Iraqi party helping U.S. reassemble Iran spy unit
Resurrection of once-feared service could backfire, critics say
Neela Banerjee, Douglas Jehl, New York Times Tuesday, July 22, 2003
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Baghdad -- Relying on the help of an Iraqi political party, the United States has moved to resurrect parts of Iraq's once-feared intelligence service, with the branch that monitors Iran among the top priorities, former Iraqi agents and politicians say.
The Iraqi National Congress, which is led by Ahmad Chalabi, the longtime exile who is now a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, says its senior officials have met with senior members of the so-called Iran and Turkey branch of the Mukhabarat, or Iraqi intelligence, over the past several weeks. The party has received documents from the intelligence officers and recruited them into a reconstituted version of the unit, said Abdulaziz Kubaisi, the Iraqi National Congress official responsible for the recruiting effort.
American officials, he said, are fully informed about what the party is doing. Iraqi intelligence officers who have been asked to rejoin the branch contend that the United States is orchestrating the effort.
"As far as what we do, we are sending back information to the Pentagon, to people who are responsible," Kubaisi said. "They know the nature of what we're doing. There is coordination. We have representatives of (U.S. Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld (at the Congress)."
But some Middle East experts said trying to revive the branch before a sovereign government is in place and working through a political party could backfire.
"This sets a bad precedent because you don't have a government in place, and because Chalabi's party is a minority and doesn't represent the majority of Iraqis," said Edward Walker, former ambassador to Egypt and Israel under former President George Bush and now president of the Middle East Institute, "I think it will be highly controversial to rebuild the intelligence arm when there are so many unresolved questions about Iraqi intelligence from before."
The effort to reach out to former Iraqi intelligence officials also appears hard to harmonize with the American drive to "de-Baathify" Iraqi society, given the prominence of the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein in his government.
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full at
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/07/22/MN248282.DTL
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