The Associated Press

December 4, 2002, Wednesday, BC cycle

SECTION: International News

LENGTH: 672 words

HEADLINE: Kurdish officials say they are well ahead of Saddam in one military specialty - spying

BYLINE: By BORZOU DARAGAHI, Associated Press Writer

DATELINE: IRBIL, Iraq

BODY:
On the battlefield, the Kurds' 70,000 lightly armed soldiers are no match for Saddam Hussein's tanks, artillery and veteran troops. But the Kurds say they have one asset Baghdad cannot match - their spy agency Parastin.

The Kurds say their agents have been quietly scoring victories over Saddam for three decades and have contacts at all levels of his government, which has no control over the northern region where Kurds rule under American-British air protection.

But Kurdish leaders complain that neither the United States nor the U.N. arms experts searching for Iraq's lethal weapons have taken full advantage of the Kurds' network. "We don't understand why," said Karim Sinjari, the interior minister for the section of Kurdish Iraq controlled by the Kurdistan Democratic Party. "It all depends on them."

Kurds say Parastin activities range from receiving dispatches from high-level Iraqi officials to ground-level debriefing of people crossing between the Kurdish autonomous region and Baghdad-controlled Iraq.

At various checkpoints, merchants and other travelers bring tidbits of information that Kurdish officials patiently sift through.

Saddam also sends spies to northern Iraq. But the Kurds maintain many of his agents get fingered by contacts in Baghdad and arrested. Two months ago, Kurdish agents tipped off by a government source netted a team of would-be assassins from Iraq's Mukhabarat spy agency attempting to cross the border.

"What Kurds do have is amazing human intelligence resources," said Andrew Apostolou, an Oxford historian and Middle East authority who has studied intelligence operations. "They've got precisely the type of ground-level intelligence that the U.S. desperately lacks."

Parastin was founded 35 years ago with help from Israel and Iran at a time when the pro-Western Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi ruled in Tehran and the Kurds were fighting a guerrilla war against Baghdad.

Spies from Iran's Savak and the Israeli Mossad helped train the first Kurdish recruits in the late 1960s in an attempt to destabilize the pro-Soviet Baathist regime in Baghdad.

After the Kurdish revolt against Saddam collapsed in 1975, Parastin's activities subsided. Kurdish officials say Parastin has since been rejuvenated to protect against hostile neighbors and internal threats. It has ferreted out spies from Iran, Turkey and Syria, all of which worry the Kurdish self-rule experiment will inspire their sizable Kurdish minorities to revolt.

The spy service is also said to have infiltrated militant Islamic groups, but its primary purpose remains keeping tabs on Saddam, who Kurds say has ordered numerous terrorist operations in the region.

In Sulaymania, a Kurdish city south of here, officials of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan said a bombing that injured 20 people at a mosque in June 2000 was carried out by Saddam's agents. The group's security chief, who spoke on condition his name not be published, said the mosque bombers were captured and confessed to working for Baghdad.

Experts say the U.N. weapons inspectors are reluctant to tap into the Kurds' intelligence resources because the United Nations usually only recognizes official governments like that in Baghdad.

"The U.N. really gives the Kurds the cold shoulder," said Apostolou, the British intelligence expert.

Officials here say that while a delegation of CIA and U.S. military officials showed up in black sports-utility vehicles two months ago for a visit, the CIA keeps its distance from Kurdish intelligence. They theorize Washington doesn't want to alienate Turkey, which opposes recognizing the Kurdish autonomous enclave.

But Apostolou said the lack of U.S. cooperation with Kurdish intelligence dates to 1996, when the Kurds' main political rivals sought out unsavory allies during their civil war. The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan turned to Islamic Iran for help, and the Kurdistan Democratic Party reached out to Saddam.

The CIA, which had had a presence in northern Iraq, pulled out.