How the CIA found and groomed Saddam Hussein

Indo-Asian News Service
April 16, 2003

WASHINGTON: US forces may now be searching high and low for Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein but in the past he was seen by US intelligence as a bulwark of anti-communism, reports UPI.

American intelligence operatives used him as their instrument for more than 40 years, according to former US intelligence officials and diplomats.

UPI interviewed almost a dozen former US diplomats, British scholars and former US intelligence officials to piece together the following account. The CIA declined to comment.

While many have thought that Saddam Hussein became involved with US intelligence agencies from the 1980 Iran-Iraq war, his first contacts date back to 1959 when he was part of a CIA-authorized six-man squad tasked with assassinating then Iraqi prime minister General Abd al-Karim Qasim.

In July 1958, Qasim had overthrown the Iraqi monarchy. According to US officials, Iraq was then regarded as a key buffer and strategic asset in the Cold War with the Soviet Union...
For example, in the mid-1950s, Iraq was quick to join the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact which was to defend the region and whose members included Turkey, Britain, Iran and Pakistan.

Little attention was paid to Qasim's bloody and conspiratorial regime until his sudden decision to withdraw from the pact in 1959.

Washington watched in marked dismay as Qasim began to buy arms from the Soviet Union and put his own domestic communists into ministry positions of real power.

In the mid-1980s, Miles Copeland, a veteran CIA operative, said the CIA enjoyed "close ties" with Qasim's ruling Baath Party.

In a recent public statement, Roger Morris, a former National Security Council staffer in the 1970s, confirmed this, saying the CIA chose the authoritarian and anti-communist Baath Party as its instrument.

According to another former senior State Department official, Saddam Hussein, while only in his early 20s, became a part of a US plot to get rid of Qasim.

According to this source, Saddam Hussein was installed in an apartment in Baghdad on al-Rashid Street directly opposite Qasim's office in Iraq's ministry of defence to observe Qasim's movements.

Adel Darwish, a Middle East expert and author of "Unholy Babylon," said the move was done "with full knowledge of CIA" and that Saddam Hussein's CIA handler was an Iraqi dentist working for CIA and Egyptian intelligence.

The assassination was set for October 7, 1959, but it was completely botched. One former CIA official said the 22-year-old Saddam lost his nerve and fired too soon, killing Qasim's driver and only wounding Qasim in the shoulder and arm.

Qasim, hiding on the floor of his car, escaped death, and Saddam Hussein, whose calf had been grazed by a fellow would-be assassin, escaped to Tikrit, thanks to CIA and Egyptian intelligence agents.

He then crossed into Syria and was transferred by Egyptian intelligence agents to Beirut.

While in Beirut, the CIA paid for Saddam Hussein's apartment and put him through a brief training course. The agency then helped him get to Cairo.

During this time Saddam made frequent visits to the American Embassy where CIA specialists such as Miles Copeland and CIA station chief Jim Eichelberger were in residence and knew him.

In February 1963, Qasim was killed in a Baath Party coup. Morris claimed that the CIA was behind the coup, which was sanctioned by President John F. Kennedy.

The CIA quickly moved into action. Noting that the Baath Party was hunting down Iraqi communists, the CIA provided the submachine gun-toting Iraqi National Guardsmen with lists of suspected communists who were then jailed, interrogated, and summarily gunned down, according to former US intelligence officials with intimate knowledge of the executions.

Many suspected communists were killed outright, these sources said. Darwish told UPI that the mass killings, presided over by Saddam Hussein, took place at Qasr al-Nehayat, literally, the Palace of the End.

Saddam Hussein became head of the Baath Party's intelligence apparatus.

The CIA/Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) relation with Saddam Hussein intensified after the start of the Iran-Iraq war in September 1980. During the war, the CIA regularly sent a team to Saddam Hussein to deliver battlefield intelligence to aid the effectiveness of the Iraqi armed forces.

A former CIA official said that Saddam Hussein had assigned a top team of three senior officers from Iraq's military intelligence to meet the Americans.

According to Darwish, the CIA and DIA provided military assistance to Saddam Hussein's ferocious 1988 assault on Iranian positions in the al-Fao peninsula by blinding Iranian radars for three days.

The Saddam Hussein-US intelligence alliance of convenience came to an end on August 2, 1990 when 100,000 Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait. America's one-time ally had become its bitterest enemy.

[If you found this article of interest, please consider perusing the FriendsOfLiberty/SiaNews archives]

...can't ignore the facts of history.

This isn't the truth because I've never seen this report on Fox News.

Trolling along for a Troll. They don't like inconvenient facts.

Ihe diagonese, We should go out and protest again for Saddam and thank the CIA for putting him in power. I know we shoud never correct mistakes either. Hey, maybe if go to Syria we can go have a tag team match with Saddam and OUdaui, that would be fun, wouldn't it?

You, sir, are an imbecile.

You are so cool man, how did you get Sir as a title? I'd like to get that in my name too, that would be kick ass man.

What a clever response, daveman. NOT!

...half so.

Take a look around the world.
The CIA wanders around the world putting out the flames of
democracy with blood. They also smuggle drugs and start wars to promote arm sales. Oh. They also gather intelligence.

They also concocted the whole
moon landing fraud and
they create cropcircles.
No wait, they
cover up the truth of
crop circles
circles
of lies

and I won't argue it's truth. The idea that we put Saddam into power during our country's battle with communism changes nothing. The social and political climate of the time was far different than that of today. Few (except for Diogenes and his comrads) could argue that having a non-communist element, an element resistant to communistic tendency, was a tactical, deliberate move by our government at the time, that proved quite beneficial in helping to prevent global cotastrophy by shortening the duration of the cold war (speculation of course, and I admit that). Anyway, times have changed. The political structure has changed in the region, Saddam poses a "clear and present danger" to this country and he needed to be removed. If he been a good little dictator and not taunted the free world and gassed his own people while torturing thousands of others maybe he would still be allowed to live in lavish palaces while his people die in the street of starvation.

The cold war.
How clever it was to take the most hated mass
murders of WW2 and ensconce them in the new 'intelligence
agency' as a ravaged Europe and Soviet Union cried for
justice. So we hung a very few and let a few pop themselves. South America and North America welcomed the worst. Then Barbie, Mengele, Gehland and others took over
the business of setting up shop for more business.
That business is to regroup and do it right this time. None of the bankers or comfortable ‘captains of industry’ were even jailed for their blood money

Way to go. Whenever we conservatives don't have a valid argument, we can always rationalize. Great job!

Ha, ha, ha, ha, NEOphyte thinks he she is clever and is inoculating himself from having a very weak argument ripped to shreds. Thanks for the invitation:

“ Few (except for Diogenes and his comrads) could argue that having a non-communist element, an element resistant to communistic tendency, was a tactical, deliberate move by our government at the time, that proved quite beneficial in helping to prevent global cotastrophy by shortening the duration of the cold war (speculation of course, and I admit that).

NEO wants us to accept unquestioned his implied premise: That Communism was such a threat that we were right to coddle and prop up bloody handed Third World Dictators who murdered and oppressed their people because it was for a greater “good”: Fighting Communism. There was of course “no alternative” to supporting repressive regimes and building up petty despots. That American Corporations were thus able to have cheap access to Natural Resources in those countries was “purely coincidental”. Since free and democratic regimes were equally opposed to Communist Dictatorship I think the assumption is unwarranted and unsupported. However, Dictators friendly to U.S. Interests have an advantage to businesses in that they are able to sell their Country’s resources at Fire Sale prices - while still enriching themselves. Democracies have a tendency to take a dim view of raping their own country for the enrichment of a few.

It is provably false that propping up any of those repressive regimes had any long term benefit to the United States as a whole. Witness that where such regimes have been overthrown and replaced with relatively free governments they are generally luke warm to outright hostile to the United States. For example Chile and Iran. The Iranians have just cause for calling the U.S. “The Great Satan” as the U.S. engineered the Coup’ that returned the very very brutal and sadistic Shah of Iran to power. His Secret Police could have taught Saddam’s a few lessons on the fine art of torture, but he was a “loyal ally” i.e., client of the U.S. Elites. One could go on and mention Bolivian and Colombian Death Squads trained at the “School of The Americas” at Ft. Benning GA which has among it’s curriculum some of those refined torture techniques.

Ultimately his argument boils down to: “It is all right to support EVIL if you are opposing EVIL”.

No one who has taken the time to study, even on a cursory level, the depredations of the Communist Regime’s of Russia and China would argue that they are representatives of honor and dignity. However, that they needed to be opposed does not prove that the opposition had to resort to evils as great as that which was being opposed. In any event Communism, as an Economic System, does not work. It is one of those things that sounds very pretty on paper when sold by it’s proponents but it has repeatedly failed the test of real world experience. However, to use it as a justification for evil is simply dishonest.

Here we have another unproved assumption slipped in as though it were an “accepted truth”:

“The political structure has changed in the region, Saddam poses a "clear and present danger" to this country and he needed to be removed. “

In what way? You offer nothing to support your point - just the assumption that this true beyond question. What a Pant Load. Saddam for all his bluster, and vile behavior (I will not be trapped into supporting him) was not ever a threat to the United States Militarily. He had not the weapons or delivery systems and evidenced no direct threat against the United States. Was he a danger to the Economic Elites? You betcha’! Having switched to the Euro as his Oil Trade Currency the implied threat was that other countries might follow suit thus removing the price support, from Oil, for Federal Reserve Notes (A fiat money produced by a PRIVATE BANK). Estimates I have read suggest that such a move would minimally produce a 40 Percent DECLINE in the value of the Dollar in International Currency Markets. Quite a hit to someone with their holdings running into the Billions (or even probably Trillions in the case of the Rothschild and Rockefeller types).

NEOphyte then goes on to offer some faint support for his assumptions by repeating a many times disproven lie that Saddam intentionally gassed his own people. What Bilge Rot. I love the part about mentioning his palaces - as though the bloody handed Plutocrats that run this country do not have their equivalent. Ever priced property and houses in Beverly Hills, The Hamptons, or Martha’s Vineyard? Ever hear of the Hearst Mansion? The term “Palace” is replaced with the more “genteel” “Mansion”. Another Pant Load. (NEO I think you need some new pants.) They just do not show up in the Press because the Plutocrats own the Press. Free Press only exists if you own a Printing Press.

There is really a lot more that could be covered to further shred NEOs SPIN but I’ll leave it up to you to do some looking if you so desire.

Some suggested Search Terms to start with:

Cold War

Operation Paper Clip
Which was about bringing the NAZIs here under OSS and later CIA cover.

Operation Mockingbird
Subverting and controlling the Press

MK Ultra
Mind Control Programs run by the CIA

Tavistock or Tavistock Institute
British Intelligence’s (MI-6) pet Psychiatrists. They have done a lot to advance the cause of mass manipulation.

“Cold War” AND Fraud

The School of The Americas

Rothschild Family

International Banking Cartel
Ultimately much of the evil we see in our current world comes down to manipulation and control by wealthy and long established Banking Families/Cartels manipulating world events to their own profit. Sound big? It is. These are not nice people just interested in making an “honest” buck.

These are only a beginning. However if you start with these they will lead you down many “interesting” paths.

“We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth...for my part, I am willing to know the whole truth,; to know the worst; and to provide for it.” - Patrick Henry March 23, 1775

"by repeating a many times disproven lie that Saddam intentionally gassed his own people."

Hmmm. Interesting.
Now your schizophrenia is encompassing even the outright nonsense of trying to aleve Sadam of some of his more heinous acts.
Very interesting.
The whole gassing thing. Purely a Psyops myth huh?

...photoshopped, huh, Diogenes?

http://www.kdp.pp.se/chemical.html

You have a serious disconnect from reality.

But that's okay; the marginalized don't really need to see what's going on.

Sucks to be you.

I was just thinking the same about you. Id really hate to think like you. I would lump all anti-war protesters with saddam and the commies, and drive around with 2 american flags waving. That would really suck. Id rather be a pot-smoking hippy with no job.