Word: mukhabarat
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...operations chief for the I.N.C. goes by the name of Abu Ranin. His job before the war was to crack the mukhabarat. His tactics were hardball. The I.N.C. had done surveillance on Iraqi missions around the world, making educated guesses about who was an intelligence agent. From these lists, the I.N.C. narrowed down its targets. "We chose them for their weaknesses, setting out to get something on them and force them to work for us," says Abu Ranin, who was then based in Jordan...
...West European capital, Abu Ranin says, he collected evidence on a mukhabarat station chief who was selling government property on the black market. When Abu Ranin threatened to alert Baghdad, he says, the officer rolled over. Abu Ranin would not say what information the man provided. Abu Ranin's greatest coup, he says, was in Romania. As he tells the story, he discovered a mukhabarat officer in Bucharest who had two useful qualities: he oversaw the regime's East European agents, and he had a weakness for prostitutes. Posing as a wealthy businessman based in Europe, Abu Ranin befriended...
...former MIC official insists that this view is mistaken. "In Iraq we don't write everything," he says. The claim that Saddam would destroy his most dangerous weapons of his own accord and not retain the means to prove it seems a stretch. But a captain in the Mukhabarat, the main Iraqi intelligence service, says he was a witness to just such an exercise. In July 1991, he says, he traveled into the Nibai desert in a caravan of trucks carrying 25 missiles loaded with biological agents. First the bulldozers took a week to bury them. It took three more...
...these exercises as a cover for retaining a fraction of their stores. The idea is that they would destroy quantities of weapons (creating a disposal site and eyewitnesses, if not written records) and claim to have got rid of everything yet actually hold on to some of it. The Mukhabarat captain concedes that scientists kept small amounts of VX and mustard gas for future experiments. "I saw it myself, several times," he says...
Saddam's underlings appear to have invented weapons programs and fabricated experiments to keep the funding coming. The Mukhabarat captain says the scamming went all the way to the top of the MIC to its director, Huweish, who would appease Saddam with every report, never telling him the truth about failures or production levels and meanwhile siphoning money from projects. "He would tell the President he had invented a new missile for Stealth bombers but hadn't. So Saddam would say, 'Make 20 missiles.' He would make one and put the rest in his pocket," says the captain. Colonel Hussan...