Blueprint for the Iraqi Insurgency
HAYES, STEPHEN F.
Blueprint for the Iraqi Insurgency What happened to the "treasure trove" of documents from Saddam's foreign ministry? by STEPHEN F HAYES IN LATE APRIL 2003, some two weeks after the world watched...
...intelligence officials with several compact discs...
...The looting was haphazard and opportunistic, but the destruction of documents and torching of offices appeared to be well-planned...
...intelligence community even know it has this document...
...One was a memo from the director of Iraqi Intelligence, the Mukhabarat, from February 2003, with instructions to senior regime and intelligence officials in anticipation of a U.S...
...Nearly three years after the U.S...
...government—will be released within two weeks...
...presence in Iraq and piles scorn on the "ideological" aspects of the reconstruction...
...Then I saw paul Bremer, former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, interviewed about his new book My Year in Iraq on the January 15 Meet the Press...
...They were told, however, that there were not yet enough U.S...
...We gave it to something they were calling the fusion cell in the palace [CPA headquarters], but those guys just couldn't handle it...
...Hoekstra says that he hopes these documents—again, just a fraction of the nearly 2 million Saddam-era documents in the possession of the U.S...
...What have they told interrogators about the insurgency...
...They are, therefore, not for public release...
...And about the early cooperation between foreign fighters and the broader Baathist networks...
...Institute of Peace, he criticizes many aspects of the U.S...
...inspectors, and other documents described simply as "position papers...
...government agency"—presumably the CIA—the recipient reported back that the find was "a treasure trove...
...Among the papers the MoFA team Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...This material is potentially even more significant than it sounds, when one considers that Iraq, like many other countries, used its embassies to run its foreign intelligence operations...
...It worked...
...Infiltrate the mosques, the Shiite holy places.'" The contents of the document were virtually identical to the one described to me by the Iraqi, but Bremer told me he didn't know where the Mukhabarat document was found...
...And in a speech before the war, Dunford was highly critical of Bush administration policy in the Middle East...
...In an August 25, 2004, interview published by the U.S...
...What remains unclear is what happened to the other materials collected at that ministry...
...Among them, according to officials who were in the MoFA in April 2003, were 16 or 17 floppy disks from the personal computer of Naji Sabri al-Hadithi's office manager...
...A spokesman for Negroponte says the documents provided to Hoekstra are "FOUO," for official use only, and are "still being reviewed for any sensitive intelligence-related information that might result in reclassification...
...How many of them have been captured or killed in Iraq...
...One day after the floppy disks from Naji Sabri's office manager were passed to a representative of "another U.S...
...Which "folks in Saudi Arabia" made arrangements for their travel to Iraq...
...The building had been looted, stripped of many fixtures and even some of its electrical wiring...
...Is this document part of that small fraction of exploited data, or part of the much larger mass of information that sits unexamined on U.S...
...Iraqis described as "militias" were living in makeshift barracks on the ground floor...
...Said Russert: "You went back to Iraq, and they found a memo which they presented to you about the insurgency and again, it's in your book and this is a very important document...
...Representative Pete Hoekstra, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has continued to press the case for freeing the documents with both the Defense Intelligence Agency and the director of national intelligence, John Negro-ponte...
...It's quite interesting...
...So they waited...
...When the Americans saw a BBC reporter broadcasting live from inside the ministry, or MoFA as it became known, they pushed to get a military escort so that they might begin their job...
...The CDs contained correspondence between senior Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials and Iraqi embassies throughout the world from January 1, 2003, through the eve of war in mid-March 2003...
...So I asked Dunford about this...
...But let's back up: Does the U.S...
...The other was a long list of jihadists who had been brought to Iraq before the war...
...And what about the nearly 2 million captured Iraqi documents that have not yet been exploited...
...intelligence officials tell The Weekly Standard that they are working from lists like the one found in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs...
...Still, some important items survived...
...What was their relationship to the Iraqi regime before the war...
...Are we even keeping track...
...invasion...
...It may have been that folks in Saudi Arabia—not the Saudi government— were organizing these jihadists from elsewhere and sending them into Iraq...
...intelligence community...
...It did indeed call for a strategy of organized resistance which included the classic pattern of forming cells and training combatants in insurgency...
...Senior U.S...
...Dunford said he thought he had heard of a document like the Mukhabarat document but didn't remember any of the details...
...invasion...
...Who are these jihadists...
...This small team soon got bigger— adding a military civil affairs officer, Iraqi-Americans under contract with the pentagon, a British foreign service officer, a Romanian diplomat, and several Iraqis who had worked for the MoFA under Saddam Hussein...
...Interesting questions...
...government hard drives and in warehouses in Doha, Qatar...
...Destroy electric power stations and water conduits...
...In those early days of the new Iraq, according to an American official working in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a "very reliable source" provided U.S...
...Operatives' were to engage in 'sabotage and looting.' Random sniper attacks, ambushes to be organized...
...troops in the Iraqi capital to secure that neighborhood...
...by STEPHEN F HAYES IN LATE APRIL 2003, some two weeks after the world watched jubilant Iraqis and U.S...
...Three weeks ago, Hoekstra received 39 of those documents—some 3,000 pages of information—in two large cardboard boxes...
...discovered was a map of the ministry with names of ministry officials and the suites they occupied...
...We know that less than 3 percent of the overall document take from Afghanistan and Iraq has been exploited...
...I had sought him out to discuss another subject when he rather casually mentioned two documents the Americans had recovered...
...Russert read Bre-mer's words: "The document . . . listed orders for point-by-point strategy to be implemented after the probable collapse of the regime beginning with the order of 'Burn this office.' I read the translation...
...Dunford is hardly a Bush administration apologist...
...In interviews, several of them described the ministry when they arrived...
...It's harder to make that case about the documents found in Naji Sabri's office...
...Said Dunford: "We pulled stuff out of there very early on...
...If so, do the counter-insurgency teams in Iraq have this information...
...The Iraqi who had described the jihadist document to me indicated that "hundreds and hundreds" of these fighters had come from several countries in the region including Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Sudan and Syria...
...Marines topple the tall statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad's Fir dos Square, a small group of American officials began the thankless and dangerous task of recreating the Iraqi Ministry of Foreign Affairs...
...The order continued, 'scatter agents to every town...
...What do they tell us...
...I called around to check on his claims and received only vague confirmations of the documents' existence...
...Have these documents been exploited...
...For now, anyway...
...Where did they receive their training...
...invasion, and with the nature of the deposed Iraqi regime still the subject of a highly politicized debate, it will be none too soon...
...That was the last that any of these officials have heard about the recovered documents...
...in others the team found piles of papers sitting untouched in the middle of the rooms, apparently awaiting destruction...
...We never got a good sense of what was in all of the documents other than what we translated on the spot...
...Then, without prompting, he added this: "I do remember one document that we found that was a list of jihadists, for want of a better word, coming into Iraq from Saudi Arabia before the war...
...At the suggestion of an Iraqi source, I called Ambassador Dunford and asked him about the Mukhabarat document Bremer describes in his book...
...They included Sabri's personal correspondence with other senior Iraqi regime officials, his talking points for meetings with U.N...
...In November, Hoekstra requested 40 Iraqi documents from the U.S...
...That suggested to me that Saddam was planning the insurgency before the war...
...As his important position might suggest, he was close to Saddam Hussein...
...The team, led by Ambassador David Dunford, had been eager to get into the ministry sooner...
...Documents such as the one allegedly listing jihadists in Iraq raise more questions than they answer...
...It may be that documents like the list of jihadists should not be released to the American public...
...Sabri was Iraq's minister of foreign affairs from August 2001 through March 2003...
...No one else I spoke with had seen the documents or could provide more specific information, so I didn't report on them...
...His staff is reviewing the documents and Hoekstra is pushing both the DIA and DNI to allow him to release them to the public...
...Host Tim Russert asked Bremer about a document he describes in the book...
...Offices of several senior officials had been severely damaged by fire...
...Last summer, almost by accident, I spoke to an Iraqi who had been in the ministry in those early days...
...A cursory field-examination of the disks suggests they might be quite valuable to those interested in understanding the activities of the Iraqi regime in the months and years leading up to the U.S...
Vol. 11 • February 2006 • No. 22
