[Reader-list] Fw: Saddam & CIA

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>
>
> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2849.htm
> Exclusive: Saddam Was key in early CIA plot
>
> 04/11/03
> UPI:By Richard Sale
>
> 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."
>
> 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 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
>
>   UPI: Richard Sale
>
>
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