Former U.S. official says CIA aided Iraqi Baathists

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By David Morgan

PHILADELPHIA, April 17 (Reuters) - If the United States succeeds in 
shepherding the creation of a postwar Iraqi government, it won't be the 
first time that Washington has played a primary role in changing the 
country's rulers.

At least not according to Roger Morris, who says the CIA had a hand in two 
coups in Iraq during the darkest days of the Cold War, including a 1968 
putsch that set Saddam Hussein firmly on the path to power.

"This takes you down a longer, darker road in terms of American 
culpability," said Morris, a former State Department foreign service 
officer who was on the National Security Council staff during the Johnson 
and Nixon administrations.

In 1963, two years after the ill-fated U.S. attempt at overthrow in Cuba 
known as the Bay of Pigs, Morris says the CIA helped organize a bloody 
coup in Iraq that deposed the Soviet-leaning government of Gen. 
Abdel-Karim Kassem.

"As in Iran in '53, it was mostly American money and even American 
involvement on the ground," said Morris, referring to a U.S.-backed coup 
that had brought the return of the shah to neighboring Iran.

Kassem, who had allowed communists to hold positions of responsibility in 
his government, was machine-gunned to death. And the country wound up in 
the hands of the Baath Party.

At the time, Saddam was a Baath operative studying law in Cairo, one of 
the venues the CIA chose to plan the coup, Morris says. In fact, he claims 
the former Iraqi ruler castigated by U.S. President George W. Bush as one 
of history's most "brutal dictators," was actually on the CIA payroll in 
those days.

"There's no question," Morris told Reuters. "It was there in Cairo that 
(Saddam) and others were first contacted by the agency."

U.S. ROLE ALLEGED IN SADDAM'S RISE

Five years later, in 1968, Morris says the CIA encouraged a palace revolt 
among Baath Party elements led by long-time Saddam mentor Ahmed Hassan 
al-Bakr, who would turn over the reins of power to his ambitious protege 
in 1979.

"It's a regime that was unquestionably midwived by the United States, and 
the (CIA's) involvement there was really primary," Morris said.

His version of history is a far cry from current American rhetoric about 
Iraq -- a country that top U.S. officials say has been liberated from 
decades of tyranny and given the chance for a bright democratic future 
without their making mention of America's own alleged role in giving birth 
to the regime.

A spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment on 
Morris' claims of CIA involvement in the Iraqi coups but said his 
assertion that Saddam once received payments from the CIA was "utterly 
ridiculous."

Morris, who resigned from the NSC staff over the 1970 U.S. invasion of 
Cambodia, says he learned the details of American covert involvement in 
Iraq from ranking CIA officials of the day including President Teddy 
Roosevelt's grandson Archibald Roosevelt.

Now 65, Morris went on to become a Nixon biographer and is currently 
writing a book about U.S. covert action in Afghanistan and Iraq.

He regards Saddam as a deposed U.S. client in the mold of former 
Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and former Panamanian dictator 
Manuel Noriega.

"We climb into bed with these people without really knowing anything about 
their politics," Morris said in an interview from Seattle where he is 
working on his book. "It's not unusual, of course, in American policy. We 
tire of these people, and we find reasons to shed them."

POISONED HANDKERCHIEF?

But many experts, including foreign affairs scholars, say there is little 
to suggest U.S. involvement in Iraq in the 1960s.

David Wise, a Washington-based author who has written extensively about 
Cold War espionage, says he is only aware of records showing that a CIA 
group known as the "Health Alteration Committee" tried to assassinate 
Kassem in 1960 by sending the Iraqi leader a poisoned monogrammed 
handkerchief.

"Clearly, they felt that Kassem was somebody who had to be eliminated," 
Wise said.

Morris contends that little is known about CIA involvement in the Iraqi 
coups because the Middle East did not hold as much strategic importance in 
the 1960s and most senior U.S. officials involved there at the time have 
since died.

But even if the United States played no role in the rise of Iraq's Baath 
Party, experts say Washington has obviously had to confront unintended 
consequences of former U.S. policies -- including those of Bush's father, 
President George Bush, a former CIA director.

"There are always some unintended consequences. There were unintended 
consequences in World War One that brought the rise of Hitler," said 
Helmut Sonnenfeldt, guest scholar in foreign policy studies at the 
Brookings Institution and former NSC staffer.

The United States and other Western powers supported Saddam's regime 
during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, even after the Baghdad government used 
chemical weapons to kill thousands of Kurdish villagers in Halabja.

The 1988 atrocity recently was used by U.S. officials to justify the 
toppling of Saddam's regime.

But Jon Alterman, Middle East program director at the Center for Strategic 
and International Studies, said he was a legislative aide on Capitol Hill 
at the time and recalls Bush allies dismissing the Halabja issue as a ploy 
by pro-Israel lobbyists to disrupt U.S.-Iraqi relations.

U.S. SENDS ANTHRAX, OTHER PATHOGENS

Before war broke out last month, a flurry of U.S. headlines also called 
attention to reports that pathogens used by Iraq for its biological 
warfare program came from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and 
Prevention and the private Manassas, Virginia-based biological samples 
repository called the American Type Culture Collection.

Officials at the two institutions said shipments of anthrax, West Nile 
virus, botulinum toxins and other pathogens were sent to Iraq in the 1980s 
with U.S. Commerce Department approval for medical research purposes.

Even Iraq's alleged nuclear weapons program, which U.S. officials said was 
on the verge of producing a nuclear bomb last year, got under way with 
help from a 1950s Eisenhower administration program to share the peaceful 
benefits of nuclear energy called "Atoms for Peace."

That is according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington-based 
group co-founded by media mogul Ted Turner and former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn 
to reduce the global threat of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

James Phillips, senior Middle East analyst for the Heritage Foundation, 
disagrees that President Bush's war in Iraq is the result of CIA 
involvement or U.S. policy.

But he said the United States did turn a blind eye to the chance to topple 
Saddam during the 1991 Gulf War, just as it left Afghanistan to the mercy 
of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network after Soviet forces 
left that country.

"I am reminded of the biblical expression about the sins of the father," 
Phillips said.

"The first Bush administration was the one that decided to cut off aid to 
the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and set them adrift. And they were also the 
ones who decided not to go to Baghdad during the first Gulf War."