wmassociation.com
MR. ROBERT BAER
Former CIA Operative and Author
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DINNER SPEAKER
Friday, September 27, 2002
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Thank you very much for having me this evening. I’m going to give this talk without notes because I’ve been warned by the CIA that should I speak in public with notes then I’m subject to their regulations, so I will try to make this as coherent as I can. What I’d like to talk about tonight is a subject on everybody’s mind, and that’s Iraq, the history of what happened after the Gulf War in 1991, missed opportunities, and where we are today.
What I’d like to do is start by relating my experience in Iraq in 1994 and 1995. I came back from an assignment in Tajikistan. I’m sure you all know where it is, a small country above Afghanistan. I spent two years there without newspapers, without any sort of communications with Washington, or periodic communications. I came back to Langley and was informed that I was going to be made temporarily head of the Iraqi operations group, in the absence of anybody else, and that the mission was to change the regime in Baghdad.
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He shows up at my front door and says we’ve got to get rid of Saddam. I said, okay, that’s a good idea. How do we do it, short of a war? He said, look, Saddam’s in trouble. He’s broke. The army is deserting in droves. This is before oil-for-food. The Iraqis are fed up, his family’s fed up, the military is fed up. Would the United States accept regime change? Unequivocally I said yes, we want regime change. We don’t believe we can ever live with Saddam. I can’t promise you any help, but we do want regime change.
He said to me, well, let’s assassinate Saddam. I said, what do you have in mind? He said, listen. There’s a town that Saddam passes through once a week going to his natal village, which is Awjah, right below Tikrit, and what I’m going to do is I’m going to take 100 people and when Saddam’s convoy crosses the bridge, we’re going to block it off and we’re going to block off the convoy on the other end of the bridge and we’re going to shoot it up until everybody’s dead. I said, all right, took a deep breath, and sent this to Washington.
You have to keep in mind, I was the appointed representative of the United States government in Iraq. I did have a little bit of authority, not a lot. I wrote this up with a message number, making it very clear what these people wanted to do. One week, two week, three weeks go by. There was no response. Nothing. Not a word. I called up Langley and said, what do you guys want to do? “We’ll get to it.”
At the end of three weeks the general came back to me and said, what do you want to do? The people inside are waiting to do something about Saddam. I took my own initiative and said, it’s against American law to assassinate people. Maybe if you could try something else. Do a coup d’état.
I was on the ground. What I’m talking about here is reality, the way covert action works, if you want to see it from the inside.
He comes back a week later, same group. There’s a senior general inside Iraq, and he says, all right, we have a tank unit near Tikrit. We have 12 tanks. Normally tanks around Saddam are not armed. They have 125-mm shells and they separate them from the tanks for just this reason. But, he said, we’ve managed to steal enough rounds to arm these tanks. He described how he was going to induce Saddam to come up north to Tikrit by causing a diversion in Baghdad, a diversion in the north, in Mosul and Kirkuk, at which time, when Saddam was in his compound, they were going to box him in and level the compound. Don’t ask me the difference between assassination and leveling Saddam in his house, but anyhow.
I sent that back to Washington, including the plan for this diversion in order that the tanks could get on the road. The diversion was people would be running around the north firing rockets, shooting up, something that Saddam was bound to find out about, and he did find out about it. Not a word out of Washington. I sent three or four messages and said, do you want to continue with this or don’t you? This isn’t my call. I don’t run U.S. foreign policy. Not a word.
So I went back to the Iraqis, the Kurds, and the general, and I said, guys, as far as I know it’s okay. I wouldn’t call this a green light. It’s a yellow light maybe. But it’s your country. If you want to kill Saddam, go ahead. It’s fine with me.
In the meantime I’m fighting with the Kurds, trying to get them to stop fighting and turn their guns on Saddam. They’re moving to the lines. The Iraqi army on the 28th of February 1995 goes on maximum alert, an alert that it had never been on since the war in 1991. The Iranian army went on full alert and they started putting up surveillance platforms. They moved three divisions to the Iraqi border, and we could see them coming. As if it weren’t complicated enough, the Turkish army went on full alert, and we thought they were going to invade the north. So you had the three largest armies in the Middle East on alert, and still not a word out of Washington.
I’m in a tough position here. They’re saying, what’s happening? You can’t tell people in the Middle East you’re not getting a response. They either think you’re crazy or lying. They just can’t believe that Washington can’t react to an action like this. By this time I’m seeing so much activity, the tanks are moving forward, they’re in place, they’re relaying messages to me. I’m getting excited; maybe we really are going to get rid of Saddam. Maybe this is going to work. It’s totally fantastic for me—changing history.
About 7:00 o’clock in the morning we get a call from communications in Langley saying, open your communications, we have something for you. It was a message from Tony Lake that said, the operation you have planned—and I don’t know who the you was —it’s been totally compromised. If you go ahead, you’re on your own.
My question on the ground, of course, was, what’s compromised, the 12 tanks or the insurrection? If it’s the insurrection, it should be compromised. I handed the message to all the Iraqis involved, as instructed. Which in Iraqi terms meant we don’t support you, we want to stop this operation.
One of the Kurdish groups, immediately upon receiving the message, arrested the courier to the guy with the 12 tanks. He was key to the operation, to making it go forward. Because we lost communications with the tank unit, they were subsequently all arrested and executed. One of the Kurdish groups backed out of the insurrection; it was a very public insurrection. The other Kurdish group said, it’s too late to turn back now, and started marching south. Within the first days of the engagement, they overran three Iraqi divisions and destroyed them. They no longer existed. Which told me that the Iraqi army indeed was in trouble.
As if the story isn’t exciting enough, I get a subsequent message that says, come back to Washington, you and your team. I said, if I come back, any chance of putting this back together is over. I’m associated with this. If I leave, it looks like we’re in trouble. The Kurds are going to mistake what happened, the Iraqi military will too. Come back to Washington and report at this office at 9 o’clock in the morning. Not only that, but you’re prohibited from calling anybody on the way home or when you get home.
I get out at CIA headquarters and I’m met by the FBI, who read me my rights, as well as my team’s. The charge was attempted murder of Saddam Hussein. And not only that, it was a capital crime, Title 18, Section 1958, which I think falls under RICO. If there are lawyers here, they may be able to explain this better. But it’s crossing interstate borders to commit murder.
Obviously I got out of this, but you want to talk about sending a confused message to the Iraqis? The one chance that I know about we could have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein, the CIA people end up charged with a capital crime? We were cleared. We received medals because we didn’t try to assassinate Saddam. We were just relaying what these Iraqis wanted to do. We had done our duty. We reported it, we had the cable numbers, the cables. The FBI was furious. People in the CIA got the message, which they still have today—that if you get involved in an operation like getting rid of Saddam Hussein, you end up in jail.
Think about it. If you’re in the CIA, you want to get paid every two weeks and stay out of jail. Who’s going to get involved in something like this? I’m expendable, my team was expendable, but it’s the message that went through the CIA.
As you know, history got worse from there. In 1996 people were arrested working with the CIA. Today the Kurds are asking the question, what precisely do we have in mind? We betrayed them in 1995; we betrayed them again in 1996 when the Iraqi army invaded the north. Today we are faced with going in militarily. The Iraqi opposition today cannot get rid of Saddam alone. It’s going to take U.S. troops. But today it’s an entirely different situation. Osama bin Laden is one of the most popular men in the Middle East, at least in the street. Saddam Hussein is quickly becoming the Saladin of the Arabs, the second Saladin.
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