CIA helped Baathists gain power in Iraq: ex-official
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA: If the United States succeeds in shepherding the creation of a Iraqi government, it won’t be the first time that Washington has played a primary role in changing the country’s rulers.
At least not according to Roger Morris, who says the CIA had a hand in two coups in Iraq during the darkest days of the Cold War, including a 1968 putsch that set Saddam Hussein firmly on the path to power.
“This takes you down a longer, darker road in terms of American culpability,” said Morris, a former State Department foreign service officer who was on the National Security Council staff during the Johnson and Nixon administrations.
In 1963, two years after the ill-fated US attempt to overthrow the Cuban government, Morris says the CIA helped organize a bloody coup in Iraq that deposed the Soviet-leaning government of General Abdel-Karim Kassem.
“As in Iran in 1953, it was mostly American money and even American involvement on the ground,” said Morris, referring to a US-backed coup that had brought about the return of the Shah to Iran.
Kassem, who had allowed communists to hold positions of responsibility in his government, was machine-gunned to death. And the country wound up in the hands of the Baath Party.
At the time, Saddam was a Baath operative studying law in Cairo, one of the places where the CIA chose to plan the coup, Morris says. In fact, he claims the former Iraqi ruler castigated by US President George W. Bush as one of history’s most “brutal dictators,” was actually on the CIA payroll in those days.
US ROLE IN SADDAM’S RISE: Five years later, in 1968, Morris says the CIA encouraged a palace revolt among Baath Party elements led by long-time Saddam mentor Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, who would turn over the reins of power to his ambitious protege in 1979.
“It’s a regime that was unquestionably midwived by the United States, and the (CIA’s) involvement there was really primary,” Morris said.
His version of history is a far cry from current American rhetoric about Iraq — a country that top US officials say has been liberated from decades of tyranny and given the chance for a bright democratic future without making mention of America’s own alleged role in giving birth to the regime.
A spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment on Morris’ claims of CIA involvement in the Iraqi coups but said his assertion that Saddam once received payments from the agency was “utterly ridiculous.”
Morris, who resigned from the NSC staff over the 1970 US invasion of Cambodia, says he learned the details of US covert involvement in Iraq from ranking CIA officials of the day.
Now 65, Morris went on to become a Nixon biographer and is currently writing a book about US covert action in Afghanistan and Iraq.
He regards Saddam as a deposed US client in the mould of former Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos and former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega.
“We climb into bed with these people without really knowing anything about their politics,” Morris said in an interview from Seattle where he is working on his book. “It’s not unusual, of course, in American policy. We tire of these people, and we find reasons to shed them.”
POISONED HANDKERCHIEF?: But many experts, including foreign affairs scholars, say there is little to suggest US involvement in Iraq in the 1960s.
David Wise, a Washington-based author who has written extensively about Cold War espionage, says he is aware only of records showing that a CIA group known as the “Health Alteration Committee” tried to assassinate Kassem in 1960 by sending the Iraqi leader a poisoned monogrammed handkerchief.
Morris contends that little is known about CIA involvement in the Iraqi coups because the Middle East did not hold as much strategic importance in the 1960s and most senior US officials involved there at the time have since died.
But even if the United States played no role in the rise of Iraq’s Baath Party, experts say Washington has obviously had to confront unintended consequences of former US policies — including those of Bush’s father, a former CIA director.
The United States and other Western powers supported Saddam during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, even after the Baghdad government used chemical weapons to kill thousands of Kurds in Halabja.
The 1988 atrocity was used by US officials to justify Saddam’s overthrow.
But Jon Alterman, Middle East programme director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said he was a legislative aide on Capitol Hill at the time and recalls Bush allies dismissing Halabja as a ploy by pro-Israel lobbyists to disrupt US-Iraqi relations.—Reuters
