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the discussion about what the U.S. should do about Iraq comes to
a head, the CIA has stepped up its efforts to discredit the main
Iraqi opposition movement, the Iraqi National Congress (INC). For
example, the CIA has tried to downplay the significance of each
of the defectors the INC has brought out of Iraq since 9/11, including
those who described the terrorist training Iraq has been giving
foreign Islamic militants. Of course when these stories were given
prominence by the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, or
NPR, the Agency had to admit the defectors were providing valuable
information.
An American
reader would normally find it easy to believe that the INC, like
most exile groups, is self-serving and unreliable, and that that
the CIA is providing realistic information based on objective professional
analysis. But for Iraq, history suggests the opposite. The INC has
a long record of providing reliable information and being proven
correct by later developments. And in the Middle East, especially
Iraq, the CIA has a long record of getting the facts wrong. Which
may be one of the reasons that James Woolsey, a former director
of the CIA, is a leading supporter of the INC — along with
other lower-level former CIA officers who had experience working
with the INC.
The most famous
and dramatic example of the CIA being proven wrong in a disagreement
with the INC occurred in connection with the last major CIA effort
to organize a coup against Saddam from Jordan. Ahmad Chalabi, the
INC's leader, flew to the U.S. to warn CIA Director John Deutsch
that he had learned from inside Iraq that Saddam knew about and
had penetrated the CIA's plot. Deutsch assigned George Tenet to
evaluate the information Chalabi provided, and Tenet, who is now
the CIA Director, concluded that Chalabi's information should be
rejected and the coup attempt should go forward. Some weeks later
Saddam caught and executed the plotters in Iraq and his agents used
the radio the CIA had provided to the plotters to taunt the CIA.
It was particularly surprising that the CIA rejected the information
from Chalabi because Chalabi had been living in northern Iraq for
more than three years as leader of the Iraqi opposition and had
survived seven attempts by Saddam to have him killed. His survival
in an area where Saddam's agents were able to operate was a very
practical demonstration that the INC could penetrate Saddam's intelligence
service better than Saddam was able to penetrate the INC. Despite
this experience one of the arguments that the State Department has
made against the INC is that it is penetrated by Saddam's agents.
Also, in October 1994, when the INC reported to the U.S. in detail
about Iraqi troop movements toward Kuwait and warned that Saddam
was about to make a new attack against Kuwait, the CIA called the
reports exaggerated. Several weeks later the U.S. government realized
that the INC was right. Only hours after the State Department publicly
announced that there was no problem, the U.S. sent 30,000 troops
to the region to deter Saddam.
Eight months
later the CIA said that the INC would not be able to mount a substantial
offensive out of northern Iraq. When the agency finally saw that
the INC could carry out such an offensive it said that the Iraqi
military would crush it. But the INC defeated the Iraqi military
forces the CIA said would crush them. They destroyed two Iraqi infantry
divisions; thousands of officers and soldiers came over to the opposition
and much equipment was captured. Three weeks later, although the
CIA had prevented the INC from having any anti-tank weapons bigger
than RPGs, the INC forces also repelled an Iraqi armored counterattack.
The INC forces only withdrew to northern Iraq because of U.S. opposition
to their attacks on Saddam's regime.
The next year the INC was forced out of northern Iraq when Saddam
took the risk of exposing 400 tanks and 40,000 soldiers from his
best forces to U.S. air power by marching them from Baghdad to the
north. This was only a few months before the U.S. election and the
President only sent planes to take INC people out of the country
to avoid capture by Saddam rather than protecting the INC by bombing
the Iraqi expeditionary force when it was in the open.
Since then the INC has regularly provided correct timely information
from inside Iraq. There is no significant case where the CIA and
the INC have disagreed about facts or predictions concerning Iraq
and the CIA has turned out to be correct. This should not be surprising
because the INC, as an exile organization without authority or resources,
knows that it will only be listened to if it builds and keeps a
reputation for accuracy and reliability. Of course this does not
imply that the U.S. government should just accept everything that
the INC says; but it does suggest that when the CIA and the INC
disagree about whether Iraq had an important part in the 9/11 attack
carried out by members of al Qaeda neither high U.S. officials nor
newspaper readers should assume that giant U.S. government agencies
necessarily know more than a small group of Iraqi opposition leaders.
Another reason
to doubt the CIA when it speaks about Iraq is that the pattern of
CIA incompetence in the Middle East goes back many years. Richard
Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board, likes to point out
that when in 1979 as an Assistant to Senator Scoop Jackson he asked
the CIA to confirm some quotations from Ayatollah Khomeini's books,
shortly before the Shah of Iran's overthrow, the CIA did not know
about the books Khomeini had written and opined that the quotations
from these books that were shown to them were phonies.
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