[So the "official" Iraqi intelligence agency is fully CIA funded and staffed with ex-Baathists? I can't imagine why the Shiites wouldn't trust that. Which of course doesn't make their own operation any less scary in its own distinctively mob rule way.]
[The details of this story also cast an interesting light on various recent stories, among them: the seizure of Iranian diplomats in Kurdish territory; and the recently released Iranian diplomat who said he was captured by Iraqi intelligence and tortured by the CIA. And it sheds even more light on the otherwise inexplicable periodic government seizures of leading Sunni and Shiite figures that seem to designed to provoke and scuttle, but to be motivated by opposite points of view -- they are, and they're done by different, diametrically opposed agencies.]
April 15, 2007 Los Angeles Times
THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ: A 'SHADOW' INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
Divided Iraq has two spy agencies
Shiite officials wary of the CIA-funded, Sunni-led official
intelligence service have set up a parallel organization.
By Ned Parker
Times Staff Writer
BAGHDAD -- Suspicious of Iraq's CIA-funded national intelligence
agency, members of the Iraqi government have erected a "shadow" secret
service that critics say is driven by a Shiite Muslim agenda and has
left the country with dueling spy agencies.
The minister of state for national security, a Shiite named Sherwan
Waili, has built a spy service boasting an estimated 1,200 intelligence
agents out of a second-tier ministry with a minimal staff and meager
budget, Western officials say.
"He has representatives in every province," a Western diplomat said,
speaking on condition of anonymity. "At the moment, it's a slightly
shady parallel organization."
Shiite officials say the minister is providing information on Al Qaeda
and former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party that isn't being
supplied by the Iraqi National Intelligence Service, or INIS, Iraq's
primary spy service.
The INIS was established in the spring of 2004 by the U.S.-led
provisional authority and has been under the command of Gen. Mohammed
Shahwani, a Sunni Arab involved in a CIA-backed coup plot against
Hussein a decade ago. For the last three years, the agency has been
funded by the CIA, U.S. military and Iraqi officials say.
The service reports directly to Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, a Shiite
Muslim, but coreligionists in his government distrust the agency, which
has agents from the Hussein era. For most of 2005 and the first part of
2006, Shahwani said, he was banned from Cabinet meetings.
"The general feeling is that the intelligence service is not
functioning or conducting its work in the proper way," said deputy
parliament speaker Khalid Attiya, a Shiite.
The two spy agencies risk becoming open partisans in Iraq's civil war
if vying political parties do not reach an agreement on how to rule the
country, one analyst warned.
"If no critical compromise is reached, the security services are going
to fall apart on ethnic, sectarian and party lines," said Joost
Hiltermann, Middle East director of the International Crisis Group. "It
will be a failed state situation like Somalia."
From its conception, Shahwani's agency has antagonized Iraq's new
Shiite elite. In September 2004, his men arrested at least 50 members
of a Shiite party in southern Iraq called Hezbollah -- which is not
linked to the Lebanese group of that name -- and detained them for
several months. In the same period, Shahwani accused one of the
country's main Shiite political parties, the Supreme Council for
Islamic Revolution in Iraq, of being on Iran's payroll and blamed its
militia for the deaths of 10 of his agents.
The Shiite drive to create the parallel secret service can be traced to
the spring of 2005, when the United States, mindful of Shiite
politicians' close ties to Iran, fended off then-Prime Minister Ibrahim
Jafari's effort to take charge of the INIS.
U.S. backing
The U.S. had invested heavily in creating a strong spy service and
trusted Shahwani, who has been a crucial asset to the Americans since
the fall of Hussein's regime. Shahwani, who owns a home in the U.S.,
provided them access to old army officers, and formed an Iraqi special
forces unit, called the "Shahwanis," that fought in the November 2004
battle to retake Fallouja from Sunni Arab insurgents.
Shahwani's service "is funded completely by the U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency, not by the Iraqi government," a U.S. military
official said on condition of anonymity. "U.S. funding for the INIS
amounts to $3 billion over a three-year period that started in 2004."
Asked about the funding, CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said, "The CIA
does not as a rule discuss publicly the details of its relationships
with the intelligence services of other countries."
After failing to remove Shahwani in 2005, Shiite officials sought to
fill the gap. Then the minister of state for national security, Abdul
Karim Anizi, lobbied Jafari to turn his post into a full-fledged
ministry.
"He pushed to provide a service. He was very proactive. He exerted a
lot of pressure and requested to make his post a full ministry, but the
proposal didn't move an inch," a former government official said on
condition of anonymity. "He started to recruit informers and
sympathizers. He couldn't give them full salaries, but he could give
them government privileges and he built up a network of informers."
When Anizi stepped down, he was replaced by Waili. The service has
expanded dramatically in the last year, Waili said, getting around its
limited state budget by hiring agents on contracts.
The agency provides a hard-line Shiite view in national security
meetings, observers say.
"It's slightly reactionary in a Shiite sense," the Western diplomat
said. "If you talk about [Sunni Muslim] Anbar province, you know he is
going to take a view largely uncharitable toward the Anbar tribes."
A U.S. official suggested that certain sectarian groups were frustrated
with their inability to control the INIS and use it to advance
sectarian agendas, and that was fueling the emphasis on the parallel
service. The official also implied that Iran had sought to undermine
the INIS, in part because of its close ties to the United States and
the CIA.
"There might be some friction caused by the way this service operates
-- it doesn't operate on a sectarian basis," the U.S. official said on
condition of anonymity. "There appear to be people in Iraq, and perhaps
in one of its neighboring countries, who do not like that fact."
A Shiite official who deals with insurgency issues said that Waili was
trying to steer his service away from a sectarian bias, but the problem
was with those surrounding him.
"He is trying very hard to move away from sectarianism and say this is
a government to protect the people, but some of his officers have
sectarian views," the official said.
Waili said his main goals were to crack down on Al Qaeda, Baathists,
militias and criminals. But his service has no legal charter to engage
in domestic spying or arrest people, and it is lobbying for a law that
would formalize its surveillance activities, make it a full ministry
and bring the CIA-funded INIS under its control. But the governing
Shiite coalition has not made its mind up about whether to formalize
Waili's powers.
Sunni Arabs speak with deep distrust of Waili's ministry, describing it
as sectarian in nature.
"I think non-Shiites would find it difficult to be accepted in this
ministry. It is a nonprofessional organization," said independent Sunni
lawmaker Mithal Alusi, who serves as an informal consultant to Maliki.
Alusi said Waili's men had been arresting people on raids.
In their most controversial operation, Waili's agents spied on at least
one Sunni member of parliament they suspected of terrorist activities.
The agents submitted evidence during the winter to the Iraqi judiciary
in a campaign to strip Sheik Abdel Nasser Janabi of his parliamentary
immunity.
Janabi, a fundamentalist cleric, is accused of being behind the
killings of more than 150 Shiites in the so-called "triangle of death,"
a region just south of Baghdad, where Sunni extremists regularly target
Shiites.
Authority questioned
Parliament Speaker Mahmoud Mashadani, an ally of Janabi, said the
investigation was politically motivated, and illegal.
"The information depends on an undercover officer from a ministry that
doesn't even have the [legal] right to conduct surveillance," Mashadani
said.
Waili defended his actions, saying his agents are tasked by the
government to gather evidence, adding that they can participate in
arrests if authorized by the prime minister. "We are doing our work
according to the law and for the service of the people and so far
nothing negative has been said about our security agents," he said.
The fact remains that Waili and the rest of the Shiite-led government
have not pursued any investigations of Shiite lawmakers suspected of
involvement in sectarian killings.
One Shiite politician acknowledged the problem. "There are things that
have happened that when we have peace, people will have to be held
accountable for," the lawmaker said on condition of anonymity.
At the same time, Shahwani's INIS continues to run into troubles with
the Shiite elite.
Shahwani's most recent controversy involves accusations that his men
kidnapped an Iranian diplomat in February in Baghdad. Iraqi Foreign
Minister Hoshyar Zebari said four of Shahwani's agents were involved in
the kidnapping and had been arrested.
Shahwani told The Times that the four detained men were his agents, but
that they had been in the area on another mission at the time the
Iranian diplomat went missing. Shahwani also accused the Iranians of
inventing the story of the kidnapping so they could abduct one of his
men who had been spying on their diplomat. The freed Iranian diplomat
has said he was abducted by an Iraqi security force and then tortured
by the CIA.
Both Shahwani and Waili's agencies have been accused of bending the law
in a country that has a legacy of military coups, authoritarian regimes
and unaccountable security agencies.
"In Iraq, everybody spies on everybody, everybody kills everybody,"
Mashadani said. "We are still living in a Saddam culture."
Times staff writer Greg Miller in Washington contributed to this
report.
Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times