PHILADELPHIA, 19 April 2003 — If the United States succeeds in shepherding the creation of a postwar Iraqi government, it won’t be the first time that Washington has played a primary role in changing the country’s rulers.
At least not according to Roger Morris, who says the the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had a hand in two coups in Iraq during the darkest days of the Cold War, including a 1968 putsch that set Saddam Hussein firmly on the path to power.
“This takes you down a longer, darker road in terms of American culpability,” said Morris, a former State Department foreign service officer who was on the National Security Council staff during the Johnson and Nixon administrations.
In 1963, two years after the ill-fated US attempt to overthrow the Cuban government, Morris says the CIA helped organize a bloody coup in Iraq that deposed the Soviet-leaning government of Gen. Abdel-Karim Kassem.
“As in Iran in ‘53, it was mostly American money and even American involvement on the ground,” said Morris, referring to a US-backed coup that had brought about the return of the shah to neighboring Iran.
Kassem, who had allowed communists to hold positions of responsibility in his government, was machine-gunned to death. And the country wound up in the hands of the Baath Party.
At the time, Saddam was a Baath operative studying law in Cairo, one of the places where the CIA chose to plan the coup, Morris says.
In fact, he claims the former Iraqi ruler castigated by US President George W. Bush as one of history’s most “brutal dictators,” was actually on the CIA payroll in those days.
Five years later, in 1968, Morris says the CIA encouraged a palace revolt among Baath Party elements led by long-time Saddam mentor Ahmed Hassan Al-Bakr, who would turn over the reins of power to his ambitious protege in 1979.
“It’s a regime that was unquestionably midwifed by the United States, and the (CIA’s) involvement there was really primary,” Morris said.
His version of history is a far cry from current American rhetoric about Iraq — a country that top US officials say has been liberated from decades of tyranny and given the chance for a bright democratic future without making mention of America’s own alleged role in giving birth to the regime.
A spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment on Morris’ claims of CIA involvement in the Iraqi coups but said his assertion that Saddam once received payments from the agency was “utterly ridiculous.”
Morris, who resigned from the NSC staff over the 1970 US invasion of Cambodia, says he learned the details of US covert involvement in Iraq from ranking CIA officials of the day.
Now 65, Morris went on to become a Nixon biographer and is currently writing a book about US covert action in Afghanistan and Iraq.
He regards Saddam as a deposed US client in the mould of former Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos and former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega.
“We climb into bed with these people without really knowing anything about their politics,” Morris said in an interview from Seattle where he is working on his book. “It’s not unusual, of course, in American policy. We tire of these people, and we find reasons to shed them.”
But many experts, including foreign affairs scholars, say there is little to suggest US involvement in Iraq in the 1960s.
David Wise, a Washington-based author who has written extensively about Cold War espionage, says he is aware only of records showing that a CIA group known as the “Health Alteration Committee” tried to assassinate Kassem in 1960 by sending the Iraqi leader a poisoned monogrammed handkerchief.
Morris contends that little is known about CIA involvement in the Iraqi coups because the Middle East did not hold as much strategic importance in the 1960s and most senior US officials involved there at the time have since died.
But even if the United States played no role in the rise of Iraq’s Baath Party, experts say Washington has obviously had to confront unintended consequences of former US policies — including those of Bush’s father, a former CIA director.
The United States and other Western powers supported Saddam during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, even after the Baghdad government used chemical weapons to kill thousands of Kurds in Halabja.
The 1988 atrocity was used by US officials to justify Saddam’s overthrow.
But Jon Alterman, Middle East program director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said he was a legislative aide on Capitol Hill at the time and recalls Bush allies dismissing Halabja as a ploy by pro-Israel lobbyists to disrupt US-Iraqi relations.
Before war broke out last month, a flurry of US headlines drew attention to reports that pathogens used by Iraq for its biological warfare program came from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the private Manassas, Virginia-based biological samples repository called the American Type Culture Collection.
Officials at the two institutions said shipments of anthrax, West Nile virus, botulinum toxins and other pathogens were sent to Iraq in the 1980s with US Commerce Department approval for medical research purposes.
Even Iraq’s alleged nuclear weapons program, which US officials said was on the verge of producing a nuclear bomb last year, got under way with help from a 1950s Eisenhower administration program to share the peaceful benefits of nuclear energy called “Atoms for Peace.”
That is according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington-based group founded by media mogul Ted Turner and former US Senator Sam Nunn to reduce the global threat of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
James Phillips, senior Middle East analyst for the Heritage Foundation, disagrees that Bush’s war in Iraq is the result of CIA involvement or US policy.
But he said the United States did turn a blind eye to the chance to topple Saddam during the 1991 Gulf War, just as it left Afghanistan to the mercy of the Taleban and Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network after Soviet forces left that country.
