CIA Plans New Iraqi Spy Agency Using Baathist Agents

The Bush administration has authorized creation of an Iraqi intelligence service to spy on groups and individuals inside Iraq that are targeting U.S. troops and civilians working to form a new government, according to U.S. government officials.

The new service will be trained, financed and equipped largely by the CIA with help from Jordan. Initially the agency will be headed by Iraqi Interior Minister Nouri Badran, a secular Shiite and activist in the Jordan-based Iraqi National Accord, a former exile group that includes former Baath Party military and intelligence officials.

Badran and Ayad Alawi, leader of the INA, are spending much of this week at CIA headquarters in Langley to work out the details of the new program. Both men have worked closely with the CIA over the past decade in unsuccessful efforts to incite coups against Saddam Hussein. The agency and the two men believe they can effectively screen former government officials to find agents for the service and weed out those who are unreliable or unsavory, officials said.

By contrast, some Pentagon officials and Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, vehemently oppose allowing former intelligence and military officials into the new organization for fear they cannot be trusted. Intelligence experts said Chalabi and his sponsors also fear some former government officials would use the new apparatus to undermine the influence of Chalabi, who wants to play a central role in a new Iraq.

Although no deadline has been set, officials hope to have the service running by mid-February. Congress had approved money for the effort in the classified annex of this year's budget. The service will focus largely on domestic intelligence and is seen by some administration officials as a critical step in the administration's effort to hand over the running of the country to Iraqis.

The CIA declined to comment on the program.

Establishing the service is just one of several new steps the CIA is taking to deal with an increasingly worrisome Iraqi resistance, U.S. intelligence officials said. In recent weeks, the deputy director for intelligence, Jami Miscik, has pulled together an analytical working group at CIA headquarters similar to the task force the agency used during the war. Miscik has more than doubled the number of analysts working to identify insurgents and their sources of support.

Likewise, the CIA station in Baghdad has grown significantly since major combat operations ceased, as have the number of substations around the country. "The intelligence community doesn't understand what's going on in Iraq and has decided to put a whole bunch of analytical manpower on it," one intelligence official said. "They definitely didn't think this would happen as it has," the official said, referring to the resilience of the insurgency.

Another U.S. intelligence official used the phrase "midcourse correction" to describe new efforts by the larger intelligence community, which includes military intelligence.

Two weeks ago, the U.S. occupation authority decided to form a paramilitary unit to track down insurgents. The unit, composed of Iraqi militiamen from the country's five largest political parties, will work with U.S. Special Forces soldiers, and their operations will be overseen by U.S. military commanders. Since the summer, the CIA has recruited and trained some former Iraqi intelligence agents to help identify the insurgents.

Setting up a new intelligence service is an obvious next step as U.S. forces work to thwart daily attacks that have killed and maimed Iraqis and Americans. But the challenges are daunting, especially in a country where the four secret Iraqi intelligence services acted for decades as Hussein's main apparatus of control.

Because political rivalries are acute in Iraq, some U.S. government officials with knowledge of the program said they are worried that various Sunni or Shiite factions could eventually use the service to secretly undermine their political competitors.

According to some U.S. officials, L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. governor in Iraq, has come to regret his decision to disband the Iraqi army and, similarly, has become more open to using former Iraqi intelligence officials in the new service. In the summer Bremer dissolved Iraq's four intelligence services, along with the ministries of information and defense.

To vet Iraq's former intelligence officials, the CIA has flown polygraph machines to Iraq. To help determine who is worth hiring, the CIA is relying on help from intelligence officials from Jordan and other Middle Eastern nations, from Iraqis on the Governing Council and from political leaders in the provinces.

Hussein's government kept meticulous records of its intelligence personnel and operations. Literally tons of these documents are now in U.S. hands and are being used to question new intelligence service recruits.

Still, the outstanding issue is, "to what degree you bring back former intelligence service," one U.S. intelligence expert said.

Candidates for positions in the new service will have to pledge loyalty to the goals of a free Iraq, an official said, and then provide a full accounting of what they were involved with in the past — an honest airing of what they did for the previous government and what they did for Hussein.

"We'll try to build in enough protection," another official said.

In the past, U.S. efforts to set up or bolster foreign intelligence services have had mixed results.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, high-level CIA officials traveled to each newly independent state offering help. In Prague, for example, the CIA station tripled in size. The agency built a secure, bug-proof room in the prime minister's castle, gave the president an armor-plated fleet of cars and helped the government find secret communist sleeper cells. In Iran, the CIA helped equip and train the Iranian secret police, Savak, whose human rights abuses against its own citizens under the shah fueled the revolution that brought Shiite fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini to power.

"Intelligence services are the heart and soul of a new country," said one former CIA operative who helped several post-communist countries establish new services.