Welcome back, friends. Welcome back to another edition of The Corbett Report. I'm James Corbett of CorbettReport.com, coming to you, as always, from the sunny climes of Western Japan here in July of 2025 with another edition of Questions for Corbett. And this time we're going to take the question from the mailbag, specifically from an email that came in from Cali, I'm going to say, or perhaps Cal, not sure how to pronounce that, who writes, Hi, Mr.
Corbett, my question is about Saddam Hussein. Can you reveal connections between him and intelligence agencies? Thank you for the question, Callie. And the answer is yes. Yes, I can reveal some interesting connections.
And actually, I think this is an important question because it gives us insight not only into an important piece of recent history that I think still has relevance in the world today, but also gives us insight into the broader question of how certain deep state puppets or toys or whatever they may be, operate on the geopolitical stage, which I think is valuable knowledge to have. So let's get into the details.
And in order to start tracing the connection between Saddam Hussein and the intelligence agencies, I think we have to set the stage back in 1958, which was when Abdul Karim Qasim and some fellow officers in the Iraqi military.
Modeling themselves after the Free Officers Movement in Egypt, which had overthrown the king there in 1952, decided to overthrow the king in Iraq, specifically King Faisal II, the Hashemite king who had been pro-British installed by, or at least propped up by the British, and was anti-Arab, which was not to the liking of many in Iraq at the time. There was a growing pan-Arab movement, obviously, and there was a lot of pro-Arab nationalist sentiment in Iraq at the time.
So these officers, capitalizing on that sentiment and sharing it themselves, decided to overthrow the king and staged a bloody coup. Killing not only King Faisal II, but also many members of his family and other high-ranking members of his government, in order to topple the government and install a new one. And that was the July 14th revolution that took place there in Iraq in 1958. And as a result of which, Abdul Karim Qasim quickly consolidated power and became the new prime minister of Iraq.
But as is the way of such things, quickly after becoming the new prime minister and consolidating that power, he started to turn away from the ideals of the conspirators who had put him in place. So instead of being a pro-Arab nationalist, Kassim started to become more of a pro-Iraqi nationalist. He wanted more of the power for himself and less of this feel-good Arab nationalism, pan-Arabism that was sweeping the Middle East at that time.
So as a result of that, you started to get these splinter groups. People who were unhappy with the way Qasim started to wield his power. One of these splinter groups was the Ba'ath Party. And this consisted of people who were pro-Arab nationalist and were unhappy with the direction Qasim was taking the country. And within the Ba'ath Party, there formed an even smaller clique that decided to take it upon themselves to assassinate Abdul Karim Qasim and take over the Iraqi government.
So this ultimately precipitated in a six-man squad that came together to assassinate Qasim. And that six-man squad included a then relatively unknown 22-year-old law school dropout named Saddam Hussein. So, Brock, let's cut to the exciting footage of the event in which this assassination squad attempted to assassinate Abdul Karim Qasim. Come on! Come on!
Oh, okay, maybe that wasn't actual file footage of the dramatic assassination attempt on Qasim, but it was footage of a sort, and it's perhaps even more perplexing and intriguing than actual footage of the event would have been.
Specifically, that was Al-Ayam Al-Tawila, which is apparently translated into English as The Long Days, and was a 1980 propaganda film commissioned by none other than Iraqi president-slash-dictator Saddam Hussein based on an autobiography, which was ghost-ridden for him, that told the valiant attempt of the plucky young Saddam Hussein and his road to becoming the wonderful dictator that we all know and love. Apparently, there was a six-hour version of this movie that Hussein forced people
to watch on many occasions. and it was a favorite of the regime for a long time. Intriguingly, and I say intriguing because apparently it was co-directed, question mark, edited, question mark, by Terrence Young, who people in the crowd may or may not recognize as a director of at least three different James Bond movies, including Thunderball and Dr. No, and somehow or other became involved with this 1980 Iraqi propaganda film.
I don't know the details of this, and unfortunately, I still don't know the details. You can go to the site MI6HQ, which purports to tell you about Terrence Young, the dictator's director, but unfortunately, the details on this are maddeningly slight. They talk about how in 1979, Young was, quote, approached about a biographical project commissioned by the Iraqi dictator. Okay.
Young was commissioned to edit The Long Days, a mammoth six-hour biopic on the life of Saddam, at a time when the West's attitude to the regime was quite different than what it is today. So, okay. Who approached? In what way? Why did Young take this project? How was he involved in this? Did he co-direct, as sometimes stated? All basically question marks. But it does go on to provide some context about the film.
The film was a crucial part of the personal mythology Saddam constructed around his early life, particularly his involvement in the 1959 assassination attempt on the life of Abdul Al-Karim Qasim, the brigadier who led the 1958 coup. Saddam was injured in the gunfight and fled, dressing as a Bedouin and escaping Baghdad on horseback. According to the film, he rode north for four days towards his hometown of Tikrit and almost drowned, swimming across the cold waters of the Tigris to freedom.
He later relied upon his heroic account of the escape to build up the folklore that fueled his strongman image. So it was an important propaganda film, but of course propaganda. And perhaps one of the most important things that we can learn about this assassination attempt is that it was unsuccessful. They did not succeed. Despite what you would think from watching that scene, they did not succeed in killing Qasim. And secondly, there was support for this assassination attempt.
And I'll give you three guesses who was supporting that. No, oh, okay, I'll give you one guess. Yes, it was the CIA. You are correct. How did you know? And we can take this advisedly from a number of sources. One of them is this important article from 2003, exclusive Saddam Ki in early CIA plot by Richard Sale, which notes, among other things, while many have thought that Saddam first became involved with U.S.
Intelligence agencies at the start of the September 1980 Iran-Iraq war, his first contacts with U.S. Officials date back to 1959 when he was part of a CIA-authorized six-man squad tasked with assassinating then-Iraqi Prime Minister General Abdul Al-Karim Qasim. It goes on to talk about why the CIA and the West generally were interested in getting rid of Qasim, and they talk about this anti-Soviet Baghdad pact that Iraq was part of from the mid-1950s.
Which Iraq was seen as a good buffer state against the Soviets in the Cold War. So the anti-Soviet Baghdad pact basically solidified Iraq's role on the U.S. Side of that war. but Kasim had decided to withdraw from the pact in 1959, an act that freaked out everybody out, according to a former senior U.S. State Department official. And they go on to cite CIA Director Alan Dulles, who said that Iraq was the most dangerous spot in the world.
So, of course, the CIA got involved in his overthrow, specifically in the mid-1980s. Miles Copeland, a veteran CIA operative, and yes, for those keeping track at home, that is Miles Copeland, as in the father of Stuart Copeland, the drummer of the police, told UPI that the CIA had enjoyed close ties with Qasim's ruling Ba'ath Party, just as it had close connections with the intelligence service of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul-Nassar.
In a recent public statement, Roger Morris, a former National Security Council staffer in the 1970s, confirmed this claim, saying that the CIA had chosen the authoritarian and anti-communist Ba'ath Party as its instrument. So this article goes on to point out that Saddam, while only in his early 20s, became a part of a U.S. plot to get rid of Qasim.
And according to this source, the State Department official, Saddam was installed in an apartment in Baghdad on Al-Rashid Street, directly opposite Qasim's office in Iraq's Ministry of Defense to observe Qasim's movements. The move was done with full knowledge of the CIA, and Saddam's CIA handler was an Iraqi dentist working for CIA and Egyptian intelligence. The article goes on to talk about the attempt itself. The assassination was set for October 7th, 1959, but it was completely botched.
Accounts differ. One former CIA official said that the 22-year-old Saddam lost his nerve and began firing too soon, killing Qasim's driver and only wounding Qasim in the shoulder and arm. Darwish told UPI that one of the assassins had bullets that did not fit his gun and that another had a hand grenade that got stuck in the lining of his coat. It bordered on farce, a former senior U.S.
Intelligence official said. And it notes that Saddam, whose calf had been grazed by a fellow would-be assassin, so shot by one of his own, escaped to Tigrit thanks to CIA and Egyptian intelligence agents, several U.S. Government officials said. Slightly different than that propaganda film, I suppose would have you believe. It goes on to say that while Saddam was in Beirut, the CIA paid for Saddam's apartment and put him through a brief training course, former CIA official said.
The agency then helped him to get to Cairo. And in Cairo, Saddam was installed an apartment in the upper-class neighborhood of Duki and spent his time playing dominoes in the Indiana Cafe, watched over by CIA and Egyptian intelligence operatives. During this time, Saddam was making frequent visits to the American embassy, where CIA specialists such as Miles Copeland and CIA station chief Jim Eichelberger were in residence and knew Saddam, former U.S. intelligence officials said.
Fast forward to February 1963, and Qasim was killed in a Ba'ath Party coup. Now, sources differ. Morris claimed recently that the CIA was behind the coup, which was sanctioned by President John F. Kennedy, but a former very senior CIA official strongly denied this. At any rate, the coup did happen. And it goes on to say that, noting that the Ba'ath Party was hunting down Iraq's communists.
The CIA provided the submachine gun-toting Iraqi National Guardsmen with lists of suspected communists who were then jailed, interrogated, and summarily gunned down. At the time, Saddam was taking part in those killings. He quickly became a key intelligence operative in the Iraqi government. And eventually, in 1979, Consolidated Power became president-slash-dictator of Iraq.
And that's when we got for example as this article notes the CIA Defense Intelligence Agency relation with Saddam intensified after the start of the Iran-Iraq war in September of 1980 and that's where. Most people would understand where the intelligence agency's links began, but no, they started way earlier. And again, we don't have to take this from this single article and the numerous sources that it is citing.
There are other articles that make this point. For example, A Tyrant, 40 Years in the Making, which gives some more context as to why the CIA would have participated in a overthrow of Qasim after the failed assassination attempt.
It says, for example, By 1961, the Qasem regime had grown more assertive, seeking new arms rivaling Israel's arsenal, threatening Western oil interests, resuming his country's old quarrel with Kuwait, talking openly of challenging the dominance of America in the Middle East, all steps Saddam Hussein was to repeat in some form. Qasem was regarded by Washington as a dangerous leader who must be removed. So it talks about the various things that the U.S.
Was doing in the wake of the 1963 coup. for example, sending arms to the new regime. Weapons later used against the same Kurdish insurgents the United States had backed against Qasem, and then abandoned. Soon, Western corporations like Mobil, Bechtel, and British Petroleum were doing business with Baghdad for American firms, their first major involvement in Iraq.
In 1968, after yet another coup, the Ba'athist general Ahmed Hassam al-Bakr seized control, bringing to the threshold of power his kinsman, Saddam Hussein. Again, this coup, amid more factional violence, came with CIA backing. Serving on the staff of the National Security Council under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in the late 1960s.
I, as in Roger Morris, the author of this report, often heard CIA officers, including Archibald Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and a ranking CIA official for the Near East and Africa at the time, speak openly about their close relations with the Iraqi Baathists.
We can also get more of this picture from yet another important article, this one from 1997 in The Independent, revealed how the West set Saddam on the bloody road to power, which notes, for example, new fresh evidence has emerged that popular Iraqi suspicions about the overthrow of Qasim in 1963 were correct. In a new book, Saeed Abarish, a writer on Arab political affairs, has gathered details of how the coup against General Qasim was organized and fine-tuned by, drumroll please, the CIA.
We came to power on a CIA train, said Ali Saleh Saadi, the minister of the interior of the regime, which replaced General Qasim. All right, and many more details in this article and some other sources that one can find. But long story short, yes, Saddam was part of a CIA-backed assassination attempt against Qasim in 1959, and at the very least, a CIA-supported overthrow of Qasim in 1963.
And it wasn't long before, as I say, he had started to consolidate more and more power, and ultimately, by 1979, installed himself as president of Iraq, at which point. Well, as has been noted, intelligence agency cooperation between Saddam's regime and the U.S. Only intensified, of course, in the wake of the 1980s Iran-Iraq war. And there is a lot that one can say about that and that has been said about that.
Of course, everyone has seen the iconic handshake between Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein in December 1983. But there's much more to that story besides, and you can get it from, for example, this handy-dandy resource from Global Policy that I will throw in that has a number of reports and articles about the collaboration between the U.S. and Iraq in the 1980s.
The Regal Report from 94, a report from 2002, officers say u.s aided iraq in war despite use of gas uh the true iraq appeasers morality in iraq then and now rumsfeld visits baghdad in 1984 to reassure iraqis document show etc etc there's a lot that one can dig into if one is so inclined but a lot has been said on these events in the past um but long story short in 1982 specifically um that is cited as a time in which the real collaboration really started on in earnest with
the CIA and the US generally seeing from the satellite images that Iran was. On the verge of making a significant breakthrough in the Iran-Iraq war and potentially rolling in on Baghdad and fulfilling Ayatollah Khomeini's promise to string Hussein up from the nearest Baghdad light pole. Well, they were quite freaked out about this potentiality. So the Uncle Sam started sharing satellite imagery with Saddam Hussein.
And in fact, that is when, in 1982, the CIA started a small one-man-at-first mission in Baghdad that was supplying satellite imagery throughout the Iran-Iraq war to the Iraqis. And this was in the face and in the wake of the fact that, the known fact at the time, that of course Saddam was using chemical weapons, not only against the Iranians, but also against the Kurds.
And that is something that, for example, I talk about in reportage, Essays on the New World Order, specifically in my essay on Escaping the Grand Chessboard. I outline exactly how that occurred and what that was about and where the arms were coming from, of course, the chemical weapons. As the old joke goes, of course, the U.S. knew that Saddam had chemical weapons because the receipts were in the basement of the Pentagon.
Well, yes, it was not only the U.S. that was helping with some of the precursors and materials for that chemical weapons program in Iraq, but it was the Europeans as well. And this is documented in a number of places. I'll throw in this trench of declassified CIA documents on Iraq's use of chemical weapons in the 1980s that show that, of course, as we all knew and has been reported many times, but here are the documents themselves.
Of course, they knew that Iraq had chemical weapons and was using them, were using them in the Iran-Iraq war. And yes, here's a specific document in which they say Iraq began an aggressive program to produce chemical weapons munitions in 1981. Chemical agent precursors, munitions, equipment, and expertise were purchased in Western Europe and Egypt with a view toward development of both mustard and nerve agents.
And then it goes on to talk about the mustard program was successful, etc., etc. Okay, wonderful. Great stuff. So all of that is documented on the record. We do not have to speculate about that.
Even the CIA admits it at this point. So yes, we all know about the 1980s Iran-Iraq war and the demonstrable on-the-record help that the CIA was giving in a number of different ways, including providing the satellite imagery, which was so vital for the Iraqis to fight that war to the stalemate that it ultimately arrived at. But of course, that brings us to the events of 1990 that we all now remember so well.
This is NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw. Reporting tonight from NBC News headquarters in New York. Good evening. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the tiny country that is a primary source of oil for much of the Western world. But tonight, the United States, the Soviet Union, Israel, and other powers are concentrating on diplomatic and economic solutions to this surprising and dangerous development.
The invasion by 100,000 Iraqi troops backed by air cover and tanks was brutally efficient. Iraq wants control of Kuwait's territory, its oil, and the money that comes with it. Ah, yes, who can forget the dramatic events of August 2nd, 1990, when Saddam Hussein just went absolutely berserk, and for no particular reason at all, just rolled tanks on Kuwait. Well, okay, there's more to the story than most people understand or realize.
There was some history there, not only between Iraq and Kuwait generally, but specifically with regard to the aforementioned Iran-Iraq war, which Iraq had depleted its resources fighting for eight years, and Saddam Hussein, perhaps not unreasonably, thought that the entire Arab world owed him a solid for having done that and been at the front line of that war and kept the Iranians at bay all that time.
But as a result of that war, he was deeply indebted to a number of nations, including Kuwait, and Kuwait was pumping too much oil, driving the price down, and for every dollar that the price went down on the international markets for a barrel of oil, the Iraqis lost something like a billion dollars in revenues. So he wanted them to stop drilling. There was the slant drilling, all of that. So clearly Hussein had his issues with Kuwait, which the U.S. definitely didn't know about.
And that culminated in what has now become the iconic July 25th meeting in which Hussein summoned the United States ambassador to Baghdad, April Glaspie, to his office for a high-level diplomatic meeting between the two sides, the results of which were then released as a transcript by the Iraqi foreign minister at the time, and then was published in the New York Times in September.
And although I guess there has been some dispute about the accuracy of this transcript over the years, there have been a number of releases and things which have basically confirmed that this is right in its particulars. Specifically, for example, Saddam Hussein, we do not want too high prices for oil, etc., etc. Glassby responds, we have many Americans who would like to see the price go above $25 because they come from oil-producing states, dot, dot, dot.
But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait, etc., etc. And you can read through the transcript. But that has been interpreted over the years by different parties in different ways. There are those who definitely see that there were green lights being given to Hussein, or at least what was being interpreted as green lights, as in, yes, go ahead, roll in on Kuwait, we're not going to stop you.
Others have interpreted that as a yellow light of some sort. At any rate, it seemed that there was some miscommunication or potentially deliberate miscommunication, and Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi government at least thought that the U.S. Were not going to be actively opposed to the invasion of Kuwait. But boy, were they wrong about that. And of course, we got the dramatic events of the Gulf War as the direct consequence of his decision.
So the real question then is, what was this meeting about? What was Glaspy saying? On what authority was she saying it? Essentially, the question is, was Saddam Hussein set up? Was he given the green light? Go ahead, we won't do anything. And then down comes the hammer. And if so, why? Wasn't Hussein this serviceable puppet for the CIA and US and Israeli intelligence operatives over the years? Hadn't he done his job in, at the very least, keeping Iran at bay throughout
the 1980s? Why, if he was set up, why would that happen? Well, again, there are a number of different interpretations of this. So here's an example of one scholar who believes that, yes, Saddam Hussein was deliberately set up to take the fall, essentially, with the Gulf War. The then U.S. ambassador in Baghdad met Saddam a week before the invasion of Kuwait. On 25th July 1990, she was an articulate Arabic speaker. She spoke Arabic very well. She was former U.S. ambassador in Kuwait.
She met Saddam on 25th July 1990. A week later, 2nd August, Saddam invaded Kuwait. And during that interview, the full text of it was published by Iraq. And the long extracts of it were published in New York Times. She told him verbatim that we do not interfere in inter-Arab conflicts and relations, giving him the green light to go and invade Kuwait.
And it was a trap, obviously. They interrupt him in order to proceed because during that time, during that year before he invaded Kuwait, there were military exercises in the United States. Led by General Schwarzkopf. Schwarzkopf became the overall commander of fighting Iraqi forces in Kuwait. And he was training his forces in the United States for the moment when Iraq crosses the border into Kuwait.
For a whole year, American forces in the United States were being trained how to fight Iraqi forces when they enter Kuwait. And the moment they crossed, Schwarzkopf, and this is in his own memoirs, phoned Powell, the then Defense Secretary, Powell, to tell him they have crossed the border. I'm coming to Washington. So the entrapment of Saddam was in full view. And this is not new, by the way. The United States turning against its own people.
Well, that's one perspective. On the other hand, you have, for example, Scott Horton, who in his book Enough Already seems to take the side that it probably was not a setup, it was a genuine miscommunication. If the administration had plotted to set up Hussein and snare him in a trap in the first place, it would probably not have looked much different than what actually took place.
Still, the simplest interpretation is that there was a massive failure to coordinate between the various U.S. government departments. Even though the Defense Intelligence Agency was warning that Hussein was, quote, not bluffing, end quote, when it came to his threats against Kuwait, the State Department was signaling at least a yellow light to Iraq to proceed.
Meanwhile, the CIA and military central command decided to encourage the Kuwaitis to continue taking an intransigent stance against Iraq's demands for new negotiations. Back at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Undersecretary for Policy Wolfowitz had given a public warning to Iraq, claiming the U.S. Was obligated to defend Kuwait. But their spokesman Pete Williams had walked it back.
The darker hypothesis that this divided response was a deliberate trap set for Hussein does not seem to hold up. But as a prominent Kuwaiti businessman explained, quote, I think that if the Americans had not pushed, the royal family would never have taken the steps that it did to provoke Saddam, end quote. All right. Two competing views of what may or may not have happened in that July 25th meeting between Hussein and Glaspy.
Make of it what you will. Although I will note that at the very least, Scott Horton does admit there that if this was a setup to get Hussein to invade Kuwait so that he could then be smart bombed to death. Well, they couldn't have done it any better if they were trying. So whether this was just an actual miscommunication or an intentional setup, It looks very similar from the outside. So if it was a setup, if the U.S.
Deep state, the Western forces that had been propping up and aiding Saddam for so many years suddenly decided they wanted to bring the hammer down on him, why? What was the reason behind that? Well, there are a few things we could point to, one of which comes from this book, Crusade, The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War.
And if you turn to this book, specifically page 107, you can read, the central command that Schwarzkopf inherited in 1989 had focused on a Soviet thrust south into Iran, a hypothesis obviated by the collapse of central authority in Moscow. Almost immediately after assuming command, he, Schwarzkopf, began looking at other threats. In September 1989, with encouragement from Undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz, the CINC asked the Defense Intelligence Agency to scrutinize Iraq as a potential foe.
By July 1990, he had assembled portions of a secret battle plan, Operations Plan 1002-90, Defense of the Arabian Peninsula, which was designed to parry an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia through Kuwait. All right, so there's another interesting piece on the table. There is an actual operations plan, defense of the Arabian Peninsula, that was being war-gamed out by Schwarzkopf there in July of 1990 as Glaspy was meeting with Hussein.
They were already working on the plans to strike Iraq, at any rate, to parry an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia through Kuwait. So they were already working on defending Kuwait there in July 1990 before any of this had actually transpired. And who was this being encouraged by? Oh, that's right, Undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz. That name rings a bell because, of course, he was part of the PNAC gaggle of neocons who, of course, infested the Bush, the George W.
Bush administration there in the early 2000s. And from the moment of 9-11, in fact, before 9-11, they were advocating for the ouster of Saddam. But obviously, from the moment of 9-11, they saw their great golden opportunity to try to use the events of 9-11 as some sort of excuse for re-invading Iraq. So that's, of course, all in the future at this point. So what does 1989-1990 Paul Wolfowitz, why is he so interested in trying to topple Saddam in Iraq? What was the point of that?
Well, maybe, just maybe, it's related to what his neocon fellow travelers were writing about in their Clean Break document just a few years later. In 1996, a group of prominent neoconservatives, including Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wormser, wrote a report for then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Titled, A Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, the report urged Israel to shape its strategic environment by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria.
The way to do this, the report concluded, was to focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right, as a means of foiling Syria's regional ambitions. Oh, of course, those neocons, or at least proto-neocons there in 1990, like Wolfowitz, may have had the concern that they demonstrated throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, which was toppling Saddam in Iraq as part of Israel's larger security operations.
So maybe that was what they were already starting to plan and think about there, as clearly Iran had been contained, at least for the time being after the Iran-Iraq war, So the next big threat Israel was worrying about was Saddam in Iraq. So that does make sense. That does check out. That would certainly be one reason why the deep state would set up and prop up and support this dictator for decades and then drop him at the drop of a hat because.
Hey, you know, he's served his role and now his role is to be the boogeyman and ultimately to fall.
And in addition to that obvious and on-the-record documented operations plan that was already underway in July of 1990, we can also put this in the broader context and framework of the coming New World Order, because of course there in 1990 slash into 1991, that was the time not only of the fall of the Soviet Union and the reordering of the world at that time, But obviously, major shifts were taking place on the global chessboard at that time that were being capitalized on by Uncle Sam.
And of course, extolled in that infamous September 11th, 1990 speech by George H.W. Bush, specifically talking about the Gulf War and the New World Order. And we stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment. The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation.
Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective, a new world order, can emerge, a new era, freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the nations of the world, east and west, north and south, can prosper and live in harmony. A hundred generations have searched for this elusive path to peace, while 1,000 wars raged across the span of human endeavor.
And today that new world is struggling to be born. A world quite different from the one we've known. A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. A world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak, This is the vision that I shared with President Gorbachev in Helsinki.
He and other leaders from Europe, the Gulf, and around the world understand that how we manage this crisis today could shape the future for generations to come. Yes, indeed, out of these troubled times can emerge the new world order, as George H.W. Bush intoned there. Yes, Christ-a-tunity, guys. And to top it all off, the Gulf War, of course, also was the excuse that was used to station U.S.
Troops in the Holy Land of the Arabian Peninsula for the first time, thus creating the excuse for Al-Siaida to start its reign of terror, as in how dare you occupiers set foot on the Holy Land. So it's win, win, win, win, win for the deep state, unless, of course, you happen to be Saddam. Hussein, I suppose there's a significant loss there, which does beg the question, then what was Saddam's role in all of this?
Was he a willing and conscious collaborator with these intelligence agencies and deep state forces? And if so, what was his read on his ultimate downfall? Well, there's a lot that can and should be said about that, one of which is the observation that there is a difference, for example, between a patsy and a willing puppet and a collaborator and a toy, for example. There are different ways in which assets can be deployed and sometimes even used without their knowledge.
And I would say that if you do go and watch False Flags, A Secret History of Al-Qaeda, I think there is the sense in which some of those LCIA agents, easy for me to say. Were genuine true believers in their cause, but had no idea, did not really understand that doors were being opened. Certain things were being facilitated. They were allowed to use these heavily surveilled communications. They were able to waltz in and out of countries and through borders because they were being allowed.
Those doors were being opened for them by forces that they did not understand or control themselves. And so the question might be, well, maybe Saddam was just an unwitting pawn in all of these intelligence agency machinations. Well, there is to some extent we can document that that is not true.
He certainly knew, for example, knew, obviously, that he was receiving the satellite data from the U.S., specifically from the CIA, who he allowed into the country in the Iran-Iraq war to provide him with that data. But from what we now know from the documents that have been declassified and released, we now know... That Saddam certainly didn't take any of that at face value. He certainly knew that there could have been a much bigger operation.
And in his new book on the Achilles trap, Steve Call, who was one of the sources for one of the many, many books cited in that False Flags documentary, he has gone through those records and talked, for example, about how in the early 1980s, Saddam was very, very cautious and curious about the satellite data and assuming that the CIA was also sharing satellite data with Iran so that they could battle themselves, Iran and Iraq could eventually battle themselves to a stalemate,
which they eventually did. And he was not without cause or reason for suspecting that would be the case. I mean, from what we now know, for example, Kissinger had the plan, the plot, to arm the Kurdish insurgency in Iraq just enough to undermine Saddam, but without actually winning. No one should be able to win a decisive blow. And similarly, between Iran and Iraq, it was, I believe, again, Kissinger who opined that it would be great if they could just basically fight themselves to nothing.
So Saddam was very cautious about what information was being provided to him and for what reason. And apparently, even before it became public knowledge in 1986, he was telling his own cabinet, who was apparently disbelieving of him. No, you don't understand. The U.S. are providing arms to Iran through the Israelis. And that seemed like a crazy conspiracy theory until, oh, it came out. Oh, Iran-Contra. Yeah, what was going on there and who was providing what to whom?
Turns out Saddam was a conspiracy realist in certain ways. So the question is, well, what happened there and what was he aware of and what was he not? Let's turn to the aforementioned Steve Call, who in a recent podcast appearance talking about his new book on the Achilles trap does raise some of these points. But just to set the story briefly, of course, Saddam started a war with Iran in 1980.
He got bogged down. And in 1982, the Iranians, through counterattack, looked like they might be about to break through Iraqi lines and drive on Baghdad and overthrow Saddam. Ayatollah Khomeini had vowed to do that, to hang Saddam from the nearest lamppost. Well, the Reagan administration saw these developments through satellite photography. It wasn't available, obviously, to either of the combatants, and they panicked.
They said, we can't afford to have the Iranian revolution expand through the conquest of Iraq with all of its oil, not to mention its population and so on. So they sent a CIA officer, Thomas Twenton, who you might have worked with or come across, who was basically empowered to carry satellite photography evidence of Iranian military positions into Saddam and say, look, we're here to help you avoid losing this war. And that started a liaison that lasted for six years.
And during it, the United States provided secretly, primarily through the CIA, a considerable advantage to Saddam. And throughout, Saddam was suspicious about what the Americans were doing. He didn't trust this. I think at first he sort of said, I don't believe these photographs are accurate. Like, what if they're being doctored to get us, lure us into an ambush? But I think his generals made it clear, well, actually, this stuff's pretty valuable.
It's got to be accurate. We can look over the hill. And yes, they are there. So gradually, the military became advocates for continuing and even expanding this information sharing. But Saddam always harbored suspicions. And in meetings, he would say to his colleagues, you know, look, I think, suppose these photographs are accurate. I'll bet you the Americans are giving the exact same ones to the Iranians because what they're trying to do is to make us fight into a permanent stalemate.
And finally, in late 1986. Then Attorney General Edmund Meese revealed that, in fact, Saddam was right, that we had been collaborating for a brief period, relatively, a year, year and a half, with the Israelis to provide arms to Ayatollah Khomeini's regime to fight against Saddam in the hope that this would liberate hostages that Iranian proxies held in Lebanon. And as people will remember, it was a huge scandal, went on for years, there were prosecutions.
A lot of people in the Arab world were shocked that the Americans were doing this. Saddam was not surprised. There are these wonderful tapes of him the morning after the press conference, basically saying to his comrades, see, I told you, I've told you this for years. You didn't believe me. This is the permanent state of conspiracy. The Americans, the Israelis, and Ayatollah Khomeini, the Americans created the Iranian revolution. Don't you understand? Now it's a project of America and Israel.
And this reveals that I understood this correctly all along. All right. So the point in terms of its impact is what you were alluding to, which is that he never changed his mind about the existence of this conspiracy against him. He held on to this. And there are tapes years later in the 90s where something completely different comes up in his relations with the Americans. And he says, look, the answer is what happened in 1986. That's still going on. Don't you understand?
Even though we know that it wasn't. And so, yeah, it had an enormous reinforcing influence on him. It made him confident about his suspicions about who was out to get him and about this conspiracy that he saw, this trilateral conspiracy between the United States, Israel and revolutionary Iran. If you're interested in that, I will, of course, provide the link to that full podcast, as well as everything else that I am talking about and citing in today's
episode. So you can go and explore that to your heart's content. But let's summarize what it is we have learned today. First of all, let's be clear. Saddam was not an idiot. He did not survive the decades that he did survive playing the Game of Thrones of Iraqi politics and the many assassination attempts and intrigues and plots that were happening internally there in Iraq, let alone the many enemies that he had crewed around the world.
He did not survive for so long because he was a complete idiot. He did have some sense. He certainly knew that there was active intelligence agency complicity and cooperation. Of course, he would have known, given that he was involved with CIA handlers as far back as 1959. So he played that game and he played it well enough to survive, at least up until the early 2000s. So there's that. Of course, this is not to say Saddam was a good guy, guys. No,
he was a tyrant. He was a thug. He was a brutal, murderous dictator, of course. He was aware that he was playing a game with the intelligence agencies and that that game could come back and burn him, and it did ultimately do so. So there's a lot to be said about that. But it does, at the very least, I think, again, this is a good illustrative example, not only of an important part of political history, our recent political history, that it would behoove us not to forget.
It's already starting to go down that rabbit hole. Oh, remember that whole Iraq war thing and all that stuff? Ah, whatever, you know, ancient history. No, it is important for us to know about that and how those millions of Iraqis and many others died in the process on the basis of all the lies that were told in the intelligence agency manipulations.
But even just on the broader scale, it is interesting to note how these puppets slash agents, patsies, toys of the intelligence agencies can be used and manipulated and discarded at a moment's notice, as they inevitably are. Gaddafi and others being good examples of how that process works. And maybe a sober example for would-be dictators of the future maybe don't play that game with the intelligence agencies because they are going to double-cross you at some point.
Anyway, I just want to thank you, Kelly, for allowing me to put all of this on record. I think there's some important information in here. And if you think so as well, I would invite you to go to CorbettReport.com so you can peruse all of the many, many show notes for today's episode. But I think we're going to leave that here for today. Thank you for the question. And this is James Corbett of CorbettReport.com. Looking forward to talking to you again in the near future.
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