Out with Saddam’s secrets

Iraqi exiles have given the British authorities a secret document obtained from Saddam Hussein's intelligence service which has not yet reac...

Iraqi exiles have given the British authorities a secret document obtained from Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service which has not yet reached his own desk, the head of one of the country’s leading opposition groups claimed.

Ayad Alawi, leader of the Iraqi National Accord (INA), said he had passed on an assessment by Iraq’s directorate-general of intelligence (DGI) of threats to the regime, together with other highly classified material attesting to the group’s reach into the centres of power in Baghdad.

The document is to be delivered to Saddam next month, but it is already in the hands of Britain, the US and other Western governments. Another document listing intelligence officers posted under cover to Iraqi diplomatic missions abroad has been passed to the relevant security services. Alawi’s organisation and a dozen other opposition groups will be represented at a meeting next Monday with Derek Fatchett, British Minister of State at the Foreign Office, as Britain explores what it can do to helpweaken, if not topple President Saddam after the standoff with UN weapons inspectors.

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The INA is the current favourite of Western governments, especially intelligence agencies like the CIA and Britain’s MI6, who value its networks in Iraq and its ability to identify and help a stream of high-level defectors. Its hallmark is its emphasis on “structured opposition”, though critics say it relies on the `silver bullet’ option of assassinating President Saddam. It is at odds with the Iraqi National Congress, once supported by the US but abandoned in 1995 and now in disarray. “We understand the power structure inside Iraq and our policy is to break it down so that Saddam will crack,” Alawi said in his first British newspaper interview. “We don’t want to indulge in infighting and backstabbing. We are puppets of no one.”

According to the INA, there are now daily executions in Iraq, including those of 30 officers and men of the Hammurabi division of the Republican Guard last month. Alawi is a former Ba’athParty official who fell out with the regime and was seriously injured in an assassination attempt in London in 1978.

The INA, whose main foreign base is in Jordan, will ask Britain to help set up a relay transmitter to circumvent Iraqi jamming of its radio station, Sawt al-Mustaqbal (the Voice of the Future). The INA helped with the defection of Abbas al-Janabi, former personal secretary to Uday, President Saddam’s son, who was later given political asylum in Britain. “We welcome any rats who want to jump Saddam’s sinking ship,” Alawi said.The Observer News Service