In his three-year struggle to overthrow President Saddam Hussein and bring democracy to Iraq, Warren Marik of the CIA says he did everything he could think of -- and was permitted to do.
He helped organize flights of unmanned aircraft over Baghdad to drop leaflets ridiculing the Iraqi dictator on his birthday. He organized military training and some small arms supplies to Kurdish guerrillas in northern Iraq. And he oversaw spending millions of dollars that went to a Washington-based public relations firm to produce radio scripts and videotapes denouncing the regime.
None of it worked. The anti-Saddam campaign that Marik helped run was broken apart by the Iraqi dictator last year with relative ease. And now, partly in frustration, Marik has come in from the cold to tell the story of the CIA's war on Saddam as he saw it.
Marik says he does so partly with the hope of getting the agency to reconsider what he views as a misguided shift of strategy. He criticizes a past shift toward fomenting a quick coup against Saddam, and away from the plan that he tried to carry out aimed at gradually strengthening a "liberated" zone in the country's Kurdish north.
The decision of the 25-year CIA veteran to go public with details of an operation that is still technically ongoing has been strongly influenced by a similar decision by a leading Iraqi opposition figure, Ahmed Chalabi, and his colleagues in the Iraqi National Congress to make a clean break with the agency and start a new political phase in their efforts to bring change to Iraq. Marik and the CIA worked closely in the north with Chalabi and the National Congress, an umbrella group of anti-Saddam activists made up mostly of ethnic Kurds.
"We have learned the hard way that covert action that is not part of a large strategic political program is of no value," Chalabi said here yesterday. "We want to work with the State Department, the National Security Council, or AID. But our involvement with any covert agencies is finished."
Marik, a ruddy, affable 51-year-old who retired from the agency six months ago, says he has no regrets about the role he personally played.
"I still feel good about what I did in northern Iraq. We were supporting exactly the kind of people America should support. But we tied ourselves in knots," he said yesterday.
Marik tells a story of sharp factionalism and confusion within the CIA as case officers warred with each other to impress superiors and promote different sets of "clients" among the Iraqi dissidents they supported.
In particular, while Marik was working with Chalabi and the National Congress, others in the U.S. government opted to support former political associates of Saddam and his generals in the belief that they had a chance to quickly overthrow his regime.
Marik and some other senior CIA officials believe the bureaucratic warfare undermined a promising effort to cage Saddam. But Marik says he is publicizing his past activities to dramatize his view that the agency does not bear sole responsibility for a broad policy failure that implicates the White House, Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department as much as it does the CIA.
His matter-of-fact, precise descriptions of risky agency exploits in the remote Kurdish homeland of northern Iraq center on the help provided to the Iraqi opposition to assemble a force capable of taking on an Iraqi army division in March 1995.
Parts of the story of the failure of that offensive, and the rout of the competing CIA attempt to organize a palace coup against Saddam, have been previously published. Among the new points about the operation, which absorbed at least $100 million in U.S. funds and cost the lives or freedom of hundreds if not thousands of Iraqis who worked with the agency, are these:
A top CIA covert operative -- known to the Iraqis as "Bob" and not further identified in this account because he is still in covert service with the CIA -- designed what the Iraqis called the "Bob plan" for a direct attack on the Iraqi army in March 1995. The goal was to demonstrate the rebels' strength and, hopefully, highlight the unwillingness of Iraqi troops to fight to defend Saddam. Marik and "Bob" were the two principal CIA agents working in northern Iraq with the National Congress rebels.
According to Chalabi, the "Bob plan" included a secret contact with Iran -- a neighbor and bitter foe of Iraq -- seeking Iranian complicity in the Iraqi rebel attack. But Washington quickly disavowed that message and withdrew support for the operation.
As its first step in the campaign to bring down Saddam, the agency hired an American public relations and political lobbying firm, the Rendon Group of Washington, to develop a worldwide propaganda campaign. John Rendon, head of the firm, is a former campaign consultant for Jimmy Carter.
Congress -- particularly the Senate intelligence committee, which sent two staff aides along with CIA agents on evaluation missions in the north -- has played a major role in pressing for covert action and in shaping a program that many at the agency saw as doomed to fail from the outset.
The CIA official with direct departmental responsibility for the ill-fated operation, Steven Richter, is said by agency insiders to be the leading candidate for the powerful position of director of operations at the agency -- head of the CIA's clandestine wing -- if President Clinton's designated director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, is confirmed by the Senate in mid-July as expected.
The accounts offered separately by Marik and Chalabi were supported in many details, and in their overall thrust, by nearly 100 hours of interviews over several months with other CIA officers who asked not to be named, with Iraqi opposition figures and military defectors and with U.S. and foreign diplomats having direct involvement in or knowledge of American policy in the Persian Gulf.
Marik, a veteran of the CIA's successful insurgency campaign in Afghanistan and a Turkish-language specialist, describes the fundamental error he thinks the agency made this way:
"In northern Iraq we ran a political program that was to eventually reduce Saddam's control over Iraq and make him nothing more than the mayor of Baghdad. That kind of slow, salami-slicing operation worked in Afghanistan, and against the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
"But then came pressure from the top for the quick kill -- for a coup on deadline -- and we lost our way."
Marik declines to speculate on the motivation for that shift. Other CIA officers viewed the shift as a prudent hedging of bets that went awry. Others said the National Congress was seriously hampered from the start by feuding among its rival Kurdish factions and lack of support among Iraq's politically dominant Sunni Arab religious group and neighboring governments.
Two CIA sources noted that the pressure within the Clinton administration to get on with overthrowing Saddam accelerated when John M. Deutch moved from the Defense Department to become CIA director in May 1995, and intensified more as the 1996 presidential election campaign moved nearer.
Deutch, now teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, declined to comment for this article, as did the CIA's office of public affairs. A White House official denied that any pressure had been exerted on the CIA for political reasons.
The Iraq operation spans two presidencies and grows out of a miscalculation by President Bush and the U.S. generals who prosecuted the Persian Gulf War against Iraq in 1991. They assumed the humiliated Iraqi army would finish the job they started by overthrowing Saddam, according to senior Bush officials.
When that did not happen, Bush signed what agency personnel call a "lethal finding" and ordered the CIA to create the conditions that would lead to a change in regime in Iraq. The leaders of the agency's Iraq Operations Group doubted they could easily accomplish what an international army of 500,000 men had failed to do.
But they began drawing up a classic covert operation similar to those that had worked with varying degrees of success over the past half-century in Iran, Guatemala, Afghanistan, Nicaragua and elsewhere in the Third World.
"Lethal findings" -- under which the agency can with two exceptions undertake whatever action is needed, even if that action would lead to fatalities -- are rare. Marik only worked in two situations covered by such a document: Afghanistan and Iraq.
Under U.S. law, CIA officers cannot directly participate in an assassination plot. And they cannot suggest in their propaganda that the United States will support a public uprising against an entrenched regime.
Some agents call this latter red line -- a standard one in covert action -- "Budapest rules." The agency was accused of having incited the Hungarian population to rise against Soviet occupation in 1956 and then having done nothing to help fight the Russians.
The initial funding for the Iraq operation was set at $40 million, according to two independent sources. But that could grow under Bush.
"The question we kept getting from the White House then was `How much do you need?' " says a CIA source. "After Clinton and [national security adviser Anthony] Lake came in, it changed to `How much can you get along on?' At several key points, the Clinton White House refusal to come up with a few million dollars jeopardized or stymied the whole operation."
The agency's first reflex was to expand a global propaganda campaign the Kuwait government was already financing to denounce Iraqi atrocities in the 1990 invasion. The Rendon Group, a public relations firm, got the contract.
John W. Rendon, head of the firm, is a political consultant close to the Democratic National Committee who worked as scheduler for President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 campaign. He was out of the country yesterday and his firm did not return a telephone call.
Rendon ran the operation from Washington with branch offices in Boston and London. Their main activity, veterans of the operation say, was to produce radio scripts calling on Iraqi army officers to defect for broadcast on two large radio transmitters the CIA established and managed in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. Agency-run radio stations also sprang up in Cairo and Amman. The Kuwait and Amman stations are still in operation.
By mid-1992, Chalabi and the National Congress were working with the Rendon group. Chalabi, a graduate of MIT and the University of Chicago, had been active in anti-Saddam efforts since the early 1970s but had not previously worked with the agency.
But in 1992 he and other leaders in the National Congress decided to accept covert support, which would eventually grow to $326,000 a month. In Washington, Marik, who came aboard the agency's Iraq Operation Group in 1993, began shifting money from the Rendon operation to direct support of the National Congress.
U.S. officials began visiting the northern enclave the United States had ordered Saddam to stay out of in 1991. In September 1994, two Senate intelligence committee staff aides accompanied "Bob," deputy director of the Iraqi Operations Group at that point, into the north and shortly afterward the committee cleared the agency to establish a clandestine, semipermanent team in northern Iraq.
Over the next two years a total of about 50 agents rotated in and out, living in a fortified compound in the opposition-controlled town of Salahuddin. Teams composed of four to 10 agents each lived there for an average stay of six weeks. Their formal mission was to monitor the National Congress and gather intelligence.
In fact, they did much more. Marik, who led the first field team into Iraq in late October 1994, put it this way: "Nobody said we should provide military training and provide weapons to the [National Congress] force. But when we did that and reported it back to Washington, nobody said stop it, either."
His time in Iraq was a transforming experience for Marik, a Chicago native who entered the agency after military service in Vietnam. He brushes aside questions about what he did in Afghanistan by answering only "the usual stuff." But on Iraq, he feels passionately that the agency had a winning hand that it threw away.
In late 1994, control of the Iraq Operation Group was taken away from the veterans who had worked out the long-term political program with Chalabi and who, in the words of one agent, "kept the crazy ideas about silver-bullet coups away from the agency leadership."
After that the agency embarked on a "special channel" compartmentalized operation to prepare a quick-strike coup against Saddam. It was to be organized by former army officers and political cronies of the Iraqi dictator. They claimed they were in touch with serving military officers who would oust Saddam and take power.
Marik and the officers working with the Chalabi group were told to stay away from the operation, run with a dissident group called the Iraqi National Accord, when it became apparent to them that a second covert operation targeted at Saddam was under way.
Upon his arrival in 1995, Deutch not only gave the coup effort the green light but also pressed his agency to set "milestones" for getting the job done. Some officials there had the impression they were facing a deadline of about a year, in time to remove Saddam as an issue in the 1996 election.
But Chalabi, Marik and others in the agency were telling the operations group that the National Accord was deeply penetrated by Saddam's agents from the beginning. In June 1996, Saddam rolled up the plot by arresting 100 of the Accord's contacts in the military and executing 30 other officers.
The strategy that Chalabi had originally proposed to the agency took that into account. Instead of banking on a coup, Chalabi proposed establishing a political and administrative structure in the northern enclave that would become an alternative to Saddam as the dictator's powers were worn down.
The idea was to hollow out the Iraqi army by making defection to the north safe. Chalabi sought to hold the two main Kurdish factions together and use their guerrilla forces as the core of a regional military force. But they needed training, weapons, a military plan and reason to hope the United States would help them in a crunch.
Gradually "the Bob plan," named after the blond, blue-eyed, 6-foot-tall agent who elaborated it, came into being, with a target date of March 4, 1995, for a coordinated strike on the garrisons of Mosul and Kirkuk by 20,000 Kurdish guerrillas, 1,000 National Congress soldiers and 1,000 armed followers of the Iraqi Communist Party, according to Gen. Wafiq Samarrai, Saddam's former chief of military intelligence. He defected to the National Congress in 1994 and directed the offensive.
"We wanted Saddam to go on full alert, to try to fight back and see that his units would not fight for him," Chalabi says.
According to Chalabi, on Feb. 27 "Bob" asked him to use his contacts with Iran's ruling ayatollahs to pass a message saying Washington would look with favor on Iran moving troops along its border to distract Saddam as the offensive began.
"Bob" could not meet the Iranians himself. But Chalabi says the CIA agent stood in the hallway of the Khadra Hotel in Salahuddin as two Iranian intelligence operatives filed into Chalabi's room to be given what they were told was a message from the White House. "They had to see an American there or they wouldn't believe it," says Chalabi. "Their eyes were popping out of their heads."
U.S. officials would not comment on that description. But two administration officials confirm what Chalabi says happened next, apparently after communications intercepts of Iranian messages alerted the White House to the "Bob plan."
On March 3, they said, "Bob" and another agent showed up with a three-point message for Chalabi. One: Your operation has been penetrated and there is a risk of failure. Two: If you go ahead, it will be without U.S. involvement or support. It is your decision. Three: There is only one place for contact between Iran and the United States, and it is not in northern Iraq.
The effect of the message was to split the Kurds, who received a separate briefing on it. One Kurdish leader, Massoud Barzani, would not commit his forces to fighting the Iraqi army, and the offensive failed. In August 1996, he invited Saddam's troops into the north to help break up the CIA-backed operation.
"I know other people in the agency disagree with me and saw the [National] Accord operation as a prudent hedge," Marik says. "But I feel that we got too impatient with a genuine effort to install democracy and turned instead to fighting Saddam with incompetent Saddams, who are headed for the dust heap of history."
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