(From AP: “Russia had a military intelligence unit operating in Iraq up through the 2003 U.S. invasion and fall of Baghdad, a Russian analyst said Friday. A Pentagon report said Russia provided Saddam Hussein with intelligence on U.S. military movements and plans. The unclassified report does not assess the value of the information or provide details beyond citing two captured Iraqi documents that say the Russians collected information from sources “inside the American Central Command” and that battlefield intelligence was provided to Saddam through the Russian ambassador in Baghdad.” Posted on January 30, 2006: From Stephen Hayes: A follow-up on Dan McKivergan’s post on Russia and Iran. Dan wrote of the worrisome prospect of the U.S. putting its trust in Putin on Iran: “We better have a Plan B if Moscow’s recent past is prologue. ” The examples he and Mort Zuckerman provide are deeply disturbing. There are more. Russian intelligence services, for instance, trained Iraqi intelligence operatives as late as September 2002, even as Putin and his cronies spoke publicly of a “common goal” on Iraq between the U.S. and Russia. It’s September 2002. President Bush gives a speech to the UN making clear that his administration would hold Iraq to account for its defiance of UN resolutions. The Russian government, which for years had carried Iraq’s water on the UN Security Council, announced that it would not send troops in the event of war in Iraq and fought hard against U.S. and British efforts to confront Saddam Hussein. Nonetheless, Russia eventually endorsed UN Resolution 1441, which threatened “serious consequences” that would result from Iraq’s continued flouting of previous UN resolutions. Putin’s government spoke of its partnership with the U.S. on the war on terror. Putin spokesman Sergei Prikhodko declared: “Russia and the United States have a common goal regarding the Iraqi issue” – disarmament. And Russian Foreign Minister Boris Malakhov proclaimed that the U.S. and Russia “are partners in the anti-terror coalition.” Not quite. The San Francisco Chronicle‘s Robert Collier wrote a series of articles in April 2003 on Russian double-dealing on Iraq. The articles provide a stark reminder of the perils in working with Putin’s Russia and of the need to expedite the exploitation of 2 million documents recovered in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan:
The “Moscow-based organization,” it turns out, was the SVR, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service.
The Chronicle article continues:
Ronald Reagan’s famous aphorism about dealing with the Soviets was “Trust but Verify.” Perhaps it needs updating. “Don’t Trust.”
