LONDON, 12 May 2003 — Iraqi intelligence agents infiltrated the Arabic satellite news channel Al-Jazeera in an effort to influence its coverage, the Sunday Times reported, quoting documents allegedly obtained in Baghdad.
In response to the claims, the Qatar-based station denied that its coverage of Iraq was biased and said it was unaware of any wrongdoing by its staff. The report could not be independently verified.
The Sunday Times said that its journalists had been given access to some of the files by the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the long-time opponents of Saddam Hussein’s ousted regime.
The INC said it had retrieved the documents, which cover a period from August 1999 to November 2002, from a local office of the Iraqi intelligence service in Baghdad after US-led forces toppled the Iraqi regime last month, according to the report.
“Senior officers of Iraq’s intelligence agency controlled three agents who worked at the Al-Jazeera network, say the files,” the Sunday Times reported.
“Their detailed reports also refer to the Qatar-based news network as an ‘instrument’ of the regime.
“They claim the channel was used to ‘foil’ American aggression and outline the secret contacts between Al-Jazeera’s staff and Saddam’s intelligence network,” the paper added.
One of the files contained a registration document for “Iraqi or foreign secret co-operatives,” it said.
It also names an Iraqi employee at Al-Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha who is alleged to have provided the Iraqi regime with two letters written by Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, according to the Sunday Times.
Al-Jazeera denied it was influenced by Saddam’s regime. The station’s editor-in-chief, Ibrahim Hilal, told Britain’s Channel 4 News on Saturday that it was highly unlikely Iraqi agents were working at Al-Jazeera.
But he added: “You can never guarantee that any person working in a newsroom cannot be an intelligence agent.”
