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| quote: | Originally posted by NYCTrancefan
Coincidentally I just finished reading this story as well.
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But to understand it I guess you have to know much of our history with Saddam, which began back in 1959.
Here's a few interesting articles from the past, but obvioulsy they won't go into any details about all that went on.
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How CIA’s Secret War on Saddam Collapsed
By Jim Hoagland
Washington Post
Foreign Service
Thursday, June 26, 1997; Page A21
In his three-year struggle to overthrow President Saddam Hussein and bring democracy to Iraq, Warren Marik of the CIA says he did everything he could think of -- and was permitted to do.
He helped organize flights of unmanned aircraft over Baghdad to drop leaflets ridiculing the Iraqi dictator on his birthday. He organized military training and some small arms supplies to Kurdish guerrillas in northern Iraq. And he oversaw spending millions of dollars that went to a Washington-based public relations firm to produce radio scripts and videotapes denouncing the regime.
None of it worked. The anti-Saddam campaign that Marik helped run was broken apart by the Iraqi dictator last year with relative ease. And now, partly in frustration, Marik has come in from the cold to tell the story of the CIA's war on Saddam as he saw it.
Marik says he does so partly with the hope of getting the agency to reconsider what he views as a misguided shift of strategy. He criticizes a past shift toward fomenting a quick coup against Saddam, and away from the plan that he tried to carry out aimed at gradually strengthening a "liberated" zone in the country's Kurdish north.
The decision of the 25-year CIA veteran to go public with details of an operation that is still technically ongoing has been strongly influenced by a similar decision by a leading Iraqi opposition figure, Ahmed Chalabi, and his colleagues in the Iraqi National Congress to make a clean break with the agency and start a new political phase in their efforts to bring change to Iraq. Marik and the CIA worked closely in the north with Chalabi and the National Congress, an umbrella group of anti-Saddam activists made up mostly of ethnic Kurds.
"We have learned the hard way that covert action that is not part of a large strategic political program is of no value," Chalabi said here yesterday. "We want to work with the State Department, the National Security Council, or AID. But our involvement with any covert agencies is finished."
Marik, a ruddy, affable 51-year-old who retired from the agency six months ago, says he has no regrets about the role he personally played.
"I still feel good about what I did in northern Iraq. We were supporting exactly the kind of people America should support. But we tied ourselves in knots," he said yesterday.
Marik tells a story of sharp factionalism and confusion within the CIA as case officers warred with each other to impress superiors and promote different sets of "clients" among the Iraqi dissidents they supported.
In particular, while Marik was working with Chalabi and the National Congress, others in the U.S. government opted to support former political associates of Saddam and his generals in the belief that they had a chance to quickly overthrow his regime.
Marik and some other senior CIA officials believe the bureaucratic warfare undermined a promising effort to cage Saddam. But Marik says he is publicizing his past activities to dramatize his view that the agency does not bear sole responsibility for a broad policy failure that implicates the White House, Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department as much as it does the CIA.
His matter-of-fact, precise descriptions of risky agency exploits in the remote Kurdish homeland of northern Iraq center on the help provided to the Iraqi opposition to assemble a force capable of taking on an Iraqi army division in March 1995.
Parts of the story of the failure of that offensive, and the rout of the competing CIA attempt to organize a palace coup against Saddam, have been previously published. Among the new points about the operation, which absorbed at least $100 million in U.S. funds and cost the lives or freedom of hundreds if not thousands of Iraqis who worked with the agency, are these:
A top CIA covert operative -- known to the Iraqis as "Bob" and not further identified in this account because he is still in covert service with the CIA -- designed what the Iraqis called the "Bob plan" for a direct attack on the Iraqi army in March 1995. The goal was to demonstrate the rebels' strength and, hopefully, highlight the unwillingness of Iraqi troops to fight to defend Saddam. Marik and "Bob" were the two principal CIA agents working in northern Iraq with the National Congress rebels.
According to Chalabi, the "Bob plan" included a secret contact with Iran -- a neighbor and bitter foe of Iraq -- seeking Iranian complicity in the Iraqi rebel attack. But Washington quickly disavowed that message and withdrew support for the operation.
As its first step in the campaign to bring down Saddam, the agency hired an American public relations and political lobbying firm, the Rendon Group of Washington, to develop a worldwide propaganda campaign. John Rendon, head of the firm, is a former campaign consultant for Jimmy Carter.
Congress -- particularly the Senate intelligence committee, which sent two staff aides along with CIA agents on evaluation missions in the north -- has played a major role in pressing for covert action and in shaping a program that many at the agency saw as doomed to fail from the outset.
The CIA official with direct departmental responsibility for the ill-fated operation, Steven Richter, is said by agency insiders to be the leading candidate for the powerful position of director of operations at the agency -- head of the CIA's clandestine wing -- if President Clinton's designated director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, is confirmed by the Senate in mid-July as expected.
The accounts offered separately by Marik and Chalabi were supported in many details, and in their overall thrust, by nearly 100 hours of interviews over several months with other CIA officers who asked not to be named, with Iraqi opposition figures and military defectors and with U.S. and foreign diplomats having direct involvement in or knowledge of American policy in the Persian Gulf.
Marik, a veteran of the CIA's successful insurgency campaign in Afghanistan and a Turkish-language specialist, describes the fundamental error he thinks the agency made this way:
"In northern Iraq we ran a political program that was to eventually reduce Saddam's control over Iraq and make him nothing more than the mayor of Baghdad. That kind of slow, salami-slicing operation worked in Afghanistan, and against the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
"But then came pressure from the top for the quick kill -- for a coup on deadline -- and we lost our way."
Marik declines to speculate on the motivation for that shift. Other CIA officers viewed the shift as a prudent hedging of bets that went awry. Others said the National Congress was seriously hampered from the start by feuding among its rival Kurdish factions and lack of support among Iraq's politically dominant Sunni Arab religious group and neighboring governments.
Two CIA sources noted that the pressure within the Clinton administration to get on with overthrowing Saddam accelerated when John M. Deutch moved from the Defense Department to become CIA director in May 1995, and intensified more as the 1996 presidential election campaign moved nearer.
Deutch, now teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, declined to comment for this article, as did the CIA's office of public affairs. A White House official denied that any pressure had been exerted on the CIA for political reasons.
The Iraq operation spans two presidencies and grows out of a miscalculation by President Bush and the U.S. generals who prosecuted the Persian Gulf War against Iraq in 1991. They assumed the humiliated Iraqi army would finish the job they started by overthrowing Saddam, according to senior Bush officials.
When that did not happen, Bush signed what agency personnel call a "lethal finding" and ordered the CIA to create the conditions that would lead to a change in regime in Iraq. The leaders of the agency's Iraq Operations Group doubted they could easily accomplish what an international army of 500,000 men had failed to do.
But they began drawing up a classic covert operation similar to those that had worked with varying degrees of success over the past half-century in Iran, Guatemala, Afghanistan, Nicaragua and elsewhere in the Third World.
"Lethal findings" -- under which the agency can with two exceptions undertake whatever action is needed, even if that action would lead to fatalities -- are rare. Marik only worked in two situations covered by such a document: Afghanistan and Iraq.
Under U.S. law, CIA officers cannot directly participate in an assassination plot. And they cannot suggest in their propaganda that the United States will support a public uprising against an entrenched regime.
Some agents call this latter red line -- a standard one in covert action -- "Budapest rules." The agency was accused of having incited the Hungarian population to rise against Soviet occupation in 1956 and then having done nothing to help fight the Russians.
The initial funding for the Iraq operation was set at $40 million, according to two independent sources. But that could grow under Bush.
"The question we kept getting from the White House then was `How much do you need?' " says a CIA source. "After Clinton and [national security adviser Anthony] Lake came in, it changed to `How much can you get along on?' At several key points, the Clinton White House refusal to come up with a few million dollars jeopardized or stymied the whole operation."
The agency's first reflex was to expand a global propaganda campaign the Kuwait government was already financing to denounce Iraqi atrocities in the 1990 invasion. The Rendon Group, a public relations firm, got the contract.
John W. Rendon, head of the firm, is a political consultant close to the Democratic National Committee who worked as scheduler for President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 campaign. He was out of the country yesterday and his firm did not return a telephone call.
Rendon ran the operation from Washington with branch offices in Boston and London. Their main activity, veterans of the operation say, was to produce radio scripts calling on Iraqi army officers to defect for broadcast on two large radio transmitters the CIA established and managed in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. Agency-run radio stations also sprang up in Cairo and Amman. The Kuwait and Amman stations are still in operation.
By mid-1992, Chalabi and the National Congress were working with the Rendon group. Chalabi, a graduate of MIT and the University of Chicago, had been active in anti-Saddam efforts since the early 1970s but had not previously worked with the agency.
But in 1992 he and other leaders in the National Congress decided to accept covert support, which would eventually grow to $326,000 a month. In Washington, Marik, who came aboard the agency's Iraq Operation Group in 1993, began shifting money from the Rendon operation to direct support of the National Congress.
U.S. officials began visiting the northern enclave the United States had ordered Saddam to stay out of in 1991. In September 1994, two Senate intelligence committee staff aides accompanied "Bob," deputy director of the Iraqi Operations Group at that point, into the north and shortly afterward the committee cleared the agency to establish a clandestine, semipermanent team in northern Iraq.
Over the next two years a total of about 50 agents rotated in and out, living in a fortified compound in the opposition-controlled town of Salahuddin. Teams composed of four to 10 agents each lived there for an average stay of six weeks. Their formal mission was to monitor the National Congress and gather intelligence.
In fact, they did much more. Marik, who led the first field team into Iraq in late October 1994, put it this way: "Nobody said we should provide military training and provide weapons to the [National Congress] force. But when we did that and reported it back to Washington, nobody said stop it, either."
His time in Iraq was a transforming experience for Marik, a Chicago native who entered the agency after military service in Vietnam. He brushes aside questions about what he did in Afghanistan by answering only "the usual stuff." But on Iraq, he feels passionately that the agency had a winning hand that it threw away.
In late 1994, control of the Iraq Operation Group was taken away from the veterans who had worked out the long-term political program with Chalabi and who, in the words of one agent, "kept the crazy ideas about silver-bullet coups away from the agency leadership."
After that the agency embarked on a "special channel" compartmentalized operation to prepare a quick-strike coup against Saddam. It was to be organized by former army officers and political cronies of the Iraqi dictator. They claimed they were in touch with serving military officers who would oust Saddam and take power.
Marik and the officers working with the Chalabi group were told to stay away from the operation, run with a dissident group called the Iraqi National Accord, when it became apparent to them that a second covert operation targeted at Saddam was under way.
Upon his arrival in 1995, Deutch not only gave the coup effort the green light but also pressed his agency to set "milestones" for getting the job done. Some officials there had the impression they were facing a deadline of about a year, in time to remove Saddam as an issue in the 1996 election.
But Chalabi, Marik and others in the agency were telling the operations group that the National Accord was deeply penetrated by Saddam's agents from the beginning. In June 1996, Saddam rolled up the plot by arresting 100 of the Accord's contacts in the military and executing 30 other officers.
The strategy that Chalabi had originally proposed to the agency took that into account. Instead of banking on a coup, Chalabi proposed establishing a political and administrative structure in the northern enclave that would become an alternative to Saddam as the dictator's powers were worn down.
The idea was to hollow out the Iraqi army by making defection to the north safe. Chalabi sought to hold the two main Kurdish factions together and use their guerrilla forces as the core of a regional military force. But they needed training, weapons, a military plan and reason to hope the United States would help them in a crunch.
Gradually "the Bob plan," named after the blond, blue-eyed, 6-foot-tall agent who elaborated it, came into being, with a target date of March 4, 1995, for a coordinated strike on the garrisons of Mosul and Kirkuk by 20,000 Kurdish guerrillas, 1,000 National Congress soldiers and 1,000 armed followers of the Iraqi Communist Party, according to Gen. Wafiq Samarrai, Saddam's former chief of military intelligence. He defected to the National Congress in 1994 and directed the offensive.
"We wanted Saddam to go on full alert, to try to fight back and see that his units would not fight for him," Chalabi says.
According to Chalabi, on Feb. 27 "Bob" asked him to use his contacts with Iran's ruling ayatollahs to pass a message saying Washington would look with favor on Iran moving troops along its border to distract Saddam as the offensive began.
"Bob" could not meet the Iranians himself. But Chalabi says the CIA agent stood in the hallway of the Khadra Hotel in Salahuddin as two Iranian intelligence operatives filed into Chalabi's room to be given what they were told was a message from the White House. "They had to see an American there or they wouldn't believe it," says Chalabi. "Their eyes were popping out of their heads."
U.S. officials would not comment on that description. But two administration officials confirm what Chalabi says happened next, apparently after communications intercepts of Iranian messages alerted the White House to the "Bob plan."
On March 3, they said, "Bob" and another agent showed up with a three-point message for Chalabi. One: Your operation has been penetrated and there is a risk of failure. Two: If you go ahead, it will be without U.S. involvement or support. It is your decision. Three: There is only one place for contact between Iran and the United States, and it is not in northern Iraq.
The effect of the message was to split the Kurds, who received a separate briefing on it. One Kurdish leader, Massoud Barzani, would not commit his forces to fighting the Iraqi army, and the offensive failed. In August 1996, he invited Saddam's troops into the north to help break up the CIA-backed operation.
"I know other people in the agency disagree with me and saw the [National] Accord operation as a prudent hedge," Marik says. "But I feel that we got too impatient with a genuine effort to install democracy and turned instead to fighting Saddam with incompetent Saddams, who are headed for the dust heap of history."
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Saddam Key in Early CIA Plot
Newsmax Wires
Friday, April 11, 2003
U.S. forces in Baghdad might now be searching high and low for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, but in the past Saddam was seen by U.S. intelligence services as a bulwark of anti-communism and they used him as their instrument for more than 40 years, according to former U.S. intelligence diplomats and intelligence officials.
United Press International has interviewed almost a dozen former U.S. diplomats, British scholars and former U.S. intelligence officials to piece together the following account. The CIA declined to comment on the report.
While many have thought that Saddam first became involved with U.S. intelligence agencies at the start of the September 1980 Iran-Iraq war, his first contacts with U.S. officials date back to 1959, when he was part of a CIA-authorized six-man squad tasked with assassinating then Iraqi Prime Minister Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim.
In July 1958, Qasim had overthrown the Iraqi monarchy in what one former U.S. diplomat, who asked not to be identified, described as "a horrible orgy of bloodshed."
According to current and former U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Iraq was then regarded as a key buffer and strategic asset in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. For example, in the mid-1950s, Iraq was quick to join the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact which was to defend the region and whose members included Turkey, Britain, Iran and Pakistan.
Little attention was paid to Qasim's bloody and conspiratorial regime until his sudden decision to withdraw from the pact in 1959, an act that "freaked everybody out" according to a former senior U.S. State Department official.
Washington watched in marked dismay as Qasim began to buy arms from the Soviet Union and put his own domestic communists into ministry positions of "real power," according to this official. The domestic instability of the country prompted CIA Director Allan Dulles to say publicly that Iraq was "the most dangerous spot in the world."
Close Ties With Baath Party
In the mid-1980s, Miles Copeland, a veteran CIA operative, told UPI the CIA had enjoyed "close ties" with Qasim's ruling Baath Party, just as it had close connections with the intelligence service of Egyptian leader Gamel Abd Nassar. In a recent public statement, Roger Morris, a former National Security Council staffer in the 1970s, confirmed this claim, saying that the CIA had chosen the authoritarian and anti-communist Baath Party "as its instrument."
According to another former senior State Department official, Saddam, while only in his early 20s, became a part of a U.S. plot to get rid of Qasim. According to this source, Saddam was installed in an apartment in Baghdad on al-Rashid Street directly opposite Qasim's office in Iraq's Ministry of Defense, to observe Qasim's movements.
Adel Darwish, Middle East expert and author of "Unholy Babylon," said the move was done "with full knowledge of the CIA," and that Saddam's CIA handler was an Iraqi dentist working for CIA and Egyptian intelligence. U.S. officials separately confirmed Darwish's account.
Darwish said that Saddam's paymaster was Capt. Abdel Maquid Farid, the assistant military attaché at the Egyptian Embassy who paid for the apartment from his own personal account. Three former senior U.S. officials have confirmed that this is accurate.
The assassination was set for Oct. 7, 1959, but it was completely botched. Accounts differ. One former CIA official said that the 22-year-old Saddam lost his nerve and began firing too soon, killing Qasim's driver and only wounding Qasim in the shoulder and arm. Darwish told UPI that one of the assassins had bullets that did not fit his gun and that another had a hand grenade that got stuck in the lining of his coat.
"It bordered on farce," a former senior U.S. intelligence official said. But Qasim, hiding on the floor of his car, escaped death, and Saddam, whose calf had been grazed by a fellow would-be assassin, escaped to Tikrit, thanks to CIA and Egyptian intelligence agents, several U.S. government officials said.
Saddam to Syria
Saddam then crossed into Syria and was transferred by Egyptian intelligence agents to Beirut, according to Darwish and former senior CIA officials. While Saddam was in Beirut, the CIA paid for Saddam's apartment and put him through a brief training course, former CIA officials said. The agency then helped him get to Cairo, they said.
One former U.S. government official, who knew Saddam at the time, said that even then Saddam "was known as having no class. He was a thug -- a cutthroat."
In Cairo, Saddam was installed in an apartment in the upper class neighborhood of Dukki and spent his time playing dominos in the Indiana Café, watched over by CIA and Egyptian intelligence operatives, according to Darwish and former U.S. intelligence officials.
One former senior U.S. government official said: "In Cairo, I often went to Groppie Café at Emad Eldine Pasha Street, which was very posh, very upper class. Saddam would not have fit in there. The Indiana was your basic dive."
But during this time Saddam was making frequent visits to the American Embassy where CIA specialists such as Miles Copeland and CIA station chief Jim Eichelberger were in residence and knew Saddam, former U.S. intelligence officials said.
Saddam's U.S. handlers even pushed Saddam to get his Egyptian handlers to raise his monthly allowance, a gesture not appreciated by Egyptian officials since they knew of Saddam's American connection, according to Darwish. His assertion was confirmed by former U.S. diplomat in Egypt at the time.
In February 1963 Qasim was killed in a Baath Party coup. Morris claimed recently that the CIA was behind the coup, which was sanctioned by President John F. Kennedy, but a former very senior CIA official strongly denied this.
"We were absolutely stunned. We had guys running around asking what the hell had happened," this official said.
Communists Gunned Down
But the agency quickly moved into action. Noting that the Baath Party was hunting down Iraq's communist, the CIA provided the submachine gun-toting Iraqi National Guardsmen with lists of suspected communists who were then jailed, interrogated, and summarily gunned down, according to former U.S. intelligence officials with intimate knowledge of the executions.
Many suspected communists were killed outright, these sources said. Darwish told UPI that the mass killings, presided over by Saddam, took place at Qasr al-Nehayat, literally, the Palace of the End.
A former senior U.S. State Department official told UPI: "We were frankly glad to be rid of them. You ask that they get a fair trial? You have to get kidding. This was serious business."
A former senior CIA official said: "It was a bit like the mysterious killings of Iran's communists just after Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in 1979. All 4,000 of his communists suddenly got killed."
British scholar Con Coughlin, author of "Saddam: King of Terror," quotes Jim Critchfield, then a senior Middle East agency official, as saying the killing of Qasim and the communists was regarded "as a great victory." A former long-time covert U.S. intelligence operative and friend of Critchfield said: "Jim was an old Middle East hand. He wasn't sorry to see the communists go at all. Hey, we were playing for keeps."
Saddam, in the meantime, became head of al-Jihaz a-Khas, the secret intelligence apparatus of the Baath Party.
Relationship Intensifies
The CIA/Defense Intelligence Agency relation with Saddam intensified after the start of the Iran-Iraq war in September of 1980. During the war, the CIA regularly sent a team to Saddam to deliver battlefield intelligence obtained from Saudi AWACS surveillance aircraft to aid the effectiveness of Iraq's armed forces, according to a former DIA official, part of a U.S. interagency intelligence group.
This former official said that he personally had signed off on a document that shared U.S. satellite intelligence with both Iraq and Iran in an attempt to produce a military stalemate. "When I signed it, I thought I was losing my mind," the former official told UPI.
A former CIA official said that Saddam had assigned a top team of three senior officers from the Estikhbarat, Iraq's military intelligence, to meet with the Americans.
According to Darwish, the CIA and DIA provided military assistance to Saddam's ferocious February 1988 assault on Iranian positions in the al-Fao peninsula by blinding Iranian radars for three days.
The Saddam-U.S. intelligence alliance of convenience came to an end at 2 a.m. Aug. 2, 1990, when 100,000 Iraqi troops, backed by 300 tanks, invaded its neighbor, Kuwait. America's one-time ally had become its bitterest enemy.
Copyright 2003 by United Press International.
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/art...10/205859.shtml
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How the CIA found and groomed Saddam Hussein
Indo-Asian News Service
April 16, 2003
WASHINGTON: US forces may now be searching high and low for Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein but in the past he was seen by US intelligence as a bulwark of anti-communism, reports UPI.
American intelligence operatives used him as their instrument for more than 40 years, according to former US intelligence officials and diplomats.
UPI interviewed almost a dozen former US diplomats, British scholars and former US intelligence officials to piece together the following account. The CIA declined to comment.
While many have thought that Saddam Hussein became involved with US intelligence agencies from the 1980 Iran-Iraq war, his first contacts date back to 1959 when he was part of a CIA-authorized six-man squad tasked with assassinating then Iraqi prime minister General Abd al-Karim Qasim.
In July 1958, Qasim had overthrown the Iraqi monarchy. According to US officials, Iraq was then regarded as a key buffer and strategic asset in the Cold War with the Soviet Union...
For example, in the mid-1950s, Iraq was quick to join the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact which was to defend the region and whose members included Turkey, Britain, Iran and Pakistan.
Little attention was paid to Qasim's bloody and conspiratorial regime until his sudden decision to withdraw from the pact in 1959.
Washington watched in marked dismay as Qasim began to buy arms from the Soviet Union and put his own domestic communists into ministry positions of real power.
In the mid-1980s, Miles Copeland, a veteran CIA operative, said the CIA enjoyed "close ties" with Qasim's ruling Baath Party.
In a recent public statement, Roger Morris, a former National Security Council staffer in the 1970s, confirmed this, saying the CIA chose the authoritarian and anti-communist Baath Party as its instrument.
According to another former senior State Department official, Saddam Hussein, while only in his early 20s, became a part of a US plot to get rid of Qasim.
According to this source, Saddam Hussein was installed in an apartment in Baghdad on al-Rashid Street directly opposite Qasim's office in Iraq's ministry of defence to observe Qasim's movements.
Adel Darwish, a Middle East expert and author of "Unholy Babylon," said the move was done "with full knowledge of CIA" and that Saddam Hussein's CIA handler was an Iraqi dentist working for CIA and Egyptian intelligence.
The assassination was set for October 7, 1959, but it was completely botched. One former CIA official said the 22-year-old Saddam lost his nerve and fired too soon, killing Qasim's driver and only wounding Qasim in the shoulder and arm.
Qasim, hiding on the floor of his car, escaped death, and Saddam Hussein, whose calf had been grazed by a fellow would-be assassin, escaped to Tikrit, thanks to CIA and Egyptian intelligence agents.
He then crossed into Syria and was transferred by Egyptian intelligence agents to Beirut.
While in Beirut, the CIA paid for Saddam Hussein's apartment and put him through a brief training course. The agency then helped him get to Cairo.
During this time Saddam made frequent visits to the American Embassy where CIA specialists such as Miles Copeland and CIA station chief Jim Eichelberger were in residence and knew him.
In February 1963, Qasim was killed in a Baath Party coup. Morris claimed that the CIA was behind the coup, which was sanctioned by President John F. Kennedy.
The CIA quickly moved into action. Noting that the Baath Party was hunting down Iraqi communists, the CIA provided the submachine gun-toting Iraqi National Guardsmen with lists of suspected communists who were then jailed, interrogated, and summarily gunned down, according to former US intelligence officials with intimate knowledge of the executions.
Many suspected communists were killed outright, these sources said. Darwish told UPI that the mass killings, presided over by Saddam Hussein, took place at Qasr al-Nehayat, literally, the Palace of the End.
Saddam Hussein became head of the Baath Party's intelligence apparatus.
The CIA/Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) relation with Saddam Hussein intensified after the start of the Iran-Iraq war in September 1980. During the war, the CIA regularly sent a team to Saddam Hussein to deliver battlefield intelligence to aid the effectiveness of the Iraqi armed forces.
A former CIA official said that Saddam Hussein had assigned a top team of three senior officers from Iraq's military intelligence to meet the Americans.
According to Darwish, the CIA and DIA provided military assistance to Saddam Hussein's ferocious 1988 assault on Iranian positions in the al-Fao peninsula by blinding Iranian radars for three days.
The Saddam Hussein-US intelligence alliance of convenience came to an end on August 2, 1990 when 100,000 Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait. America's one-time ally had become its bitterest enemy.
http://www.sianews.com/modules.php?...article&sid=856
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Rumsfeld and his 'old friend' Saddam
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - At last in United States military captivity, ousted former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein will soon mark an important 20th anniversary, the kind of anniversary that brings with it an appreciation of the ironies of life, and politics.
His captor, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, might also recall long-forgotten memories - or memories best forgotten - of what he was doing exactly 20 years ago.
If so, he will remember that he was in Baghdad, as a special envoy from then-president Ronald Reagan, assuring his host that, to quote the secret National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) that served as his talking points: the US would regard "any major reversal of Iraq's fortunes as a strategic defeat for the West".
So began the effective resumption of close relations between Baghdad and Washington that had been cut off by Iraq during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Within a year, Washington would fully normalize ties with Saddam, and even suggest that the dictator had become a full-fledged "Arab moderate", ready to make peace with Israel.
Of course, the reason for this rapprochement - nay, avid courtship - was the bad turn that the war between Iraq and Iran had taken for Baghdad. A victory by Tehran, which seemed imminent, would pose a major threat to US interests in the Gulf, such as access to the region's oil.
It was a question of the lesser of two evils, as explained succinctly by Howard Teicher, who worked on Iraq as a member of Reagan's National Security Council. "You have to understand the geostrategic context, which was very different from where we are now," he told the Washington Post earlier this year. "Realpolitik dictated that we act to prevent the situation from getting worse."
It was presumably realpolitik that also persuaded Rumsfeld not to bring up Iraq's use of chemical weapons with Saddam in their first meeting of December 20, 1983, even though the administration knew about it. (After long insisting that he did raise the issue with Saddam, the recent release of State Department memoranda obtained by the National Security Archive has forced Rumsfeld to change his story. He did mention the issue, among many others, when he met with then-foreign minister Tariq Aziz separately.)
For the next five years, Washington would quietly ensure that Saddam received all the military equipment he needed to stave off defeat, even precursor chemicals that could be used against Iranian soldiers and Kurdish civilians. Not that Washington supported the use of chemical weapons, particularly against civilians. It was more that the Reagan administration was very reluctant to condemn their use by Iraq back then.
How much more of this intimate relationship Saddam will recall when he gets a public forum is undoubtedly a concern of many current and past administration figures. The situation echoes the worries of former US president George H W Bush over what Panamanian strongman General Manuel Antonio Noriega might say in open court about his long and intimate connections to US intelligence agencies when he surrendered to the US military after Washington's invasion of Panama in 1989. Of course, Noriega was recruited while he was still in the military academy, and his rise to power was facilitated tremendously by those ties.
He was a paid agent from the beginning, and, while a rogue who did not hesitate to intimidate and occasionally knock off a few dissidents to keep things quiet, he was never the mass murderer and serial invader of his neighbors that Saddam has been.
On the other hand, Saddam was also a beneficiary of the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) help - even if he did not get the kind of sustained attention that Noriega received - and long before Rumsfeld's visit at that.
According to an investigative report by Richard Sale of United Press International (UPI) published in April, Saddam's first contacts date back to 1959, when the CIA backed an assassination attempt in which he took part against then Iraqi prime minister General Abd al-Karim Qasim, the man who overthrew the Western-backed monarchy the year before.
At the time, Iraq - as in 1982 - was seen as a key strategic asset, and Qasim's decision to withdraw from the Baghdad Pact and subsequently get cosy with Moscow was seen by Washington as a potentially disastrous setback.
Saddam, an aspiring young Ba'athist tough, was handled on behalf of the CIA by a local agent and an Egyptian military attache, who set him up in an apartment opposite Qasim's office, according to Adel Darwish, author of Unholy Babylon: The Secret History of Saddam's War, in an account backed up to UPI by US officials.
The specific hit, however, was botched when Saddam "lost his nerve", according to another UPI source.
When Qasim was finally overthrown in a Ba'ath Party coup - whether the CIA supported it is a matter of dispute, although the party's secretary general at the time said: "We came to power on a CIA train" - Saddam was back as head of the party's secret intelligence branch, and, according to Darwish, was leading execution squads of Iraqi National Guardsmen who were hunting down and killing suspected communists included on lists provided by ... the CIA.
In the early 1970s, then-president Richard Nixon tilted definitively toward the Shah of Iran as the main protector of US interests in the Gulf. It was not until 1979, when the Shah was overthrown and Saddam installed himself as president of Iraq, that Washington once again began taking an interest in Baghdad's internal affairs, although no evidence of any link between Washington and Saddam's elevation has come to light.
Washington's standoffishness changed when the incoming Reagan administration realized by late 1981 that Baghdad could lose the war with disastrous consequences for US interests in the region. In early 1982, it removed Iraq from the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism, making Baghdad eligible for billions of dollars in agricultural credits and sales of "dual-use" equipment goods, such as chemical precursors, sophisticated communications equipment and technology that could be useful in weapons programs, with both civilian and military uses.
As the Iranians continued to shift the strategic balance, however, the situation became more urgent. On November 26, 1983, NSDD 114, which remains classified, was signed by Reagan, even as US intelligence had learned that Baghdad's forces were using chemical weapons to stop the Iranian offensive.
Rumsfeld was soon on his way to Baghdad in a trip that, by 1985, would result in Washington supplying Saddam with some US$1.5 billion worth of weapons equipment and technology, including items applicable to Iraq's nuclear or biological-weapons program, such as anthrax strains and pesticides.
At the same time, the CIA was tasked to ensure that its former charge not run short of either weapons or vitally needed intelligence on the disposition of Iranian forces, a task, according to a 1995 affidavit by Teicher, that then CIA director William Casey took to with abandon. Casey, for example, used a Chilean arms company, Cardoen, to supply Iraq with cluster bombs that he thought would be particularly effective against Iranian "human wave" tactics.
In addition to the credit, equipment and covert military assistance, Saddam also received diplomatic help from Washington at the United Nations and elsewhere in fending off condemnations of his use of banned weapons during the war, as well as efforts in Congress to cut off US help.
The CIA was still providing intelligence and other help when Saddam used poison gas that killed some 5,000 Kurdish non-combatants in Halabja in March 1988. The attack was part of the infamous Anfal campaign, which wiped out dozens of northern Kurdish villages and that is certain to figure prominently, along with a number of other particularly egregious atrocities known to Washington at the time that they were committed, in any eventual trial against the former leader.
All US support for Iraq ended two-and-a-half years later when Saddam invaded Kuwait under circumstances that have suggested to some observers - including, perhaps, Saddam himself - that Washington might have encouraged him to do so.
It's certain that he remembered Rumsfeld's trip at that time, and it seems likely that he may reflect on it again on Saturday. Rumsfeld, however, may not be so inclined.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EL17Ak01.html
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