Mole may have been fed false information

THE revelation that a mole inside US Central Command was sending to the Russians secret operational material about the coalition plan to invade Iraq in March 2003 is the most extraordinary development to emerge since Saddam Hussein was found in a hole in the ground.

However, the mole’s betrayal might have provided little assistance to the Iraqi dictator. It is conceivable that the material was either deliberately skewed to confuse the Baghdad regime or was out of date by the time that Saddam and his war planners were given the details.

There is even a possibility that the mole had been discovered by the Americans early on and steps were taken to feed him or her with false information. None of the material released in the Pentagon papers gave Saddam such crucial information that enabled him to take measures against the US-led advance on Baghdad.

There can never have been any doubt in Saddam’s mind that the Americans and British planned to advance from Kuwait, since all the coalition forces were assembled in the desert areas south of the Kuwaiti/Iraqi border.

The document passed to Baghdad states that the Americans also planned to attack from the north and the east. In fact, US Marines and special forces attacked from the west, and the plan to mount an offensive from the north was abandoned when Turkey refused to allow coalition forces to invade from Turkish territory.

The original British operation was to have been exclusively from the north, but after the decision by the Turkish parliament to prohibit the use of Turkish bases, Britain had to switch all its troop deployments and armour to Kuwait for an attack from the south.

The document revealed that the mole in Central Command tipped off the Russians that the Americans had decided against occupying major Iraqi cities en route to Baghdad. This was accurate. Apart from the British mission to seize and occupy Basra and create a safe route for logistics movements from Kuwait to Baghdad, the plan was for US divisions to sweep past the other cities on the way to the Sunni triangle in central Iraq to reach Baghdad as rapidly as possible. US forces advanced past Najaf and Nasariyah so quickly that they were on the outskirts of Baghdad before Iraq’s Revolutionary Guard divisions were able to put up a proper fight.

With or without intelligence tip-offs from the Russians, Saddam was incapable of mounting a defence of his capital city or of deploying his supposedly elite Revolutionary Guards to protect his regime.