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Date Posted: 05:05:27 04/30/03 Wed
Author: Alie
Subject: Scribes and scoundrels scour the treasure chest of Iraqi intelligence
In reply to: Alie 's message, "Unembedded news are back!" on 04:17:26 04/30/03 Wed

This is a story that refers to Dante's post about the Telegraph's news about document finds in Iraqi ministeries.

From The Independent

Scribes and scoundrels scour the treasure chest of Iraqi intelligence
By Phil Reeves in Baghdad
29 April 2003

We cannot reveal the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, but we can tell you that Iraq's gruesome intelligence service used hypnotists and magicians as cover for its spies in the hope of spiriting information out of people. We can also reveal exclusively that the penalty for an Iraqi agent who secretly used the office car in his free time, got drunk and crashed was a month in the can.

For two hours yesterday we rummaged anew through the bomb-damaged Baghdad headquarters of the Mukhabarat, the dreaded intelligence agency, like excited children on an Easter egg hunt.

This compound has been thoroughly picked over for a fortnight by journalists, including The Independent, and by looters. Scribes and scoundrels have found it to be a treasure trove.

Last weekend � according to The Sunday Telegraph � it yielded evidence of a connection between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. This is the link that has eluded even the tireless Israeli military intelligence services, a connection, at last, between America's "war on terror" and its invasion and occupation of Iraq. So, with more possible scoops lying amid the dust and detritus, a return visit was in order.

HQ is very large. The main building is several hundred yards long and three storeys high, rising to four over the tall, stark main entrance. And that does not include the outer offices. Several rooms are so severely damaged by bombs that they are too dangerous to enter. A missile has punched a hole through the floor of the upper corridors in several places.

Stationery, stray documents, dust-caked folder covers and wreckage are strewn everywhere. Torn-up posters of a youthful looking Saddam litter the floor, amid the broken ceiling tiles and shattered glass. The filing cabinets have all been emptied; some of the paperwork has been torn into tiny pieces, presumably by Mukhabarat agents as they prepared to flee. We examined some of the fragments and found them to be on Kurdish groups, but they were too small to make any sense.

Yet fascinating snippets of information, which throw light on the extraordinary benighted and frightening world of Saddam's security apparatus, are still easy to find amid the mess. Some of it is sinister; some of it mundane; some is even funny. I searched with Haider, my Iraqi translator. Only a month ago, he regarded this place with such fear that he did not dare even look at it as he passed by; now he was roaming freely through its rooms, although he said he still felt deeply uneasy at first.

The hunt is a lucky dip. We found a great number of tedious bureaucratic records. But there were glimpses of what life was inside this gigantic information-gathering, snooping, propaganda-spouting state machine. We found a memo solemnly telling Iraqi intelligence agents to encourage their relatives and friends to read Zabibah and the King, a play about a lonely monarch based on one of two novels written by Saddam Hussein after the 1991 Gulf War. There was a report outlining how mass graves containing Iraqi soldiers killed in 1991 could be used as propaganda against the Americans. We unearthed a paper recommending that a prominent Jordanian shipper be black-listed for doing business with Israel, and a memo requesting copies of the distribution list of the oil-for-food programme � a massive inventory of the names and addresses of ordinary citizens � saying that this would be useful to Iraqi intelligence. There were details of Iraq's agents living in Europe, and how they were paid, and a schedule of the agency's surveillance of ambassadors living in Baghdad.

The document on the magicians was the most bizarre of all. Dated 16 April 2000, it describes how lectures were organised for Mukhabarat agents to teach them how to become magicians or hypnotists to cover their true identity, and wheedle out information from unsuspecting members of the public � presumably those in their audiences. Six spies performed especially well, and emerged with high marks.

Could someone plant an incriminating document here in the hope that it would get picked up by a journalist? The answer is yes.

It must be said that the possibility is remote of anyone deliberately leaving a document in a place so large and so chaotic with any reasonable hope of it being found. On the other hand, journalists have been in and out of the place for days. For a small bribe, young Iraqi looters � who armed with screwdrivers are still "liberating" anything portable � happily guide scoop-hungry journalists to the right spot. One of them volunteered to take me to a room in one of the smaller buildings near by, which he promised contained papers about bombs. It turned out to be full of manuals on electrical circuitry. There are very few complete files lying around. Anything that looks reasonably meaty, such as an intact folder, leaps out at the eye. It would be snaffled and making history within a day.

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Replies:

And another comment on the Telegraph's secret document finds -- Alie, 15:40:19 04/30/03 Wed
- Exactly! This whole business of "discovering" secret documents that point blame and "prove" connections stinks of fabrication at every level. Call me cynical for not buying any of it, but anybody who does is just plain naive (NT) -- Drew Greyfox, 19:13:15 04/30/03 Wed
  - Cynical? Realistic is more to the point. I stopped believing anything said by any US official or the pro-US press until I checked it with reliable sources. I don't know of any western 'civilzed' administration who cooked up such a storm of lies ever before. (NT) -- Alie, 01:41:37 05/01/03 Thu