Glaspie Reportedly Misled Congress on Iraq Warning

Classified State Department cables show that April Glaspie, the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, misled Congress in March when she insisted that she had warned President Saddam Hussein not to take military action against Kuwait, congressional sources said Thursday.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.) has sent a letter to Secretary of State James A. Baker III demanding an explanation for the inconsistency.

Pell’s committee recently obtained copies of the classified messages Glaspie sent to the State Department after her July 25, 1990, meeting with the Iraqi leader. That conversation was Hussein’s last with a U.S. official before he launched his invasion a week later.

According to several sources, the cables flatly contradict Glaspie’s contention that she cautioned Hussein that the United States would not condone an invasion. “She did not give the strong message that she sought to portray to Congress,” said one source.

In those documents, she indicated that the Iraqi leader “has a legitimate point of view, and he’s somebody who can be worked with,” added one Senate staff member familiar with the contents of the cables.

Glaspie’s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about her crucial meeting with Hussein was “in tone and in substance . . . at great variance with reporting cables” she sent to the State Department, said Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.), a member of the committee. Cranston declined to elaborate.

At least one panel member, however, disputed that interpretation of the cables. “I must say that there are some questions that can be raised, but I still believe that she told the truth,” said Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah). “Knowing most ambassadors, they generally tread lightly when they are talking to heads of state.”

Pell declined to comment until he receives a response from Baker to his letter.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher also declined to discuss the Senate investigation. “I just wouldn’t be appropriate for me to try to comment, not having seen the full text of what the senator has said,” he said.

Boucher added that he was unable to reach Glaspie to obtain her response. Glaspie has accepted a job as diplomat-in-residence at UC San Diego. Boucher said he did not know whether she had started work at her new post.

Because the session before the committee was an informal one, Glaspie was not required to take an oath to tell the truth. As a result, Cranston said, she could not be charged with perjury, a felony.

However, Glaspie may be vulnerable to being charged with a misdemeanor of failing to testify fully and accurately, he added.

Glaspie’s nationally televised testimony before the panel--in which she broke months of silence--helped deflect criticism that the Administration, by allowing sales of high technology to Iraq and failing to deal sternly with Baghdad through diplomatic channels, actually contributed to Hussein’s boldness in attacking his weaker neighbor.

In her testimony, Glaspie insisted, “I of course . . . explained we were a superpower and we intended to act like one. We had vital interests, and we would protect them. And that was that.”

Her confident and firm tone before the panel turned what was to have been a hostile session into a sympathetic one. In fact, some senators complimented her on her diplomatic performance. “I think you are one of our finest ambassadors,” Sen. Larry Pressler (R-S.D.) told her.

At the same time, however, Glaspie’s comments to the committee raised new questions as to why the State Department failed to mount a spirited defense of her actions when the charges first arose that, in a rare face-to-face meeting with the Iraqi president, she might actually have given tacit encouragement to the invasion of Kuwait.

Glaspie was thrust into the spotlight by the Iraqi leader himself shortly after the invasion, when he released what he called a transcript of that meeting.

The transcript, which both Glaspie and her State Department superiors called abridged and misleading, indicated that Glaspie had taken a soothing tone with Hussein, showing more support than defiance of his position.

One of the most damaging passages of the Iraqi transcript quoted her as saying: “We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.”

“That was only part of my sentence,” Glaspie told the committee. “The other part of my sentence was, ‘But we insist that you settle your disputes with Kuwait nonviolently.’ And he told me he would do so.”

Although Glaspie insisted in her testimony that her cables reflected that entire statement, Senate sources who reviewed the communications said they did not.

Cranston urged the State Department to declassify the materials it made available to the committee.

Times staff writers Norman Kempster and Michael Ross contributed to this story.