Russia now admits training Iraqi spies / But it says intent was to fight crime, terror

2003-04-17 04:00:00 PDT Baghdad -- Russian intelligence officials have confirmed that Iraqi spies received training in specialized counterintelligence techniques in Moscow last fall -- training that appears to violate the United Nations resolution barring military and security assistance to Iraq.

A spokesman for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Boris Labusov, acknowledged that Iraqi secret police agents had been trained by his agency but said the training was for nonmilitary purposes, such as fighting crime and terrorism.

Yet documents discovered in Baghdad by The Chronicle last week suggest that the spying techniques the Iraqi agents learned in Russia may have been used against foreign diplomats and civilians, raising doubt about the accuracy of Labusov's characterization.

The Russian training program for Iraqi spies was revealed Sunday in an exclusive Chronicle story that was based on documents found in an Iraqi security complex in Baghdad after looters had ransacked the building.

The documents included personnel dossiers on officers of the Mukhabarat, Saddam Hussein's security service. At least five of the dossiers contained certificates of graduation from specialized surveillance courses given in September 2002 by the Special Training Center in Moscow.

Russian officials in the United States flatly refused to discuss the documents discovered by The Chronicle.

"We will have no comment on the matter at all," said Evgeni Horosho, press liaison for the Russian Embassy in Washington.

But Labusov, the press officer for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service,

confirmed that the certificates discovered by The Chronicle were genuine and that the Iraqis had received the training the documents described.

Labusov was questioned about the documents by Andrey Soldatov, director of Agentura, a Moscow-based journalism organization that uses the Internet to disseminate information about Russian intelligence services.

Labusov suggested that the training the Iraqis received was not unusual. "The SVR does not refuse cooperation with secret services of different countries in the areas of counter-terrorism and war, fighting drug traffic and investigating the illegal trade of weapons," he told Soldatov, who relayed the response to The Chronicle by e-mail.

TRAINING MISAPPLIED?

However, it seems likely that the Iraqi agents who were trained at the Moscow center were using their skills for other purposes. Found in the same Mukhabarat office with their personnel files and graduation certificates were a host of other documents, including orders for wiretaps and for break-ins at such sites as the Iranian Embassy, the five-star al-Mansour Hotel and private doctors' offices.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. State Department flatly declined to comment on the spy training the Russians provided to Iraq and also refused to discuss whether the training appeared to violate U.N. resolutions prohibiting military and security assistance to the Hussein regime.

But one U.S. intelligence source who agreed to speak on background told The Chronicle that it was disingenuous of the Russians to compare Iraqi counterintelligence agents to law enforcement and security officers from other countries who combat terrorism, drug trafficking and illegal arms sales.

"The sole purpose of the Iraqi security services was to protect the Baath regime from its enemies inside and outside Iraq," he said. "That was their only reason for existence."

Iraq is listed among the states that sponsor terrorism in the "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report issued by the State Department in May.

EXPLANATIONS WANTED

Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Walnut Creek, said that Russia, a member of the U.N. Security Council, must explain why it was helping to shore up Iraq's secret police at the same time it was criticizing the Iraqi government for giving assistance to terrorist organizations.

"Back in September of last year, it was very clear that Iraq was on the other side of the fence from the rest of the world in terms of the fight against global terrorism," said Tauscher, a member of the House Armed Services Committee. "It doesn't make sense for the Russians to have been providing them with additional intelligence capabilities at that time."

Victor Mizin, a former global security expert for the Russian Ministry of International Affairs who now is a senior diplomatic fellow specializing in Russian arms and security operations for the Monterey Institute for International Studies, said that the Special Training Center where the diplomas were issued appears to be one of several training facilities that Russian Foreign Intelligence Service officials use to train intelligence officers from other countries.

"There are a belt of such camps in Moscow," Mizin said. "They were established in the 1920s and 1930s to train agents for the old COMINTERN (Communist International)."

Russian security services have long provided technical training for Iraqi military and security specialists, Mizin said, adding that about 70,000 Russian military and security advisers had been sent to Iraq over the last 30 years.

Mizin said Russian training for Iraqi intelligence officers may fall into a gray area under U.N. resolutions dating back to the 1991 Gulf War that prohibit giving military assistance to Iraq.

After the U.N. resolutions went into effect, "all the old contracts to provide material and services stopped, but the (personal) contacts went on," Mizin said.

Telephone and e-mail messages to U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard, seeking clarification on whether Russia had violated U.N. sanctions by training Iraqi spies, went unanswered Wednesday.

HISTORY OF COOPERATION

Last week, Mikhail Falkov, a Russian expert on the Middle East and author of the book "Afghani Pandora's Box," wrote an article for the Agentura Web site (www.agentura.ru) that details the long history of cooperation between spy agencies for Iraq and Russia.

"Soviet instructors have played a primary role in the reorganization of Iraqi intelligence and security agencies," Falkov wrote. "Many officers of these special services have passed through training in the USSR."

Although the Iran-Iraq war and a Baath Party crackdown on Iraqi communists in the 1970s and 1980s weakened the relationship between the two nations' spy agencies, Iraqi agents continued to have close ties to their Russian counterparts, receiving aid and assistance from the Russians in return for Iraqi intelligence information on Arab countries that had no diplomatic relationships with Russian.

For example, Falkov said Iraq had provided information about some Islamic extremist organizations operating in Chechnya.

And as recently as October 1999, the Iraqi minister of foreign affairs met with Russian military and security officials, announcing afterward that the meetings had been to negotiate "an exchange of experience (and) realization of joint trainings of different sorts of experts in our area."