama bin Laden. Of all t he information we’ve found in the Bible code, one thing stands out as most useful - a clearly stated location where bin Laden, his Al Qaeda headquarters and all of his most dangerous weaponry might be found."

There was a stunned silence. "That would be useful," said Admiral Jacoby, his dry understatement breaking the silence.

"You won’t publish this, will you?" asked Wells. ...

"The Bible code clearly suggests New York has not yet witnessed the worst danger," I said. "September 11 was the beginning, not the end. And it’s all tied in some way to Al Qaeda andthis same hideout. I don’t want to sound apocalyptic, but the full scale of danger is captured only by the words of Biblical prophecy. The phrase ‘In the End of Days’ appears in the original, uncoded words of the Bible, crossed by the coded word ‘terrorism’ and the name of the base. In fact, the code states that ‘terrorism’ will be ‘co-ordinated from hiding place X ‘in the End of Days’." ...

I realised it was likely that many, even most, of the intelligence leaders were committed Christians and, like the President himself, believed in the ‘End of Days’. ...

Everyone from the President down has said it publicly - we were in a third world war, unlike any war we had fought before because the enemy was hidden. And I guessed that one of the reasons I had been called to brief the Pentagon on the Bible code was that, on some deep level, everyone knew we needed a miracle to avoid catastrophe.

"There’s one problem," I said as the hour-long briefing came to an end. "I’ve never seen anything as clearly encoded as the location of this terrorist base, but the code does not state a year. I can only suggest that you look now, and again, and again - because if you succeed you will stop terrorism at its source." ...

I had just been at the centre of the inner sanctum of America’s invisible government. I had met its leaders. I had told them that we faced a danger so great it was captured only by the words of Biblical prophecy - "Armageddon", the "End of Days", the "Apocalypse".

There was still work to do. I flew to Israel and met its top intelligence analyst, General Yossi Kuperwasser, at Israel’s military headquaters, the Kirya in Tel Aviv.

I had met Kuperwasser before, and like most officials at the highest level of Israeli intelligence, he listened to the Bible code warnings because they kept coming true.

The code also agreed with Mossad’s own best estimate of the year in which the threat of atomic attack by terrorists would peak - 2006.

Now I showed him a new code table. "In Jerusalem", was encoded with "mega-terror" and "war", crossed by "bin Laden".

"The odds against it happening by chance are three million to one," I told Kuperwasser. "Bin Laden is going to strike Israel if you don’t find him first."

I had already given the Israelis the same information I had given the Pentagon, including the name of bin Laden’s hideout. "We already looked," said General Kuperwasser. "We’ll look again. We’ll keep looking." ...

I sent a letter to Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz. I stated: "I believe the next major terrorist attack is not far off, and that this time we may lose an entire city and not just two tall buildings. There is a warning of a new attack on New York, perhaps as early as 2004." ...

At the end of July this year, just before President Bush left the White House for an August vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, I sent him a letter.

It warned: "The Bible code states the final danger in modern terms - ‘atomic holoaust’ and ‘world war’ are both encoded in the Bible. And both are encoded with the same year - 2006." ...