[Peace-discuss] US recruiting Iraqi agents

[Ricky Baldwin]

[Now, folks, here's another excellent letter-writing
opportunity.  The US has a proud history of doing this
kind of thing, as in Germany after WW2.  Readers of
the News-Gazette and other papers should certainly
know of this.  Might even raise a few more hackles.  I
didn't see it in the paper, so I'd suggest beginning a
letter to the editor by noting its omission. Any
takers?  -RB]


 U.S. Recruiting Hussein's Spies
 
 By Anthony Shadid and Daniel Williams

Washington Post
 
  BAGHDAD, Aug. 23 -- U.S.-led occupation authorities
have begun a 
covert campaign to recruit and train agents with the
once-dreaded Iraqi 
intelligence service to help identify resistance to
American forces here 
after months of increasingly sophisticated attacks and
bombings, 
according to U.S. and Iraqi officials.
 
 The extraordinary move to recruit agents of former
president Saddam 
Hussein's  security services underscores a growing
recognition among U.S. 
officials that American military forces -- already
stretched thin -- 
cannot alone prevent attacks like the devastating
truck bombing of the 
U.N. headquarters this past week, the officials said.
 
 Authorities have stepped up the recruitment over the
past two weeks, 
one senior U.S. official said, despite sometimes
adamant objections by  
members of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council,
who complain 
that they have too little control over the pool of
recruits. While U.S. 
officials acknowledge the sensitivity of cooperating
with a force that 
embodied the ruthlessness of Hussein's rule, they
assert that an urgent 
need for better and more precise intelligence has
forced unusual 
compromises.
 
 "The only way you can combat terrorism is through
intelligence," the 
senior official said. "It's the only way you're going
to stop these 
people from doing what they're doing." He added:
"Without Iraqi input, 
that's not going to work."
 
 Officials are reluctant to disclose how many former
agents have been 
recruited since the effort began. But Iraqi officials
say they number 
anywhere from dozens to a few hundred, and U.S.
officials acknowledge 
that the recruitment is extensive.
 
 "We're reaching out very widely," said one official
with the U.S.-led 
administration, who like most spoke on condition of
anonymity because 
of sensitivity over questions of intelligence and
sources.
 
 Added a Western diplomat: "There is an obvious
evolution in American 
thinking. First the police are reconstituted, then the
army. It is 
logical that intelligence officials from the regime
would also be 
recruited."
 
  Officials say the first line of
intelligence-gathering remains the 
Iraqi police, who number 6,500 in Baghdad and 33,000
nationwide. But that 
force is hampered in intelligence work by a lack of
credibility with a 
disenchanted public, and its numbers remain far below
what U.S. 
officials say they need to bring order to an unruly
capital. Across Iraq, 
walk-in informers have provided tips on weapons caches
and locations of 
suspected guerrillas, but many Iraqis dismiss those
reports as haphazard 
and sometimes motivated by a desire for personal gain.
 
 The emphasis in recruitment appears to be on the
intelligence service 
known as the Mukhabarat, one of four branches in
Hussein's former 
security service, although it is not the only target
for the U.S. effort. 
The Mukhabarat, whose name itself inspired fear in
ordinary Iraqis, was 
the foreign intelligence service, the most
sophisticated of the four. 
Within that service, officials have reached out to
agents who once were 
assigned to Syria and Iran, Iraqi officials and former
intelligence 
agents say.
 
 For years, U.S. relations with both Syria and Iran
have remained tense 
and, if anything, have deteriorated since American
forces overthrew 
Hussein's government on April 9. Once-vigilantly
patrolled borders 
stretching hundreds of miles are remarkably porous,
and L. Paul Bremer, the 
U.S. civilian administrator of Iraq, has openly
accused Syria of allowing 
foreign fighters to enter Iraq. A senior American
official said those 
fighters inside Iraq, mainly from Saudi Arabia and
Syria, number  
between 100 and 200.
 
 The emphasis on intelligence mirrors a decision
earlier this month by 
Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of U.S. ground
forces, to 
minimize large military sweeps to the north and west
of Baghdad. Launched in 
June and July, the sweeps rounded up hundreds of
Iraqis, but angered 
residents who complained of mistreatment, arbitrary
arrests and 
humiliation at the hands of U.S. soldiers. 
 
 Sanchez and others have suggested that the anger
caused by those raids 
could bolster the support  for guerrillas, who are
thought to number in 
the thousands, mainly in the Sunni Muslim-dominated
regions that 
provided Hussein much of his support.
 
 The guerrilla tactics have grown in sophistication
over the four 
months of the occupation. But U.S. officials said the
guerrillas remain 
decentralized, with no sign yet of national
coordination. In the view of 
Bremer, a former counterterrorism specialist, and
other U.S. officials, 
their amorphous nature makes them harder to stamp out,
and makes more 
pressing the need for intelligence to pinpoint raids
and create the 
possibility of infiltrating the groups.
 
 "The expectation is that we're going to have to fight
it out," one 
senior official said.
 
 The official said it might require 500,000 U.S.
troops, perhaps far 
more, to secure every potential target in the country
-- an unlikely 
prospect, given that many U.S. allies are balking at
the prospect of 
sending more soldiers, especially without a U.N.
mandate. The United States  
has 132,000 troops in the country, and there are
17,000 other soldiers, 
the majority of them British.
 
 "The key is to try to stay ahead of this game and
prevent it from 
happening," the senior official said.
 
 At a news conference today, Bremer repeatedly
stressed the need for 
better intelligence, saying that U.S. authorities were
"constantly 
working to refine and upgrade our intelligence
capabilities."
 
 The goal, he said, was "to find and, if necessary,
kill as many of 
them as possible before they find and kill us."
 
 Hussein's security forces were a suffocating presence
in Iraq and 
still cast a long shadow. 
 
 Of the four security branches, the Mukhabarat  was
the best-treated 
and often supplied agents for the other branches. The
largest was 
internal security, known as Amn al-Amm, which focused
on domestic 
intelligence. The third was special security, which
protected government officials. 
These three answered to the presidency. Only military
intelligence was 
nominally independent of Hussein's inner circle and
operated within the 
Defense Ministry. The Baath Party, with membership in
the millions, 
provided a check of sorts, with its almost endless
network of informers in 
every town and village.
 
 Within the Mukhabarat, former intelligence officers
say, the branches 
dedicated to Iran, Israel and, during the 1990s, the
United Nations 
were the most important. One officer, a 23-year
veteran who spied on the 
United Nations, said about 100 agents worked on Iran,
between 75 and 100 
on the United Nations and 50 each on Israel and Syria,
in addition to 
their networks and contacts.
 
 Earlier this summer, Bremer dissolved those services,
along with the 
information and defense ministries. But Wafiq
Samarrai, a former 
military intelligence chief who went into exile in
1995 and retains contacts, 
said U.S. officials were seeking to reconstitute them
in some form. 
"They are trying to rebuild it very quietly," he said.
 
 One officer, who was not contacted by the Americans,
said he believed 
that about 300 people were being recruited. Adil Abdul
Mahdi,  the 
director of the political bureau for the Supreme
Council for the Islamic 
Revolution in Iraq, one of the groups taking part in
the Governing 
Council, said his organization has a list of almost 20
names of recruited 
officers from the dreaded Fifth Section, an organ
inside military 
intelligence that focused on Iran. He said his group
believed that at least one 
of those agents was sent to the United States for
training last month. 
An official with the U.S.-led administration said he
was not aware of 
agents having been sent to the United States. 
 
 While not disclosing how they check the operatives,
U.S. officials 
said they believed some agents remained "fairly
untainted" by Hussein's 
government. But they said they recognized the
potential pitfalls in 
relying on an instrument loathed by most Iraqis and
renowned across the Arab 
world for its casual use of torture, fear,
intimidation, rape and 
imprisonment.
 
 "We have to be very careful in how we vet them, in
how we go through 
their backgrounds," the senior American official said.
"We don't want to 
put a cancer right in the middle of this."
 
 Another official called the recruitment part of an
ongoing struggle 
between principle and what he called the practical
needs of the 
occupation. "Pragmatically, those are people who are
potentially very useful 
because they have access to information, so you have
to compromise on 
that," he said. "What we need to do is make sure they
are indeed aware of 
the error of their ways."
 
 While many Iraqi officials say they are aware of the
recruitment, some 
have spoken against the use of former operatives, and
others have 
warned against reconstituting an intelligence service
before an independent 
Iraqi government takes charge. Former exiles who
cooperated with the 
Americans were trailed by Iraqi intelligence for
years, and among them 
the issue is particularly sensitive. "We've always
criticized the 
procedure of recruiting from the old regime's
officers. We think it is a 
mistake," Mahdi said. "We've told them you have some
bad people in your 
security apparatus."
 
  The objections come in the context of a struggle
between Bremer and 
the Governing Council over the degree of Iraqi control
over the security 
services. Bremer said today that despite Iraqi
objections, security 
will remain in the hands of U.S. forces. But many
Iraqis, both former 
operatives and U.S.-allied officials, are dismissive
of the U.S. ability to 
run intelligence inside the country. They say U.S.
officials lack the 
means to recruit effective networks and are
overwhelmed with information 
of dubious quality.
 
 "There's a difference between how we perceive things
and how they 
react," said one council member. "There's no quick
response to 
intelligence. The Americans have huge quantities of
it, most of it nonsense. They 
have no means of distinguishing."
 
   

 
Would you like to send this article to a friend? Go to

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/admin/emailfriend?contentId=A37331-2003Aug23&sent=no&referrer=emailarticle
 
 

 


__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com