U.S. army chief says Iraqi senior generals took bribes to surrender Baghdad

[Atlanta Skins Fan]

This is a variation of a rumor I posted a few weeks ago (widely attacked here) that senior Iraqi officials were bribed into surrendering Baghdad in return for safe passage and large sums of money. The very reputable Independent in the U.K., citing U.S. general Tommy Franks, is now reporting a variation on the story, in which the bribed officials were senior Iraqi commanders, not Hussein and senior government officials.

As I said in my previous post, I'm not sure that I oppose this decision. Generally I'm in favor of solutions that minimize widespread and unnecessary loss of life.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=409090

The Independent

US army chief says Iraqi troops took bribes to surrender

By Andrew Buncombe in Washington

24 May 2003

Senior Iraqi officers who commanded troops crucial to the defence of key Iraqi cities were bribed not to fight by American special forces, the US general in charge of the war has confirmed.

Well before hostilities started, special forces troops and intelligence agents paid sums of money to a number of Iraqi officers, whose support was deemed important to a swift, low-casualty victory.

General Tommy Franks, the US army commander for the war, said these Iraqi officers had acknowledged their loyalties were no longer with the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, but with their American paymasters. As a result, many officers chose not to defend their positions as American and British forces pushed north from Kuwait.

"I had letters from Iraqi generals saying: 'I now work for you'," General Franks said.

It is not clear which Iraqi officers were bribed, how many were bought off or at what cost. It is likely, however, that the US focused on officers in control of Saddam's elite forces, which were expected to defend the capital. The Pentagon said that bribing the senior officers was a cost-effective method of fighting and one that led to fewer casualties.

"What is the effect you want?" a senior Pentagon official said. "How much does a cruise missile cost? Between $1m and $2.5m. Well, a bribe is a PGM [precision guided missile) ­ it achieves the aim but it's bloodless and there's zero collateral damage.

"This part of the operation was as important as the shooting part; maybe more important. We knew that some units would fight out of a sense of duty and patriotism, and they did. But it didn't change the outcome because we knew how many of these [iraqi generals] were going to call in sick," he added.

The revelation by General Franks, who this week announced his intention to retire as commander of US Central Command, helps explain one of the enduring mysteries of the US-led war against Iraq: why Iraqi forces did not make a greater stand in their defence of Baghdad, in many cases melting away and changing into civilian clothes rather than forcing the allied troops to engage in bitter, street-to-street fighting.

John Pike, director of the Washington-based military research group, GlobalSecurity.Org, said: "It certainly strikes me that this is part of the mix. I don't think there is any way of discerning how big a part of the mix it is ... but it is part of the long queue of very interesting questions for which we do not yet have definitive answers." In the run-up to the war against Iraq, the Pentagon revealed its ambitious efforts to try to encourage Iraqi soldiers and officers to lay down their weapons rather than stand and fight.

As American and British troops massed in northern Kuwait in preparation, millions of leaflets printed in Arabic were dropped over towns and cities where troops were thought to be concentrated, urging them not to support Saddam. The leaflets gave specific instructions as to how the troops should surrender and included such information as ensuring that all tanks turrets were turned around and pointed towards the north. Senior officers were also targeted by US psy-ops officers using e-mails and telephone calls to their private addresses and mobile phones.

As a result, while some Iraqi forces ­ especially those supported by militias ­ put up staunch resistance in several cities as Allied forces marched north, many thousands of Iraqi soldiers chose not to fight, in most cases simply throwing off their uniforms and going home to their families.

But the confirmation ­ revealed in the current edition of Defence News by reporter Vago Muradian ­ that crucial senior officers were bribed, would explain why there was so little resistance in locations where it was anticipated that better-trained troops such as the Republican Guard would make a stand.

Some of the techniques employed by the Pentagon to persuade Iraqi troops not to fight were used with some success in the recent war in Afghanistan, where US special forces carried with them considerable sums of money in dollar bills to buy off warlords whose support was deemed crucial to the war effort.

This follow-up story, sourcing "Le Journal du Dimanche" suggests that the Republican Guard commander Tikriti was spirited away on a U.S. military transport, and that the U.S. falsely declared Tikriti was dead.

I don't know anything about the source, but the story seems to follow the Independent story's logic, so is at least plausible.

http://www.islamonline.net/English/News/2003-05/25/article14.shtml

Saddam Betrayed By Republican Guard Chief: Report

PARIS, May 25 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Special Republican Guard chief, and one of Saddam Hussein’s cousins, Maher Sufian al-Tikriti, betrayed the deposed Iraqi leader by ordering his elite forces not to defend Baghdad after making a deal with the United States, a leading newspaper reported on Sunday, May 25.

General Tikriti, responsible for defending the Iraqi capital, left Baghdad aboard a U.S. military transport plane, bound for a U.S. base outside Iraq, Le Journal du Dimanche reported Sunday, citing an Iraqi source close to Saddam's former regime.

His departure, along with that of a 20-strong entourage, came on April 8, the day before U.S. forces swept into Baghdad, and after U.S. Marines announced that the general had been killed, added the press report.

Before he left Baghdad, following the capture of the capital's international airport on April 4, Sufian ordered his troops to lay down their weapons, another Iraqi general, Mahdi Abdullah al-Dulaimi, was quoted as saying.

Sufian does not appear on the U.S. military's list of most wanted Iraqis, which names Barzan al-Ghafur Sulayman Majid as commander of the Special Republican Guard, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).

An Arab diplomat told Le Journal du Dimanche that the plot was hatched more than a year before by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), noting: "Many suitcases filled with dollars were floating around."

The report helps explain one of the enduring mysteries of the U.S.-led invasion against Iraq: why the U.S. forces rolled into Baghdad to no resistance from Iraqi forces, in many cases “melting away and changing into civilian clothes,” rather than forcing the invading troops to engage in bitter, street-to-street fighting.

"Being cautious, those who accepted the deal only agreed to defect once the American soldiers were in sight. The signal was to be the taking of the airport in Baghdad," the diplomat added.

The press report came one day after U.S. commander in Iraq Tommy Franks said that senior Iraqi officers in command of troops defending key Iraqi cities against the U.S.-led invasion were bribed not to fight American forces.

“These Iraqi officers had acknowledged their loyalties were no longer with the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, but with their American paymasters,” Franks said.

“We knew that some units would fight out of a sense of duty and patriotism, and they did. But it didn't change the outcome because we knew how many of these [iraqi generals] were going to call in sick," he added.

In the run-up to the invasion against Iraq, the Pentagon revealed its ambitious attempts to encourage Iraqi soldiers and officers to lay down their weapons rather than stand and fight, the Independent reported.

Aziz’s Family In Amman

Meanwhile, a relative to Saddam’s deputy prime minister Tareq Aziz, who surrendered last month to U.S. forces, said the latter’s family is living in Amman under police protection.

"The wife of Aziz, Umm Ziad, his two sons, the wife and three children of one of them, arrived in Jordan several days ago," the relative told AFP on condition of anonymity.

The only member of the family to stay in Baghdad was Aziz's married daughter.

The elder son Ziad's wife is expecting their fourth child, the relative added, while his younger brother is studying medicine.

The relative added the family had not heard from Aziz since he surrendered to U.S. forces in Baghdad on April 24.

The Daily Telegraph said late in April that Saddam Hussein security chiefs placed members of Aziz's family under arrest shortly before the start of the war to make sure that the former Iraqi deputy prime minister did not defect to the West.

The paper added that Aziz might have sold Saddam out by helping the U.S. target the place of a secret meeting chaired by the former Iraqi leader one day before the invasion opened its salvoes on March 20.

[Riggo-toni]

This may very well be true, and if so, was a smart move on our part!!!

[Bigkatt]

If True.........Great job by our Intel guys.

[luckydevil]

I have no problems with it

[Atlanta Skins Fan]

I'm still tracking this story. It appears that the Independent did not break the story, but rather the May 19 "Defense News" did, based on its May 10 interview with U.S. General Tommy Franks.

So far, the only significant U.S. mainstream publication that I've seen pick up the story is Slate, in the article I quote below.

My question is, why is the U.S. mass media spiking this story? It's pretty big news. As I said earlier, I actually agree with the decision. My main problem with the story is a sense of American PR fraud by omission -- it's not quite a lie (not to disclose the bribery), but it's a massive "lie by omission". That this lie by omission is being magnified by U.S. major media silence is disturbing.

I still wonder if there's more to the story that we're not hearing. Why couldn't these Iraqi generals deliver Saddam Hussein? How do we know that Hussein wasn't in on the bribery -- that the U.S. didn't offer him safe passage to stand down?

You might think these questions are unwarranted, but you said as much when I raised these rumors some weeks ago. Now Tommy Franks admits the generals were bribed. Seems like a pretty smart idea, so why not just explain this when Baghdad fell so quickly? What's so hard about the truth?

http://slate.msn.com/id/2083271/

Slate.com

Smart Bribes

Centcom's real secret weapon.

By Fred Kaplan

Posted Tuesday, May 20, 2003, at 2:49 PM PT

A fascinating piece in the May 19 Defense News quotes Gen. Tommy Franks, chief of U.S. Central Command, confirming what had until now been mere rumors picked up by dubious Arab media outlets—that, before Gulf War II began, U.S. special forces had gone in and bribed Iraqi generals not to fight.

"I had letters from Iraqi generals saying, 'I now work for you,' " Franks told Defense News reporter Vago Muradian in a May 10 interview.

The article quotes a "senior official" as adding, "What is the effect you want? How much does a cruise missile cost? Between one and 2.5 million dollars. Well, a bribe is a PGM [precision-guided munition]—it achieves the aim, but it's bloodless and there's zero collateral damage."

One official is quoted as saying that, in the scheme of the whole military operation, the bribery "was just icing on the cake." But another says that it "was as important as the shooting part, maybe more important. We knew that some units would fight out of a sense of duty and patriotism, and they did. But it didn't change the outcome because we knew how many of these [iraqi generals] were going to call in sick."

All of which further reinforces the vague sense that—for all the embeds, armchair generals, and round-the-clock news coverage—we still know startlingly little about what really happened in this war.

The Defense News article raises what could be the biggest military question of all: Just what won this war so swiftly—the high-tech prowess and agility of the modern American military, or old-fashioned back-alley spycraft? Which was the real wonder weapon—the smart bomb or the greenback?

I suspect a bit of both. But before we rush ahead and restructure the entire U.S. military on the basis of the lessons from the war, it might be good to find out for sure just what those lessons were.

A month ago, I posed eight unanswered questions about this war. (Only one of them has since been resolved.) Here's another:

How many Iraqi generals, representing how many brigades or divisions, were paid off? How much money passed hands? Where are these generals today? As a broader assessment, to what degree did the Republican Guard collapse because they were bombarded and outmaneuvered—and to what degree because their generals went on paid leave? This is not a matter of mere curiosity. If bribes played a major part, we should understand that the tactic may not work against more ideologically driven commanders—say, North Koreans (who would have nothing to buy with the money, in any case) or al-Qaida higher-ups (who have apparently turned up their noses at the $25 million reward for turning over Osama Bin Laden).

While we're at it, here's another question, about the continuing mystery of the missing weapons of mass destruction. When Secretary of State Colin Powell made his Feb. 5 presentation to the U.N. Security Council—the much-lauded but rejected pitch for taking action against Iraq—he played two tape recordings of intercepted conversations between Iraqi officers. On one, from Nov. 26, 2002, the day before U.N. weapons inspectors were to visit a certain site, an Iraqi colonel told a Republican Guard brigadier general, "We evacuated everything. We don't have anything left." On the second, one Republican Guard commander told another, "Write this down: Remove the expression 'nerve agent' whenever it comes up in wireless instructions." These tapes struck many at the time as persuasive evidence (I called it a "smoking gun") that a) Iraq possessed illegal weapons, was deliberately hiding them from the inspectors, and c) was not likely to give up the weapons on its own.

So, here's the question, which could now presumably be answered: Who were these officers on the tapes? Are they still alive? Were they among the Iraqi officers who were bribed before the war? Were they taken away someplace and interrogated—or could they be interrogated now—on exactly what was "evacuated" and just where those hushed-up "nerve agents" are? If not, why not? The U.S. intelligence officials involved in this intercept must have known, or could have found out, the identities of the Iraqis speaking. Is it possible that we let these A-list witnesses disappear?

[redman]

This is actually consistent with the reports from the Pentagon and CentCom during the war about our direct cell phone and email contact with Iraqi leaders to lobby them into surrendering and other cooperation. I too have no problem with this.

BTW AST, the words "very reliable Independent" should never be uttered. They may have this story right, but if they slanted any farther left they'd be horizontal.

[Art]

ASF,

You'll have to show the board the thread you're talking about that attacked the idea of having bribed Iraqi generals not to fight because if I'm not mistaken, we've all known that was part of what was going on for some time. We were announcing as much from the day the war started in that we were in contact with Iraqi generals.

I certainly think this was a good idea. Perhaps after you refresh our memory as to what you wrote before we can identify why a previous message may have been met with less pleasure.

[Atlanta Skins Fan]

Originally posted by Art

ASF,

You'll have to show the board the thread you're talking about that attacked the idea of having bribed Iraqi generals not to fight because if I'm not mistaken, we've all known that was part of what was going on for some time.

As I wrote earlier in this thread, I hadn't referred specifically to the generals, but rather Saddam and his men standing down in return for safe passage and cash, enabling the coalition to take Baghdad without a fight.

So far the main thrust of this rumor I posted earlier seems to be correct, with the notable exception of whether Hussein himself was included. (I'm still curious about that.)

Here's my post from May 7.

the rumor in Middle East circles is that Saudi Arabia brokered a deal between the U.S. and Hussein's leadership, by which Hussein and his men would escape to Syria (possibly now with this cash?), the U.S. would exit Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. would occupy Iraq as a central Middle East military base without having to conquer Baghdad by force. Just a rumor, but something to consider.

This isn't a big deal. It's just that occasionally I can be "somewhat right" about theories people dismiss.

[Art]

Uh, ASF, no offense brother, but, the two theories aren't even in the ballpark of similar ideas. That the U.S. may have bought of some generals to make the capture of Baghdad easier is completely different than paying off Saddam to flee, especially when he'd already been given a chance to flee.

[inmate running the asylum]

I don't see any problem with buying off some generals, especially if it saved American lives.

I heard about this possibility in the first week of the war, when it was reported on Fox News.

So I don't see where there is any media coverup here. In fact I think it's old news.