Free Republic

The Russian Government had a spy inside the US military command who passed information to Saddam Hussein on America’s war plan in the opening days of the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon announced yesterday. The explosive revelation was based on Iraqi documents captured since the fall of the dictator and were set last night to trigger a major diplomatic incident between Washington and Moscow. The Russian spy, who was not named, passed detailed information on US troop movements through the Russian Ambassador in Baghdad, who sent the information to Saddam’s personal secretary. The first document is a handwritten account of...

HER dusty file was one of hundreds of thousands of documents stacked in a house in a wealthy neighbourhood of Baghdad. Asma Rasheed married a pilot, lived comfortably in the presidential compound of Saddam Hussein and directed a microbiology programme that was not supposed to exist. Rasheed’s light blue folder has emerged from a huge archive seized by forces loyal to Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, which opposed Saddam. The archive — a dark who’s who of Iraq — reveals the tiniest details of blandishments and humiliations by a paranoid regime that shared the Nazis’ obsession...

On March 20, Russian President Vladimir Putin denounced the U.S.-led "aggression" against Iraq as "unwarranted" and "unjustifiable." Three days later, Pravda said that an anonymous Russian "military expert" was predicting that the United States would fabricate finding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov immediately started plying the idea abroad, and it has taken hold around the world ever since. As a former Romanian spy chief who used to take orders from the Soviet KGB, it is perfectly obvious to me that Russia is behind the evanescence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. After all, Russia...