Airstrip One

The Iraqi archives - 8th May 2003, 23.16

Insight Magazine has a number of pieces detailing the initial discoveries from the captured Iraqi archives. Their first astonishing claim: the Russians are acting just like the Soviets, using the same dirty tactics and smears. The only difference is that they are acting in the national interest of Russia. The article does highlight a possible problem in post-war Iraq: the possible utilisation of stolen archives by Russia to blackmail former Ba'athists for their own advantage. This tactic has proved succesful in post-communist countries.

What really happened? U.S. intelligence sources aren't talking. But Russian tradecraft and practice show a precedent. A parliamentary investigation in post-Communist Poland found that before many archives in Central and Eastern Europe were destroyed, they were copied and shipped to Russia. A Czech parliamentary probe reached a similar conclusion. Moscow then penetrated the newly democratic societies by controlling former internal-security agents of the old Communist regimes. Jiri Ruml, in the early 1990s chief of a parliamentary commission to investigate the StB Soviet-era security forces, reported to lawmakers that the files of 10,000 StB agents and informers were missing, and that "former collaborators of the StB are still continuing their activity, and their network reaches into the new parliament."

However, those archives that were not incinerated, have been looted or lifted by Iraqis and the western press.

U.S. troops arrived too late to take control of many of the 23 government ministries and other intelligence-rich sites in Baghdad. Local Iraqis carted off bags of documents and videotapes from secret-police facilities. An American TV company reportedly stuffed several vehicles with secret Iraqi documents. British journalists sacked the foreign-ministry building April 22 after a reporter from London's Daily Telegraph discovered a document of former foreign minister Tariq Aziz in the wreckage, showing that antiwar leader George Galloway, a left-wing Member of Parliament, allegedly was in the pay of Saddam.

It appears that Britain and the United States did not anticipate the lively interest that access to these archives would bring, just as they did not anticipate the chaos or the looting.

U.S. troops arrived too late to take control of many of the 23 government ministries and other intelligence-rich sites in Baghdad. Local Iraqis carted off bags of documents and videotapes from secret-police facilities. An American TV company reportedly stuffed several vehicles with secret Iraqi documents. British journalists sacked the foreign-ministry building April 22 after a reporter from London's Daily Telegraph discovered a document of former foreign minister Tariq Aziz in the wreckage, showing that antiwar leader George Galloway, a left-wing Member of Parliament, allegedly was in the pay of Saddam.