Talk:U.S. intelligence activities in Iraq

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Recent Changes

• For some odd reason, this article spelled Qasim's name in multiple ways, including Qassem. I corrected that.
• If we are to maintain a policy of neutrality, we should avoid using fringe sources like Roger Morris. Morris writes for the anti-American hate blog ZNet and cites no sources in any of his articles. I don't think many people would take him very seriously if they were familar with some of his most fanatical rants (based on a crazy patchwork of assumptions, anonymous sources, and conspiracy theories), in which he basically blames the CIA for every bad thing that happens in the world and endlessly recycles long-debunked myths about the US overthrowing Sihanouk or Sukarno. But to examine his specific claims cited in this article:

• "America's anti-Kassem intrigue has been widely substantiated, however, in disclosures by the Senate Committee on Intelligence and in the work of journalists and historians like David Wise, an authority on the C.I.A."
• Wise was interviewed about Morris’ piece by David Morgan. Wise told Morgan that "there is little to suggest U.S. involvement in Iraq in the sixties," adding that he was "only aware of the poisoned handkerchief" the CIA planned to send Qasim in 1960. As for the Church Committee? It found that the handkerchief never reached its intended target "if, indeed, [it was] sent"—and that the CIA "had nothing to do" with Qasim’s ouster in 1963. Thus, both of Morris’ sources say the exact opposite of what he claims. Precisely because Wise is "an authority on the CIA," it seems highly unlikely that Morris is correct.
• "From 1958 to 1960, despite Kassem's harsh repression, the Eisenhower administration abided him as a counter to Washington's Arab nemesis of the era, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt -- much as Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush would aid Saddam Hussein in the 1980's against the common foe of Iran. By 1961, the Kassem regime had grown more assertive. In 1963....the C.I.A.'s Health Alteration Committee, as it was tactfully called, sent Kassem a monogrammed, poisoned handkerchief, though the potentially lethal gift either failed to work or never reached its victim."
• Even on matters of basic fact, Morris is profoundly confused. It was in February 1960 that Eisenhower, not Kennedy, plotted to send the handkerchief to Qasim—in a plan totally unrelated to the coup three years later.
• "In 1963 Britain and Israel backed American intervention in Iraq, while other United States allies -- chiefly France and Germany -- resisted."
• There is substantial evidence that Britain was as deeply involved in the 1963 coup in Iraq as the United States—which is to say, not very deeply. However, Morris provides no evidence for the notion that Israel also encouraged the plot, or that France and Germany were opposed. Indeed, he seems to expect us to accept this claim solely out of prejudice towards the "Israel Lobby." No scholar or historian of Iraq has ever made comparable accusations.
• "According to the former Baathist leader Hani Fkaiki, among party members colluding with the C.I.A. in 1962 and 1963 was Saddam Hussein, then a 25-year-old who had fled to Cairo after taking part in a failed assassination of Kassem in 1958."
• A quick search of Fkaiki’s name online reveals only references to Morris’ assertions, which naturally causes me to doubt his veracity; nevertheless, it isn’t impossible that the U.S. had contacts with Saddam at the time, much as Saddam later had contacts with al Qaeda.
• "According to Western scholars, as well as Iraqi refugees and a British human rights organization, the 1963 coup was accompanied by a bloodbath."
• This is, no doubt, absolutely true—nevertheless, Morris’ resolute refusal to name sources is notable. "A British human rights organization"? Which one? What "Western scholars"?
• "Using lists of suspected Communists and other leftists provided by the C.I.A., the Baathists systematically murdered untold numbers of Iraq's educated elite -- killings in which Saddam Hussein himself is said to have participated."
• Other sources have claimed that there was such a CIA "death list," but it is worth noting that none of the declassified records from the time support this notion, and that comparable claims about Indonesia have been totally discredited. The phrase "said to have participated" effectively sums up the quality of Morris’ sourcing; his work is a bizarre amalgam of the conspiracy theories and popular beliefs common in the Middle East, along with propaganda more palatable to Western audiences.
• "The United States also sent arms to the new regime, weapons later used against the same Kurdish insurgents the United States had backed against Kassem and then abandoned."
• I’m not sure if there is any evidence of arms being sent, as there would have to be for this to be true. Regardless, Qasim was the one Iraqi leader renowned for his positive relations with the Kurds. Morris claims that these "facts" were revealed by the Church and Pike Committees in the seventies, but the Pike Committee actually investigated the CIA’s arming of Kurdish insurgents from 1973-75—against the Ba’athist government of Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr. Morris omits this fact because he wants us to think that the CIA was working with the Ba’athists at the very time the CIA was actually arming rebels who wanted to overthrow them!
• "Serving on the staff of the National Security Council under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in the late 1960's, I often heard C.I.A. officers -- including Archibald Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and a ranking C.I.A. official for the Near East and Africa at the time -- speak openly about their close relations with the Iraqi Baathists."
• You might think that this is a "he said-she said" sort of thing, and that it’s difficult to know if Morris—decades after the fact—is accurately extrapolating, from a few private conversations he claims to have overheard, the crux of decades of U.S. policy towards Iraq. But there’s no need to wonder if Morris’ assertions are truthful: They aren’t. Roosevelt’s only service in Iraq took place during World War 2. As for being "a ranking CIA official for the Near East and Africa at the time," Roosevelt did serve as head of the Near East section of Voice of America—from 1949 to 1951 (!). From 1962 to 1966, Roosevelt—far from working in the Middle East—was actually the CIA station chief in London! And, yes, he lived in London—where he presumably never had any contacts with Morris, who lived in the United States. From 1967 to 1974, Roosevelt served in the U.S., where he gradually prepared for retirement, and there is no evidence that he was contacted for advice on Middle East policy at any point during the sixties or seventies. The only time he was "a ranking official" for the Middle East (and never for Africa) was decades before the events Morris describes. This entire section of the piece, which is the most important part in terms of establishing Morris’ credibility, is a complete fantasy. Is it possible that Morris heard something from someone at some time about U.S. opposition to Qasim, and from there drew broader conclusions about U.S. involvement in several coups and power struggles in Iraq in the sixties? Is Morris thinking of a different Roosevelt? Kermit Roosevelt, who led the coup in Iran in 1953 and would thus be an easy target for conspiracy theorists, retired in 1958. Did Morris invent this libelous claim about Archibald Roosevelt solely out of thin air? How seriously can we take anything Morris says?
• Morris’ claim that the U.S. backed the 1968 coup and maintained a “close relationship” with the Ba’athists into the seventies merits special attention. After all, the 1963 coup did not establish a Ba’athist regime: 12 of Qasim’s 16 cabinet members were Ba’athists, and the U.S.-backed President, Abdul Rahman Arif, ultimately purged the Ba’ath from the government. It was the 1968 coup that put Saddam on the path to power. However, Morris is the only source to even suggest U.S. involvement in the coup. Indeed, the United States and Iraq did not have any diplomatic relations whatever from 1967 to 1984. The Ba’athists had seized power in Syria in 1966 and established close ties with the Soviet Union. Ali Ibrahim al-Tikriti, an Iraqi general and friend of Saddam who defected in 1991, has dismissed the very idea of American support for the coup as "absolutely ludicrous," adding that "I was there helping with the revolution and worked on two occasions with Soviet KGB officials to help train us, much like the United States did with the Taliban in Afghanistan." The United States expressed vehement opposition to the 1968 coup, with the Congress making all arms sales to Iraq formally illegal and the CIA supporting a Kurdish revolt against the Ba’athists. Al-Bakr signed a treaty of friendship with Moscow in 1972 and nationalized the assets of foreign oil companies that same year. Nobody at the time ever suggested that Iraq—the most pro-Soviet and anti-Israel Arab state—was actually an American client! James Chritchfeld, the head of the CIA’s Near East division at the time, told PBS that the Ba’ath "staged a radical counter-coup" against the pro-American government of Iraq, thus prompting Arif to purge the party (Saddam was reportedly imprisoned from 1964 to 1967). Chritchfeld stated that the CIA was "surprised" by the "radical movement within the Ba’ath" and developed "enormous reservations about the ability of the Ba’ath to bring Iraq constructively along" after the 1968 coup. Nowhere does he suggest that the United States was a fan of the Ba’ath Party’s socialist ideology, or continued to favor the party after it split into several branches in 1966 and was hijacked by anti-American fanatics. No historians agree with Morris, and certainly no Congressional investigations or credible journalists like David Wise support his outrageous allegations. Apparently, even when actively trying to undermine the Ba’athists, the CIA was still in cahoots with them, somehow.
• "This history is known to many in the Middle East and Europe, though few Americans are acquainted with it, much less understand it."
• The standard intellectual superiority canard. Because "many" "know" this "history," Morris has no need to provide evidence for anything he says. Middle Easterners, including those that are supposedly moderate or have lived in the West, often relate fantastic plots of foreign intervention; it’s widely "known"--in Iran--that the Iranian Revolution was a British plot. The CIA’s opposition to Qasim was certainly well-known in the United States at the time; there were countless news stories about American opposition to his regime and his threats to Kuwait, and CIA director Allen Dulles publicly declared Iraq to be "the most dangerous place in the world." The Church hearings got massive press coverage at the time. However, the United States opposed Qasim for the same reason it opposed al-Bakr’s seizure of power in 1968: Both were allied with the Soviet Union, both threatened Kuwait, and both were hostile to the Shah’s Iran and Israel. There’s no reason to think that the CIA helped oust the Arif brothers after assisting them in gaining power in the first place. Even in the case of the 1963 coup, Morris vastly overstates the importance of the CIA. As Robert Komer wrote to Kennedy at the time, "CIA had excellent reports on the plotting, but I doubt either they or UK should claim much credit for it." CIA agent Harry Rotizke wrote about it in his 1977 memoirs, claiming only that the U.S. was "unofficially complicit" in the coup but did not play a direct role. Morris shouldn’t complain about the ignorance of the public. It is this very ignorance he is counting on to rewrite history so that America, not the Soviet Union, supported the rise of Arab socialism in Iraq. As was the case elsewhere in the region, the USSR was the main patron of socialism in Iraq--under Qasim, al-Bakr, and Hussein.

• What this article said: "The CIA orchestrated a bomb and sabotage campaign....According to this former CIA official [Robert Baer], the civilian targets included a movie theater and a bombing of a school bus and schoolchildren were killed." What the cited source actually says: "The Iraqi government at the time claimed that the bombs, including one it said exploded in a movie theater, resulted in many civilian casualties. But whether the bombings actually killed any civilians could not be confirmed because, as a former C.I.A. official said, the United States had no significant intelligence sources in Iraq then....Baer, a critic of the Iraq war, said he did not recall which resistance group might have set off that bomb." I changed the wording to be more accurate.
• The entire 1990 section was devoted to US efforts to oust Saddam after the Gulf War. But the Gulf War happened in 1991....
• Additional sources on Iraqi history could include the works of Con Couglin or Charles Tripp. Fringe blogs like Common Dreams or ZNet shouldn't be used. Currently, I rewrote the article with more emphasis on Congressional investigations and declassified records. I added the CIA support for the Kurdish revolt of 1972-75.Jake Murrin 17:10, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

Comments

I'm far from an expert in this area, but your changes here and in related articles cause me considerable concern about bias. Is there a history or politics editor available to offer a more informed opinion?

You refer to "fringe sources like Roger Morris. Morris writes for the anti-American hate blog ZNet..." However, when I look up Morris, I find he is a Harvard PhD and former senior US official[1]. As for Znet, they describe themselves as "A community of people committed to social change". That makes them leftist and biased, but you overstate your criticism far beyond reason. Sandy Harris 05:58, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

I second Sandy on his concerns. I would say the article needs more paraphrasing and less direct quotations. And sources such as "Memo. Deputy Chief CI to DDP. 4/l/62" should be cited using <ref></ref> notation like the rest of the article. (Chunbum Park 08:11, 5 July 2012 (UTC))

But, you see, that's all ZNet is. It has no editorial oversight or journalistic credibility. As for Morris, he is a lonely source. I have read many books on Iraqi history. I have read the Church report and David Wise. I have to ask: Can you find one other reliable source that makes comparable claims? Morris can't be the only source. I think we should go with his sources: Wise and Church. They both contradict him, but he cites them regardless. Morris took the Church report quote about Qasim suffering "a terminal illness before a firing squad in Baghdad" and ignored the second half--"an event we had nothing to do with"--to prove his point. I'm just saying we should use the full quote. Relying solely on Morris will profoundly skew the article. Sandy, what other changes have I made that you object to? The Vietnam war edit, or CIA activities in Cambodia, or CIA activities in Iran, or what? In any case, these changes are not directly related to the accuracy of my edits here. Many of the citations were broken, and there was a lot of incoherent repeat text, when I got here. This page was a sloppy copy of the old Wikipedia version. It needed serious work.Jake Murrin 20:14, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

The thing that first got my attention was noticing a huge deletion in the "US intelligence in Iran" article, claiming it was unsalvageable "conspiracy theory" nonsense. You may be right; it started by citing the Socialist Worker or some such exceedingly dubious source, but it does cite other sources as well. I'm not certain the entire notion should be left undiscussed; if it is influential then it needs mention. My own opinion — as someone who went to Iran as an English teacher in '78 and bailed out in early '79 a couple of days ahead of the Shah — is that the suggestion of Western support for Iranian Islamicists is ludicrous. The French did give Khomeni refuge, but no-one else was assisting. Carter was loudly praising the Shah right to the end.

Then I noticed you were making large changes in a number of other articles. Basically, that's great; we need more contributors and you are one. On the other hand, I'm not yet sure I trust your judgement. I'd really like a second opinion from someone who knows the area. Sandy Harris 00:42, 6 July 2012 (UTC)

I wish Howard C. Berkowitz could provide his opinion on the changes. Too bad he was banned. (Chunbum Park 04:04, 6 July 2012 (UTC))