Too bad it failed: In the mid-1990’s, the CIA infiltrated the UN’s weapons inspection efforts in Iraq and used their position to engineer a coup against Saddam Hussein. This is according to Scott Ritter – who was one of the actual weapons inspectors in Iraq at the time – in an interview that just went up on Buzzflash:
BuzzFlash: At some point during this process, Iraqi intelligence officers learned that the CIA was planning a coup. How exactly did they learn about the coup, and what happened as a result?
Scott Ritter: By … 1996, the Iraqis had put together a fairly sophisticated matrix of who the inspectors were and who they ultimately worked for. So whenever we submitted a roster of inspectors to the Iraqis, they were pretty locked in on what kind of inspection it would be, and what kind of emphasis there would be, and who on the inspection team they should be concerned about. So they have a good feel for that.
But the Mukhabarat [the Iraqi intelligence] also had to deal with aspects of protecting Saddam Hussein that had nothing to do with UNSCOM [weapons inspectors], such as the CIA’s own efforts to recruit people inside Iraq to target Saddam. And what the Mukhabarat did is they were tracking these two separate issues and found that there was crossover – that the CIA was using the inspection process to facilitate a coup d’etat by another group of Iraqis that was being handled by the CIA outside the framework of the weapons inspections.
And the Iraqis tracked this. They infiltrated the coup and they pulled the plug on it, executed the plotters and terminated the CIA’s effort. But in the process, they got definitive proof that the CIA was using the inspection process as a vehicle not only to gather intelligence, but to trigger a coup d’etat. And it destroyed the integrity of the inspection process.
The CIA infiltration into the weapons inspection efforts – and its discovery by the Iraqis – dampered, if not ruined, the efficacy of U.N. weapons inspections in the future as a peaceful means for disarming predator states.
Ritter also believes that had the CIA undercover effort not been exposed the inspections might have worked:
BuzzFlash: Hindsight is twenty-twenty, but if the CIA had let UNSCOM do its job, do you believe that your mission would have confirmed – as history has proven to be true – that Iraq was complying with the UN resolution and that perhaps we never would have invaded Iraq in the years that followed?
Scott Ritter: Oh, there’s no doubt. First of all, it’s not just the CIA. We have to remember the CIA doesn’t make policy – it implements policy. If the United States government had been serious about disarming Iraq, and serious about complying with the mandate when the U.S. voted for Security Council resolutions calling for the disarmament, and then lifting sanctions once Iraq was verified as being disarmed, then this problem could have been cleared up by 1993-1994 at the latest. We would have been able to wrap this up and conclude our business in Iraq, and there would still be inspectors in Iraq today conducting long-term monitoring of Iraq’s industrial infrastructure to make sure that they never again reconstituted any of these weapons. It would have been a tremendous victory for disarmament, for arms control, for non-proliferation, and for international peace and security. That’s one of the tragedies that nobody wants to really focus on is just how good the inspectors were, and what a loss it was to the international community that the United States – not just the CIA, but the United States – corrupted the integrity of this operation.
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