Spooks Lose the Iraq Plot By Pavel Felgenhauer
With the war all but over and the victors clear, many in Russia are asking questions: Why did our military and intelligence people get it all wrong? Why did they tell yarns about "resolute Iraqi resistance," when the regime and its armies were crumbling? Did these falsehoods seriously affect national decision-making, and is the spin still continuing?
Of course, not only Russians got it all wrong. Many defense analysts in Europe and North America were only a week or so ago talking of a war that would last months, of a Pentagon war plan that had collapsed because of unexpectedly fierce Iraqi resistance and other fantasies.
It wasn't only Russian media that were biased; in the West it was more or less the same. The French and German media, and many British publications, were one-sidedly antiwar and anti-American, while some U.S. outlets indulged in Soviet-style pro-war chanting.
The Iraqi crisis created a multitude of strange bedfellows. As late as April 7, the Guardian newspaper carried a story piling praise on a group of unnamed Russians, who during the war published daily assessments of the campaign on a number of web sites under the collective pseudonym "Ramzaj."
The Guardian story assumed that the Ramzaj group was an alias for Russian military intelligence, or GRU, and that this was "really the one source of reliable information on this war -- coming from Russian spies." Many Russians asked me: Who is Ramzaj? So I did some investigating.
On April 8, the Ramzaj group announced it would stop issuing daily bulletins. The statement cited the withdrawal of Russian diplomats from Baghdad as one of the main reasons for terminating activities, as well as growing resistance from Russian official structures. This last statement by the group describes its members as former Russian spies, who have retired but keep close contacts with the intelligence community.
A former high-ranking official of the GRU told me after reading a collection of Ramzaj bulletins that the authors may indeed be former GRU officers, but of low rank and qualification. Their materials contained obvious mistakes in the overall assessment of the situation: E.g., on April 6 Ramzaj stated that U.S. troops who had reached Baghdad were stranded and would be forced to besiege the city for weeks to come. The estimate of U.S. casualties by Ramzaj was several times higher than the real figure.
Some of the Ramzaj materials reveal ignorance unworthy of intelligence professionals. For example, in one bulletin Ramzaj demoted allied commander General Tommy Franks to three stars from four. The bulletins contained lots of emotional language that official GRU releases tend to avoid. In many cases, the bulletins were apparently based on Western media reports and Iraqi propaganda announcements, while disguising the sources with talk of spy satellite images and radio intercepts.
The former GRU official I interviewed believes that the Ramzaj group was formed by some guys kicked out of the secret services for incompetence who were using the war in Iraq to promote themselves in an attempt to get employed by some oligarch or oil company with connections in the Middle East.
The Ramzaj bulletins are clearly not a verbatim copy of the material the Kremlin was getting from the GRU or KGB-successor intelligence agencies. But the essence and quality of the official stuff may be the same. The degradation that engulfed the military after the demise of the Soviet Union has not spared the intelligence community or the GRU. The Guardian has it wrong: The GRU is no longer "the most sophisticated agency of its kind in the world."
A high-ranking government official told me last week that for half a year or more, Russian secret services, including military intelligence, were lobbying the Kremlin and President Vladimir Putin to back Saddam Hussein in the confrontation with the U.S.-led coalition. I was also told that Russian oil companies and other businesses that trade with Iraq actually contracted Russian spooks to do the lobbying.
This week, with the fray over, another official connected to the intelligence services (not retired) told me: "Our leadership never had any illusions about an ultimate American victory. It was the French that genuinely believed a miracle Saddam victory was possible and scolded us for being 'fatalistic.'"
That's always the way: The losers shift the blame about who made the decision to back the wrong horse, while the victors fight over the spoils. http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2003/04/17/009.html