SI
SI
discoversearch

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor.  We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community.  If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.
Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Sully- who wrote (91805)12/20/2004 4:39:30 PM
From: Bill  Respond to of 108807
 
If the photos of Clinton hugging Arafat and shaking hands with Johnny Chung aren't proof he's a terrorist felon, why is a photo of Saddam and Rumsfeld proof Saddam was in the CIA. Doesn't make too much sense.



To: Sully- who wrote (91805)12/21/2004 12:41:30 AM
From: Grainne  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 108807
 
This article is from newsmax.com, a favorite rag of the conservative right. It details Saddam's career as a CIA operative:

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.

All rights reserved.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Saddam Hussein/Iraq

Editor's note:
Discover and use the CIA’s secrets Click Here Now

newsmax.com



To: Sully- who wrote (91805)12/21/2004 12:50:49 AM
From: Grainne  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 108807
 


The deep politics of regime removal in Iraq: Overt conquest, covert operations
Part Four: The unfinished business between Saddam Hussein and George H.W. Bush

By Larry Chin
Online Journal Contributing Editor

Download a .pdf file for printing.
Adobe Acrobat Reader required.
Click here to download a free copy.

November 14, 2002—In a much-publicized CNN interview on September 18, 2002, former President and CIA Director George H.W. Bush declared that he "hates" Saddam Hussein. This canard-filled propaganda display was designed to cloak the historical fact that the elder Bush "loved" Saddam Hussein—as a key Middle East ally, a CIA asset, and partner in numerous illegal business partnerships. Indeed, the recalcitrant Saddam Hussein poses a grave threat, i.e., to the secrecy that cloaks the Bush family's involvement in some of the most unsavory episodes in American history.

"Read My Lips, I'm Lying"

"I hate Saddam Hussein," the trembling former president told interviewer Paula Zahn. "I don't hate a lot of people. I don't hate easily, but I think he's, as I say, his word is no good and he's a brute. I have nothing but hatred in my heart for him." Bush added, threateningly, "He's got a lot of problems, but immortality isn't one of them."

Not satisfied with simply offering deceptive opinion, the elder Bush began reeling off historical falsehoods, starting with the now-classic Saddam Hussein "gassing" legend. "He's used poison gas on his own people!" Bush declared, not mentioning, of course, that he and other members of the Reagan-Bush administrations armed the Iraqi regime with this poison gas, and encouraged its use.

As documented by US Congressional records, the Reagan administration—with VP George H.W. Bush spearheading top-level policy—furnished Iraq with the biological and chemical materials, throughout the 1980s. This continued through Bush I's administration, right up to the start of the Gulf War.

Poison gas used in the Iran-Iraq War was manufactured using ingredients reportedly supplied by LaFarge Corporation, of which Bush was a substantial owner, and Hillary Rodham Clinton was a director.

On July 3, 1991, the Financial Times reported that a Florida company run by an Iraqi national had produced cyanide—some of which went to Iraq for use in chemical weapons—and had shipped it via a CIA contractor.

According to investigative journalist Tom Flocco, Baker & Botts, the law firm of then-Secretary of State James Baker, maintained numerous legal and financial ties with a Boca Raton, Florida, chemical company headed by Iraqi terrorist Ihsan Barbouti. This connection continued, according to Flocco, "during the period when illegal nerve gas precursors were shipped by the Boca Raton company to Iraq just months prior to the outbreak of Gulf War hostilities." With the help of then-Attorney General Richard Thornburgh, Bush manufactured a "conflict of interest waiver" that absolved his administration from criminal prosecution. Of course, this waiver was kept secret from Congress.

Details of another direct Bush-Iraq tie emerged in September 1992, when a six-month investigation by John Connolly in Spy Magazine exposed that Wackenhut Corporation (a CIA front company) ferried equipment for the manufacture of chemical weapons to Iraq in 1990. George Wackenhut is a close friend of the Bush family, and has made enormous contributions to the campaigns of all Bush family members who have run for office.

A recent New York Times page one story (8/18/02), "Officers Say US Aided Iraq in War Despite Use of Gas," revealed that the Reagan administration provided Iraq with battle planning assistance despite knowledge that chemical weapons were being used against Iran.

Members of the current Bush administration, leftovers from the previous Bush reign, were also heavily involved. Journalist Jeremy Scahill reported that in 1984, "Donald Rumsfeld was in a position to draw the world's attention to Saddam's chemical threat. He was in Baghdad as the UN concluded that chemical weapons had been used against Iran. He was armed with a fresh communication from the State Department that it had available evidence Iraq was using chemical weapons. But Rumsfeld said nothing."

Reagan-Bush also provided Saddam with dual-use technology—computers, armored vehicles, helicopters, chemicals—through a vast network of companies, based in the U.S. and abroad.

Apologists for Bush might insist that, regardless of US involvement, the Iraqis still gassed the Kurds. Not entirely true.

According to UC Berkeley Professor Peter Dale Scott, Stephen Pelletiere, chief of the CIA Iraq desk at Langley in the 1980s (and author of Iraq and the International Oil System: Why America Went to War in the Gulf) confirms that several hundred Kurds were likely killed by Iran—not Iraq. Furthermore, these deaths were caused by cyanide gas, which Iraq had not used in the war against Iran (they used mustard gas), and which, says Pelletiere, they had no ability to produce.

Pelletiere argues that the gassing deaths of 100,000 Kurds claimed by former Secretary of State George Shultz was a complete fabrication, and that to this day no bodies were ever found. Scott concludes that although there is evidence that both sides used gas, and Iranian gas killed the Kurds, this information was not revealed until 1990, leaving the impression that only Iraq was involved, and cementing the "Saddam gassed Kurds" legend into place—to be exploited and repeated endlessly.

Poppy Bush went on to explain to Zahn why Saddam was left in power. "I know what would have happened. I know that the coalition would have shattered. My only regret is that I was wrong, as was every other leader, in thinking that Saddam Hussein would be gone." This explanation is deceptive.

In fact, Saddam was deliberately left in place (albeit disarmed and crippled) as a "lingering threat" so that the US could 1) justify a permanent military presence in Saudi Arabia (and other neighboring countries) and throughout the immediate region to police Middle East oil, and 2) organize a coup or insurrection, and install a new puppet regime in Baghdad acceptable to the US (the second step has been in the works since 1991, and has been difficult to execute) and 3) curtail the ability of OPEC to influence world oil prices.

In a final deception, Bush said in response to Zahn's question about what the country should do with the Iraqi leader now, "That's the problem facing the president of the United States of America, not me."

In fact, the elder Bush remains intimately involved with his son's administration, and many believe that he initiates policy. In July 2001, Bush personally contacted Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah to "clarify" his son's Middle East policies. Also during the summer of 2001, Bush forwarded his son a North Korea policy plan penned by "Asia expert" and former ambassador to Korea, Donald Gregg. Gregg is a 31-year CIA veteran and the elder Bush's former national security adviser whose expertise involved participation in the Vietnam-era Phoenix Program (death squads), Air America heroin smuggling, "pacification" efforts in El Salvador and Guatemala, the "October Surprise," and the Iran-Contra operation (for which Gregg received a Bush pardon in 1992).

A few months later, North Korea was named to George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil," right alongside Iraq—no doubt influenced by the Bush-Gregg "suggestions."

Poppy Bush continues to be briefed by the CIA, a "privilege" granted to all former US presidents. But Bush receives these briefings more frequently than other ex-presidents.

The BCCI-BNL-Iraqgate Skeletons That Keep Rattling

As CIA director, and throughout the Reagan-Bush administrations, Poppy Bush funneled money to Saddam Hussein without congressional approval, through the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) and Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL). It was through these loans and other covert arrangements that Iraq's war machine was armed.

BCCI itself was a product of the original Soviet-Afghan War, the primary covert bank for the CIA, global crime syndicates, and virtually every world government. Officials of both US political parties were deeply involved. Among BCCI's other clients were the Medellin Cartel, Manuel Noriega, and Golden Triangle heroin warlord Khun Sa.

The connection between the Bush family and BCCI (and its agents and later incarnations) remains intact today. Former BCCI executive and Carlyle Group investor Khalid bin Mahfouz is the banker for the Saudi royal family, and connected to both the Bush and bin Laden families. A business association with Texas investment banker and CIA-connected James Bath ties George W. Bush directly to Osama bin Laden and BCCI. Bath served in the Texas Air National Guard and co-owned Arbusto Energy with the junior Bush. Bath is a broker for the bin Laden financial empire, and bin Mahfouz's portfolio manager.

As noted by Russ W. Baker in the Columbia Journalism Review (March/April 1993), the obscure Atlanta branch of BNL, "relying partially on U.S. taxpayer-guaranteed loans, funneled $5 billion to Iraq from 1985 to 1989. Some government-backed loans were supposed to be for agricultural purposes, but were used to facilitate the purchase of stronger stuff than wheat. In February 1990, Attorney General Dick Thornburgh blocked U.S. investigators from traveling to Rome and Istanbul to pursue the case. More damningly, we know now that mid-level staffers at the Commerce Department altered Iraqi export licenses to obscure the exported materials' military function—before sending the documents on to Congress, which was investigating the affair.

According to the Financial Times, top officials at the International Monetary Fund and the Pentagon expressed alarm over Export-Import Bank loan guarantees to Iraq, which abetted the development and stockpiling of a major chemical warfare capability in Iraq. Among the companies shipping technology to Iraq were Hewlett-Packard, Tektronix, and Matrix Churchill, through its Ohio branch.

ABC's Nightline, which had been looking at Iraqgate for some time, hooked up with the Financial Times in an unusual and productive arrangement. On May 2, 1991, the team reported the secret minutes of the President's National Advisory Council, at which, despite earlier reports of abuses, an undersecretary of state declared that terminating Iraqi loans would be "contrary to the president's (Bush's) intentions."

In his book Defrauding America, investigator and former federal inspector Rodney Stich documents the BNL-Iraqgate case in even greater detail:

"Some of the money furnished by the US was used to purchase poison gas that was used on an Iraqi Kurdish village, much of it purchased through Cardeon Industries in Chile, a CIA asset. According to documents, CIA deliberately withheld evidence of the transactions. US District Judge Marvin Shoob: 'The employees of BNL were pawns or bit players in a far larger and wider-ranging sophisticated conspiracy that involved BNL-Rome and possibly large American and foreign corporations and the governments of the United States, England, Italy and Iraq.'"

The manager of the Atlanta branch of BNL, Christopher Dragoul, was ordered by his superiors in Rome, who in turn received orders from US representatives, to fund the fraudulent diversion of funds and falsify the paperwork. Britain was involved in the diversion of funds.

As early as 1984, Kissinger Associates was involved in arranging some of the loans from BNL to the Iraqi government to finance its arms acquisitions from a little-known subsidiary of Fiat Corporation. Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger were employed by Kissinger. George H.W. Bush was subpoenaed. Testimony and evidence showing Bush's involvement in this fraud were blocked repeatedly by both Bush and Clinton Justice Departments."

Stich's Defrauding America details two other explosive accounts of hidden Gulf War-related Bush administration misconduct:

Several days prior to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait on July 25, 1990 (which was set up and provoked by the Bush administration and the government of Kuwait), Bush prepared a secret deal with Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev, in which the USSR would not intervene if the US invaded Iraq. In exchange for this agreement, the US would provide the USSR with large amounts of financial aid. Naval Intelligence/ONI-CIA operative Gunther Russbacher was one of eight people (along with CIA Director William Webster and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft) who flew one of four CIA SR-71 aircraft to Moscow to secure Gorbachev's signature. Russbacher spoke Russian, had been assigned to the US Embassy in Moscow and knew Gorbachev personally. Russbacher, who participated in numerous CIA deep-cover operations, including the "October Surprise"(he was one of the pilots who flew Bush to Paris), Inslaw, Iran-Contra and looting (via CIA front companies), was promoted following this Moscow mission. Because he posed a serious threat to high officials as a whistleblower, Russbacher was charged with numerous federal offenses, jailed, and silenced.

CIA/ONI/ Navy Seal Commander Robert Hunt participated in a 1992 war game exercise known as Operation Auger Mace. According to Hunt: "Our mission was to go into Baghdad and actually try to bring Saddam back to the United States. The purpose was to help President Bush win re-election. Bush knew at that point in the game that he was in trouble. So we went into Bahrain, and from Bahrain, we went to Tel Aviv, working with an Israeli general by the name of Uri Simhoni. He was an attaché at the Israeli Embassy in Washington at one time. He was a major general and with his intel network we were to go into Baghdad, extract Saddam Hussein, bring him back, similar to what we did with Noriega. This operation was put together with my unit and also a Delta unit, and we were to go in there with the Israeli and extract him from his quarters, right outside of Baghdad, and just take him on out."

Like Russbacher and other whistleblowers, Hunt was jailed on trumped-up charges and later released.

The Tag-Team Looting Of Billions

According to investigator Sherman Skolnick, George H.W. Bush and Saddam Hussein enjoyed a lucrative personal relationship that went far beyond official diplomatic business.

In documents obtained in Case No. 90C 6863, The People of the State of Illinois ex rel Willis C. Harris vs the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (US Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit, Chicago), the suppressed bank records of BNL involved secret private joint business partnerships between Bush and Saddam Hussein, who reportedly split $250 billion in Persian Gulf oil kickbacks between 1980 and 1990, which were funneled through BCCI. In these records, Bush is also implicated in other enormous business deals with other "unsavory" world leaders, including Manuel Noriega.

Skolnick and his team were the only journalists who attended this court hearing. He claims that he interviewed participants in the case repeatedly, and that they confirmed the Bush-Hussein transactions. Skolnick has maintained for years that he has a complete record of the Bush-Saddam case, including an affidavit of the CIA general counsel, which warned that revealing the details of the documents would violate national security.

Skolnick is the founder/chairman of Citizen's Committee To Clean Up the Courts, a public interest group that investigates judicial bribery and political murders. His investigations have sent numerous judges to jail.

To date, no one has refuted Skolnick's charges, nor the facts of the Harris v. Federal Reserve court record.

Remove Saddam, Erase History

On November 1, 2001, George W. Bush issued an Executive Order declaring that in light of the "national emergency" of 9/11, the release of papers from the Reagan and George H.W. Bush presidencies would remain sealed—even though the release of these documents is mandated by the Presidential Records Act of 1978.

As a former Bush business partner and US ally, Saddam Hussein is in a position to provide living testimony to decades of treasonous Bush crimes and violations of international law committed by the United States.

Manuel Noriega was in the same position before the US invaded Panama in 1989.

Even as the Bush administration bullies, intimidates, blackmails, threatens and bulldozes its way towards its war in Iraq, this subtext cannot be dismissed.

In his CNN interview, Bush hissed that "there is nothing redeeming" about Saddam Hussein. Is there anything redeeming about George Herbert Walker Bush, the man who is connected to virtually every major political crime in the past forty years?

Is there anything redeeming about the illegitimately installed George W. Bush, whose totalitarian administration (and the financial empire that it represents) has committed more willfully criminal acts, more mass destruction, and more irreversible damage to the rule of law (and the fabric of civil society), in a shorter time than any regime in modern history?

onlinejournal.com



To: Sully- who wrote (91805)12/21/2004 12:53:39 AM
From: Grainne  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 108807
 
From owner-imap@chumbly.math.missouri.edu Sun Oct 27 07:30:06 2002
Date: Sat, 26 Oct 2002 18:06:59 -0500 (CDT)
From: ernie yacub <yacinfo@mars.ark.com>
Subject: [EMMAS] Regime Change: How the CIA put Saddam's Party in Power,
Article: 146452
To: undisclosed-recipients:;

Regime Change: How the CIA put Saddam's Party in Power, 1963
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2002 13:24:07 -0400
From: Richard Sanders <ad207@freenet.carleton.ca>

Richard Helms: CIA Assassination, Regime Change, Mass Murder and Saddam
By Richard Sanders, Coordinator, Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade and editor, of COAT's quarterly magazine Press for Conversion!

Regime Change: How the CIA put Saddam's Party in Power
From Richard Sanders, 24 October 2002
Source: Andrew and Patrick Cockburn,
excerpt from Out of the Ashes, The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, 2000.
Cited by Tim Buckley <http://www.casi.org.uk/discuss/2000/msg01267.html>

With the death of former CIA director Richard Helms, the corporate media is offering a rare glimpse into the CIA's use of political assassinations. Unfortunately, however, the coverage is highly-sanitized. It covers up much more than it reveals.

Contrary to what the corporate media suggests, assassination is not a clean, surgical method of removing very specific political enemies. It is only one small element in a larger cluster of crimes used by the CIA in executing a regime change.

The reality is that the CIA's use of assassination to exterminate political leaders has historically been closely linked to many other political crimes that are, arguably, even worse.

For example, when planning, coordinating, arming, training and financing repressive military coups, as the CIA has done so many times, their henchmen are wont to carry out mass arrests, mass torture and mass murder. It's a nasty business. As Kissinger once said about the CIA's betrayal of Iraqi Kurds, covert action should not be confused with missionary work.

Although 32 of the 98 recent stories on Richard Helms (found using a google media search) mention the term assassination, not one of these articles mentions any of the following terms that are equally relevant to CIA operations: torture, murder, arrest.

Only 4 of the 98 recent stories on Helms mention the term coup. In one case, the article uses the term to praise Helms, saying he scored a journalistic coup when he interviewed Adolph Hitler in 1935. Richard Helms' contact with Nazis didn't end there (and probably didn't begin there either). Helms went on to work closely with General Reinhard Gehlen, the notorious Nazi spymaster who was hired by US intelligence to set up an organization within the CIA. The Gehlen Org recruited thousands of Nazi agents to run covert operations in Eastern Europe after the war. Gehlen is, of course, not mentioned in any of recent news reports on Helms. Neither is the fact that the OSS (the US agency that preceded the CIA) had a lot in common with the SS. To both, the biggest evil in the word was summed up in one word, communism. And to both, the elimination of communists, labour activists and other undesirable elements that got in the way of corporatism was their chief preoccupation.

Political assassination is a valuable weapon in the covert operative's toolbox. But it is only one tool among many. A successful right-wing covert action not only removes the enemy's head, it replaces the body politic.

The CIA has been organizing regime change for 50 years. They have removed many governments that are unfriendly to US corporate interests and replaced them with regimes that are more likely to work closely and slavishly to carry out the economic and geopolitical desires of the US corporate elite.

But the CIA's crimes don't end when a right-wing coup has succeeded. The CIA then has to keep its repressive despots in power in order to ensure that they can put into place and then maintain a variety of unjust economic systems and structures. This is done with arms sales (and outright gifts of surplus weapons), glowing diplomatic support, intelligence support (sic) and massive economic investment (i.e., pillaging as much profit as possible by exploiting the natural resources that drew them in there in the first place, and handing out some of the spoils to a loyal local elite).

When the corporate media describe the CIA's use of political assassination as if it exists in isolation from mass imprisonment, torture and murder, they cover up the horror, pain and suffering experienced by thousands of ordinary people in countries where CIA-backed blood baths have taken place. They neglect to reveal that when the CIA carries out its high-profile assassination efforts, they also carry out murders of thousands of lesser-known political figures.

It's standard procedure with many coups that thousands of grassroots activists and organizers get rounded up, tortured and killed. Such waves of mass violence make today's serial sniper in Washington look like a Boy Scout. The CIA has used such goons to eliminate its opponents and as a scare tactic to ensure that other citizens, who might otherwise have protested the regime change, decide instead to lay very low in order to stay alive.

An apt example of a real CIA assassination campaign was the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. Tens of thousands of people where specifically targetted, tracked down and assassinated, many by snipers. Although Helms held the post of Director of the CIA during the height of this mass serial assassination program, none of the 98 recent stories on Helms, found with the google search engine, even mention Phoenix. Reliable estimates on the total number of people killed by the US in South East Asia during the Vietnam war range from three to five million people. But, of course, there is no mention of Helms culpability in any recent corporate media articles. they say it is taboo to speak ill of the dead, but what they don't say is that it is even more taboo to speak ill of the CIA, or breath word that CIA directors are criminals for overseeing the deliberate murder of millions of innocent civilians.

During Helms' tenure as director of the CIA under President Johnson, he also oversaw the secret war against Laos. But, it was no secret for the people of Laos. Over two million tons of bombs were dropped on this small country. The word Laos is not mentioned in any of the 98 recent corporate media articles found by google in a search for Richard Helms. Tio much of the world, it's still a secret war.

Another very good example of a CIA-organized regime change was a coup in 1963 that employed political assassination, mass imprisonment, torture and murder. This was the military coup that first brought Saddam Hussein's beloved Ba'ath Party to power in Iraq. At the time, Richard Helms was Director for Plans at the CIA. That is the top CIA position responsible for covert actions, like organizing coups. Helms served in that capacity until 1966, when he was made Director.

In the quotations collected below, the name of the leader who was assassinated is spelled variously as Qasim, Qassim and Kassem. But, however you spell his name, when he took power in a popularly-backed coup in 1958, he certainly got recognized in Washington. He carried out such anti-American and anti-corporatist policies as starting the process of nationalizing foreign oil companies in Iraq, withdrawing Iraq from the US-initiated right-wing Baghdad Pact (which included another military-run, US-puppet state, i.e., Pakistan) and decriminalizing the Iraqi Communist Party. Despite these actions, and more likely because of them, he was Iraq's most popular leader. He had to go!

In 1959, there was a failed assassination attempt on Qasim. The failed assassin was none other than a young Saddam Hussein. In 1963, a CIA-organized coup did successfully assassinate Qasim and Saddam's Ba'ath Party came to power for the first time. Saddam returned from exile in Egypt and took up the key post as head of Iraq's secret service. The CIA then provided the new pliant, Iraqi regime with the names of thousands of communists, and other leftist activists and organizers. Thousands of these supporters of Qasim and his policies were soon dead in a rampage of mass murder carried out by the CIA's close friends in Iraq.

Iraq is once again a target of US regime change. Despite that, precious little is being said by the corporate media about how the CIA aided and abetted political assassination, regime change and mass murder, all in the name of putting Saddam's Ba'ath power into power for the first time in Iraq.

One thing is for sure, the US will find it much harder to remove the Ba'ath Party from power in Iraq than they did putting them in power back in 1963. If more people knew about this diabolical history, they just might not be so inclined to trust the US in its current efforts to execute regime change in Iraq.

Here then are some quotations that I've gathered on this fascinating early history of CIA involvement in the vicious history of regime change in Iraq:

In early 1963, Saddam had more important things to worry about than his outstanding bill at the Andiana Cafe. On February 8, a military coup in Baghdad, in which the Baath Party played a leading role, overthrew Qassim. Support for the conspirators was limited. In the first hours of fighting, they had only nine tanks under their control. The Baath Party had just 850 active members. But Qassim ignored warnings about the impending coup. What tipped the balance against him was the involvement of the United States. He had taken Iraq out of the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact. In 1961, he threatened to occupy Kuwait and nationalized part of the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), the foreign oil consortium that exploited Iraq's oil. In retrospect, it was the ClAs favorite coup. We really had the ts crossed on what was happening, James Critchfield, then head of the CIA in the Middle East, told us. We regarded it as a great victory. Iraqi participants later confirmed American involvement. We came to power on a CIA train, admitted Ali Saleh Sa'adi, the Baath Party secretary general who was about to institute an unprecedented reign of terror. CIA assistance reportedly included coordination of the coup plotters from the agency's station inside the U.S. embassy in Baghdad as well as a clandestine radio station in Kuwait and solicitation of advice from around the Middle East on who on the left should be eliminated once the coup was successful. To the end, Qassim retained his popularity in the streets of Baghdad. After his execution, his sup- porters refused to believe he was dead until the coup leaders showed pictures of his bullet-riddled body on TV and in the newspapers.

Source: Alfred Mendes,
Excerpt from Blood for Oil, Spectr@zine.
<http://www.spectrezine.org/war/Mendes.htm>

The Ba'athist coup, resulted in the return to Iraq of young fellow-Ba'athist Saddam Hussein, who had fled to Egypt after his earlier abortive attempt to assassinate Qasim. Saddam was immediately assigned to head the Al-Jihaz al-Khas, the clandestine Ba'athist Intelligence organisation. As such, he was soon involved in the killing of some 5,000 communists. Saddam's rise to power had, ironically, begun on the back of a CIA-engineered coup!

Source: From Practical History,
London, May 2000.
<http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/7672/iraq.html>

1963: Qasim's government is overthrown in a coup bringing the Arab nationalist Ba'ath party to power. They favour the joining together of Iraq, Egypt and Syria in one Arab nation. In the same year, the Ba'ath also come to power in Syria, although the Syrian and Iraqi parties subsequently split.

The Ba'ath strengthen links with the U.S. During the coup, demonstrators are mown down by tanks, initiating a period of ruthless persecution. Up to 10,000 people are imprisoned, many are tortured. The CIA supply intelligence to the Ba'athists on communists and radicals to be rounded up. In addition to the 149 officially executed, about 5,000 are killed in the terror, many buried alive in mass graves. The new government continues the war on the Kurds, bombarding them with tanks, artillery and from the air, and bulldozing villages.

Source: Muslimedia:
August 16-31, 1997
<http://www.muslimedia.com/archives/features98/saddam.htm>

Iraqis have always suspected that the 1963 military coup that set Saddam Husain on the road to absolute power had been masterminded by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). New evidence just published reveals that the agency not only engineered the putsch but also supplied the list of people to be eliminated once power was secured--a monstrous stratagem that led to the decimation of Iraq's professional class.

The overthrow of president Abdul Karim Kassim on February 8, 1963 was not, of course, the first intervention in the region by the agency, but it was the bloodiest--far bloodier than the coup it orchestrated in 1953 to restore the shah of Iran to power. Just how gory, and how deep the CIA's involvement in it, is demonstrated in a new book by Said Aburish, a writer on Arab political affairs.

The book, A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite (1997), sets out the details not only of how the CIA closely controlled the planning stages but also how it played a central role in the subsequent purge of suspected leftists after the coup.

The author reckons that 5,000 were killed, giving the names of 600 of them--including many doctors, lawyers, teachers and professors who formed Iraq's educated elite. The massacre was carried out on the basis of death lists provided by the CIA.

The lists were compiled in CIA stations throughout the Middle East with the assistance of Iraqi exiles like Saddam, who was based in Egypt. An Egyptian intelligence officer, who obtained a good deal of his information from Saddam, helped the Cairo CIA station draw up its list. According to Aburish, however, the American agent who produced the longest list was William McHale, who operated under the cover of a news correspondent for the Beirut bureau of Time magazine.

The butchery began as soon as the lists reached Baghdad. No-one was spared. Even pregnant women and elderly men were killed. Some were tortured in front of their children. According to the author, Saddam who 'had rushed back to Iraq from exile in Cairo to join the victors, was personally involved in the torture of leftists in the separate detention centres for fellaheen [peasants] and the Muthaqafeen or educated classes.'

King Hussain of Jordan, who maintained close links with the CIA, says the death lists were relayed by radio to Baghdad from Kuwait, the foreign base for the Iraqi coup. According to him, a secret radio broadcast was made from Kuwait on the day of the coup, February 8, 'that relayed to those carrying out the coup the names and addresses of communists there, so they could be seized and executed.'

The CIA's royal collaborator also gives an insight into how closely the Ba'athist party and American intelligence operators worked together during the planning stages. 'Many meetings were held between the Ba'ath party and American intelligence--the most critical ones in Kuwait,' he says.

At the time the Ba'ath party was a small nationalist movement with only 850 members. But the CIA decided to use it because of its close relations with the army. One of its members tried to assassinate Kassim as early as 1959. Saddam, then 22, was wounded in the leg, later fleeing the country.

According to Aburish, the Ba'ath party leaders--in return for CIA support--agreed to 'undertake a cleansing programme to get rid of the communists and their leftist allies.' Hani Fkaiki, a Ba'ath party leader, says that the party's contact man who orchestrated the coup was William Lakeland, the US assistant military attache in Baghdad.

One of the coup leaders, colonel Saleh Mahdi Ammash, former Iraqi assistant military attache in Washington, was in fact arrested for being in touch with Lakeland in Baghdad. His arrest caused the conspirators to move earlier than they had planned.

Aburish's book shows that the Ba'ath leaders did not deny plotting with the CIA ro overthrow Kassim. When Syrian Ba'ath party officials demanded to know why they were in cahoots with the US agency, the Iraqis tried to justify it in terms of ideology comparing their collusion to 'Lenin arriving in a German train to carry out his revolution.' Ali Saleh, the minister of interior of the regime which had replaced Kassim, said: 'We came to power on a CIA train.'

It should not come as a surprise that the Americans were so eager to overthrow Kassim or so willing to cause such a blood bath to achieve their objective. At the height of the cold war, they were causing similar mayhem in Latin America and Indo-China overthrowing any leaders that dared show the slighest degree of independence.

Kassim was a prime target for US aggression and arrogance. After taking power in 1958, he took Iraq out of the Baghdad Pact, the US-backed anti-Soviet alliance in the Middle East, and in 1961 he dared nationalise part of the concession of the British-controlled Iraq Petroleum company and resurrected a long-standing Iraqi claim to Kuwait ( the regime which succeeded him immediately dropped the claim to Kuwait).

But the cold war does not by itself explain Uncle Sam's propensity to violence. When president George Bush bombed Iraq to smithereens, killing thousands of civilians, the cold war was over. Clinton cannot cite the cold war for insisting that the brutal regime of sanctions imposed on the country should stay.

In fact the brutal, blood-stained nature of Uncle Sam goes back all the way to the so-called 'Founding Fathers,' who made no attempt to conceal it. As long ago as 1818, John Quincy Adams hailed the 'salutary efficacy' of terror in dealing with 'mingled hordes of lawless Indians and negroes.' He was defending Andrew Jackson's frenzied operations in Florida which virtually wiped out the indigenous population and left the Spanish province under US control. Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues were not above professing to be impressed by the wisdom of his words.

Source: Kryss Katsiavriades and Talaat Qureshi,
The Acts of the Democracies: 1960 to 1964
<http://www.krysstal.com/democracy_1960to1964.html>

Kassem had helped found the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in an attempt to curtail Western control of Arab oil. He had been planning to nationalise the Iraq Petroleum Company in which the USA had an interest. Iraq had also disapproved when Kuwait had been given independence by the UK with a pro-west emir (king) and oil concessions to Western companies. A few days before the coup, the French newspaper La Monde had reported that Kassem had been warned by the USA government to change his country's economic policies or face sanctions. British government papers later declassified would indicate that the coup was backed by the USA and UK. The new government promises not to nationalise American oil interests and renounces its claim to Kuwait. The USA recognises and praises the new government.

Source: Gareth Smyth,
In the Middle East, the CIA has hurt its friends and helped its own enemies.
<http://www.mafhoum.com/press2/cia276_files/home_files/azpolitics_03.htm>

A history of twists and turns, with the CIA often as a blunt axe, have made it very difficult for the United States to be seen as a reliable, or even honest, presence in the Middle East. The resentment is not confined to Arabs. Nine years ago, Massoud Barzani, who has rarely ever traveled away from Kurdistan, agreed to visit Washington with a deputation of the opposition Iraqi National Congress (INC). Massoud, used to the traditional baggy trousers and cummerbund, looked uncomfortable in an Armani suit at receptions, but the INC was keen to create the right impression with senators and opinion-formers. Nonetheless, Massoud refused an invitation to visit Henry Kissinger.

Despite all the compromises of Kurdish politics, Massoud had never forgiven the former secretary of state for engineering the 1975 Algiers agreement between Iraq and Iran, when the two sides suddenly settled long-standing differences and felt free to deal with their internal problems, including the Kurds. Algiers came just two years after Massoud went to Washington to meet Richard Helms, the CIA director, and Al Haig, the White House chief of staff a meeting that led to both CIA and Israeli advisers moving into northern Iraq to help the Kurds. Algiers left the Kurds high and dry, ending a generation of Kurdish revolt led by Massoud's father, Mulla Mustafa, whose broken heart sent him into exile and an early death. Even if those in Washington forgot quickly, Massoud did not.

The relationship between the CIA and Saddam Hussein is a long one. In 1963, the Americans plotted with the Ba'ath against Abdel Karim Kassem, a man who, in the words of the writer Said Aburish, retains more of the affection of the Iraqi people than any leader this century. The CIA supplied lists for the Ba'ath to kill leftists and communists, and Washington flew arms to Kirkuk to use against the Kurds.

In Aburish's biography of the Iraqi leader, the author quotes many anti-Saddam Iraqis including Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the INC on CIA cooperation with the second Ba'ath coup in 1968. Later, in the 1980s, the United States and Britain helped arm Saddam in his confrontation with Iran only to turn against him over the 1990 Kuwait crisis. When in 1991 the Iraqi people rose against Saddam, the United States was fearful that change would put its majority Shi'ites and thus Iran in power, and US forces stood by as the Republican Guard crushed the rebellion. The CIA then worked on sponsoring a coup in Baghdad, a strategy that crumbled in 1996 when Iraqi intelligence infiltrated a conspiracy led by the ex-Ba'athist Iyad Alawi. Having rounded up hundreds of officers, the mukhabarat sent a message to the CIA team in Amman: We have arrested all your people. You might as well pack up and go home.

The CIA's half-hearted support for the INC also ended in 1996, when Saddam exploited Kurdish in-fighting to crush an INC presence in the Kurdish-controlled zone in the north. As Iraqi tanks moved in, the CIA fled and left the INC people to their fate. Washington washed its hands of the affair, and Chalabi noted that CIA officials are not known for their veracity.

Source: Ruth Wilson,
American Policy in Iraq
<http://www.speakeasy.org/wfp/37/american.html>

In 1963, Saddam Hussein worked with the CIA to carry out the coup by the Baath party, which eventually brought him to power in Iraq. The book, A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite by Said K. Aburish, which was reviewed recently in Counterpunch (The CIA: Lest We Forget, CounterPunch. Sept.16-30 1997, p.2), describes how the CIA, Saddam and other members of the Baath party collaborated to bring about the coup, murdering perhaps 5,000 people in the process. The United States went on to help Saddam win the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. According to Noam Chomsky, There were no passionate calls for a military strike after Saddam's gassing of Kurds at Halabja in March, 1988; on the contrary, the US and U.K. extended their strong support for the mass murderer, then, also 'our kind of guy' (Iraq and the UN Sanctions, The Economist, Nov.19 1994, p.47)

Source: Stephen R. Shalom
Middle East Time Line (revised, 12 Dec. 2001)
<http://csf.colorado.edu/forums/pfvs/2001IV/msg01736.html>

1963: U.S. supports coup by Iraqi Ba'ath party (soon to be headed by Saddam Hussein) and reportedly gives them names of communists to murder, which they do with vigor.

Andrew Cockburn and Patrick Cockburn, Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, New York: Harperperennial. 1999, p. 74; Edith and E. F. Penrose, Iraq: International Relations and National Development, Boulder: Westview, 1978, p. 288; Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978, pp. 985-86

Source: Thomas Powers,
The Man Who Kept The Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA, 1979, pp. 160-164.

It is astonishing how many tough-minded men in American government have been convinced by the regular spiel that the CIA has a deeprooted antipathy to proposals for political murder. A witness to still another episode of the sort was Armin Meyer, a career diplomat with a long history in the Near East going back to the Office of War Information, a kind of offshoot of the OSS, during World War II. In July 1958, when the government of Iraq was overthrown in a coup notable for its violence, Meyer was deputy director of the State Department's Office of Near Eastern Affairs. The following year he was promoted to director and as such was called in whenever the CIA contemplated covert operations in Iraq. The new ruler of the country was an army general named Abdul Karim Kassem, who had murdered his predecessors as well as a number of foreigners who happened to be in Baghdad at the time of his coup. On top of that, he immediately restored diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, later lifted a ban on the Iraqi Communist party while suppressing pro-Western parties, and in many other ways invited the hostility of Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles. On one occasion during Armin Meyer's tenure as director of the Office of Near Eastern Affairs, he attended a meeting in Allen Dulles's office at the CIA to discuss how the United States might remove Kassem. Meyer had attended many such meetings; they were a routine of government; but this one stuck in his mind.

During the meeting one of those present suggested that Kassem was the problem, and maybe the best way to get rid of him was to get rid of him. Wait a minute, Dulles said. An awful silence followed. Dulles was a man of great personal authority, and his words on this occasion had a cold and deliberate emphasis which Meyer never forgot. Dulles wanted one thing to be understood: it is not in the American character to assassinate opponents; murder was not to be discussed in his office, now or ever again; he did not ever want to hear another such suggestion by a servant of the United States government; that is not the way Americans do things.

Dulles was so clear on this point, and spoke with such evident passion and conviction, that Meyer simply could not understand how Dulles ever could have been party to an assassination plot no matter who gave the orders. Meyer knew what was in the Church Committee's reports, but he simply did not believe it, there must be some error, it was beyond Meyer's capacity to conceive that he could have been mistaken on this point, Dulles had left no room for doubt: he would not be a party to assassination.

The regular spiel

...

The message to McNamara, and to us, ought to be loud and clear: assassination was too sensitive a matter to be discussed in official meetings or to be recorded in official memos and minutes. What those high officials who received the regular spiel failed to comprehend was the degree of secrecy which surrounded any matter as explosive as assassination. Armin Meyer, for example, was convinced by Dulles's version of the regular spiel that he would never be a party to assassination. He knew what was in the Church Committee's Assassination Report roughly knew, that is; he had not actually read itbut he couldn't square what he'd heard with what he thought he knew. If he had read the report, the whole report, and most particularly the long footnote on page 181, he would have known that Dulles's solemn disapproval was in truth nothing more than the regular spiel. In February 1960, while the government was trying to decide what to do about General Kassem, the chief of the DDP's Near East Division proposed that Kassem be incapacitated with a poisoned handkerchief prepared by the DDP's Technical Services Division. In April the proposal was supported by the DDP's Chief of Operations, Richard Helms, who endorsed Kassem's incapacitation as highly desirable. Meyer would further have known that Bisseil did not act in such matters without Dulles's approval, and that Bissell was convinced he could hardly have made this point any clearer to the Church Committee that Dulles would not have proceeded without an order from the only man with the authority to okay an attempt on a foreign leader's life. In this instance the handkerchief was duly dispatched to Kassem, but whether or not it ever reached him, it certainly did not kill him. His own countrymen did that on February 8, 1963, by executing him before a firing squad on live television in Baghdad.

What Livingston Merchant, Armin Meyer, Robert McNamara, and others failed to understand was that official meetings in the office of the Director of the CIA, or of the Secretary of State, or of the Special Group, were hardly the place to discuss something that was really secret. From the CIA's point of view the Secretary of State's office was about as secure as the floor of Congress with a full press gallery. It you were going to plan an assassination in the Secretary of State's office, or record the discussion in the minutes, you might as well send a press release to the New York Times. Eisenhower and Kennedy went after two enemies in particular in the years between 1959 and 1963 Lumumba in the Congo and Castro in Cuba but when they gave the job to the CIA they expected secrecy, and that is what they got.

Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade (COAT) (A network of individuals and NGOs across Canada and around the world) Email: ad207@ncf.ca Web: ncf.ca

To join our list serve on the Afghan and Iraq wars, the war on terrorism and the criminalisation of dissent, send the message: subscribe no_to_nato to <majordomo@flora.org> To see the archives at flora.org

hartford-hwp.com



To: Sully- who wrote (91805)12/21/2004 12:57:24 AM
From: Grainne  Respond to of 108807
 
Exclusive: Saddam key in early CIA plot
By Richard Sale
UPI Intelligence Correspondent
Published 4/10/2003 7:30 PM

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 attach? 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 Caf?, 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 Caf? 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.

Copyright © 2001-2004 United Press International

upi.com



To: Sully- who wrote (91805)12/22/2004 8:31:09 PM
From: Grainne  Respond to of 108807
 
I replied to your post with this:

Message 20875822

And you apparently ignored it. Do you now acknowledge that Saddam Hussein was a CIA operative, or what?