Posted on 10/28/2004 5:47:37 AM PDT by focusandclarity
Russian intelligence agents are holding daily meetings with Iraqi officials in Baghdad, and may be interested in gaining control of Iraqi secret service archives if Saddam Hussein's regime falls, the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported Friday.
The newspaper said the archives could be highly valuable to Russia in three major areas: in protecting Russian interests that remain in a postwar Iraq; in determining to what extent the Saddam regime may have financed Russian political parties and movements; and in providing Russia access to intelligence that Iraqi agents conducted in other countries.
...The report speculated that the archives were a key topic of discussion when Russian President Vladimir Putin sent Yevgeny Primakov to Baghdad last month to meet with Saddam.
Primakov, a Middle East expert, once headed the foreign intelligence service in the Soviet era. Later, as Soviet foreign minister, he attempted to negotiate an agreement to avoid the 1991 Gulf War.
His meeting with Saddam in February was given little publicity, with the Foreign Ministry issuing only a brief statement saying he had received Saddam's promise to cooperate with United Nations resolutions, and the trip has remained cloaked in mystery and speculation.
The other purpose of this ongoing operation is to ensure the most damning documents showing Russia's involvement in supporting Saddam's regime are shredded. France was reported during the UN inspections to have agents in Baghdad making sure invoices from French chemical companies were shredded. The Russians will have to destroy most sensitive documents now because our Special Forces will try to intercept them if they move archives north or west, and the CIA along with free Iraqis will spend years trying to find anything hidden in the city. What I worry about is operational computers and power in the middle of a war. The Russians can seriously encrypt anything they want to keep out of our hands. Depending on how powerfully encrypted, and the volume, the NSA won't have much chance to decode it all. Posted by Chris Regan at 07:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Both. And we shouldn't forget about the fact that the Russkies were also physically present with the Iraqis when the Iraqis were trying to use the Russian POS jammers on our smart bombs. I wonder how many Russians were killed fighting with their Iraqi comrades during the first week of airstrikes?
Loftus was all over this story when it happened. There were many Russian military advisors in Iraq before the war, as well as several Russian diplomats. They had to get documents out of the country which documented Russia's sale of banned weapons to Iraq and involvement in the oil for food scandal.
I imagine the WMD's ( originally purchased illegally from Russia) did make it out of Iraq under the direction of the Russian military advisors.
But according to Loftus, the cars containing the Russian diplomats and the documents were detained by U.S. troops. The Russians didn't complete their mission as planned. We know what they were trying to do--don't know if we got the compromising documents, or not--but my bet is we got at least some of them. It's been a year and a half since Loftus talked about this, but now we're starting to understand what it's all about.
May also explain why Bush and Putin have been on such nicety terms for the past 18 months.
Do you think Loftus will weigh in on this "now"?
also
"May also explain why Bush and Putin have been on such nicety terms for the past 18 months."
Didn't Putin endorse Bush recently?
ping
Probably already has. I haven't caught the Loftus Report on WABC for the past few nights because I've been watching the World Series. Will try to catch it tonight.
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