You posted a link in one of the duplicate threads that AM yanked. The link was to a story from April 2003 about Russians getting medals in Iraq just before Operation Iraqi Freedom. I was pinging myself to that link when AM pulled the thread. Could you post that again please?
Nevermind, even though the thread was yanked by the mod, I could get my post back and I'd copied the link. Here is the story about Russians being in Iraq just before we invaded.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/884529/posts
You can search for Iraq and Russian and find it in the Freerepublic archives. Here's another article with essentially the same information.
http://www.usni.org/Proceedings/Articles03/progallowayiraq0403.htm
They mostly discuss these people's expertise in airdefense but I also recall a ex Russian intelligence guy discussing the fact that at least one of these guys was an expert in military "clean up." Can't find that article right now however.