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http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040628fa_fact

June 24, 2004 | home

PLAN B
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
As June 30th approaches, Israel looks to the Kurds.

Issue of 2004-06-28
Posted 2004-06-21

In July, 2003, two months after President Bush declared victory in Iraq, the
war, far from winding down, reached a critical point. Israel, which had been
among the war's most enthusiastic supporters, began warning the
Administration that the American-led occupation would face a heightened
insurgency-a campaign of bombings and assassinations-later that summer.
Israeli intelligence assets in Iraq were reporting that the insurgents had
the support of Iranian intelligence operatives and other foreign fighters,
who were crossing the unprotected border between Iran and Iraq at will. The
Israelis urged the United States to seal the nine-hundred-mile-long border,
at whatever cost.

The border stayed open, however. "The Administration wasn't ignoring the
Israeli intelligence about Iran," Patrick Clawson, who is the deputy
director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and has close ties
to the White House, explained. "There's no question that we took no steps
last summer to close the border, but our attitude was that it was more
useful for Iraqis to have contacts with ordinary Iranians coming across the
border, and thousands were coming across every day-for instance, to make
pilgrimages." He added, "The questions we confronted were 'Is the trade-off
worth it? Do we want to isolate the Iraqis?' Our answer was that as long as
the Iranians were not picking up guns and shooting at us, it was worth the
price."

Clawson said, "The Israelis disagreed quite vigorously with us last summer.
Their concern was very straightforward-that the Iranians would create social
and charity organizations in Iraq and use them to recruit people who would
engage in armed attacks against Americans."
The warnings of increased violence proved accurate. By early August, the
insurgency against the occupation had exploded, with bombings in Baghdad, at
the Jordanian Embassy and the United Nations headquarters, that killed
forty-two people. A former Israeli intelligence officer said that Israel's
leadership had concluded by then that the United States was unwilling to
confront Iran; in terms of salvaging the situation in Iraq, he said, "it
doesn't add up. It's over. Not militarily-the United States cannot be
defeated militarily in Iraq-but politically."

Flynt Leverett, a former C.I.A. analyst who until last year served on the
National Security Council and is now a fellow at the Saban Center for Middle
East Policy, told me that late last summer "the Administration had a chance
to turn it around after it was clear that 'Mission Accomplished'"-a
reference to Bush's May speech-"was premature. The Bush people could have
gone to their allies and got more boots on the ground. But the neocons were
dug in-'We're doing this on our own.'"

Leverett went on, "The President was only belatedly coming to the
understanding that he had to either make a strategic change or, if he was
going to insist on unilateral control, get tougher and find the actual
insurgency." The Administration then decided, Leverett said, to "deploy the
Guant�namo model in Iraq"-to put aside its rules of interrogation. That
decision failed to stop the insurgency and eventually led to the scandal at
the Abu Ghraib prison.

In early November, the President received a grim assessment from the C.I.A.'
s station chief in Baghdad, who filed a special field appraisal, known
internally as an Aardwolf, warning that the security situation in Iraq was
nearing collapse. The document, as described by Knight-Ridder, said that
"none of the postwar Iraqi political institutions and leaders have shown an
ability to govern the country" or to hold elections and draft a
constitution.

A few days later, the Administration, rattled by the violence and the new
intelligence, finally attempted to change its go-it-alone policy, and set
June 30th as the date for the handover of sovereignty to an interim
government, which would allow it to bring the United Nations into the
process. "November was one year before the Presidential election," a U.N.
consultant who worked on Iraqi issues told me. "They panicked and decided to
share the blame with the U.N. and the Iraqis."

A former Administration official who had supported the war completed a
discouraging tour of Iraq late last fall. He visited Tel Aviv afterward and
found that the Israelis he met with were equally discouraged. As they saw
it, their warnings and advice had been ignored, and the American war against
the insurgency was continuing to founder. "I spent hours talking to the
senior members of the Israeli political and intelligence community," the
former official recalled. "Their concern was 'You're not going to get it
right in Iraq, and shouldn't we be planning for the worst-case scenario and
how to deal with it?'"

Ehud Barak, the former Israeli Prime Minister, who supported the Bush
Administration's invasion of Iraq, took it upon himself at this point to
privately warn Vice-President Dick Cheney that America had lost in Iraq;
according to an American close to Barak, he said that Israel "had learned
that there's no way to win an occupation." The only issue, Barak told
Cheney, "was choosing the size of your humiliation." Cheney did not respond
to Barak's assessment. (Cheney's office declined to comment.)

In a series of interviews in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States,
officials told me that by the end of last year Israel had concluded that the
Bush Administration would not be able to bring stability or democracy to
Iraq, and that Israel needed other options. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's
government decided, I was told, to minimize the damage that the war was
causing to Israel's strategic position by expanding its long-standing
relationship with Iraq's Kurds and establishing a significant presence on
the ground in the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan. Several officials
depicted Sharon's decision, which involves a heavy financial commitment, as
a potentially reckless move that could create even more chaos and violence
as the insurgency in Iraq continues to grow.

Israeli intelligence and military operatives are now quietly at work in
Kurdistan, providing training for Kurdish commando units and, most important
in Israel's view, running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and
Syria. Israel feels particularly threatened by Iran, whose position in the
region has been strengthened by the war. The Israeli operatives include
members of the Mossad, Israel's clandestine foreign-intelligence service,
who work undercover in Kurdistan as businessmen and, in some cases, do not
carry Israeli passports.

Asked to comment, Mark Regev, the spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in
Washington, said, "The story is simply untrue and the relevant governments
know it's untrue." Kurdish officials declined to comment, as did a spokesman
for the State Department.

However, a senior C.I.A. official acknowledged in an interview last week
that the Israelis were indeed operating in Kurdistan. He told me that the
Israelis felt that they had little choice: "They think they have to be
there." Asked whether the Israelis had sought approval from Washington, the
official laughed and said, "Do you know anybody who can tell the Israelis
what to do? They're always going to do what is in their best interest." The
C.I.A. official added that the Israeli presence was widely known in the
American intelligence community.

The Israeli decision to seek a bigger foothold in Kurdistan-characterized by
the former Israeli intelligence officer as "Plan B"-has also raised tensions
between Israel and Turkey. It has provoked bitter statements from Turkish
politicians and, in a major regional shift, a new alliance among Iran,
Syria, and Turkey, all of which have significant Kurdish minorities. In
early June, Intel Brief, a privately circulated intelligence newsletter
produced by Vincent Cannistraro, a retired C.I.A. counterterrorism chief,
and Philip Giraldi, who served as the C.I.A.'s deputy chief of base in
Istanbul in the late nineteen-eighties, said:

Turkish sources confidentially report that the Turks are increasingly
concerned by the expanding Israeli presence in Kurdistan and alleged
encouragement of Kurdish ambitions to create an independent state. . . . The
Turks note that the large Israeli intelligence operations in Northern Iraq
incorporate anti-Syrian and anti-Iranian activity, including support to
Iranian and Syrian Kurds who are in opposition to their respective
governments.

In the years since the first Gulf War, Iraq's Kurds, aided by an
internationally enforced no-fly zone and by a U.N. mandate providing them
with a share of the country's oil revenues, have managed to achieve a large
measure of independence in three northern Iraqi provinces. As far as most
Kurds are concerned, however, historic "Kurdistan" extends well beyond Iraq'
s borders, encompassing parts of Iran, Syria, and Turkey.

All three countries fear that Kurdistan, despite public pledges to the
contrary, will declare its independence from the interim Iraqi government if
conditions don't improve after June 30th.

Israeli involvement in Kurdistan is not new. Throughout the nineteen-sixties
and seventies, Israel actively supported a Kurdish rebellion against Iraq,
as part of its strategic policy of seeking alliances with non-Arabs in the
Middle East. In 1975, the Kurds were betrayed by the United States, when
Washington went along with a decision by the Shah of Iran to stop supporting
Kurdish aspirations for autonomy in Iraq.

Betrayal and violence became the norm in the next two decades. Inside Iraq,
the Kurds were brutally repressed by Saddam Hussein, who used airpower and
chemical weapons against them. In 1984, the Kurdistan Workers Party, or
P.K.K., initiated a campaign of separatist violence in Turkey that lasted
fifteen years; more than thirty thousand people, most of them Kurds, were
killed. The Turkish government ruthlessly crushed the separatists, and
eventually captured the P.K.K.'s leader, Abdullah Ocalan. Last month, the
P.K.K., now known as the Kongra-Gel, announced that it was ending a
five-year unilateral ceasefire and would begin targeting Turkish citizens
once again.

The Iraqi Kurdish leadership was furious when, early this month, the United
States acceded to a U.N. resolution on the restoration of Iraqi sovereignty
that did not affirm the interim constitution that granted the minority Kurds
veto power in any permanent constitution. Kurdish leaders immediately warned
President Bush in a letter that they would not participate in a new
Shiite-controlled government unless they were assured that their rights
under the interim constitution were preserved. "The people of Kurdistan will
no longer accept second-class citizenship in Iraq," the letter said.

There are fears that the Kurds will move to seize the city of Kirkuk,
together with the substantial oil reserves in the surrounding region. Kirkuk
is dominated by Arab Iraqis, many of whom were relocated there, beginning in
the nineteen-seventies, as part of Saddam Hussein's campaign to "Arabize"
the region, but the Kurds consider Kirkuk and its oil part of their historic
homeland. "If Kirkuk is threatened by the Kurds, the Sunni insurgents will
move in there, along with the Turkomen, and there will be a bloodbath," an
American military expert who is studying Iraq told me. "And, even if the
Kurds do take Kirkuk, they can't transport the oil out of the country, since
all of the pipelines run through the Sunni-Arab heartland."

A top German national-security official said in an interview that "an
independent Kurdistan with sufficient oil would have enormous consequences
for Syria, Iran, and Turkey" and would lead to continuing instability in the
Middle East-no matter what the outcome in Iraq is. There is also a
widespread belief, another senior German official said, that some elements
inside the Bush Administration-he referred specifically to the faction
headed by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz-would tolerate an
independent Kurdistan. This, the German argued, would be a mistake. "It
would be a new Israel-a pariah state in the middle of hostile nations."

A declaration of independence would trigger a Turkish response-and possibly
a war-and also derail what has been an important alliance for Israel. Turkey
and Israel have become strong diplomatic and economic partners in the past
decade. Thousands of Israelis travel to Turkey every year as tourists.
Turkish opposition to the Iraq war has strained the relationship; still,
Turkey remains oriented toward the West and, despite the victory of an
Islamic party in national elections in 2002, relatively secular. It is now
vying for acceptance in the European Union. In contrast, Turkey and Syria
have been at odds for years, at times coming close to open confrontation,
and Turkey and Iran have long been regional rivals. One area of tension
between them is the conflict between Turkey's pro-Western stand and Iran's
rigid theocracy. But their mutual wariness of the Kurds has transcended
these divisions.

A European foreign minister, in a conversation last month, said that the
"blowing up" of Israel's alliance with Turkey would be a major setback for
the region. He went on, "To avoid chaos, you need the neighbors to work as
one common entity."

The Israelis, however, view the neighborhood, with the exception of
Kurdistan, as hostile. Israel is convinced that Iran is on the verge of
developing nuclear weapons, and that, with Syria's help, it is planning to
bolster Palestinian terrorism as Israel withdraws from the Gaza Strip.
Iraqi Shiite militia leaders like Moqtada al-Sadr, the former American
intelligence official said, are seen by the Israeli leadership as "stalking
horses" for Iran-owing much of their success in defying the American-led
coalition to logistical and communications support and training provided by
Iran. The former intelligence official said, "We began to see telltale signs
of organizational training last summer. But the White House didn't want to
hear it: 'We can't take on another problem right now. We can't afford to
push Iran to the point where we've got to have a showdown.'"

Last summer, according to a document I obtained, the Bush Administration
directed the Marines to draft a detailed plan, called Operation Stuart, for
the arrest and, if necessary, assassination of Sadr. But the operation was
cancelled, the former intelligence official told me, after it became clear
that Sadr had been "tipped off" about the plan. Seven months later, after
Sadr spent the winter building support for his movement, the American-led
coalition shut down his newspaper, provoking a crisis that Sadr survived
with his status enhanced, thus insuring that he will play a major, and
unwelcome, role in the political and military machinations after June 30th.

"Israel's immediate goal after June 30th is to build up the Kurdish commando
units to balance the Shiite militias-especially those which would be hostile
to the kind of order in southern Iraq that Israel would like to see," the
former senior intelligence official said. "Of course, if a fanatic Sunni
Baathist militia took control-one as hostile to Israel as Saddam Hussein
was-Israel would unleash the Kurds on it, too." The Kurdish armed forces,
known as the peshmerga, number an estimated seventy-five thousand troops, a
total that far exceeds the known Sunni and Shiite militias.

The former Israeli intelligence officer acknowledged that since late last
year Israel has been training Kurdish commando units to operate in the same
manner and with the same effectiveness as Israel's most secretive commando
units, the Mistaravim. The initial goal of the Israeli assistance to the
Kurds, the former officer said, was to allow them to do what American
commando units had been unable to do-penetrate, gather intelligence on, and
then kill off the leadership of the Shiite and Sunni insurgencies in Iraq.
(I was unable to learn whether any such mission had yet taken place.) "The
feeling was that this was a more effective way to get at the insurgency,"
the former officer said. "But the growing Kurdish-Israeli relationship began
upsetting the Turks no end. Their issue is that the very same Kurdish
commandos trained for Iraq could infiltrate and attack in Turkey."

The Kurdish-Israeli collaboration inevitably expanded, the Israeli said.
Some Israeli operatives have crossed the border into Iran, accompanied by
Kurdish commandos, to install sensors and other sensitive devices that
primarily target suspected Iranian nuclear facilities. The former officer
said, "Look, Israel has always supported the Kurds in a Machiavellian way-as
balance against Saddam. It's Realpolitik."

He added, "By aligning with the Kurds, Israel gains eyes and ears in Iran,
Iraq, and Syria." He went on, "What Israel was doing with the Kurds was not
so unacceptable in the Bush Administration."

Senior German officials told me, with alarm, that their intelligence
community also has evidence that Israel is using its new leverage inside
Kurdistan, and within the Kurdish communities in Iran and Syria, for
intelligence and operational purposes. Syrian and Lebanese officials believe
that Israeli intelligence played a role in a series of violent protests in
Syria in mid-March in which Syrian Kurdish dissidents and Syrian troops
clashed, leaving at least thirty people dead. (There are nearly two million
Kurds living in Syria, which has a population of seventeen million.) Much of
the fighting took place in cities along Syria's borders with Turkey and
Kurdish-controlled Iraq. Michel Samaha, the Lebanese Minister of
Information, told me that while the disturbances amounted to an uprising by
the Kurds against the leadership of Bashir Assad, the Syrian President, his
government had evidence that Israel was "preparing the Kurds to fight all
around Iraq, in Syria, Turkey, and Iran. They're being programmed to do
commando operations."

The top German national-security official told me that he believes that the
Bush Administration continually misread Iran. "The Iranians wanted to keep
America tied down in Iraq, and to keep it busy there, but they didn't want
chaos," he said. One of the senior German officials told me, "The critical
question is 'What will the behavior of Iran be if there is an independent
Kurdistan with close ties to Israel?' Iran does not want an Israeli
land-based aircraft carrier"-that is, a military stronghold-"on its border."

Another senior European official said, "The Iranians would do something
positive in the south of Iraq if they get something positive in return, but
Washington won't do it. The Bush Administration won't ask the Iranians for
help, and can't ask the Syrians. Who is going to save the United States?" He
added that, at the start of the American invasion of Iraq, several top
European officials had told their counterparts in Iran, "You will be the
winners in the region."

Israel is not alone in believing that Iran, despite its protestations, is
secretly hard at work on a nuclear bomb. Early this month, the International
Atomic Energy Agency, which is responsible for monitoring nuclear
proliferation, issued its fifth quarterly report in a row stating that Iran
was continuing to misrepresent its research into materials that could be
used for the production of nuclear weapons. Much of the concern centers on
an underground enrichment facility at Natanz, two hundred and fifty miles
from the Iran-Iraq border, which, during previous I.A.E.A. inspections, was
discovered to contain centrifuges showing traces of weapons-grade uranium.
The huge complex, which is still under construction, is said to total nearly
eight hundred thousand square feet, and it will be sheltered in a few months
by a roof whose design allows it to be covered with sand. Once the work is
completed, the complex "will be blind to satellites, and the Iranians could
add additional floors underground," an I.A.E.A. official told me. "The
question is, will the Israelis hit Iran?"

Mohamed ElBaradei, the I.A.E.A. director, has repeatedly stated that his
agency has not "seen concrete proof of a military program, so it's premature
to make a judgment on that." David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector
who is an expert on nuclear proliferation, buttressed the I.A.E.A. claim.
"The United States has no concrete evidence of a nuclear-weapons program,"
Albright told me. "It's just an inference.

There's no smoking gun." (Last Friday, at a meeting in Vienna, the I.A.E.A.
passed a resolution that, while acknowledging some progress, complained that
Iran had yet to be as open as it should be, and urgently called upon it to
resolve a list of outstanding questions.)
The I.A.E.A. official told me that the I.A.E.A. leadership has been
privately warned by Foreign Ministry officials in Iran that they are "having
a hard time getting information" from the hard-line religious and military
leaders who run the country. "The Iranian Foreign Ministry tells us, 'We're
just diplomats, and we don't know whether we're getting the whole story from
our own people,'" the official said. He noted that the Bush Administration
has repeatedly advised the I.A.E.A. that there are secret nuclear facilities
in Iran that have not been declared. The Administration will not say more,
apparently worried that the information could get back to Iran.

Patrick Clawson, of the Institute for Near East Policy, provided another
explanation for the reluctance of the Bush Administration to hand over
specific intelligence. "If we were to identify a site," he told me, "it's
conceivable that it could be quickly disassembled and the I.A.E.A.
inspectors would arrive"-international inspections often take weeks to
organize-"and find nothing." The American intelligence community, already
discredited because of its faulty reporting on Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction, would be criticized anew. "It's much better," Clawson said, "to
have the I.A.E.A. figure out on its own that there's a site and then find
evidence that there had been enriched material there."
Clawson told me that Israel's overwhelming national-security concern must be
Iran. Given that a presence in Kurdistan would give Israel a way to monitor
the Iranian nuclear effort, he said, "it would be negligent for the Israelis
not to be there."

At the moment, the former American senior intelligence official said, the
Israelis' tie to Kurdistan "would be of greater value than their growing
alliance with Turkey. 'We love Turkey but got to keep the pressure on Iran.
'" The former Israeli intelligence officer said, "The Kurds were the last
surviving group close to the United States with any say in Iraq. The only
question was how to square it with Turkey."

There may be no way to square it with Turkey. Over breakfast in Ankara, a
senior Turkish official explained, "Before the war, Israel was active in
Kurdistan, and now it is active again. This is very dangerous for us, and
for them, too. We do not want to see Iraq divided, and we will not ignore
it." Then, citing a popular Turkish proverb-"We will burn a blanket to kill
a flea"-he said, "We have told the Kurds, 'We are not afraid of you, but you
should be afraid of us.'" (A Turkish diplomat I spoke to later was more
direct: "We tell our Israeli and Kurdish friends that Turkey's good will
lies in keeping Iraq together. We will not support alternative solutions.")

"If you end up with a divided Iraq, it will bring more blood, tears, and
pain to the Middle East, and you will be blamed," the senior Turkish
official said. "From Mexico to Russia, everybody will claim that the United
States had a secret agenda in Iraq: you came there to break up Iraq. If Iraq
is divided, America cannot explain this to the world." The official compared
the situation to the breakup of Yugoslavia, but added, "In the Balkans, you
did not have oil." He said, "The lesson of Yugoslavia is that when you give
one country independence everybody will want it." If that happens, he said,
"Kirkuk will be the Sarajevo of Iraq. If something happens there, it will be
impossible to contain the crisis."

In Ankara, another senior Turkish official explained that his government had
"openly shared its worries" about the Israeli military activities inside
Kurdistan with the Israeli Foreign Ministry. "They deny the training and the
purchase of property and claim it's not official but done by private
persons. Obviously, our intelligence community is aware that it was not so.
This policy is not good for America, Iraq, or Israel and the Jews."

Turkey's increasingly emphatic and public complaints about Israel's missile
attacks on the Hamas leadership in the Gaza Strip is another factor in the
growing tensions between the allies. On May 26th, Turkey's Foreign Minister,
Abdullah Gul, announced at a news conference in Ankara that the Turkish
government was bringing its Ambassador in Israel home for consultations on
how to revive the Middle East peace process. He also told the Turkish
parliament that the government was planning to strengthen its ties to the
Palestinian Authority, and, in conversations with Middle Eastern diplomats
in the past month, he expressed grave concern about Israel. In one such
talk, one diplomat told me, Gul described Israeli activities, and the
possibility of an independent Kurdistan, as "presenting us with a choice
that is not a real choice-between survival and alliance."

A third Turkish official told me that the Israelis were "talking to us in
order to appease our concern. They say, 'We aren't doing anything in
Kurdistan to undermine your interests. Don't worry.'" The official added,
"If it goes out publicly what they've been doing, it will put your
government and our government in a difficult position. We can tolerate
'Kurdistan' if Iraq is intact, but nobody knows the future-not even the
Americans."

A former White House official depicted the Administration as eager-almost
desperate-late this spring to install an acceptable new interim government
in Iraq before President Bush's declared June 30th deadline for the transfer
of sovereignty. The Administration turned to Lakhdar Brahimi, the United
Nations special envoy, to "put together something by June 30th-just
something that could stand up" through the Presidential election, the former
official said. Brahimi was given the task of selecting, with Washington's
public approval, the thirty-one members of Iraq's interim government.
Nevertheless, according to press reports, the choice of Iyad Allawi as
interim Prime Minister was a disappointment to Brahimi.

The White House has yet to deal with Allawi's past. His credentials as a
neurologist, and his involvement during the past two decades in anti-Saddam
activities, as the founder of the British-based Iraqi National Accord, have
been widely reported. But his role as a Baath Party operative while Saddam
struggled for control in the nineteen-sixties and seventies-Saddam became
President in 1979-is much less well known. "Allawi helped Saddam get to
power," an American intelligence officer told me. "He was a very effective
operator and a true believer." Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former C.I.A. case
officer who served in the Middle East, added, "Two facts stand out about
Allawi. One, he likes to think of himself as a man of ideas; and, two, his
strongest virtue is that he's a thug."

Early this year, one of Allawi's former medical-school classmates, Dr. Haifa
al-Azawi, published an essay in an Arabic newspaper in London raising
questions about his character and his medical bona fides. She depicted
Allawi as a "big husky man . . . who carried a gun on his belt and
frequently brandished it, terrorizing the medical students." Allawi's
medical degree, she wrote, "was conferred upon him by the Baath party."
Allawi moved to London in 1971, ostensibly to continue his medical
education; there he was in charge of the European operations of the Baath
Party organization and the local activities of the Mukhabarat, its
intelligence agency, until 1975.

"If you're asking me if Allawi has blood on his hands from his days in
London, the answer is yes, he does," Vincent Cannistraro, the former C.I.A.
officer, said. "He was a paid Mukhabarat agent for the Iraqis, and he was
involved in dirty stuff." A cabinet-level Middle East diplomat, who was
rankled by the U.S. indifference to Allawi's personal history, told me early
this month that Allawi was involved with a Mukhabarat "hit team" that sought
out and killed Baath Party dissenters throughout Europe. (Allawi's office
did not respond to a request for comment.) At some point, for reasons that
are not clear, Allawi fell from favor, and the Baathists organized a series
of attempts on his life. The third attempt, by an axe-wielding assassin who
broke into his home near London in 1978, resulted in a year-long hospital
stay.

The Saban Center's Flynt Leverett said of the transfer of sovereignty, "If
it doesn't work, there is no fallback-nothing." The former senior American
intelligence official told me, similarly, that "the neocons still think they
can pull the rabbit out of the hat" in Iraq. "What's the plan? They say, 'We
don't need it. Democracy is strong enough. We'll work it out.'"

Middle East diplomats and former C.I.A. operatives who now consult in
Baghdad have told me that many wealthy Iraqi businessmen and their families
have deserted Baghdad in recent weeks in anticipation of continued, and
perhaps heightened, suicide attacks and terror bombings after June 30th. "We
'll see Christians, Shiites, and Sunnis getting out," Michel Samaha, the
Lebanese Minister of Information, reported. "What the resistance is doing is
targeting the poor people who run the bureaucracy-those who can't afford to
pay for private guards. A month ago, friends of mine who are important
landowners in Iraq came to Baghdad to do business. The cost of one day's
security was about twelve thousand dollars."

Whitley Bruner, a retired intelligence officer who was a senior member of
the C.I.A.'s task force on Iraq a decade ago, said that the new interim
government in Iraq is urgently seeking ways to provide affordable security
for second-tier officials-the men and women who make the government work. In
early June, two such officials-Kamal Jarrah, an Education Ministry official,
and Bassam Salih Kubba, who was serving as deputy foreign minister-were
assassinated by unidentified gunmen outside their homes. Neither had hired
private guards. Bruner, who returned from Baghdad earlier this month, said
that he was now working to help organize Iraqi companies that could provide
high-quality security that Iraqis could afford. "It's going to be a hot
summer," Bruner said. "A lot of people have decided to get to Lebanon,
Jordan, or the Gulf and wait this one out."

####



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sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.

Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
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