Humiliated in Iraq, Again

                         By Jim Hoagland

Thursday, May 8 1997; Page A27
The Washington Post

The Central Intelligence Agency has spent six years and $110
million trying to overthrow Saddam Hussein in the most
expensive sustained failure in agency history. Iraq is the Bay of
Pigs in unending free fall, with fresh humiliation looming around
the corner.

The agency could not stop throwing money at the Saddam
problem if it wanted to. Refusing to admit defeat, the White
House orders this international embarrassment prolonged. The
current covert operation, which will cost about $5 million this
year, has dwindled into an ineffective propaganda effort
carried out by two Arabic language radio stations in Jordan
and Kuwait.

Senators who normally line up to rail at executive agencies for
wasting taxpayer money have kept quiet on the CIA debacle in
Iraq. The Senate Intelligence Committee passed up a golden
opportunity to educate itself and the American public on
Tuesday when it failed to probe CIA Director-designate
George J. Tenet about Iraq and cost-effectiveness in Tenet's
confirmation hearings.

It is now up to Tenet, all but assured confirmation as America's
top spy, to decide what to do about this continuing failure, in
which he played a not insignificant role as a member of
President Clinton's National Security Council staff and then as
deputy director of the CIA.

The story Tenet could assemble would rival any spy novel.
Interviews in Washington and Europe with CIA personnel,
Iraqi dissidents and foreign intelligence sources provide new
insights into this collosal exercise in self-deception and
factionalism within the agency.

Some Americans who worked in Iraq covertly now wonder
whether the agency was a victim of an elaborate sting
perpetrated by Saddam, who watched with a benign eye as
the CIA funneled money and Iraqi military defectors into a
Jordan-based exile group for two years before effortlessly
rolling up that organization and exposing its American roots last
summer.

"The guys in Amman were promising us a zipless coup, telling
us they had the silver bullet that would change Iraq," said one
American who worked on the Iraq covert program. "They
were put out of business in an afternoon, and a big U.S.
investment just went up in smoke."

Despite that failure, the agency is set to provide $4.8 million in
covert funds to that group, the Iraqi National Accord (INA),
again this year according to my sources. But it will be less than
that if Jordan's King Hussein yields to Saddam's increasingly
insistent demands to shut down the agency-fi\nanced, INA-run
radio studio and transmitter, which broadcasts under the name
the Voice of the Future.

King Hussein is known to feel badly burned by the INA fiasco.
The agency pressured Jordan to provide facilities and
high-level political support for the group's amateurish coup
plotting and then left the Jordanians to suffer the political
consequences.

The king's shutting down the station would be a final
humiliation for the agency in an effort that was conceived and
pursued in halfhearted fashion after George Bush and his
generals declined to use military might to remove Saddam in
1991.

Bush put up $40 million as a down payment on Saddam's
removal when he secretly ordered the agency to create the
conditions for Saddam's downfall in 1991. Much of that
money went to buy and move a clandestine radio transmitter
from Croatia and to finance a London-based propaganda
operation that turned out fake Baghdad newspapers, television
films and radio broadcasts.

About 15 American contract employees worked in London to
produce the expensive propaganda. At one point, the agency
used an unmanned aircraft based in northern Iraq to drop
anti-Saddam leaflets across Iraq on the dictator's birthday.

Within the agency, the Iraq operation was seen by some --
including Frank Anderson, former head of the Middle East
department -- as a can of worms. These officers knew they
would never get enough money or political support from the
White House to engage in an all-out war against Saddam.

That feeling was reinforced when annual funding was cut to
$20 million in late 1992, and then to $15 million in 1994, after
Bill Clinton came to the White House and adopted Bush's
program in a memorandum of notification to Congress.
Ambitious junior officers targeted the money on flashy projects
that led nowhere but allowed the White House to pretend
something was happening.

The agency has been used as "the last resort of failed policy" in
Iraq by two administrations. Tenet used those words on
Tuesday to describe something that he said would never
happen to the CIA on his watch. He did not mention Iraq, but
agency veterans knew what he had in mind.

It still is unclear how deep and how self-critical Tenet's
assessment of the Iraq failure runs. He enthusiastically backed
the INA "zipless coup" option when he became deputy
director of the CIA, according to agency sources. If there was
a Saddam sting, he was one of its principal victims.

The Senate is on the verge of giving Tenet one of life's rare
chances to clean up a mess he helped make. If he does not
take it and shape a covert program capable of producing
change in Iraq, Congress should step in swiftly with its own
investigation of a national humiliation.

 Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company