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Posted on 04/12/2003 6:16:33 PM PDT by mware
Arms secrets revealed in spies' files
Patrick Graham in Baghdad
Sunday April 13, 2003
The Observer
Iraqi intelligence agents were ordered to take files and computers with information about weapons of mass destruction home from their offices before United Nations weapons inspectors arrived late last year, say documents found at a security headquarters in Baghdad. The handwritten notes from a meeting between a departmental director and operatives on 23 September last year were in a red notebook I found lying on a desk at the surveillance centre of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, the Mukhabarat.
Agents at a meeting on 18 November, the day the inspectors arrived in Baghdad, were ordered to prepare for an 'unannounced alert' and given instructions on how to deal with the UN.
The headquarters contained numerous personnel files on agents, several of which held graduation certificates from a Russian security organisation for surveillance courses held as recently as last September. Other documents ordered the bugging of private homes, hotel rooms and the Iranian embassy.
The red notebook recording the method for handling the inspectors included orders to 'deal softly, quietly, talk carefully' with the inspectors.
'Confusion is not allowed. It is not allowed for any officer to expand his answer beyond the limit of any question or to offer further details,' the document said.
The agents were clearly concerned that inspectors would stumble across other aspects of their intelligence activities unrelated to chemical and biological weapons. The second point from the 18 November meeting refers to 'all purchases by intelligence officers that have no permission from the United Nations and have no relations to weapons of mass destruction'.
Some annotations are more obscure, such as one referring to 'keys, boxes, locks, wax and stamps'. Another simply reads 'different systems', and appears alongside the order to hide documents at home.
The headquarters, in an unmarked private residence on the banks of the River Tigris, was still smoking on Friday afternoon from what appeared to be burning of papers. Whoever set them ablaze was in too much of a hurry to use the incinerator on the patio overlooking the river, and missed the contents of several filing cabinets.
The purpose of the building was clear, however. Piles of small listening devices and manuals spilled out of cabinets along with spools of video and audio tape.
Neighbours who had never been inside the mysterious premises poked through the files, astounded by the extent of the Mukhabarat's surveillance. 'It is very strange to come in here - can't you see I am awed?' said one as he picked up the order to bug the Iranian embassy. 'You don't come in here unless you are in handcuffs.'
The neighbours said the building, like most of those owned by the regime and its Ba'ath Party elite in the neighbourhood, had been confiscated, in this case from the owner of an alcohol factory. Down the street was the palace of Saddam's son Uday as well as the home of Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz.
In the basement of the four-storey building is a small workshop. One of the machines inside made official stamps, perhaps for forgeries, and there were lathes and milling machines for very detailed metalwork.
A neighbour, who is in the steel business suggested the staff had been modifying eavesdropping equipment. Next to the workshop, the embers of a fire glowed beside a long electronic console like those used in Seventies recording studios. It was too big for looters to cart away.
They had been more interested in the banisters and sinks. The equipment itself, including banks of listening consoles and the bugs, full of transistors, seemed dated, like the set of an early James Bond film. This is not surprising. The Mukhabarat began training with the Russians in the early Seventies.
In a back room we found the piles of personnel files, five of them with certificates from two-week courses last September at the 'Special Training Center', an unidentified Moscow security organisation.
A photographic negative found nearby showed a group of men standing in front of the Kremlin, some tourism perhaps between the Iraqi agents' courses on 'photo-technical and acoustic surveillance'.
Isn't this the same location that the note about the Russians spying on Blair and sharing the info with Saddam?
Stamps? Maybe like this?
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