Posted on 08/09/2003 4:44:32 PM PDT by Sub-Driver
U.S. Moved to Undermine Iraqi Military Before War By DOUGLAS JEHL with DEXTER FILKINS
ASHINGTON, Aug. 9 — The United States military, the Central Intelligence Agency and Iraqi exiles began a broad covert effort inside Iraq at least three months before the war to forge alliances with Iraqi military leaders and persuade commanders not to fight, say people involved in the effort.
Even after the war began, the Bush administration received word that top officials of the Iraqi government, most prominently the defense minister, Gen. Sultan Hashem Ahmed al-Tai, might be willing to cooperate to bring the war to a quick end and to ensure a postwar peace, current and former American officials say.
General Hashem's ministry was never bombed by the United States during the war, and the Pentagon's decision not to knock Iraqi broadcasting off the air permitted him to appear on television with what some Iraqi exiles have called a veiled signal to troops that they should not fight the invading allies.
But Washington's war planners elected not to try to keep him or other Iraqi leaders around after the war to help them keep the peace, a decision some now see as a missed opportunity.
General Hashem's fate is not known. Some Iraqi exiles say he was shot, and perhaps killed, by Saddam Hussein's supporters during the war. Other exiles and American officials say he survived the war. Two Iraqi leaders said his family had staged a mock funeral to give the impression that he was dead.
Much more than that is uncertain about the murky operation — not least, the degree of its success.
People behind the effort, including Iraqis who were involved inside the country, said in interviews that they had succeeded in persuading hundreds of Iraqi officers to quit the war and to send their subordinates away. Iraqi military officers confirmed that after Americans and Iraqis made contact with them, they carried out acts of sabotage and helped disband their units as the war began.
American officials and two Iraqi exiles who played central roles said the American military spirited out of the country several high-level Iraqi military and intelligence officers who had cooperated with the United States and its allies.
But in interviews in Washington, Europe and the Middle East, more than half a dozen people with direct knowledge of the events said the United States might have missed an opportunity that might have stabilized Iraq as the government crumbled.
American and Arab officials said that as the war approached, the Bush administration was skeptical of the idea of cutting a lasting deal with high-level Iraqi officials like General Hashem. Washington, in the end, was reluctant to leave any high-ranking officials from the Hussein government in power after the war.
Such an agreement, they said, might have required that some officials with ties to Mr. Hussein stay in power for a time, but might have eased the entry of American troops into Baghdad and helped keep Iraq's infrastructure intact.
"A lot of people in Baghdad saw their interest in not fighting, in adapting, in getting rid of Saddam and moving forward," said Whitley Bruner, a former C.I.A. station chief in Baghdad who is now a private consultant. He is said by people involved in the operation to have helped relay messages from people inside Iraq to the United States government.
Senior Arab officials and several United States officials said General Hashem was identified as a potential ally as early as 1995, when he became defense minister. The officials described him as a capable, well-liked infantry officer who had no close connections to Mr. Hussein and his family.
"From the time he was appointed defense minister, he was always someone who was looked at as being someone you could deal with," said a senior Saudi official, whose government had long urged the United States to promote a coup in Iraq rather than a military invasion as a way of toppling Mr. Hussein's government. "Sultan Hashem was seen as someone who was more sensible, who could reach rational conclusions, and was not a Baathist ideologue or Baathist fanatic."
A senior Defense Department official refused to comment on any messages passed between the United States and General Hashem. But he said there might have been other reasons that the United States left his ministry intact.
"In any centralized, controlled society, soldiers will fight to the last order," the official said. "If you cut off the head, the arms and legs will keep going, so you want to keep in place the structure that could allow a surrender."
Today, General Hashem remains No. 27 on the 55-member American list of most-wanted Iraqis, the eight of hearts in a deck of cards circulated by the United States. But Defense Department officials say they do not know of any active effort to find him. He is wanted only as a "material witness" rather than as a possible defendant in any war crimes trial, two senior officials said.
Iraqis and officials from other Arab countries who were involved in the operation said American contacts with Iraqi officers were arranged beginning in late 2002 by Jordanian intelligence officers who were working with American Special Forces and C.I.A. agents. They said that the operation had been led by the military's super-secret Task Force 20 and that the contacts had included phone calls, e-mail messages, visits and in some cases the payment of substantial sums of money.
The intensive efforts to court Iraqi commanders, and the subsequent dissolution of the Iraqi Army, offer a partial explanation — along with the sheer brutality of the bombardment that the Iraqi Army suffered — for the light resistance that the advancing Americans faced.
"Many officers in the Iraqi Army sold out," Iyad Alawi, an important participant in the operation and now a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, said in an interview in Baghdad. "There were hundreds of them. Our effort was quite widespread. We sent in hundreds of messages."
Bush administration officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, said publicly at the outset of the war that the United States was working to win surrenders from Iraqi commanders. But the duration, extent and other details of that effort have never previously been disclosed.
Mr. Rumsfeld publicly denied on April 2 that the administration was negotiating with members of Mr. Hussein's government. But other American officials said high-ranking members of the Bush administration had given serious consideration to striking a deal that would have included General Hashem as late as March 29, 10 days into the war.
Administration officials would not disclose what such an accord might have included. They said they had regarded the signals as credible, but also said they had been wary that they might have been a ploy. In any event, an accommodation with one of Mr. Hussein's lieutenants was ultimately rejected as politically untenable.
Still, a deal that offered the Bush administration something less than the complete dismantling of the Baghdad government in exchange for a more stable postwar environment has some appeal in hindsight, now that the guerrilla war against occupation forces has taken hold.
"A lot of offers were popping up from a lot of quarters, along the lines of would you agree to a, b or c?" said a United States official with knowledge of the effort that continued into the war. "At some point, the war cabinet got together and said, `No go.' But some of these offers had meat on the bones, and in retrospect, they are beginning to look more and more attractive."
Some administration officials consider it unlikely that any kind of accord would have worked. They said they had viewed all overtures with skepticism.
In describing what the program to undermine the Iraqi government achieved and failed to achieve, some of those involved spoke on the record, but others did not, either because the operation was classified, because their own roles were sensitive, or, as some of the Iraqis said, because they feared for their own lives as long as the fate of Mr. Hussein remained an open question.
The Plotters
Among the central players, people involved said, were Mr. Bruner, the former C.I.A. officer working on behalf of an influential Iraqi-American businessman named Saad al-Janabi; Mr. Alawi, now a member of Iraq's nine-member provisional leadership council; and Muhammad Abdullah Shahwani, a former Iraqi general and a principal player in an unsuccessful C.I.A.-backed coup against Mr. Hussein in 1996.
Two others, working inside Iraq, were Abdul Karim Muhammadawi, a Shiite Muslim guerrilla leader from the south who traveled to Kuwait to coordinate efforts with American intelligence officers, and Mishan al-Jubouri, a Sunni Muslim who worked with American support from the Kurdish region in north Iraq to transmit televised propaganda into the heartland.
Mr. Bruner retired from the C.I.A. in 1997. He said he had been working for Mr. Janabi, not the agency, in the period before and during the war. Mr. Bruner said he had not wanted to play any "operational role."
But several current and former American officials said they believed that Mr. Bruner had served as one link between the American government and Mr. Janabi, whose underground organization, known as the Iraqi Republican Group, claimed the allegiance of hundreds of Iraqis inside the country.
An Iraqi exile involved in the effort said Mr. Janabi sent dozens of messages in and out of Iraq in the months before the war, some of them to senior members of Mr. Hussein's government, and sometimes relayed replies back to the United States government.
Mr. Bruner and Mr. Janabi both dealt with American officials in Kuwait, including Jay Garner, the retired lieutenant general who headed the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance.
In a telephone interview, General Garner said he had believed that Mr. Janabi had been "under the employment of the U.S. government."
A spokesman for the C.I.A., Bill Harlow, said the agency would not comment.
A senior Arab official said in an interview that his government learned of Mr. Janabi's work about two months before the war began and regarded as credible Mr. Janabi's assertion that its supporters included other members of Mr. Hussein's cabinet in addition to the defense minister.
Hussein's Foes Strike
In an interview in Iraq, Mr. Muhammadawi, a longtime opponent of Mr. Hussein from the south and the leader of a Shiite organization called Iraqi Hezbollah, said he met in February in Kuwait City with three C.I.A. officers to plan operations against the Hussein government. He said he also met there with General Shahwani, the Iraqi defector.
After returning to his home in Amara, a provincial capital, Mr. Muhammadawi said, he made contact with as many as 100 Iraqi officers, telling them that once the invasion began, they should send their troops home. In the meantime, he said, they should begin to sabotage the Iraqi defenses.
"I told them, `If you decide to fight, then I will not be able to guarantee your safety,' " he said.
Among them was Lt. Col. Muslim Suwadi, the commander of an engineering battalion in Amara, he said. In an interview, Colonel Suwadi said that a month before the war began, he started neglecting the pontoon bridges for which he was responsible. He also began telling his 150 men that they could go home. By early April, Colonel Suwadi said, most of his men had gone home.
"There was no one left in my unit — just me and my driver," said the colonel, who said his brother had been killed during the 1991 Shiite uprising. When orders came during the American-led invasion to blow up bridges in their path, he did nothing, he said. On April 6, Mr. Muhammadawi said, he led a force of about 400 men into Amara and captured the city with little fighting.
Mr. Jubouri, the Sunni who was based in the Kurdish north, said in a separate interview in Baghdad that he had worked closely with American Special Forces operatives to make contact with Iraqi military commanders in areas controlled by Mr. Hussein's government.
Mr. Jubouri said he made daily broadcasts on a local Kurdish television station urging those commanders to lay down their arms.
By the time the war began, Mr. Jubouri said, he had secured a cease-fire agreement from a garrison at Mosul. On April 9, leading a group of about 150 fighters, he said he took the town without firing a shot.
"We didn't call it a surrender, because we took no prisoners and we let them keep their guns," he said. "They all went home."
The Problem
In Baghdad, Mr. Alawi was among Iraqi exiles who said they believed that the American decision to dismantle the Iraqi government, including the army, rather than seek an accommodation, had been a mistake. That view was echoed by senior Arab officials in other capitals.
"Our idea was to take off the upper crust and leave the rest of the regime intact," said Mr. Alawi, whose group, the Iraqi National Accord, played the leading role in a 1996 effort to oust Mr. Hussein that collapsed when coup plotters were infiltrated by the Iraqi authorities. "We could change it gradually. Now it's all gone."
Even today, it is unclear how far some members of Mr. Hussein's government were willing to go to keep part of their administration intact.
General Hashem, in a televised news conference on March 28, abandoned the official Iraqi line, then still being put forth by other Iraqi officials, that the United States Army was nowhere near the capital. In the news conference, he announced that American forces were on their way and would probably reach the capital in five days.
Mudhar Shahkawt, a leading Iraqi exile who opposed any compromise with the Hussein government, said he believed that the American failure to destroy Iraqi television was proof that the Bush administration was trying to reach out to figures in Mr. Hussein's government.
"Our sources in Iraq were sending messages to us, saying, kill the TV station, kill the TV station," Mr. Shahkawt said in an interview in Baghdad. "When we relayed those messages to the Pentagon, nothing happened, the station kept on broadcasting. That's when I knew that it was part of a larger plan."
The Planning
The covert operation, as well as the efforts to reach some sort of deal, had its origins long before the war began.
Kenneth M. Pollack, an expert on Iraq who has worked for the C.I.A. and the National Security Council, said in a telephone interview that the question of whether to deal with Iraqi government officials had been explored during war games both inside and outside of government.
Mr. Pollack, who is now director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East policy at the Brookings Institution, described one session conducted by Brookings in November 2002, involving former government and military officials.
When the players representing the Iraqis offered a deal in a script in which an American advance halted on the outskirts of Baghdad, the response from participants who were playing American leaders was "no dice," Mr. Pollack said. But he said the decision had been criticized by other participants.
"There were folks around the table who said you should have taken him up on the offer, then reneged," Mr. Pollack said. "The other thing that really leapt out as a lesson was that you've got to make as much contact as you can with anyone who has the capability to lead Iraqis, so that once you did take power, you had people that you could reach out to help you administer the country."
General Shahwani, the leader of the failed 1996 coup, said one of the early notions during the preparations for the latest war called for an uprising, at least partly within the army, prompted by Iraqi exiles and supported by American bombing.
The plan was abandoned, General Shahwani said, when the Bush administration decided it would send American troops.
But as late as January, administration officials were apparently divided over whether they should try to cultivate members of Mr. Hussein's government, and President Bush himself was undecided on the issue, administration officials said. The Iraqi exiles were split as well.
In a January meeting, Mr. Bush discussed the subject with three leading Iraqi exiles — Kanan Makiya, an author; Hatem Mukhlis, a New York doctor; and Rand Rahim, head of the Iraqi Foundation.
At the meeting, Mr. Makiya said, there was talk of a negotiated settlement that would keep the army in place. Mr. Makiya, who opposed any such settlement, said he had a similar discussion with Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser. "She was intrigued by the idea that the Iraqi Army could be a force for change after the war," he said.
By that time, Mr. Janabi was already trying to reach out to members of Mr. Hussein's government. He was calling in contacts he had cultivated years before when, as a close associate of Mr. Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, he got rich holding a monopoly on the country's cigarette business. He fled the country in 1995 after he was imprisoned briefly by Mr. Hussein's son Uday, who apparently grew jealous of his growing wealth.
Hussein Kamel, who fled to Jordan in August 1995, was executed when he decided to return to Iraq. Mr. Janabi moved to California, where he became well connected in the Republican Party.
Mr. Janabi's connections to the United States government were cemented in September 2002, according to Mr. Bruner, who said he had been asked that month by Tom Krgjeski, an official in the State Department's bureau of Near East affairs, to assess Mr. Janabi's credibility and character. Mr. Bruner and Mr. Janabi soon formed a business relationship aimed at exploring business opportunities in a postwar Iraq, according to a business associate.
Mr. Janabi returned to Iraq with American officers in April, and is now living in Baghdad.
This reminds me of some of our answers on another thread the other day regarding a few DU lurkers making snide comments on a WMD thread.
Bob this also explains the bombing on the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad.....it seems they were really helping us before the war started......the young King better be concerned....he stirred up a hornets nest.
The daughters knew, the generals knew, seems only Saddam, Usay & Qusay, and a few other hard core fools (RATs included) weren't in on the fix.
You nailed it on the young Jordanian King. He's most likely a 'marked man' for his participation in this.
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