LONDON--Up to 300 Iraqis died last year as the result of a failed attempt by the CIA to overthrow Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in a debacle that led to the liquidation of the agency's extensive operation in northern Iraq.
Only now are details emerging of one of the Central Intelligence Agency's greatest failures in its 50-year history.
It not only financed an Iraqi opposition group that killed 100 people in a bombing campaign against civilian targets in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, but it fomented a military coup that was bloodily crushed by Saddam.
The CIA's debacle in Iraq may yet tarnish the reputation of George Tenet, the CIA's director designate, who as deputy director presided over the disaster.
But one former U.S. official said Thursday: "As in Somalia, the disaster in Iraq was so complete that nobody in Washington wants an inquiry into what went wrong."
Tenet will undergo confirmation hearings next week in Washington, where questions about his handling of the affair are likely to be asked.
The ease with which Saddam crushed a CIA-backed military coup in June, during which some 80 Iraqi officers were executed or died under torture, may have given the Iraqi leader the confidence two months later to send his tanks into Iraqi Kurdistan.
A further 120 Iraqis on the CIA payroll were slaughtered because the agency had failed to foresee the attack.
In the wake of this series of disasters, the CIA officer in the Jordanian capital of Amman, who was in charge of organizing the coup against Saddam, is said by a Washington source to have received a telephone call from Baghdad.
The caller, presumably an Iraqi intelligence official, gave extensive details of the coup, including the names of those involved. He then suggested that the CIA official pack up and go home.
The attempt to overthrow Saddam was sparked by the CIA's belief that the 1995 defection of Lieutenant-General Hussein Kamil, the Iraqi leader's son-in-law, meant he was vulnerable to a coup.
U.S. President Bill Clinton signed an order in early 1996 for $8.4 million Cdn in covert aid to be given to an Iraqi opposition group called the Iraqi National Accord. The group was already on the CIA payroll and was mainly recruited from former Iraqi officers and officials from the ruling party.
From its bases in Iraqi Kurdistan it had carried out bombing attacks on Baghdad. Details of these were spelled out by Abu Amneh al-Khadami, the INA's chief bomb maker, who accused his senior officer of keeping him short of money, arms and explosives, and secretly working for Iraqi intelligence.
When Iraqi tanks rolled into Arbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, last August they destroyed the remnants of one of the largest CIA operations in the world.
John Deutch the outgoing head of the CIA, is said by
an Iraqi source to feel that the strength of the INA was
misrepresented to him.
(text of article from April 11, 1997 Vancouver
Sun)