US operatives are said to be active in Iraq: Agents target sites, gather intelligence

By John Donnelly, Boston Globe, 1 June 2003

WASHINGTON - About 100 US Special Forces members and more than 50 Central Intelligence Agency officers have been operating in small groups inside Iraq for at least four months, searching for Scud missile launchers, monitoring oil fields, marking minefield sites, and using lasers to help US pilots bomb Iraqi air-defense systems, according to intelligence officials and military analysts who have talked with people on the teams.

The operations, which also have included small numbers of Jordanian, British, and Australian commandos, are considered by many analysts to be part of the opening phase of a war against Iraq, even though the Bush administration has agreed to a schedule of UN weapons inspections.

On Jan. 27, the UN team will report on whether it has found evidence of a program to develop chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. Soon after, the Bush administration is expected to announce whether Iraq is in material breach of UN resolutions and whether that is a trigger to an invasion aimed at toppling the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, and his government.

War preparations have been in full swing for months. The Pentagon says that 60,000 troops are now in the Persian Gulf region; that number could double in coming weeks.

Even as President Bush reiterated on Friday that it is not too late to avert war if Saddam Hussein fully complies with the weapons inspections by the United Nations, military analysts say that the bombing, almost daily, by US jets over the mandated no-fly zone, coupled with Special Forces and CIA officers operating inside Iraq, means that a quiet, barely noticed fight has been unfolding.

We’re bombing practically every day as we patrol the no-fly zones, taking out air defense batteries, and there are all kinds of CIA and Special Forces operations going on. So I would call it the beginning of a war, said Timur J. Eads, a former US special operations officer for 20 years who took part in missions inside Iraq in the 1990s.

A US intelligence official said that the Iraq missions are separate from the work of the UN inspectors, but that the two operations may be moving in parallel.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that some Special Forces members were following suspicious movements around suspected weapons sites and that information could be turned over to the UN teams. The administration refuses to do so, out of concern that the reports might be passed to Iraqi officials.

The Iraqi government has also been highly suspicious of the UN inspection teams, dating to 1998 when it found that a few people on the teams were US Special Forces members, according to Eads and a current Special Forces officer, who declined to be identified.

In the 1990s, Special Forces and CIA officers traveled undercover to various parts of Iraq, mostly in the northern areas dominated by the Kurds, where distrust of US intentions runs deep because of Washington’s unwillingness to remove Hussein in the early part of the decade.

A large contingent of CIA and Special Forces is reported to be operating relatively freely in northern Iraq, where Hussein’s reach has been weakened because the area falls under a no-fly zone and because of the Kurds’ antipathy toward a regime that has gassed their people.

The Americans are reportedly working alongside fighters belonging to Kurdish factions. They are also said to be identifying potential leaders to work with in case of an invasion.

That tactic was used successfully in Afghanistan with the Northern Alliance before the war there in 2001.

In another parallel to the covert operations in Afghanistan, CIA and Special Forces members also are paying thousands of dollars to those who cooperate with them, according to the official and the analysts.

In other parts of Iraq, Special Forces members are operating in small teams on a variety of missions. These are taking place in areas populated largely by Shiite Muslims around Basra, in the south, where mistrust of the Baghdad government is rife; in the western desert near the Jordanian border; and even close to Baghdad, according to the analysts.

Just as we did prior to the Gulf War, they are getting as absolutely close to the urban areas as they can, said an analyst who spoke with a Special Operations team leader after he returned from Iraq in late November. They are extremely careful, of course, and they’re getting only as close to Baghdad as the commands will let them go.

They also have been a big help in the air strikes over the last several months, the analyst said. Many of the strikes on radar sites have been directed by guys on the ground using lasers. British, Australian and Jordanian commandos are also inside, too, although not in huge numbers.

One goal of the operations will probably be to have spies in Baghdad to watch Iraqi military movements, the analysts said.

I would be very shocked if people are not already in Baghdad, said Eads, chief Washington lobbyist for EMC Corp., the Hopkinton data storage company. Somebody is sitting there watching what defenses are being built, how they guard key structures. Whether that’s a US citizen watching, I don’t know. But there are a lot of computer salesmen passing through Baghdad now. He was referring to business executives who may also double as spies.

Near Jordan, the effort is to identify likely areas for mobile missile operations, said Daniel Goure of the Lexington Institute, a Washington-area think tank.

Goure, who during the Gulf War worked in the Pentagon under Paul Wolfowitz, now the deputy defense secretary, said he received his information from friends in the Pentagon.

They want to see if there are tracks, if there are hide sites for the Scuds, and all the rest, Goure said of a mission designed to protect Israel, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia from Scud attacks.

Such retaliatory Iraqi missile launchings were unleashed on Israel and Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Gulf War. The Special Forces teams are also doing prep work in case they have to do extended operations, including searching for suitable areas for bases.

US military and CIA officials continued to decline comment officially on the activities.

We do not comment about current operations, ongoing operations, supposed or otherwise, Lieutenant Colonel Martin Compton said at US Central Command in Tampa.

The activity, Goure and others said, surely has not escaped notice of the Iraqis. Several articles in the British press have referred to US and British commandos inside Iraq. Mohammed al Douri, Iraq’s ambassador to the United Nations, was in Baghdad late last week and could not be reached for comment, a spokesman for the Iraqi mission said.

The analysts said that acknowledging the presence of Special Forces and CIA officers inside Iraq would not put the troops or operatives at increased risk. The Boston Globe is withholding details of recent operations that may compromise future missions.

The Iraqis won’t like this activity, obviously, but they expect some of this as well, Goure said. He also said that if the Special Forces and CIA members were not shooting at someone, I think you can view this as no different than what we are doing from the air, spying on them. You wonder what’s the big deal with this.

But Naseer H. Aruri, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, said the Bush administration was being duplicitous in conducting undercover operations while agreeing to the UN weapons inspections.

Certainly, the Arab world and the Islamic world would see it as being inconsistent with the weapons inspections, as well as an infringement on Iraq’s sovereignty, Aruri said. It makes clear that the public acceptance of the UN mission and inspection process was more of a tactic than anything else.

James M. Lindsay, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who was a member of the National Security Council during the Clinton administration, said that few countries outside the Middle East would object.

They are doing this in parallel with the UN weapons inspectors, he said. These efforts are not going to come as a surprise to the Brits, or the French, or the Russians, or the Chinese. What really matters is whether they are caught doing it publicly, because that would create political problems for the administration.

Lindsay also said, however, that this could change if the operations became more visible. It’s one thing to go in and make contacts with potential opposition leaders, he said. It’s another thing to go in and blow up economic installations.

Ruth Wedgwood, a specialist on international law and a member of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory panel to the Pentagon, said that Iraq was in a legally unique situation, in that it is the one country in the world forbidden... to develop capabilities of producing weapons of mass destruction.

If Iraq violates the terms of UN Security Council Resolution 687, enacted April 3, 1991, which was reinforced by another resolution passed late last year, one has a perfectly plausible legal argument that the cease-fire is over, Wedgwood said.

She also said that from a US policy standpoint, she understood the need for the Special Forces. If we are going to go in at some point, we need to make appropriate preparations. You don’t build up 30,000 or 60,000 troops for nothing, added Wedgwood, who is a professor of international law and diplomacy at Johns Hopkins University.

A key part of the current US strategy is the willingness to spend money to bribe Iraqi military leaders rather than attack or kill them, Eads said. I bet we’re approaching many of those commanders now and saying. . .We’ll give you $10,000 and a trip to Morocco, or wherever you want, as long you lay down your arms when we come through here, he said.