http://hardy.ocs.mq.edu.au/~control2/bay-cmls.html
Foreign Correspondent
The Bay of Camels
By Eric Margolis
25 August 1997
NEW YORK - The CIA's 50th anniversary last month turned out to be
the Mother of All Bad Birthdays.
The Agency was still reeling from the defection of senior agent
Aldrich Ames, who betrayed over 100 agents and CIA's inner
workings to Russian intelligence. Ames' monstrous treachery almost
destroyed CIA's covert branch, and was comparable to the near
fatal damage inflicted in the 1950's on Britain's Secret
Intelligence Service by KGB agent, Kim Philby..
Just when things couldn't seem to get worse for the beleaguered,
demoralized Agency, details of the CIA's biggest, most costly
operational fiasco since the 1961 Bay of Pigs disaster surfaced -
right in time for its golden jubilee. Call it Clinton's Bay of
Camels.
This column has followed sporadic. CIA attempts over the past six
years to overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime. All failed dismally.
But in 1995, bitter family squabbles seemed to have weakened
Saddam's regime. Two son's-in-law embarrassingly defected to
Jordan with highly sensitive military and political secrets. The
army was supposedly restive. In mid-1995, President Clinton's new
CIA Director, John Deutch, and his deputy, George Tenet, concluded
Saddam was vulnerable.
Clinton, eager for a foreign policy triumph, ordered CIA into high
gear to overthrow or eliminate the vexatious Saddam. The Agency
had long financed a motley,ineffective collection of Iraqi exile
groups and Kurdish factions. This time, CIA focused its efforts on
the Iraq National Accord(INA), a group of military and political
exiles, many formerly part of Saddam's ruling circle.
By putting them into power, CIA hoped to replicate Saddam's
iron-fisted regime - but this time with one pro-American and minus
Saddam. Most important, the CIA-installed generals were to ensure
oil-rich Iraq stayed united, and did not splinter or fall under
Iranian influence.
CIA set INA up in Amman, Jordan. The US, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait
provided funding. At Erbil, in the anarchic, US- created
autonomous Kurdish zone in northern Iraq, CIA assembled and
trained a small army of exiles and Kurds for the invasion of
Iraq..
Agents of INA, paid by the US, embarked on a bombing and
assassination campaign inside Iraq, that killed over 150
civilians. Terrorism is bad, it seems, when used against Americans
or Israelis, but fine when used against Iraqis.
By August, 1996, the invasion was ready. It was to begin by a
CIA-organized assassination attempt against Saddam. CIA's army of
Kurdish rebels and INA men would advance south from Erbil and
drive on Baghdad, with massive air support from US warplanes and
helicopter gunships. Other anti-Saddam groups would invade from
Jordan and Kuwait.
Saddam, as usual, knew all about this ham-handed operation from
his spies inside INA and Kurdish groups. Souks across the Fertile
Crescent buzzed with rumors of CIA's `secret' invasion.
Saddam struck first - just before the invasion.. He engineered a
split between the two largest Kurdish rebel groups. As rival Kurds
battled one another, Iraqi armor stormed Erbil, the main CIA base
in northern Iraq.
The CIA and its mini-army were totally surprised. Senior agents
fled their base one jump ahead of Iraqi troops, abandoning
quantities of top-secret documents, electronic equipment, and
agent lists.
Saddam's dreaded secret police rolled up all CIA's extensive
networks in Kurdistan and Iraq, executing at least 350 American
agents, Eighty senior Iraqi officers, poised to mount a coup
against Saddam from Baghdad, were arrested and shot.
The biggest. most expensive CIA field operation since the Bay of
Pigs ended a bloody, expensive, humiliating, $200 million fiasco.
Blame for this catastrophe must be shared by President Clinton,
who ordered it, inept CIA Director Deutch, a rank newcomer to
covert work, and CIA's bumbling senior bureaucrats.
As usual, Clinton ducked the debacle and pretended he didn't know
about it. Deutch was fired and replaced as Director by his deputy,
Tenet. True to recent CIA tradition, other responsible senior
field officers were promoted. Congress, which is supposed to
oversee such major operations, has so far shrugged off the
disaster. .
The fact that the US government was funding terrorist bombings in
Baghdad - and Tehran - was ignored by Congress and much of the
media. As were past attempts by US agents to assassinate Saddam
Hussein, Libya's Col. Khadaffi, and Lebanese Shia leaders, though
these acts were outright violations of American law. In the
Mideast, it seems, all rules are suspended: The moral compass
spins.
The Iraqi debacle is yet more proof that the bloated, demoralized
CIA needs massive, not just not just cosmetic surgery. One
positive sign: recent appointment of the capable Jack Downing,
former station chief in Moscow and Beijing, as chief of CIA's
clandestine Operations branch. This is one posting the bureaucrats
didn't get.
Depressingly, the cost of the `bloodless' Gulf War `victory' keeps
rising. Tens of thousands of American troops sickened by gas and
germs. Over 100,000 Iraqi children dead from malnutrition caused
by the American embargo of Iraq, and Saddam's stubbornness. The
waste of $200 million plus and many lives on botched attempts to
overthrow Saddam. Anarchy in Kurdistan. The undermining of Iraq's
territorial integrity, with potentially explosive consequences for
the entire region.
After all this, Saddam still sits proudly on his throne,. quite
rightly boasting of his great victory at Erbil against the
Americans.
© eric margolis 1997
