WASHINGTON, 26 March 2006 — The Pentagon said Friday that as US troops moved toward Iraq in 2003, Saddam Hussein received intelligence about their battle strategy and troop movements from a Russian ambassador.
Iraqi documents captured by US forces in 2003 say Russian intelligence had sources inside the US Central Command headquarters in Doha who enabled it to feed information about US troop movements and battle plans to Saddam, according to an unclassified version of the Pentagon analysis.
The report does not assess the value or accuracy of the information Saddam got or offer details on Russia’s information pipeline.
Brig. Gen. Anthony Cucolo, one of the Pentagon officials who helped put the report together, was quick to say that there was no indication the Russians had a spy inside Central Command. He noted that key details provided to Saddam by the Russians were wrong, and said it would not have mattered because the Iraqi leader ignored the intelligence in formulating his losing war strategy.
Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service was quick to deny the allegations. “Similar, baseless accusations concerning Russia’s intelligence have been made more than once,” Foreign Intelligence Service spokesman Boris Labusov said, according to a duty officer in his department. “We don’t consider it necessary to comment on such fabrications.”
Word of Russian-Iraqi collaboration came as part of an analysis by US Joint Forces Command, which looked at combat operations from an Iraqi perspective as a tool for shaping future US operations.
The Pentagon said its report was based on thousands of Iraqi documents and postwar interviews with more than a dozen Iraqi officials, not including Saddam.
Noteworthy items mentioned in the 210-page study, called the Iraqi Perspectives Project include:
• The Iraqi regime believed that Russia and France would act on behalf of their own economic interests in Iraq to block any UN Security Council actions to authorize an invasion.
• Saddam was more concerned about internal revolt than a coalition invasion; therefore bridges were not blown, oil fields were not torched, and the south was not flooded — all part of the inadequate and ineffective military planning done prior to the invasion.
• Saddam and his inner circle believed their own propaganda.
• Military and ministry leaders lied to Saddam about the true state of their capabilities.
• The regime ordered the distribution of ammunition around the country to support a prolonged war with the coalition, but not to support the insurgency or a guerrilla war.
As the study notes that some information obtained by Iraq from Russian sources was false, some experts are suggesting it was circulated as part of a deliberate American campaign intended to deceive Iraqi leaders. Military officers have disclosed separately that false war plans were part of the campaign, and it remains unclear whether any Russians may have played into the plan.
A source in Russia’s security agencies said they are not ruling out that America’s accusations were “a form of revenge on the part of the US for Russia’s firm position in regard to hostilities on Iraq’s territory.” Russia was consistently against military operation against Iraq prior to the start of the 2003 US-led operation, a move that President Vladimir Putin labeled a “big mistake” at the time.
