Baghdad Spies Live on Edge

They made an unlikely pair: One was a jolly Kurdish intelligence officer, the other a Falloujan with ties to the insurgency.

Yet twice a week for several months, Gen. Hussain Ali Kamal, head of the Interior Ministry’s spy service, broke bread with a burly man in his 20s code-named Muslah, or the reformer, who often wore a traditional Arab dishdasha robe.

“What did Saddam Hussein ever do for Iraq?” Kamal said to the former member of Hussein’s Baath Party, trying to flip him to the side of the new Iraqi government. “The Iraqis have nothing.”

That’s true, Muslah acknowledged. “But we have to fight the Americans. The Americans are occupiers,” Kamal recalled him saying.

“But the Americans will leave,” Kamal countered, “and we will have a country to build.”

So the exchange went, twice a week for two months. “It was the most enjoyable work I’ve had,” said Kamal, who finally got the big tip he sought.

The victory for Kamal would prove fatal for Muslah.

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Kamal did not have to look far to see what could happen to those working for Iraq’s new intelligence network. His office wall is lined with the color portraits of 20 officers who have been assassinated over the last year, a reminder that intelligence assets often wind up dead when operations are bungled and covers blown.

In the dishdasha-and-dagger world of Middle East intelligence, Iraq’s new spy outfit remains a faltering upstart, hamstrung by a lack of experience, outmatched and infiltrated by its rivals inside and outside Iraq and beholden to multiple masters.

“We are facing the same problems as all Iraqi security forces,” Gen. Mohammed Shahwani, director of the Iraqi National Intelligence Service, said in an interview in his spacious Green Zone office. “Every problem we have has to do with finding out ways to infiltrate.”

Hussein’s complex of intelligence organs and network of spies, commonly referred to as the Mukhabarat, inspired fear in Iraq and abroad. Its 50,000 or more operatives were known for their ruthlessness and tradecraft as well as a reach that extended to Europe, where they once almost assassinated exile leader Iyad Allawi, who became the first post-Hussein prime minister.

With most of its former intelligence officers either in hiding, in the insurgency or too politically radioactive to touch, rebuilding Iraq’s spy services has meant largely starting from scratch.

“I can take any tank driver from the former regime and put him into a tank,” said Babekir Zebari, chief of staff at the Defense Ministry. “How can I take a former intelligence officer and put him in the same job?”

Iraq’s spy services were scrapped with the April 2003 dissolution of Hussein’s regime. That, some critics say, was among the biggest mistakes made by former American civilian administrator L. Paul Bremer III. Another may have been his decision to keep the Iraqi intelligence service from conducting its own operations.

Some Iraqi officials wish Iraq had followed Iran’s example. In the years after Iran’s 1979 revolution, Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini opted to retain and even upgrade the bulk of deposed Shah Reza Pahlavi’s intelligence service. Its successor agency has become one of the most feared clandestine services operations in the world.

“We should have given amnesty to everybody except the criminals,” said Younadam Kanna, an Iraqi lawmaker and leader of a Christian political party.

Gone with Iraq’s Mukhabarat were operatives with decades of clandestine services experience. Indeed, U.S. and Iraqi officials suspect that many of Hussein’s former operatives have joined the insurgency, contributing their skills in espionage, infiltration and subversion.

Efforts to bring some of them back to their old jobs have become a politically explosive issue in an Iraq increasingly riven by tensions between majority Shiites and minority Sunni Arabs.

“Almost all Iraqis with any previous experience in the intelligence business are Sunni Arab, increasing the risk of penetration of the new intelligence apparatus by the insurgency,” said Wayne White, a former State Department intelligence official who worked on Iraq.

The transitional Iraqi government’s spy system is a three-pronged operation, largely set up by U.S. and British officials, that Iraq’s intelligence officials call “the friends”; it includes Shahwani’s national intelligence service as well as intelligence branches in the defense and interior ministries.

The heads of all three coordinate their activities through an umbrella group called the National Intelligence Coordination Commission, chaired by National Security Advisor Mowaffak Rubaie, a former doctor and Shiite activist who spent years in Britain after he was imprisoned and tortured by Hussein’s regime.

On good days, the services busy themselves with the minutiae of information-gathering as well as infiltration, counter-terrorism, counterinsurgency and counterintelligence operations.

“We don’t have any jails and no authority to arrest anyone,” national intelligence director Shahwani said. “Our information leads us to suspects whom the Interior Ministry can arrest.”

Iraqi officials acknowledge that the country’s intelligence-gathering apparatus mostly consists of passive surveillance, with a few informants -- such as Muslah -- in cities and towns across Iraq, where they discreetly pass on tips.

The fledgling intelligence network has been unable to penetrate the complex tribal ties that bind the insurgency and keep its inner workings mostly a mystery.

The spy agencies can send snoops to take notes at mosques, but they’re unable to infiltrate insurgent cells that may use the mosques for recruitment.

“We have good operatives on the street and they know how to collect information, and we have the ability to follow anyone,” said Col. Ali Fadhel Obeid, one of the many energetic young Iraqis serving as commanders in the new army. “But we’re not good enough to conduct operations.”

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That’s what made Muslah such a valuable intelligence asset. He was quite a catch: a respected member of the Dulaimi tribe, which is thought to be spearheading the insurgency, as well as a man with ties to a shadowy insurgent group called Asadullah, or the Lions of God.

Another source had said he was an open-minded young man who might be willing to betray his clan and the insurgents for the new Iraq. Through intermediaries, Kamal invited Muslah to his offices.

Muslah was broad-shouldered and tall, a tough guy in his late 20s who already had two wives. Kamal appealed to his manhood.

“Look at Saddam,” Kamal said with contempt. “Saddam was a coward. Even his sons were more honorable than him. At least they fought and died.”

Kamal’s aims were obvious; Muslah’s were murkier. Perhaps he wanted to believe there was a place for him in the new Iraq.

“When we are stable and able to build our security forces, you’ll have a role in fighting real terrorists,” Kamal told him. “One day Americans will leave and we will have a country to run.”

Muslah began to give in. He started coming through with small tips, on little notes signed with his code name.

But days after the beheading of an American contractor, Muslah came up with a big one -- the names and locations of the members of the insurgent cell responsible. What’s more, he told Kamal when to grab them all at once.

The operation was doomed almost from the start. Iraqi forces weren’t up to the task, and had to call U.S. troops for help. The Americans moved in too quickly.

“We studied this information very well,” Kamal recalled. “I told them to attack the place at a specific time because at the time all the terrorist cells would be there. They went and they didn’t find the whole group.”

Those who escaped suspected an informant in their midst. Days later, they caught up with Muslah on the road to Taji, north of Baghdad, and beheaded him.

“We consider Muslah a martyr,” Kamal said in an interview on the seventh floor of the Interior Ministry’s mammoth headquarters.

“Though he was a Baathist, he was loyal to us,” he said wistfully. “May God have mercy on him. He understood.”

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Americans also have struggled to solve Iraq’s intelligence puzzle. The U.S. military’s efforts, however, have been anything but clandestine.

Near Baqubah recently, a battalion attached to the 42nd Infantry Division rumbled into a rural village in armored Humvees to check on reports that three vans had dropped off insurgents there a few days earlier.

The soldiers set up a cordon around the town square in As Sadah and began handing out candy to children, as intelligence officers quizzed shopkeepers about the insurgents.

“There is no insurgency,” 30-year-old Ali Iskander told one soldier outside a hut that passes as the hardware store.

“Well, tell us if you see anything,” the unit’s frustrated intelligence officer said to Iskander and villagers who had gathered.

After less than 20 minutes, the Americans rolled out.

“No one is going to rat out their neighbor in front of the whole village,” said the intelligence officer, who asked that his name not be published because of the sensitive nature of his work.

The U.S. military has proved adept, however, at the technology of intelligence. Using computer overlays and databases, for example, the military figured out the patterns insurgents were using for conducting car bombing operations. Locations of known insurgent cells -- where their members lived and where they worked -- were overlaid on maps showing car bombs and reports of suspicious activity.

They discovered that car bombs afflicting Baghdad were likely being assembled within six miles of where they were being detonated. They came up with 12 hot spots, which they flooded with Iraqi and U.S. soldiers. As a result, U.S. military officials say, the number of car bombings in the capital dropped by half from May to June.

U.S. and Iraqi officials have also accused Syria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and especially Iran of sending a flood of intelligence assets into Iraq, and of launching clandestine offensives. Iraqis say they’re too overwhelmed fighting the insurgency to fend off those efforts.

“Most of our forces right now are trying to establish security when they don’t have enough forces,” said the Defense Ministry’s Zebari, a silver-haired former Kurdish peshmerga warrior who worked with Americans as commander of the Kurdish province of Dohuk during the 2003 invasion. “We are still very short on the intelligence side of things.”

Still, on occasion, Iraqis can point with pride to a clear intelligence coup. In one still-secret case, an Iraqi insurgent leader was hiding out in a neighboring country when he received a message, purportedly from a fellow fighter: Come back across the border at once, it said, and help carry out a huge operation.

But when the former member of Hussein’s security apparatus got back to Baghdad, Iraqi authorities awaited him. The suspect was promptly taken into custody, and this time, Rubaie said, “we did it with full protection of sources.”

Times staff writer Noam N. Levey in Baqubah contributed to this report.