Volume 1 - Iraq Watch

Lebanon, to its vault in Baghdad via diplomatic pouchand courier system.• He specifically mentions the Iraqi embassy inBeirut, Lebanon and the Iraqi interests section atthe Algerian embassy in Damascus, Syria, undertakingsuch activity.Figure 34. Tariq Aziz—Iraq’s plenipotentiary.• The Iraqi embassy in Beirut would transfer cash toDamascus by diplomatic-plated vehicles.• The Iraqi Embassy in Moscow assisted, amongother deals, a Russian company called Alfa Echo insigning contracts for importing oil from Iraq.Moreover, the MFA possessed an indigenous intelligencecapability, its Research and News AnalyzingOffice (RNA) that kept senior Iraqi leadership, suchas the President, Deputy Prime Minister and ForeignMinister informed about global events. The MFAmanaged this office and had branches in many of itskey embassies. It is not certain whether personnel inthe MFA’s Research and News Analyzing Office wereIIS agents or actual MFA officials. Nonetheless, theRNA focused primarily on collecting information ofeconomic and political consequence to Iraq by meansof open sources and other news reporting. MFA’sRNA paid special attention to political, military andeconomic developments in the Middle East (specialattention to Israel), global oil production and marketdevelopments, Eastern Europe, and the United States.Acting as Iraq’s plenipotentiary, Tariq Aziz (seeFigure 34) often facilitated business meetingsbetween foreigners and Iraqi officials. Foreign businessrepresentatives and government officials wouldcontact him in order to gain access to key Iraqiofficials that were in charge of approving oil and armscontracts.• On 27 December 2002, the president of the Russiancompany Russneft, Michail Gutserviev, informedAziz and the former Oil Minister Amir Rashid thathe planned to travel with a five-man delegation toIraq via private plane to negotiate with the IraqiOil Minister for oil and gas contracts. The Russianbusiness delegation was supposed to fly into Iraqin a Tupolev 134 (flight number AKT 135/136) andexpected to stay in Iraq on January 13-15, 2003.• In 2002, Baghdad sent a scientific delegation toBelarus and China in order to stay current on allaspects of nuclear physics and to procure a Chinesefiber optics communication system.54MFA-IIS ConnectionsThe MFA also supported IIS operations by offeringits agents political and economic cover to conducteconomic and political espionage. Besides providingtraditional covers for IIS agents, the MFA cooperatedclosely with the IIS on other functions. A former IISofficer also stated that all MFA diplomatic courierswere IIS officers and were controlled by the IIS’sInternal Security (M6) Directorate. Moreover, at Iraqiconsulates and embassies where IIS officer presencewas absent, MFA personnel filled in as their representatives.While we do not know the full extent ofMFA’s role in assisting the IIS in conducting illicitactivity, we have found other indicators of the breadthand nature of the IIS’ activities from captured documents.• According to one document on MFA letterhead,the MFA transferred two known IIS agents to itsembassy in Belarus under pseudonyms in June2002. Another document in the same file, an IIS“Ministerial” Order, acknowledged the transfer, theagents’ job descriptions, their salaries, as well assent copies of IIS order to other directorates.• One month prior to OIF, at least seven IIS officerswere reassigned to the MFA to cover up their truepositions in the government. They were given newidentities and positions. This activity was similarto giving agents cover stories operating outside ofIraq, according to one former IIS agent.• Outside of Iraq, Iraqi embassies provided the IISwith the only means of secure communications outsideof the diplomatic courier services. Iraqi embassiestransmitted ciphered faxes to foreign posts.However, the majority of posts had manual codebookswhile major posts like Washington, Paris,Moscow and South African were given machines