Saddam's Forces Secretly Recalled

By IE
Sunday May 6, 02:14 AM
Yahoo

Authorities with the US-led occupation have begun a covert campaign to recruit and train agents with the once-dreaded Iraqi intelligence service to help identify resistance to American forces here after months of increasingly sophisticated attacks and bombings, according to US and Iraqi officials.

The extraordinary move to recruit agents of former President Saddam Hussein's brutal security services underscores a growing recognition among US officials that American military forces - already stretched thin - cannot alone prevent attacks like the devastating truck bombing of the UN headquarters this week, they said.

Authorities have stepped up the recruitment over the past two weeks, one senior US official said, despite sometimes adamant objections by Iraqi officials in the Iraqi Governing Council, who complain that they have too little control over the pool of recruits.

...While US officials acknowledge the sensitivity of cooperating with a force that embodied the ruthlessness of Saddam's rule, they assert that an urgent need for better and more precise intelligence has forced unusual compromises.

''The only way you can combat terrorism is through intelligence,'' the official said. ''It's the only way you're going to stop these people from doing what they're doing.'' He added: ''Without Iraqi input, that's not going to work.''

Officials are reluctant to disclose how many former agents have been recruited. But Iraqi officials say they number anywhere from dozens to a few hundred, and US officials acknowledge the recruitment is extensive.

''We're reaching out widely,'' said one official.

Added a Western diplomat: ''There is an obvious evolution. First the police are reconstituted, then the army. It is logical that intelligence officials from the regime would also be recruited.''

Officials say the first line of intelligence-gathering remains the Iraqi police. But that force is hampered in intelligence work by a lack of credibility with a disenchanted public, and its numbers remain far below what US officials say they need to bring order to an unruly capital.

Across Iraq, walk-in informers have provided tips on weapons caches and locations of suspected guerrillas, but many Iraqis dismiss those reports as haphazard and sometimes motivated by personal gain.

The emphasis in recruitment, although not exclusively, appears to be on the intelligence service known as the mukhabarat, one of four branches in Saddam's government.

The mukhabarat, whose name itself inspired fear, was the foreign intelligence service, the most sophisticated of the four.

Within that service, officials have reached out to agents who once worked on Syria and Iran, Iraqi officials and former intelligence agents say. (LAT-WP)