hated despot as CIA tool? go figger...

[Chris Brady <cdbrady@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Never had this happen before, eh?  An old story.

As for what has been written here by some about the need
to support Saddam in the national struggle against USUK imperialism,
count me out.
I will never side with an agent of the CIA who murdered thousands of
fellow reds.
I've made that point before about other areas of the world.
Read the following, though, and consider making a list of places where
the CIA
provide names for the willing executioners of communists (Iraq, Iran,
Indonesia, etc.).
It is worthwhile to remember these episodes as we watch Cuba pilloried
by the
sanctimonious West for defending its revolution.

Saddam key in early CIA plot

Richard Sale/UPI, 11.04.2003 [05:46]

U.S. forces in Baghdad might now be searching high and low for Iraqi
dictator Saddam Hussein, but in the past Saddam was seen by U.S.
intelligence services as a bulwark of anti-communism and they used him
as their instrument for more than 40 years, according to former U.S.
intelligence diplomats and intelligence officials.

United Press International has interviewed almost a dozen former U.S.
diplomats, British scholars and former U.S. intelligence officials to
piece together the following account. The CIA declined to comment on the
report.

While many have thought that Saddam first became involved with U.S.
intelligence agencies at the start of the September 1980 Iran-Iraq war,
his first contacts with U.S. officials date back to 1959, when he was
part of a CIA-authorized six-man squad tasked with assassinating then
Iraqi Prime Minister Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim.

In July 1958, Qasim had overthrown the Iraqi monarchy in what one former
U.S. diplomat, who asked not to be identified, described as ?a horrible
orgy of bloodshed.? According to current and former U.S. officials, who
spoke on condition of anonymity, Iraq was then regarded as a key buffer
and strategic asset in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. For example,
in the mid-1950s, Iraq was quick to join the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact
which was to defend the region and whose members included Turkey,
Britain, Iran and Pakistan. Little attention was paid to Qasim?s bloody
and conspiratorial regime until his sudden decision to withdraw from the
pact in 1959, an act that ?freaked everybody out? according to a former
senior U.S. State Department official.

Washington watched in marked dismay as Qasim began to buy arms from the
Soviet Union and put his own domestic communists into ministry positions
of ?real power,? according to this official. The domestic instability of
the country prompted CIA Director Allan Dulles to say publicly that Iraq
was ?the most dangerous spot in the world.?

In the mid-1980s, Miles Copeland, a veteran CIA operative, told UPI the
CIA had enjoyed ?close ties? with Qasim?s ruling Baath Party, just as it
had close connections with the intelligence service of Egyptian leader
Gamel Abd Nassar. In a recent public statement, Roger Morris, a former
National Security Council staffer in the 1970s, confirmed this claim,
saying that the CIA had chosen the authoritarian and anti-communist
Baath Party ?as its instrument.?

According to another former senior State Department official, Saddam,
while only in his early 20s, became a part of a U.S. plot to get rid of
Qasim. According to this source, Saddam was installed in an apartment in
Baghdad on al-Rashid Street directly opposite Qasim?s office in Iraq?s
Ministry of Defense, to observe Qasim?s movements. Adel Darwish, Middle
East expert and author of Unholy Babylon, said the move was done ?with
full knowledge of the CIA,? and that Saddam?s CIA handler was an Iraqi
dentist working for CIA and Egyptian intelligence. U.S. officials
separately confirmed Darwish?s account. Darwish said that Saddam?s
paymaster was Capt. Abdel Maquid Farid, the assistant military attaché
at the Egyptian Embassy who paid for the apartment from his own personal
account. Three former senior U.S. officials have confirmed that this is
accurate.

The assassination was set for Oct. 7, 1959, but it was completely
botched.  Accounts differ.  One former CIA official said that the
22-year-old Saddam lost his nerve and began firing too soon, killing
Qasim?s driver and only wounding Qasim in the shoulder and arm. Darwish
told UPI that one of the assassins had bullets that did not fit his gun
and that another had a hand grenade that got stuck in the lining of his
coat. ?It bordered on farce,? a former senior U.S. intelligence official
said.  But Qasim, hiding on the floor of his car, escaped death, and
Saddam, whose calf had been grazed by a fellow would-be assassin,
escaped to Tikrit, thanks to CIA and Egyptian intelligence agents,
several U.S. government officials said.

Saddam then crossed into Syria and was transferred by Egyptian
intelligence agents to Beirut, according to Darwish and former senior
CIA officials. While Saddam was in Beirut, the CIA paid for Saddam?s
apartment and put him through a brief training course, former CIA
officials said. The agency then helped him get to Cairo, they said. One
former U.S. government official, who knew Saddam at the time, said that
even then Saddam ?was known as having no class. He was a thug -- a
cutthroat.?

In Cairo, Saddam was installed in an apartment in the upper class
neighborhood of Dukki and spent his time playing dominos in the Indiana
Café, watched over by CIA and Egyptian intelligence operatives,
according to Darwish and former U.S. intelligence officials. One former
senior U.S. government official said: ?In Cairo, I often went to Groppie
Café at Emad Eldine Pasha Street, which was very posh, very upper class.
Saddam would not have fit in there. The Indiana was your basic dive.?

But during this time Saddam was making frequent visits to the American
Embassy where CIA specialists such as Miles Copeland and CIA station
chief Jim Eichelberger were in residence and knew Saddam, former U.S.
intelligence officials said. Saddam?s U.S. handlers even pushed Saddam
to get his Egyptian handlers to raise his monthly allowance, a gesture
not appreciated by Egyptian officials since they knew of Saddam?s
American connection, according to Darwish. His assertion was confirmed
by former U.S. diplomat in Egypt at the time.

In February 1963 Qasim was killed in a Baath Party coup. Morris claimed
recently that the CIA was behind the coup, which was sanctioned by
President John F. Kennedy, but a former very senior CIA official
strongly denied this. ?We were absolutely stunned. We had guys running
around asking what the hell had happened,? this official said. But the
agency quickly moved into action. Noting that the Baath Party was
hunting down Iraq?s communists, the CIA provided the submachine
gun-toting Iraqi National Guardsmen with lists of suspected communists
who were then jailed, interrogated, and summarily gunned down, according
to former U.S. intelligence officials with intimate knowledge of the
executions. Many suspected communists were killed outright, these
sources said. Darwish told UPI that the mass killings, presided over by
Saddam, took place at Qasr al-Nehayat, literally, the Palace of the End.

A former senior U.S. State Department official told UPI: ?We were
frankly glad to be rid of them. You ask that they get a fair trial? You
have to get kidding. This was serious business.?

A former senior CIA official said: ?It was a bit like the mysterious
killings of Iran?s communists just after Ayatollah Khomeini came to
power in 1979. All 4,000 of his communists suddenly got killed.?

British scholar Con Coughlin, author of Saddam: King of Terror, quotes
Jim Critchfield, then a senior Middle East agency official, as saying
the killing of Qasim and the communists was regarded ?as a great
victory.? A former long-time covert U.S. intelligence operative and
friend of Critchfield said: ?Jim was an old Middle East hand. He wasn?t
sorry to see the communists go at all. Hey, we were playing for keeps.?

Saddam, in the meantime, became head of al-Jihaz a-Khas, the secret
intelligence apparatus of the Baath Party. The CIA/Defense Intelligence
Agency relation with Saddam intensified after the start of the Iran-Iraq
war in September of 1980. During the war, the CIA regularly sent a team
to Saddam to deliver battlefield intelligence obtained from Saudi AWACS
surveillance aircraft to aid the effectiveness of Iraq?s armed forces,
according to a former DIA official, part of a U.S. interagency
intelligence group.