From Stephen Hayes: A follow-up on Dan McKivergan’s post on Russia and Iran. Dan wrote of the worrisome prospect of the U.S. putting its trust in Putin on Iran: “We better have a Plan B if Moscow’s recent past is prologue. ” The examples he and Mort Zuckerman provide are deeply disturbing. There are more. Russian intelligence services, for instance, trained Iraqi intelligence operatives as late as September 2002, even as Putin and his cronies spoke publicly of a “common goal” on Iraq between the U.S. and Russia. It’s September 2002. President Bush gives a speech to the UN making clear that his administration would hold Iraq to account for its defiance of UN resolutions. The Russian government, which for years had carried Iraq’s water on the UN Security Council, announced that it would not send troops in the event of war in Iraq and fought hard against U.S. and British efforts to confront Saddam Hussein. Nonetheless, Russia eventually endorsed UN Resolution 1441, which threatened “serious consequences” that would result from Iraq’s continued flouting of previous UN resolutions. Putin’s government spoke of its partnership with the U.S. on the war on terror. Putin spokesman Sergei Prikhodko declared: “Russia and the United States have a common goal regarding the Iraqi issue” – disarmament. And Russian Foreign Minister Boris Malakhov proclaimed that the U.S. and Russia “are partners in the anti-terror coalition.” Not quite. The San Francisco Chronicle‘s Robert Collier wrote a series of articles in April 2003 on Russian double-dealing on Iraq. The articles provide a stark reminder of the perils in working with Putin’s Russia and of the need to expedite the exploitation of 2 million documents recovered in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan:
A Moscow-based organization was training Iraqi intelligence agents as recently as last September — at the same time Russia was resisting the Bush administration’s push for a tough stand against Saddam Hussein’s regime, Iraqi documents discovered by The Chronicle show. The documents found Thursday and Friday in a Baghdad office of the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi secret police, indicate that at least five agents graduated Sept. 15 from a two-week course in surveillance and eavesdropping techniques, according to certificates issued to the Iraqi agents by the “Special Training Center” in Moscow. The Russian government, which has expressed intense disagreement with the U.S.-led war on Iraq, has repeatedly denied giving any military or security assistance to the Hussein regime. Any such aid would violate U.N. sanctions that have severely limited trade, military and other relations with Iraq since 1991. U.S.-Russian relations have been strained by the split over Iraq. It is unclear whether these revelations, coming on top of U.S. charges that Moscow has been supplying other forms of forbidden assistance to Baghdad, may damage them further.
The “Moscow-based organization,” it turns out, was the SVR, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service.
Russian intelligence officials have confirmed that Iraqi spies received training in specialized counterintelligence techniques in Moscow last fall — training that appears to violate the United Nations resolution barring military and security assistance to Iraq. A spokesman for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Boris Labusov, acknowledged that Iraqi secret police agents had been trained by his agency but said the training was for nonmilitary purposes, such as fighting crime and terrorism. Said Labrusov: “The SVR does not refuse cooperation with secret services of different countries in the areas of counter-terrorism and war, fighting drug traffic and investigating the illegal trade of weapons.”
The Chronicle article continues:
However, it seems likely that the Iraqi agents who were trained at the Moscow center were using their skills for other purposes. Found in the same Mukhabarat office with their personnel files and graduation certificates were a host of other documents, including orders for wiretaps and for break-ins at such sites as the Iranian Embassy, the five-star al-Mansour Hotel and private doctors’ offices.
Ronald Reagan’s famous aphorism about dealing with the Soviets was “Trust but Verify.” Perhaps it needs updating. “Don’t Trust.”
