CIA Taking Aim At Saddam?

("CBS news", Feb. 27, 1998)

While the U.N. Security Council continues to wrangle over the wording of a message to Saddam Hussein, U.S. officials are taking a long, hard look at a campaign of sabotage that might topple Saddam's regime in Iraq. CBS news correspondent David Martin reports that the Central Intelligence Agency has drafted plans for sabotage inside Iraq, a suggestion that is gaining support in many political circles.Senator Jesse Helms, R-N.C., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has proposed a total blockade,"with nothing going in or out," including food. The idea is to make the Iraqi people so miserable and mad they will take action."Who knows?" Helms said in an interview Thursday. "Someone might do him in." Senator John Kerry, D-Mass., has suggested that U.S. ground forces, perhaps operating as clandestine commandos, might infiltrate Iraq to help indigenous rebels upend Saddam's regime."I would go beyond mere containment," Kerry says.Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee Thursday the administration would try to help opponents of Saddam."We look forward to working with a post-Saddam regime," Albright told lawmakers. "We have worked with opposition groups in the past and we'll be working with them effectively in the future."But Martin reports that many of President Clinton's national security advisers are urging caution about covert operations, saying most have little likelihood of success."They could only remotely hope to succeed, I think, if there were substantial outside intervention and assistance," said former CIA director James Woolsey.Even the man who ran the largest CIA covert operation to date - the CIA-supported guerrillas who fought the Soviet army to a standstill in Afghanistan -- has doubts, says Martin."I don't see how one can suggest that the CIA bring about the overthrow, the toppling of the Saddam Hussein regime, without the United States signing on to a long haul of military occupation of Iraq," said former CIA agent Milt Bearden. Retired Gen. Bernard Trainor, co-author of a book on the Persian Gulf War, said two special operations that inserted U.S. troops into Iraq ahead of the ground campaign ended in failure. Brookings Institution analyst Richard Haass compared the options being considered to the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs operation, a botched invasion that was preceded by widespread speculation and rumor and could hardly have come as a surprise to Fidel Castro's regime."The U.S. support for local opponents of (Castro) was enough to get them in trouble but not enough to put them over the top," Haass warned. "Providing direct military help for the Iraqi opposition would prove even more dangerous. We would be investing U.S. prestige and risking U.S. lives in situations in which it could be impossible to distinguish between friend and foe".