Conflicting accounts of CIA and Saddam, 1959-1963
My posting last Saturday, For Whom the Bell Tolls: Top Ten Ways the US Enabled Saddam Hussein has elicited a very interesting account by a US government insider contesting the allegations about CIA-Saddam connections early in his life, specifically 1959-1963, and which denies CIA complicity in the first Baath coup of 1963 or the use of the Baath to destroy the Iraqi Communist Party.
The former official reports that Agency case officers in Cairo in 1960-1962 maintain that they never had heard of Saddam Hussein and that it was impossible that meetings should have been held with him without their knowledge. He says that he had looked into these allegations and had also contacted a number of Foreign Service Officers who were in the Cairo embassy at that time, and they also had no recollection of any contact with Saddam. (Another retired USG official who was in Cairo in this period also denied any such contacts, so I have it from two insider eyewitnesses.)
This source maintains that a national security official in Washington, DC, with Iraq oversight duties reports that he was called back to the office the evening of February 8, 1963, to find that the CIA chief of station in Baghdad was reporting that the Ba'this had overthrown and killed `Abd al-Karim Qasim and that "to convince the public of the demise of Qasim Iraqi TV showed a film of a Ba'thi officer holding up for view Qasim's severed head." This US government old-timer writes, "I assure you that the Ba'thi coup came as a TOTAL surprise to the US intelligence and diplomatic community . . . No one in the Washington community had ANY prior knowledge that this coup would take place, let alone having been involved in fomenting it . . ."
This source quotes an Agency case officer in Baghdad 1963 as saying that there was no connection whatsoever between the CIA Station and the Baath Party of Iraq "or with any element of the Iraqi government." There were penetrations of the Party, "but no liaison with it. It did not happen. Nor was there any significant contact between the Ba'thi government and the Political Section of the Embassy or with the Ambassador."
He writes, "In November 1963, civil war erupted between two factions of the Ba'thi Party of Iraq. [The civil war was, eerily, suspended for one day that month when leaders of the two factions laid down their arms and came to a US Embassy sponsored memorial ceremony for John F. Kennedy.] The losing faction, including leader Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr, Air Force Commander Munthir al-Windawi, and, presumably, a junior Saddam Husayn, then fled the country, most going to Damascus. This faction returned to take power in 1968."
I'm sorry to say that I cannot give more detail than this, but I would like to underline that the person I talked to is an eyewitness and insider, is not an apologist, and is about the best source a historian could hope for on this issue.
posted by Juan Cole @ 1/02/2007 06:23:00 AM
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9 Comments:
In the absence of documented evidence to the contrary, the personal reports might have to stand.
But, because all this is still classified, and the CIA has not yet released all the documents from this time, we don't really have anything to go on more substantive.
And, as we all know, the CIA always tells the truth about what they are doing and have done....
Healthy skepticism is advised.
While this individual may be a retired insider from within the US government foreign policy apparatus, he remains an anonymous source. Although I cannot remember the citation at this moment, the allegations of US support for the coup I believe come largely from the (Arabic) memoirs of one of the Ba'athist coup plotters in his retirement, back in the 1970's. That source went public with his recollections -- which of course might be fabrications...
It is quite possible that the agents the eye-witness described as CIA were in fact British.
Britian had enormous influence in Iraq before the 1958 coup, much more than the USA, and they took their loss badly.
They canceled a deal to supply the Iraqi Air Force with Hunter fighter jets immediately. That was a stupid mistake because the Soviets offered Kasim Mig-15s instead on condition of allowing Mullah Mustafa Barzani back from exile in the USSR and giving the Iraqi communists a lot of freedom.
The Muqawama al-Sha'bia (popular resistance) militia was formed mainly from the Kurds and Communists who committed large-scale atrocities particularly in Kirkuk and Mosul and became a threat to Iraq itself.
So the Brits had plenty of motives and they certainly had cultivated a lot of agents during their decades of meddling in Iraq after its nominal indepedence.
Kasim eventually purged the commies himself and disbanded the militia. The newpapers then were full of little ads by ex-members declaring that they were never members -- a practice I hope and expect will be followed by the Mahdi Army members after they are purged too.
To be frank this account is more than credible. The history of the Baath cannot indeed be reduced as being a simple tool of the American or British.
In the middle east which function with conspiracy theories everything and everybody that "succeeds" is de facto an ... agent of the CIA (including Khomeiny and the Islamic Revolution – without the CIA he would have never taken power, or so they say, but they cannot explain why the U.S. should have got rid of a trusted asset like the Shah) so these reports must be taken with extreme caution.
Happy 2007 to all !
We've institutionalized paranoia
Well, of course they'ld deny it. They wouldn't have done it through the CIA unless they wanted plausible deniability. "If captured, the secretary will disavow all knowledge of your actions...", etc. And don't tell us your insider informant has no motive to cover for past mistakes. He's CIA, after all, not being what he appears was his life's work. You have no idea what loyalties guide what he says to you.
Of course, such a paranoid rebuttal would serve equally well, or poorly, as refutation of anything your insider informant may have told you. That's the point. Let paranoiacs have input into our govt's policy, and paranoia becomes necessary in evaluating that policy. Needless to say, that way madness lies.
Perhaps this present debacle, the occupation of Iraq and the American gulag, will be the straw that finally gets us to question the whole premise of the security state we have erected since 1941. Of course they will claim that they have, in a secrecy vital to the mission, saved us countless times in the years since from countless disasters at the hands of our countless global enemies. But if these claims ever were held up to the light, if we broke the secrecy and had a massive national de-classiffication of the soul of the security state, how many of them would hold up? How much good has actually been accomplished through all this official secrecy? Very little, I suspect, which is exactly why I suspect they are so keen to maintain the regime of secrecy that hides their massive non-feasance.
How much evil the security state has brought us is much easier to see. Leave aside for the moment the direct evil involved in our gulag, and our occupation of a foreign country. Mortgaging decisions about our national security to folks who cloak themselves in official secrecy means that those who control the declassification, decide the public debate by default. Even if they're right on the policy, we outsiders, I mean the public that is supposedly in charge in a republic, have no way of knowing whether they're right, or just using the process that they have under their control to selectively leak tidbits that favor their policy choices.
We will have no clarity until we end the secrecy, and banish paranoia back to the insane asylums, and out of our public forums.
I think that a large dose of healthy skepticism is in order.
When the "source" is a CIA insider don't expect to get the whole story. CIA (OSS) was founded by Wall Street lawyers, was initially located on Wall Street, and is typically run by Wall Street insiders to this day. Their primary goal is to further the interests of private enterprise, not the interests of the American people.
Information from this new "source" should be taken under serious consideration, but should not be considered as gospel.
I would agree with others that it's quite possible that the Brits were more involved than the CIA, but that's six of one, half dozen of the other.
Juan, your source either doesn't know what he's talking about or is spouting BS on purpose. The account of the CIA getting surprised by an Iraqi coup may be true, but the rest is hogwash. Seriously:
Whether Saddam and his faction of the Baathists were paid by the CIA, MI6, or Egyptian Intelligence isn't the point. They all had common interests, enthusiastically supported him, and one or the others of the organizations trained him and paid him. Saddam was an intelligence asset as a youth, and the CIA was desperate to eliminate what they saw as a communist threat in Iraq by any means necessary; Allen Dulles had already called it "the most dangerous place in the world."
In an article by the impeccable Richard Sale, at least two retired CIA officers state Saddam frequently visited the US Embassy in Cairo and met with the station chief in Cairo, Jim Eichelberger. So at the very least, your source is outnumbered:
http://www.upi.com/archive/view.php?archive=1&StoryID=20030410-070214-6557r
In fact there is a primary source on the U.S. side who is on record as admitting that the CIA knew all about the coup ahead of time and so well in fact that it proves that they had "at least unofficial complicity in the plot."
Writing in his memoirs of the 1963 coup, long time OSS and CIA intelligence analyst Harry Rositzke presented it as an example of one on which they had good intelligence in contrast to others that caught the agency by surprise. The Ba’ath overthrow “was forecast in exact detail by CIA agents.”
"Agents in the Ba’th Party headquarters in Baghdad had for years kept Washington au courant on the party’s personnel and organization, its secret communications and sources of funds, and its penetrations of military and civilian hierarchies in several countries…
CIA sources were in a perfect position to follow each step of Ba’th preparations for the Iraqi coup, which focused on making contacts with military and civilian leaders in Baghdad. The CIA’s major source, in an ideal catbird seat, reported the exact time of the coup and provided a list of the new cabinet members.
…To call an upcoming coup requires the CIA to have sources within the group of plotters. Yet, from a diplomatic point of view, having secret contacts with plotters implies at least unofficial complicity in the plot."
Harry Rositzke, The CIA’s Secret Operations: Espionage, Counterespionage, and Covert Action (Boulder, CO: 1977), 109-110.
There is also career Foreign Service Officer James Akins (Second Poliitcal Secretary in the embassy at Baghdad during the 1963 coup) who has confided to a number of scholars "off the record" that the CIA was actively involved.
I know this because I talked to some of the scholars and I have read everything I know of that has been published on the CIA involvement in the coup. I wrote my master's thesis about this entitled, "U.S. COVERT INTERVENTION IN IRAQ 1958-1963:
THE ORIGINS OF U.S. SUPPORTED REGIME CHANGE IN MODERN IRAQ." This is published and available in the library at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona California and I would be glad to make an electronic version available to this blog.
For the paper I conducted an oral history and heard very similar sounding denials from Ed Kane. Ed Kane was the head of the Iraq Desk in Washington for the CIA at the time. In my paper I publish the details of my interview with him and document the fact that he is lying. There is also many other sources with more or less compelling evidence of CIA complicity so much so you just have to read the paper.
Bill Zeman
williamjzeman@yahoo.com
The AP article was later updated and mentioned that the locks were not broken, but that guards let the protesters inside the mosque. That also answers the question about if it can be guarded.
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