No Subject

[Anonymous <anon@anon.efga.org>]

THE BAY OF CAMELS
 by
 Eric Margolis  25 August 1997
 
 NEW YORK - The CIA's 50th anniversary last month turned out to be
 the Mother of All Bad Birthdays.  
 
 The Agency was still reeling from the defection of senior
 agent Aldrich Ames, who betrayed over 100 agents and CIA's
 inner workings to  Russian intelligence. Ames' monstrous
 treachery almost destroyed CIA's covert branch, and was
 comparable to the near fatal damage inflicted in the 1950's
 on Britain's Secret Intelligence Service by KGB agent, Kim
 Philby.
 
 Just when things couldn't seem to get worse for the
 beleaguered, demoralized Agency,  details of the CIA's
 biggest, most costly operational fiasco since the 1961 Bay
 of Pigs disaster surfaced - right in time for its golden
 jubilee.  Call it Clinton's Bay of Camels.  
 
 This column has followed sporadic CIA attempts over the
 past six years to overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime. All
 failed dismally. But in 1995, bitter family squabbles seemed
 to have weakened Saddam's regime. Two son's-in-law 
 embarrassingly defected to Jordan with highly sensitive
 military and political secrets.  The army was supposedly
 restive. In mid-1995, President Clinton's new CIA Director,
 John Deutch, and his deputy, George Tenet, concluded Saddam
 was vulnerable.
 
 Clinton, eager for a foreign policy triumph, ordered CIA into
 high gear to overthrow or eliminate the vexatious Saddam. The
 Agency had long financed a motley,ineffective collection of Iraqi
 exile groups and Kurdish  factions.  This time, CIA focused its
 efforts on the Iraq National Accord(INA), a group of military and
 political exiles, many formerly part of Saddam's ruling circle.  
 
 By putting them into power, CIA hoped to replicate Saddam's
 iron-fisted regime - but this time with one pro-American and
 minus Saddam. Most important, the CIA-installed generals
 were to ensure oil-rich Iraq stayed united, and did not
 splinter or fall  under Iranian influence.  
 
 CIA set INA up in Amman, Jordan. The US, Saudi Arabia and
 Kuwait provided funding. At Erbil, in the anarchic, US-
 created autonomous Kurdish zone in northern Iraq, CIA
 assembled and trained a small army of exiles and Kurds for
 the invasion of Iraq..   
 
 Agents of INA, paid by the US,  embarked on a bombing and
 assassination campaign inside Iraq,  that killed over 150
 civilians. Terrorism is bad, it seems, when used against
 Americans or Israelis, but fine when used against Iraqis.
 
 By August, 1996, the invasion was ready. It was to begin by 
 a CIA-organized assassination attempt against Saddam.  CIA's 
 army of Kurdish rebels and INA men would advance south from
 Erbil and drive on Baghdad, with massive air support from US
 warplanes and helicopter gunships.  Other anti-Saddam groups
 would invade from Jordan and Kuwait.
 
 Saddam, as usual, knew all about this ham-handed operation
 from his spies  inside INA and Kurdish groups. Souks across
 the Fertile Crescent buzzed with rumors of CIA's `secret'
 invasion. 
 
 Saddam struck first - just before the invasion. He 
 engineered a split between the two largest Kurdish rebel
 groups.  As rival Kurds battled one another, Iraqi armor
 stormed Erbil, the main CIA base in northern Iraq.
 
 The CIA and its mini-army were totally surprised. Senior
 agents fled their base one jump ahead of Iraqi troops,
 abandoning quantities of top-secret documents, electronic
 equipment, and agent lists.
 
 Saddam's dreaded secret police rolled up all CIA's extensive
 networks in Kurdistan and Iraq, executing at least 350
 American agents,  Eighty senior Iraqi officers, poised to
 mount a coup against Saddam from Baghdad, were arrested and
 shot.  
 
 The biggest. most expensive CIA field operation since the
 Bay of Pigs ended a bloody, expensive, humiliating, $200
 million fiasco.  Blame for this catastrophe must be shared
 by  President Clinton, who ordered it, inept CIA Director
 Deutch, a rank newcomer to covert work, and CIA's bumbling
 senior bureaucrats.
 
 As usual,  Clinton ducked the debacle and pretended he
 didn't know about it.  Deutch was fired and replaced as
 Director by his deputy, Tenet. True to recent CIA tradition,
 other responsible senior field officers were promoted. 
 Congress, which is supposed to oversee such major
 operations, has so far shrugged off the disaster. 
 
 The fact that the US government was funding terrorist
 bombings in Baghdad - and Tehran - was ignored by Congress
 and much of the media. As were past attempts by US agents to
 assassinate Saddam Hussein, Libya's Col. Khadaffi, and
 Lebanese Shia leaders, though these acts were outright
 violations of American law. In the Mideast, it seems, all
 rules are suspended: The moral compass spins.
 
 The Iraqi debacle is yet more proof that the bloated,
 demoralized CIA needs massive, not just not just cosmetic
 surgery.  One positive sign: recent appointment of the
 capable Jack Downing, former station chief in Moscow and
 Beijing, as chief of CIA's clandestine Operations branch.
 This is one posting the bureaucrats didn't get.
 
 Depressingly, the cost of the `bloodless' Gulf War `victory'
 keeps rising. Tens of thousands of American troops sickened
 by gas and germs. Over 100,000 Iraqi children dead from
 malnutrition caused by the American embargo of Iraq, and
 Saddam's stubbornness.  The waste of $200 million plus and
 many lives on  botched attempts to overthrow Saddam. Anarchy
 in Kurdistan. The undermining of Iraq's territorial integrity,
 with potentially explosive consequences for the entire region. 
 
 After all this, Saddam still sits proudly on his throne,.
 quite rightly boasting of his great victory at Erbil against
 the Americans.