Invisible Nation

by Quil Lawrence

  It was an odd war. The joint parliament continued to operate until March 1995, when it finally stopped the charade, but people tried to go on with other aspects of life as usual. Although the war was always between the parties, not the people, civilians inevitably got caught in the fray. A drive from Sulimaniya to Erbil required passing through some two dozen checkpoints, each one an opportunity to meet a soldier in a foul mood. Beatings of civilians, even women, were common. Males of military age always felt targeted, and the battle lines split up families—men would be forced to confine themselves to one party's territory and their wives would have to travel across the line every few weeks for money and a brief conjugal visit. Soldiers suspiciously read any letters being sent between the cities. The enemy to the south was all but forgotten.

  "I have been stopped and harassed by both PUK and KDP numerous times, and every time they accused me of being from the other side. They never stopped me and said, 'You are a Ba'athist,'" said one Kurd from Halabja.16

  Amnesty International issued a report in 1995 deploring human rights abuses by all the parties, including practices of torture that could have been learned directly from Saddam: the use of electricity, sexual torture, and beating with hoses and cables. Even the minor parties involved ran secret prisons, but the KDP and PUK had the largest, and their internal security organizations also ran detention centers off the books, where they held alleged operatives from other parties as well as Iraqis from the south. Amnesty International condemned the use of heavy artillery inside cities and the mutilation and execution of prisoners.17 Both Barzani and Talabani promised to address the issues and then went right on making their idiotic war.

  U.N. personnel and NGO workers routinely traveled across the KDP-PUK front lines, though some organizations employed bodyguards from the neutral Surchi tribe that controlled pivotal points along the Hamilton Road (the highway between Erbil and Rawanduz built by British engineer A. M. Hamilton in 1932, still one of the best roads in Kurdistan).

  "I was afraid the U.N. was going to get jerked out of here," recalled Stafford Clarry, who worked with the United Nations throughout the conflict. He remembers driving up to the front lines with impunity to berate the Kurdish leaders. "We are not here to protect you from Saddam in order for you to fight in peace amongst yourselves," Clarry recalled telling Jalal Talabani.

  Naturally Washington, now the Clinton administration, began to sour on the Kurdish freedom fighters who seemed more interested in killing each other than hurting Saddam. Barham Salih, who had moved to the States as the Kurdistan Front representative, now reverted to his roots as the PUK's man. Still, he took no pleasure in trying to spin a positive side of the feud back in Kurdistan. "Dr. Barham" became a friend to many of the Middle East watchers in Washington and had soon perfected the art of the Beltway backyard barbecue, where much real political work gets accomplished. Just as he was getting his game on, the people he represented were acting horribly.

  "Washington was probably among the best years of my life," Salih said. "And it was probably an impossible mission—explaining the complexities of Kurdish and Iraqi politics to Americans, and worse, explaining American politics and decisions to Iraqis and Kurds."

  Salih soon rivaled his partner in London, the KDP's Hoshyar Zebari, for media savvy and government access. With the growing civil strife, the two men could no longer be partners. "The civil war was the most embarrassing time. I was never a hard-liner, anti-KDP—the same applies to my friend Hoshyar," said Salih, "but war pushed you into these trenches, and you have to take the other side on. Both of us recognized that it was stupid."

  Skepticism grew at the State Department and the White House that this Kurdish safe haven would ever amount to a significant thorn in the side of Saddam Hussein. But Bush's "finding" was still in force, and the wheels in motion. About two years after Chalabi set up the INC shop, the CIA had sent two agents out to support and keep tabs on him. Both men, Bob Baer and Warren Marik, had done serious time in the Middle East and Afghanistan. Along with other agents, they rotated into a station house just up the road from the INC headquarters in Salahudin. Cowboys at heart, they saw their goal as bringing down Saddam, even as Washington started to question the wisdom of the idea.

  Kurdistan was a good place to cultivate potential coup plotters. One of the first visitors to the station house was an Iraqi general named Wafiq al-Samarra'i, the former head of Saddam's military intelligence, Istikhbarat. Warren Marik recognized the Iraqi from his own service in Baghdad when the CIA was helping Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war. Samarra'i had met Masoud Barzani during one of the Kurdistan Front's negotiating trips to Baghdad, and the Kurdish leader had witnessed one of Saddam Hussein's sons-in-law dressing down the general publicly.18 Samarra'i had kept in contact with Barzani, who helped smuggle him north. He met with Bob Baer in Zakho in fall 1994, just as the CIA had entered Kurdistan to begin setting up their operation. Samarra'i claimed to represent a network of key military officers—mostly his own family from the Sunni Arab city of Samara. He plotted to cause a disturbance in Baghdad that would spook Saddam and send him running for his fortified hometown, 'Awjah, near Tikrit. Once Saddam had bolted, Samarra'i would enlist a brigade and two divisions in on his plot, and a commander from the nearby armory school would commandeer a dozen tanks and corner Saddam. With the dictator stuck in his hometown, Samarra'i would declare a military government, friendly to the United States.19

  Baer sent what details he could gather back to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where it received an unexcited response. This noncommittal feedback clearly jangled the coup plotters' nerves, but before long the plan was caught up in the Kurdish dispute. Ahmed Chalabi and Jalal Talabani proposed to join in the plot and start an uprising on the same day as the diversion, attacking the Iraqi Fifth Corps along the lines protecting Mosul and Kirkuk. They told Baer they would be able to humiliate Saddam by taking some of his territory away—perhaps even returning Kirkuk to Kurdish control and helping Samarra'i gain power. There was another motive. Both Chalabi and Talabani were short on cash.

  Chalabi had competition for his spot as the CIA's man in the Iraqi opposition. In London the Iraqi National Accord, the group of former military officers led by Ayad Allawi, were gathering sources for their own putsch, with much more confident support from the CIA and Britain's MI6. Chalabi aimed to beat them to the punch, but his resources were few. The United States had promised funding for the INC as a mediation force between the warring Kurds, and then never decided which agency should pay.20 Chalabi began borrowing money from merchants in Kurdistan, buying things in the bazaar on credit and hinting that all would be reimbursed when he and Uncle Sam took down Saddam.

  Talabani's troubles related to money in a different way—his rival was making too much. Since the clashes began, whatever money the KDP had shared from the Khabur bridge stopped completely, just when the border crossing had become a gold mine. Tankers smuggling oil in breach of the U.N. sanctions on Iraq were crowding the road to the Turkish border. From the outset, America turned a blind eye to the black market trade, for it did a little bit to placate the Turks and did something to fund the Kurdish region. The trade also made enormous amounts of money for Saddam's regime, being one of his few ways of directly selling oil for cash. The KDP made far less money taxing the trucks as they went through to Turkey, but it gave them a clear advantage over the PUK. Masoud Barzani's nephew Nechirvan was rumored to control the business on the Kurdish side at Zakho, charging tolls that went straight into the KDP's coffers. Clearly a fair bit of the money also kept the party leadership healthy and well-heeled. American aid workers at the border started calling Nechirvan "the best dressed man in Kurdistan."21

  Talabani decided in February 1995 that he didn't need to choose between attacking Saddam or attacking the KDP—he could do both at once. By attacking the Fifth Corps of the Iraqi army, he would rally Kurdish support and shame Masoud Barzani as either a follower behind the PUK and INC attack, a coward for sitting out, or a bl
ackguard for attacking Talabani while he was fighting the good fight against Saddam.22 This was all to occur with the American military backup that Bob Baer hadn't explicitly said was coming.

  Reality fell like a thousand-pound bomb on March 3, the day before the planned offensive and coup. Somewhere on the rocky road from Salahudin to the CIA in Langley to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a message had fallen through the cracks—the message about the entire conspiracy. To this day the missing link hasn't owned up, but Bill Clinton's national security advisor Tony Lake discovered the existence of the plot within a day of the zero hour. To add insult to insanity, Lake found out through a National Security Agency program eavesdropping not on the Kurds but on the Iraqis. Saddam was in on the CIA's plot before the White House was. The Iranians were also privy, possibly invited by Chalabi, and massed troops on the border.23 Lake sent an urgent cable to Baer in northern Iraq, telling him to carry it to the INC and the Kurds. It read: "The action you have planned for this weekend has been totally compromised. We believe there is a high risk of failure. Any decision to proceed will be on your own."24

  "On your own" apparently described Jalal Talabani's offensive, Ahmed Chalabi's INC, and the previous several months of Bob Baer's operation. Baer dutifully delivered the bad news on the morning of March 3. He discovered that the KDP already knew; Hoshyar Zebari had been checking with his own contacts in Washington and had told Barzani that Baer was blowing smoke.25 Chalabi and Talabani decided to move ahead anyway.

  "This 'Bob' came in the morning and said no, the White House decided that you must not move," Talabani recalls. "Bob said the Americans aren't coming, we don't want you to lose, they will crush you. We didn't listen to the advice from Tony Lake. We said, 'We will go.'"

  Lake says his advice came purely from a desire to avert disaster. The military was finding out about the plan just as late, and had no resources to scramble even if they had wanted to. "I am still very confused about what happened," Lake says. "At the last minute we look into it, and it's clear to everybody—the CIA, Defense, State—that there was no chance. It was infiltrated by Iran and Iraq, a potential Bay of Pigs."

  Regardless of what the putsch might have been with everyone reading from the same music, it didn't become the massacre Washington predicted. The pesh merga fought well; from Erbil, PUK commanders Omar Fattah and Kosrat Rasul made it as far as Altun Kopri—halfway to Kirkuk. Talabani himself got to Karahangir, the ridge overlooking Kirkuk. He suffered few casualties and captured thousands of Iraqi soldiers—most of them underfed conscripts who gave up at the first chance. Talabani claims that several more Iraqi officers were ready to surrender their men but that he halted when he heard that U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry had announced the United States did not support the attacks.26

  Wafiq al-Samarra'i's coup was stillborn. Clearly aware that something was afoot, Saddam never bolted toward 'Awjah and kept his entire army on alert. As Samarra'i set out to rally his conspirators, he found himself under arrest—by the KDP, who also stopped every INC member they could find and put them under house arrest until the window for action had passed.27 Chalabi finally got the hint and moved his operation from Barzani's stronghold down the hill to Erbil—it seemed that Barzani didn't trust the INC and their American pals, or he simply wanted to thwart the PUK. Samarra'i left Iraq and wound up fuming with the other exiles in London. Back in Langley the CIA wondered if the coup was ever more than an attempt by Chalabi and Talabani to draw them into a war with Saddam. Jalal Talabani at least got some of what he wanted—an angry Masoud Barzani looking cowardly and the sight of rockets exploding over Kirkuk.

  Two weeks later another neighbor reared its head. In "hot pursuit" of rebels from the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), the Turkish army thundered across the border into Iraqi Kurdistan with their biggest incursion yet: about thirty-five thousand troops backed by Turkey's tanks, helicopters, and American-built F-16s. Talabani had been allowing the PKK to move freely in his territory, while as with everything, Barzani was on the opposite side, fighting the PKK and earning Turkey's favor. Whether the PKK inspired the Turkish incursion, or Saddam requested it, or Barzani encouraged it is not clear. In any case, it was enough to force Talabani to pull back from the front lines near Kirkuk and protect his base. The Turks withdrew after about two months.28

  For his part, Bob Baer returned to Washington, where he had been told that Tony Lake wanted his head on a pike. Who blew the coup remains a contentious debate. Baer eventually wrote a bestselling book, See No Evil, in which he blamed Lake for the mess and implied that the national security advisor had unleashed the FBI on him, starting an investigation for the attempted murder of a foreign head of state. (Warren Marik refers to the NSC head as "Bunny Lake," after an old Otto Preminger film in which a woman claims her daughter is missing but the daughter might not exist.) Lake pleads ignorance, and Baer himself seems to have softened his opinion, admitting that the plan must have seemed "nutty" to anyone who found out about it the way Lake did.*

  Amid the absurdity, the United States had lost something very real. Despite all the double-dealing going on in Kurdistan, it was still the most logical place for America to cultivate human intelligence sources inside Saddam's Iraq. To anyone with a real chance of taking out Saddam, the message was clear. "The U.S. ends up looking like one hand isn't talking to the other," says Kenneth Pollack, a CIA alumnus who was Lake's director for Near East on the NSC. "It makes the Kurds wonder about what kind of a circus we're running."

  Not long after Chalabi and Talabani's foray to the south, someone back in the greater Washington area leaked word of Chalabi's CIA sponsorships. Mark Parris, on the National Security Council, went to London to read Chalabi the riot act, and Chalabi's first honeymoon with Washington was over. The Clinton administration started to think of the INC as bad for business, and of Jalal Talabani as a dangerous wild card. One more low blow would come to make the trifecta.

  Throughout the fall of 1995 the State Department's unofficial Kurdish desk, led by the senior officer for Iraq and Iran, Bob Deutsch, had tried to get Barzani and Talabani to end their rivalry. The KDP and PUK sent delegations to an American-sponsored peace conference in Drogheda, Ireland. But the two sides weren't ready to cut a deal, each wanting to hold a position of advantage. Talabani had even taunted Barzani that he was never going to see Erbil again, except through binoculars from the hilltop at Salahudin.29 When the negotiators met with Deutsch, they found the United States wasn't bringing much to the table other than free advice, according to Nawshirwan Mustafa, the PUK delegate.

  "I said, okay, we withdraw from Erbil, but if you guarantee that KDP doesn't attack and occupy Erbil; it remains neutral," said Nawshirwan Mustafa. "[Deutsch] said he can't guarantee it. I said, can you send retired U.S. soldiers to keep the peace? We'll pay their salaries. He didn't agree. I said, we will withdraw from Erbil, but you guarantee that customs revenue from Khabur comes to the central bank. He said, I can't give you guarantee. I said, okay. I will stay in Erbil."

  To the Kurds, America seemed uninterested and unwilling to spend a penny on a real peacekeeping effort. The two million dollars promised at Drogheda for a neutral Kurdish peacekeeping force never materialized—perhaps lost in President Clinton's mêlée with the new Republican-controlled Congress. To Washington, the Kurds seemed hopelessly uncooperative and ungrateful for all the political capital it took to keep Operation Provide Comfort running through Turkey.*

  The CIA had one last arrow in its quiver: Ayad Allawi's Iraqi National Accord. Theirs was to be a "textbook" coup, with plotters inside Saddam's palace and a quick decapitation of the Iraqi regime. The Clinton administration was betting on Allawi's group of former military officers, and apparently so was Barzani. The KDP sent a young Kurd from Zakho, Muhammad Ihsan, to work with the coup plotters at the CIA station in Amman, Jordan. Ihsan recalls making several hair-raising trips to Baghdad to plant specially concealed Inmarsat satellite phones—at the time the most advanced and compact device, which was about the
size of a laptop. Ihsan helped smooth the way for many Iraqi officers to slip into Kurdistan and sometimes in and out of the country from there. The INA managed to recruit people inside Saddam's military, his air-defense systems, and even his elite Republican Guard. But a nearly perfect coup plot was not enough to take down Saddam.30 "I was in Amman when I heard," said Ihsan. One of their men had been taken at the lonely desert border on the road to Baghdad, probably picked up by Baghdad's dreaded secret police, the Mukhabarat. "I had the feeling that we were fucked and we were going to lose a lot of our friends."

  Saddam didn't tip his hand for several months, letting the whole network reveal itself. In June 1996 he rounded up more than one hundred members of the conspiracy—all very well placed, and all discovered. Then the Mukhabarat chiefs couldn't resist; they picked up one of the satellite phones, called the CIA in Amman, and told them to go home.31 Baghdad sent an emissary to try to convince one of the prominent former Iraqi Army officers, Muhammad Abdullah Shahwani, to return to Iraq. The regime had collected both of his sons among the conspirators, and Saddam had offered to spare their lives if Shahwani would cooperate. It was folly, and Shahwani knew it; his sons were as good as dead, and not a quick death. The CIA agents took Shahwani with them as they packed up and fled back to America.32

  "It convinced people in the U.S. government of something we were already suspecting, which was that any coup that we know about, Saddam knows about," said Ken Pollack. "And anyone [in Iraq] who was thinking about joining us looked at it and said, if I get in bed with these guys, I'm going to end up dead."