FBI Probed Alleged CIA Plot to Kill Hussein

The FBI conducted a top-secret criminal investigation of Central Intelligence Agency officials on charges of attempting to murder Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in 1995, according to senior U.S. intelligence officials and other sources familiar with the investigation.

Although the CIA officers who had been investigated were ultimately exonerated and given awards for their efforts against Hussein, several U.S. intelligence sources said the FBI probe had a chilling effect on the CIA’s ability to conduct covert operations against Iraq.

To the few key CIA officers aware of the secret investigation at the time, it seemed to be a sign of the confused and overly legalistic approach to espionage and covert action that had come to paralyze the CIA in the post-Cold War world.

“This case was like a paradigm for everything that was wrong” with U.S. intelligence policy, one intelligence source said.

Those familiar with the criminal probe also say it underscored the degree to which U.S. policymakers have been tied up in knots for years over Iraq, unable to decide how aggressively to move against Hussein.

Federal law forbids the CIA from trying to assassinate a foreign leader. But since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, a “presidential finding” has authorized covert action against Iraq. The finding is designated “lethal,” which means that the CIA may use methods that result in the deaths of others. Despite that, the government has not mounted an all-out covert attack on Hussein.

Concerns over whether the Clinton administration is serious about getting rid of Hussein are rising again as the United States threatens a bombing attack to punish Iraq for refusing to give U.N. weapons inspectors access to possible Iraqi chemical and biological weapons facilities.

Congressional Republicans and other critics openly question whether the administration has any long-term strategy to deal with Hussein.

The fact that CIA officers were the subject of a lengthy criminal investigation for their alleged actions in Iraq is now seen by skeptics at the CIA and in Congress as a strong indication that the Clinton administration is not committed to a determined effort against Hussein.

The plot to kill Hussein was purportedly designed to coincide with a military offensive against Hussein’s regime by a CIA-backed dissident group in northern Iraq.

The FBI, which investigates allegations leveled against the intelligence community, became involved in the case at the request of the acting director of the CIA. The agency interrogated and gave polygraphs to five CIA officers involved in the covert operation, who were told that they were under investigation on the federal criminal charge of crossing state lines to attempt to kill the Iraqi leader, according to sources familiar with the investigation.

The FBI quietly dropped the case in 1996, and the Justice Department decided in April of that year not to prosecute the CIA officers, according to a document obtained by The Times.

Inaccurate Reports Spread

Ultimately, CIA and FBI officials realized that the investigation had been prompted by misleading information about CIA activities in northern Iraq that was being spread in the region, allegedly by Iraqi dissident leaders unhappy with the Clinton administration’s reluctance to take a more aggressive approach to toppling Hussein.

CIA officers say that Iranian intelligence officers also spread inaccurate reports about the CIA’s actions in the region--reports that found their way back to the United States and the Clinton administration.

The CIA and the FBI refused to comment for this article.

The tentative U.S. approach to anti-Hussein activities also had horrific consequences on the ground.

In August 1996, just months after the FBI probe of the CIA was completed, the remnant of the CIA’s covert action program in northern Iraq was crushed by the Iraqi army, scattering rebel Kurdish forces and other units from an anti-Hussein coalition that had been operating in northern Iraq under the umbrella of the CIA-backed Iraqi National Congress, or INC.

The Iraqi military invaded the north and took the key city of Irbil after one of the Kurdish leaders who had been working with the CIA switched sides and invited Hussein’s forces into the territory.

The Kurdish leader was motivated to betray the CIA and his other allies in part because of a bitter feud among the Kurds but also out of a belief that the U.S. government was not serious about taking on Hussein.

Anti-Hussein forces who stayed to fight or could not get out of the way fast enough were captured or shot, while most of the surviving Kurdish forces were pinned against Iraq’s mountainous northern border.

Many were eventually relocated to the United States, while a handful, apparently suspected of being Iraqi double agents, are still being detained by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Los Angeles.

Double Agents Penetrate Program

Meanwhile, a second CIA covert action program, designed to attract and recruit Iraqi officers to foment a military coup, was also destroyed by Hussein, in June 1996.

That CIA program, operated jointly with MI-6, the British intelligence service, was based in Jordan, using a front group called the Iraqi National Accord.

Increasingly distrustful of the Kurdish factions and other dissidents in northern Iraq, the Clinton administration decided in 1994 to place most of its energies behind this second covert program, hoping to attract Iraqi military officers in a position to overthrow Hussein.

Through the Iraqi National Accord covert program, the CIA was authorized by the White House to distribute explosives to agents inside Iraq to blow up power pylons and other elements of Iraq’s infrastructure.

But CIA sources now say this second covert program was thoroughly penetrated by Iraqi double agents, who betrayed the Iraqi military officers who dared to sign up to work with the CIA and MI-6.

Hussein executed at least 100 military officers and others who had cooperated with the Americans and the British.

As a result, by the end of 1996, both of the CIA’s covert programs against Iraq had been decimated.

The story behind the FBI’s criminal probe of the CIA’s covert action program in northern Iraq is a complex tale of bitter rivalries, plots and counterplots. It has its roots in a botched military offensive against the Iraqi army launched by the CIA-backed Iraqi National Congress in early 1995.

The INC was funded and backed by the CIA as an umbrella group to bring together rival Kurdish factions and other dissidents under the leadership of Ahmad Chalabi, a U.S.-educated Iraqi Shiite leader.

The CIA and the Clinton administration never expected that the Iraqi National Congress would overthrow the government, but rather saw INC operations in northern Iraq as an effort to harass the Iraqi regime and, in dozens of small ways, make life difficult for Hussein. With a newspaper, radio and television stations and other propaganda and political efforts, the operation served as a daily reminder to Hussein that he did not control all of Iraqi territory.

In addition, the INC, protected by a U.S.-patrolled “no-fly” zone in northern Iraq, provided a haven for would-be Iraqi defectors and allowed the United States to claim that it was supporting a democratic alternative to Hussein’s regime.

But the INC was riven by bitter infighting between the rival Kurdish factions.

What was worse, CIA officials say they never completely trusted Chalabi or the people around him. As a result, the United States never saw the INC as a trustworthy vehicle for overthrowing Hussein.

That explains why, when the administration decided to try to foment a coup, it worked with the British in a separate, compartmentalized operation based in Jordan rather than with the INC.

Yet if the administration was determined not to bet on the INC and the Kurds, the U.S. Congress had different ideas.

In the fall of 1994, two senior staff members from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence visited the INC and the Kurds in northern Iraq and came away impressed with their operations. After the staffers returned to Washington, key lawmakers began urging the administration to get serious about supporting the INC.

So when a new team of CIA officers arrived in northern Iraq to work with Chalabi’s group in January 1995, they found themselves in the midst of a volatile political situation, with Congress urging more aggressive steps while the White House and CIA management were increasingly focused on their second covert action based in Jordan.

The new CIA team also found that in northern Iraq, the INC was eager to move.

Military Campaign Planned Against Army

The CIA’s new team leader in northern Iraq--known to the INC as “Bob”--spelled out the harsh political reality to Chalabi in a series of private meetings.

The Clinton administration was not taking him or his INC operations seriously, the CIA officer bluntly told Chalabi.

“I told him he was wasting our money and time, but more importantly, he was wasting a historical opportunity,” the CIA team leader recalled in an interview. “He knew I was right.”

Chalabi began to plan a military campaign against the Iraqi army in March 1995. Meanwhile, the defection to the INC of Wafiq Samarrai, a former chief of Iraqi military intelligence, led to yet another plot.

Samarrai told the CIA’s new team leader in northern Iraq in January 1995 that he and members of his large family had a plan to ambush Hussein while he was traveling through Samarrai’s hometown of Samarra.

About 20 people loyal to Samarrai would be positioned at either end of the Samarra bridge, the former Iraqi official said. As Hussein’s convoy passed over it, they would shoot and disable the first and last cars, blocking off the convoy. Then they would make sure no one emerged from the convoy alive.

CIA headquarters flatly turned the plan down and ordered the team in the field not to discuss it further. The assassination attempt was never carried out.

But the CIA team in the field received no instructions on how to deal with Chalabi’s separate plan to mount a large-scale military offensive against Iraqi army units stationed just south of the INC.

Without clear orders from headquarters, the CIA team repeatedly encouraged the INC leaders to act.

“What I did wrong, in my view, was that I provoked Chalabi,” the CIA team leader acknowledged.

Chalabi agreed. “Bob kept pressing, ‘When is this going to happen?’ ” he said in an interview.

But CIA officers who were there say they always made it clear to Chalabi and the Kurdish leaders that the U.S. would not provide active support for the offensive.

The CIA wanted the offensive to succeed, the team leader said he told Chalabi and other leaders, but it was to be an Iraqi operation.

By February 1995, Chalabi had won agreements from the two major Kurdish groups in the INC, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK, led by Jalal Talabani, and the Kurdistan Democratic Party, led by Masoud Barzani, to join the offensive, scheduled for early March.

A Barzani spokesman said the CIA team leader sold Barzani on participating by suggesting that the United States would provide air cover for the offensive.

The CIA team leader strongly denied that claim, as well as other assertions by Chalabi and the Kurdish factions that he failed to make clear that the United States would not play an active role in their military offensive.

By late February, Chalabi had decided to try to persuade Iranian-backed dissident groups operating in southern Iraq to support his offensive with an attack on the Iraqi army from the south.

Private Meeting With Iranians

Not long afterward, two Iranian intelligence officers and several members of an Iranian-backed dissident group in southern Iraq arrived at Chalabi’s headquarters in the town of Salahuddin.

Chalabi said the CIA team leader asked him to tell the Iranian agents that the United States would not oppose Iranian support for an attack by Iranian-backed groups in southern Iraq.

The CIA team leader said instead that he met with the representatives of the Iranian-backed dissident groups--not the Iranian intelligence officers--merely to dispel the rumor that the United States secretly wanted to keep Hussein in power.

Both Chalabi and the CIA team leader agree that Chalabi met privately with the Iranian intelligence officers, and that the CIA team leader did not.

When the Iranian intelligence officers reported back to headquarters about what they had learned, their communications were intercepted by the National Security Agency, the American super-secret eavesdropping agency.

The Iranian reports on a supposed CIA coup and possible assassination attempt against Hussein quickly found their way to the CIA and the White House.

Almost immediately, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake fired off a blunt message to the CIA team to give to Chalabi and the other leaders: Their operation had been compromised and, if they went ahead, they would be without U.S. support.

Thousands of Troops Sent Into Combat

As a consequence, Barzani’s faction bowed out of Chalabi’s offensive, but Chalabi and the PUK sent as many as 15,000 troops into combat in early March 1995. The rebels won some local victories and crippled several Iraqi units before the assault faltered later that month. The anti-Hussein coalition was forced to scatter the next year.

The CIA team that had been on the ground when the 1995 offensive began was immediately pulled back to the United States, where it was informed that it was the subject of an FBI investigation.

CIA sources say that, based on the NSA intercepts of Iranian communications, acting CIA Director William Studeman had called in the FBI to conduct the investigation.

Studeman, a retired Navy admiral who has since left the CIA, could not be reached for comment.

On April 4, 1996, more than a year after the CIA team had returned from Iraq, Deputy Assistant Atty. Gen. Mark Richard informed the CIA that the Justice Department would not prosecute the matter.

And finally, in September 1996, then-CIA Director John Deutch went before Congress and acknowledged that Hussein was “stronger today than he was six weeks ago”--before his armed forces moved north that August and rolled over the Iraqi National Congress.

* BEIJING AND BAGHDAD

The U.S. ambassador to the U.N. presents case for a strike against Iraq to the Chinese. A14