Secret History of the Iraq War

Yossef Bodansky

• Editorial: HarperCollins e-books
• Año: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061753954
• Categoría: Politique et relations internationales
• Categoría: Intelligence et espionnage

In the months leading up to March 2003, fresh from its swift and heady victory in Afghanistan, the Bush administration mobilized the United States armed forces to overthrow the government of Iraq. Eight months after the president declared an end to major combat operations, Saddam Hussein was captured in a farmhouse in Al-Dawr. And yet neither peace nor democracy has taken hold in Iraq; instead the country has plunged into terrorist insurgency and guerrilla warfare, with no end in sight.What went wrong?

In The Secret History of the Iraq War, bestselling author Yossef Bodansky offers an astonishing new account of the war and its aftermath—a war that was doomed from the start, he argues, by the massive and systemic failures of the American intelligence community. Drawing back the curtain of politicized debate, Bodansky—a longtime expert and director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare—reveals that nearly every aspect of America's conflict with Iraq has been misunderstood, in both the court of public opinion and the White House itself. Among his revelations:

• The most authoritative account of Saddam Hussein's support for Islamic terrorist organizations—including extensive new reporting on his active cooperation with al-Qaeda in Iraq long after the fall of Baghdad
• Extensive new information on Iraq's major chemical and biological weapons programs—including North Korea's role in building still-undetected secret storage facilities and Iraq's transfer of banned materials to Syria, Iran, and Libya
• The first account of Saddam's plan for Iraq, Syria, and Iran to join Yasser Arafat's Palestinian forces to attack Israel, throw the region into turmoil, and upend the American campaign
• The untold story of Russia's attempt to launch a coup against Saddam before the war—and how the CIA thwarted it by ensuring that Iraq was forewarned
• Dramatic details about Saddam's final days on the run, including the untold story of a near miss with U.S. troops and the stunning revelation that Saddam was already in custody at the time of his capture—and was probably betrayed by members of his own Tikriti clan
• The definitive account of the anti-U.S. resistance and uprising in Iraq, as the American invasion ignited an Islamic jihad and Iran-inspired intifada, threatening to plunge the region into irreversible chaos fueled by hatred and revenge
• Revelations about the direct involvement of Osama bin Laden in the terrorism campaigns in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the rest of the Middle East—including the major role played by Iran and HizbAllah in al-Qaeda's operations

Drawing upon an extraordinary wealth of previously untapped intelligence and regional sources, The Secret History of the Iraq War presents the most detailed, fascinating, and convincing account of the most controversial war of our times—and offers a sobering indictment of an intelligence system that failed the White House, the American military, and the people of the Middle East.

1

Early Steps—
The Loss of Deterrence

There is a unique, and exceptionally well-defended upper-class compound in the al-Jazair neighborhood of Baghdad. It is a retirement community, but its residents are no ordinary senior citizens. They include retirees from Iraqi intelligence, former senior security officials, and a host of terrorists, most of them Arabs, who have cooperated with Baghdad over the years.

Since 2000, Sabri al-Banna—better known as Abu Nidal—had been one of the preeminent members of this community. Then, on the night of August 16, 2002, a few gunmen made their way through the well-protected gates and into a three-story house where they swiftly killed Abu Nidal and four of his aides. They then walked out without uttering a word. None of the guards or security personnel attempted to interfere with the assassination, because the assassins, like the guards themselves, worked for the Mukhabarat—Iraq’s internal security and intelligence service.

Abu Nidal had been one of the world’s most brutal terrorist leaders since rising to prominence in the 1960s. His people were involved not only in countless assassinations and bombings, but also in comprehensive support operations for diverse terrorist groups all over the world—from Latin America to Northern Ireland to Japan. He was the mastermind of some of the most lethal terrorist strikes in history, and his organization was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of civilians around the world.

Over the years, Abu Nidal closely cooperated with any number of intelligence services, including those of the Soviet Union, Romania, North Korea, Pakistan, Libya, Egypt, and Iraq. But in August 2002 the sixty-five-year-old murderer was old and infirm, bound to a wheelchair by heart disease and cancer. There seemed to be no logic to Baghdad’s decision to assassinate Abu Nidal at the height of its crisis with America; at the very least, the assassination reminded friends and foes alike of the shelter and sponsorship the Iraqi government provided to the world’s terrorist elite.

Like all aspects of the war in Iraq, the undercurrents surrounding the assassination are far more important than the action itself. And like many other facets of this crisis, they still leave more questions than answers. Quite simply, Saddam Hussein, who personally authorized the assassination of his longtime personal friend, had little reason for doing so. The act was merely an attempt to please two close allies, Hosni Mubarak and Yasser Arafat, who were desperate to ensure that American forces entering Baghdad would not be able to interrogate Abu Nidal.

Mubarak was anxious to conceal the fact that during the late 1990s Egyptian intelligence used Abu Nidal’s name to run a series of covert assassinations and “black operations” against Egyptian al-Qaeda elements. Posing as Abu Nidal’s terrorists, Egyptian intelligence operatives ruthlessly destroyed British and other intelligence networks standing in their way. They killed Egyptian Islamists Cairo knew to be spying for some of Egypt’s closest allies and benefactors. At the same time, Egyptian intelligence was receiving comprehensive assistance from the CIA. Egypt had sworn that it was not involved in these black operations, since the United States considers them illegal and the CIA is not permitted to cooperate with any country performing them, even indirectly. Egypt also adamantly denied that Abu Nidal was being sheltered in Cairo at the time, although he was receiving medical care in return for his cooperation with Egyptian intelligence.

Arafat was desperate to conceal the long-term cooperation between his Fatah movement and Abu Nidal’s Black June organization. Ion Pacepa, the former chief of Romanian intelligence, disclosed that in the late 1970s Hanni al-Hassan, one of Arafat’s closest confidants, took over Abu Nidal’s Black June organization on Arafat’s behalf so that Arafat could “have the last word in setting terrorist priorities” while enhancing his own image as a moderate. Arafat was anxious to hide his terrorist connections and maintain the charade that he was a peacemaker. Desperate to distance himself and the Palestinian Authority from the specter of terrorism (and thus exempt himself from the American war on terror), Arafat could not afford to allow Abu Nidal to reveal their quarter-century of close cooperation, during which Arafat was actually the dominant partner.

But there was a darker facet to the Abu Nidal story. In the weeks prior to the assassination, Iraqi intelligence received warnings from the intelligence services of several Gulf States that Abu Nidal was trying to reach an agreement with Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), which the Arab world respects and dreads far more than the CIA. Unhappy with the medical treatment he was getting in Baghdad, Abu Nidal had offered to divulge secrets in exchange for superior medical treatment in England. When London was cool to the original offer, Abu Nidal professed that he could provide the latest information about Iraqi cooperation with international terrorism generally, and al-Qaeda in particular.

Iraqi intelligence was reluctant to accept these reports because it knew the ailing Abu Nidal had few aides left, and most of these were actually working for Iraqi intelligence. After extended consideration, Saddam and the Mukhabarat high command concluded that the warnings had actually been a crude disinformation effort by the CIA or the SIS—a sting aimed to manipulate Baghdad into exposing its growing cooperation with bin Laden, giving the administration an excuse to strike. The Iraqis, it turns out, were correct: the SIS was indeed trying to provoke the Iraqis into reckless actions, using its allies in the Gulf States as conduits for the flow of “chicken feed” to Baghdad.

The assassination destroyed all remaining hopes in Washington and London for extracting information from Abu Nidal. Baghdad further capitalized on the event by delivering a message to the Western intelligence services. On August 21, Mukhabarat chief Taher Habush appeared in a rare press conference, showing grainy pictures of a blasted and thoroughly bandaged body he claimed was Abu Nidal’s. Habush admitted that the longtime terrorist had been hiding in Baghdad, but alarmed at his recent discovery by police, he had committed suicide rather than face Iraqi authorities.

On its own, the Abu Nidal assassination would have been a negligible episode, lost in the flurry of activity as the American invasion neared. After the fall of Baghdad, though, British intelligence investigators searching through the devastated Mukhabarat building stumbled on parts of a file pertaining to Abu Nidal. The key document in the file was an Iraqi analysis of a Russian document delivered to Saddam Hussein on behalf of Vladimir Putin in the summer of 2002. According to the Iraqi documents, the Russians warned Hussein that Abu Nidal had sent emissaries to the Gulf States to negotiate a deal with the CIA, planning to betray Saddam’s secrets in return for American shelter and medical care.

It may have appeared that Russian intelligence had fallen victim to the British sting and decided to gain favor with Saddam by recycling the information the Gulf States were already feeding Baghdad, but that is not the case. In March 2003 the Mukhabarat conducted, with the help of Russian experts, a thorough cleanup and evacuation of its Baghdad headquarters, and in April, key archives were evacuated to Moscow via Damascus by Russian diplomats. Needless to say, special attention was paid to documents pertaining to Soviet and Russian cooperation with Iraq. The Russians handle these matters efficiently, and the likelihood of so sensitive a file being lost in the chaos is very slim. This leads to the lingering questions: Is the Iraqi document genuine—that is, did the Russians deliver such a warning? Or was the document manufactured to confuse? And in any case, why was it left behind to be found by a coalition intelligence service? What message were the Russians trying to tacitly deliver: A simple reminder to the West that Moscow was aware of the intricacies of Western intelligence activities in the region? A more subtle message that Russia’s presence and interests in Iraq were not to be ignored? Or as British intelligence officials suggest, a reminder that ultimately, Russia and the leading Western powers have common interests and goals in this turbulent, vital region of the world?

Just such complex intelligence matters are at the core of the seemingly straightforward confrontation between the United States and Iraq.

In the summer of 2002, the Middle East was baking in an unprecedented heat wave, waiting anxiously for the inevitable eruption of a regional war. These expectations derived from the administration’s growing interest in confronting Saddam Hussein, and its attempt to revitalize Israeli-Palestinian negotiations by disengaging from Yasser Arafat and his corrupt coterie. Although Washington regarded the confrontation with Iraq as an integral part of the war on terrorism declared after September 11, in the region the imminent American attack exacerbated troubling regional dynamics driven by the ascent of militant Islam.

The White House had by then concluded that it could not expect Arab support for the broader war on terrorism or the effort to destroy Saddam’s regime. America would instead work with a small group of close allies rather than strive for wider coalitions and tacit endorsements. Indicative of this novel approach to the Middle East was the new policy toward Israeli-Palestinian fighting as elucidated in President Bush’s speech on June 24, 2002. The United States urged the Palestinians to get rid of Arafat and establish democracy as preconditions for negotiating peace with Israel and establishing statehood. This new American vision for the Middle East confirmed the Arabs’ worst fears and reinforced their long-standing conviction that only a cataclysmic regional war would be able to stifle the American campaign against terrorism and the quest for a democratically inclined Arab world at peace with a strong and secure Israel.

Meanwhile, the mere continuation of Israeli-Palestinian fighting and the growing defiance of Iraq, now back in the fold of the Arab League, had a profound impact on the region. Despite America’s declared policy, and Israel’s reputed military might, both Washington and Jerusalem proved incapable of drastically affecting the overall situation in the Middle East. In July, Maj. Gen. Amos Malka, just retired from the Israel Defense Forces as the chief of military intelligence, warned that the United States had lost “its deterrence capacity in the Middle East.” The Arab hierarchy felt confident that it would be able survive the U.S. war on terrorism, and the fall of the Taliban had had no tangible impact on Arab governments, if only because of the continued flow of Arab “Afghans” back to the Middle East. Emboldened by these currents, the Syrians and Iranians launched a plan to proactively thwart the war on terrorism.

Compounding the situation, no Arab elite could ignore the threat posed by militant Islamists in their midst. Indeed, the region’s key figures gravitated toward radical Islam because they recognized its rising popularity and resolve. For virtually all Arab leaders, confronting Islamists meant risking popular uprisings, terrorism, and potential coups; adopting an extreme anti-American posture was an easy way to placate the Islamists.

At the same time, convinced that an attack was imminent, Saddam boldly restated his defiance. In a major speech commemorating the 1968 Baath Revolution, Saddam railed against the United States, warning “all evil tyrants and oppressors of the world: You will never defeat me this time. Never! Even if you come together from all over the world, and invite all the devils as well, to stand by you.” Iraq’s revolutionary steadfastness was “armed with swords, bow and spear, carrying its shield or gun and cannon,” he declared. Saddam prepared the Iraqis to endure suffering in the coming war but assured them of an ultimate victory just like that awaiting the Palestinians. “The Palestinian people are victorious thanks to the stance of every Palestinian man and woman and their generous sacrifices and their readiness to give more,” he declared.

Saddam’s speech effectively solidified support because he used Islamist terminology made immensely popular by bin Laden and the Palestinian Islamists in order to inspire confidence in Iraq’s ultimate triumph. Abdul Barri al-Atwan, in an interview with al-Jazeera TV, stressed that “the Iraqi president spoke with the spirit of martyrdom, exactly like the Palestinian martyrs before they carry out their attacks against Israeli targets, just like the martyr who appears on a videotape, whether he is from HizbAllah, al-Aqsa [Martyrs] Brigades, or Izz-al-Din al-Qassim Brigades [the military wing of HAMAS].” Atwan also singled out the language and metaphors used by Saddam: “In addition to the tone of self-confidence and defiance, the Iraqi president was speaking like Sheikh Saddam Hussein or Mujahid Sheikh Saddam Hussein and not like the Iraqi Baath Party leader,” Atwan emphasized. “In fact he was just like Sheikh Osama bin Laden, the same Koranic verses, the same prayers, the same confidence in victory. This demonstrates a new phase in the Iraqi president’s strategy.” Saddam’s Islamic fervor and military brinkmanship conspired to make him a populist hero.

Contributing to Saddam’s new popular appeal, the Arab world dreaded the consequences that an American war against Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein would hold for them. Mostly they were apprehensive that Saddam’s defeat would lead to the dismemberment of Iraq, regardless of America’s plans for the country, and that a myriad of Islamist terrorist and militant groups would rise to export their brands of Islamic revolution to the rest of the Arab world.

The Islamists relished this scenario. Abd-al-Fattah Fahmi, an Egyptian “Afghan” who had just returned from Afghanistan via Iran and Iraqi-Kurdistan, warned Egyptian officials that “a U.S. attack on Iraq would unite terrorist networks.” He explained that the emergence of a post-Saddam westernized Iraq recognizing the rights and distinctions of the Shiite, Kurdish, and Sunni communities would empower the militant Islamists:

The nationalist and ethnic organizations have fallen and—as I have seen for myself—a Kurd no longer trusts anybody but the Islamists. Thus, the Islamic currents will be able to move easily inside the Kurdish community, and they will definitely be provoked by the U.S. action. They will resist it in a more fierce and vicious manner, without caring about reactions, as is the case at present in the Saddam era. Meanwhile in the Shiite regions in the south, which have the reservoirs of Iraqi petroleum, they will most certainly fall into the bosom of Shiite Iran. A new HizbAllah will arise from them, in a manner similar to what happened in Lebanon. Iraq will be turned into a crocodile lake that tears off U.S. legs. As for the Sunnis in the north, they will come out from Saddam’s repression and oppression to freedom and adhesion to the teachings of their religion. Radical organizations will also emerge, and they will have no enemy in front of them worse than the United States that fights Islam, in their perception, and that has been subjecting the Iraqi people to bitter suffering for two decades. Iraq will become another Somalia where the snobbish American nose will be rubbed in the dust. It will be an international haven for global terrorism and a formidable incubator for internal terrorism. The solution from America’s point of view would then be military presence, as in the case of Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, the United States worked urgently to consolidate a viable Iraqi opposition movement. First, Washington endorsed the creation in London of an umbrella group called the Iraqi National Forces Coalition (INFC), comprising thirteen groups, including democratic activists, Islamists, and nationalists as well as minority groups representing the Assyrians, Kurds, and Turkman. The new coalition had friction with the U.S.-funded Iraqi National Congress (INC), and Baghdad ridiculed the new exercise. Uday Saddam Hussein’s newspaper Babil even published the coalition’s first communiqué along with details of the event, suggesting that Saddam’s spies were present.

Undaunted, a few days later the United States sponsored another London meeting—this time of some seventy Iraqi military defectors, most of them affiliated with the INC. The group was to form a military council of up to ten members who would “draft strategy for the overthrow of Saddam” with special emphasis put on devising ways “to recruit Iraqi commanders to join a coup against Saddam.” Significantly, the conference organizers were Iraqi generals—Tawfiq Yassiri and Saad Ubeidi—who had been active in violently crushing the anti-Saddam insurgency of 1991. Later, Washington sponsored a major opposition meeting in London of two hundred civic, intellectual, and religious leaders as well as a few military defectors. Prince Hassan of Jordan and Sharif Ali bin-Hussein, the claimant to the Iraqi throne, were present. Again, military issues were widely discussed. Brig. Gen. Najib al-Sali, a former commander of a Republican Guards tank brigade, was highlighted as a key leader. He and other senior officers spread hints that they were involved in clandestine negotiations between Washington and dissident elements in the Iraqi armed forces.

The Arab world reacted with fury to the obvious American effort to topple the Iraqi regime. Egyptian journalist and expert on U.S. policy Ayman El-Amir wrote in a July issue of the government’s Al-Ahram Weekly that Washington was confronting Saddam solely for domestic political reasons: “Without the forced removal of Saddam Hussein, the battle will be judged a fiasco. And it is not a fiasco that President Bush can afford in his quest for a second Republican term.”

As El-Amir saw it, although Washington justified the confrontation in the context of the war on terrorism, the United States was actually taking on the entire religion of Islam and its practitioners worldwide. Indeed, the United States was so hostile that even “religious education that elevates Jihad and death in the cause of Allah to the highest rank of martyrdom is regarded [by Washington] as a terrorism assembly line.”

But raising the issue of terrorism, in El-Amir’s eyes, was nothing but an excuse for a cynical policy: “The targeting of President Saddam Hussein is consistent with that strand of U.S. political thinking that legitimizes the ouster of political leaders who may pose a threat to Washington’s perception of its national interests,” he explained. “The U.S. is now embracing a change-of-leaders doctrine and in a relatively short time the justification will be as varied as harboring terrorism, suppressing political dissent, or endangering U.S. economic interests by, say, enforcing an oil embargo.”

Ultimately, El-Amir warned, the thwarting of the U.S. conspiracy against Baghdad was a vital and urgent imperative of all Arab leaders because “should the ouster of President Saddam Hussein be as swift and surgical as the U.S. military would like it to be, [other Arab] leaders in the region and elsewhere may soon find themselves added to President Bush’s laundry list.” This point did not go unnoticed in Cairo, where President Mubarak was desperately working to establish his son Gamal as his heir. The recipient of billions of dollars in U.S. foreign and military aid (Egypt’s yearly sum is second only to Israel’s), Cairo was under mounting U.S. pressure to further democratize its regime, improve human rights, and establish a legal mechanism for succession. Mubarak understood that it was only a question of time before he would have to choose between Gamal’s empowerment and implementing the American demands. Deeply comitted to turning the presidency over to his son, Mubarak was also eager to preserve the flow of American funds for as long as he could, even though he and his inner circle were convinced that a major crisis with the United States over Egypt’s future was inevitable.

In Saudi Arabia, King Fahd and his family were petrified at the prospect of America’s replacing errant Arab leaders. Summer 2002 was already a troubling time for the Saudi leadership, as the health of King Fahd suddenly deteriorated, fueling a bitter succession struggle. Major cracks then emerged in the uppermost echelons of the House of al-Saud; that weakness was demonstrated in May in an attempt on Fahd’s life in Jeddah. Roughly twelve Saudi Islamists—all of whom had returned from Afghanistan via Iran in January 2002—tried to break into Fahd’s palace. After blowing up the main gate with a large, sophisticated bomb, they fought at the gate area with the king’s bodyguards and numerous reinforcements from other palaces and installations. Ultimately, three attackers were killed and the rest melted away; one of the dead was identified as a bodyguard of a sheikh considered a key supporter of Crown Prince Abdallah. Immediately the House of al-Saud became rife with rumors that the attack was actually part of the succession struggle rather than an Islamist strike inspired by Osama bin Laden.

Shortly afterward, King Fahd and a large retinue left for Geneva, where he could find both medical treatment and safe refuge. In July, King Fahd was well enough to conduct a series of summit meetings concerning the dire ramifications of a U.S. attack on Iraq for both the Arab world and the House of al-Saud. First, Fahd hosted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and later United Arab Emirates Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nayhan. Returning from Geneva, Mubarak informed Washington that Egypt would not support or provide assistance for any campaign against Saddam. Both Mubarak and Sheikh Zayed also warned King Fahd that Crown Prince ...