The United States and the Kurds a Cold War Story

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LittThel eUnited States and the Kurds

The United States and the Kurds A Cold War Story

✣ Douglas Little

Beneath the snowcapped Zagros Mountains that stretch from southeastern Turkey through northern Iraq to western Iran live 25 million Kurds, the largest ethnolinguistic group in the world without a state of their own. Speaking a language closer to Farsi than Arabic or Turkish and practic- ing Sunni Islam despite the presence of powerful Shiite communities nearby, the Kurds over the centuries forged a distinctive national identity shaped by an abiding mistrust of Turks, Arabs, and other outsiders who opposed Kurdish independence. After the Ottoman Empire collapsed in the wake of the First World War, the Kurds embarked on a relentless quest to establish a free, united, and independent Kurdistan, sometimes bargaining with neighboring peoples, other times pleading with the great powers, but never ºinch- ing from armed struggle to secure national liberation. When the Second World War ended, most Americans had never heard of the Kurds, and the few who had were bafºed by the always complex and occasionally absurd tribal, ethnic, and religious rivalries that plagued the no-man’s-land wedged between the Anatolian Peninsula and the headwaters of the Tigris River.1 By the late 1940s, however, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in an escalating Cold War in which an early hot zone stretched from the Turkish straits through Iraq and Iran to the Persian Gulf. As the ideologi- cal conºict heated up, Washington discovered that Kurdish nationalism could be useful in limiting Moscow’s inºuence in the Middle East. In a classic Cold War story that would be repeated from the central highlands of Vietnam to the rugged savannas of Angola, U.S. policymakers exploited ancient ethnic

1. For a concise overview of Kurdish history through the First World War, see David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds, 3rd ed. (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2004), pp. 38–112; and John Bulloch and Harvey Morris, No Friends but the Mountains: The Tragic History of the Kurds (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 50–87. For an excellent account of recent Kurdish affairs, see Quil Law- rence, Invisible Nation: How the Kurds’ Quest for Statehood Is Shaping Iraq and the Middle East (New York: Walker and Company, 2008). Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 12, No. 4, Fall 2010, pp. 63–98 © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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and tribal fault lines inside Kurdistan to achieve short-term geopolitical advantage. U.S. ofªcials displayed neither diplomatic commitment nor senti- mental attachment to the Kurds, whom they viewed as little more than spoilers in a 40-year struggle to keep the Soviet Union and its Arab clients like Iraq off balance. Although the Kurds began to make cameo appearances in con- temporary news accounts in the 1970s, recently declassiªed documents now make it possible to trace more fully the ambivalent U.S. relationship with Kurdish nationalism during the Cold War.2 This article examines three key episodes: ªrst, the secret backing given to the Kurds by the administrations of Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Ken- nedy in an effort to weaken the Iraqi military regime of Abdel Karim Qassim, who had tilted toward Moscow after seizing power in Baghdad in July 1958; second, the cynical covert action launched by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in Iraqi Kurdistan, with help from Iran and Israel, after Saddam Hussein signed an alliance with the Soviet Union in April 1972; and third, Washington’s half-hearted attempts in the early 1990s to use Kurdish guerrillas to foment regime change in Iraq after the ªrst Gulf War. In each case, the U.S. government exploited long-standing anti-Arab resentments among the Kurds, secretly supplied U.S. guns or dollars or sometimes both, and helped ignite an insurrection in Kurdistan, only to pull the plug unceremoniously when events threatened to spiral out of control. The Kurds could reasonably claim to have been betrayed three times over, yet America’s ªckleness was not the only obstacle to Kurdish self-determination. Fierce tribal rivalries among the Kurds themselves made them easy prey to outside manipulation, and Arab strongmen like Saddam Hussein regarded an independent Kurdistan as a threat to their own nationalist aspirations. Nevertheless, the ambivalent U.S. response to Kurdish nationalism during the Cold War and its immediate aftermath helps explain why the Kurds have been so reluctant to embrace U.S. plans for a uniªed multiethnic Iraq in the post-Saddam era early in the new millennium.

2. For early coverage of secret U.S. relations with the Kurds, see George Lardner, Jr., “Nixon, Shah Tied to Arms for Kurds through CIA,” The Washington Post, 2 November 1975, pp. A1, A10; Joseph Fitchett, “Kurds Say CIA Betrayed Them,” The Washington Post, 19 November 1975, p. A11; William Saªre, “Mr. Ford’s Secret Sellout,” The New York Times, 5 February 1976, p. A15; William Saªre, “Son of ‘Secret Sellout,’” The New York Times, 12 February 1976, p. A17; and Taylor Branch, “The Trial of the CIA,” The New York Times Magazine, 12 September 1976. The ªrst overviews of U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) covert action during the Cold War offered only brief accounts of U.S. contacts with Kurdish nationalists. See John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Fall of the CIA, rev. ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), pp. 607–608; and John Prados, Presidents’ Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations from World War II through Iranscam (New York: William Morrow, 1986), pp. 313–315, 323. In an updated version of his earlier study, Prados expanded his discussion of Kurdish affairs to include material on the 1990s. See John Prados, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2006), pp. 391–395, 604. By contrast, a recent prize-winning but con-

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Cold War Comes to Kurdistan

Nearly 30 years before the Cold War began, Woodrow Wilson brought the United States into a hot war “to make the world safe for democracy.” When the Kurds learned that the twelfth of Wilson’s famous Fourteen Points proposed that “other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured . . . an absolutely unmolested opportunity to autonomous develop- ment,” they expected him to endorse an independent Kurdistan.3 Self- determination proved an elusive goal, however, largely because of great-power politicking at Versailles, where imperial ambitions trumped Kurdish nationalism. Branded in the covenant of the new League of Nations as a people “not able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world,” the Kurds inhabiting the old Ottoman vilayet of Mosul became part of the new multiethnic kingdom of Iraq, a British mandate ruled by King Faisal, an Arabian-born Hashemite prince.4 Convinced that there was no hope for Kurdish autonomy inside an Iraq dominated by Sunni and Shia Arabs, Sheik Mahmoud Barzinji, the self-styled “King of Kurdistan,” led a series of rebellions in the 1920s that culminated in an all-out guerrilla war in late 1930. Outgunned by the Iraqi army and bombed by the Royal Air Force, Barzinji and his followers ºed eighteen months later into exile, where the King of Kurdistan spent his ªnal years watching Britain’s showdown with Nazi Germany from the sidelines. By the time the war ended in 1945, a Kurdish nation-state seemed about as likely to emerge as the mythical kingdom of Shangri-La.5 Prospects for self-determination grew dimmer during the ªrst stages of the Cold War when the Kurds became entangled in a U.S.-Soviet confrontation over Iran. In early 1946 the administration of Harry S. Truman was

troversial history of the CIA does not mention covert action in Kurdistan at all. See Tim Weiner, Leg- acy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Random House, 2007). 3. Woodrow Wilson, “Final Draft of the Fourteen Points Address,” 7 January 1918, in Arthur S. Link, ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 62 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), Vol. 45, p. 528. For a superb analysis of the impact of Wilson’s Fourteen Points on Third World nationalism in the immediate wake of the First World War, see Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self- Determination and the International Origins of Anti-Colonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 2007). 4. “Draft Covenant of the League of Nations,” 3 February 1919, in Link, ed., Papers of Woodrow Wil- son, Vol. 54, p. 455. On the creation of an Iraqi nation-state that included parts of Kurdistan, see McDowall, Modern History of the Kurds, pp. 115–150; and Stephen Hemsley Longrigg, Iraq 1900– 1950: A Political, Social, and Economic History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 99– 105. 5. On Barzinji and the Kurdish uprisings against the British, see McDowall, Modern History of the Kurds, pp. 158–171; Bulloch and Morris, No Friends but the Mountains, pp. 87–97; and Jonathan Randal, After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? My Encounters with Kurdistan (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), pp. 120–125.

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alarmed when Iosif Stalin tried to prolong the USSR’s wartime occupation of Azerbaijan in northern Iran, which was scheduled to end six months after the victory over Japan. The Soviet government bankrolled Azeri separatists, bul- lied young Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and stirred up trouble in Iranian Kurdistan. On 22 January 1946, Kurdish ªrebrand Qazi Mohammed proclaimed the independent Republic of Mahabad in western Iran and appealed for Soviet support. In neighboring Iraq, Mullah Mustafa Barzani, a distant cousin of Sheik Barzinji, founded the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and took aim at the wobbly pro-Western Hashemite monarchy in Baghdad. On 5 March, three days after the deadline for Soviet withdrawal, U.S. diplomats conªrmed that Soviet military units were heading west toward Mahabad and that “another strong force of Soviet cavalry” was moving south “with Iraq frontier as reported destination.”6 George F. Kennan, who was fast emerging as the leading U.S. government expert on the Soviet Union, worried that things might get even worse. From Moscow, Kennan warned on 17 March that rumors abounded of “a Sov inspired and Sov armed Kurdish action to seize Mosul district” in Iraqi Kurd- istan, “with Sov forces in background prepared to back up insurgents in favorable circumstances and perhaps to come in after them, ostensibly at Kurd request.”7 In early May, however, the Soviet Union withdrew from Iran in exchange for guaranteed access to the Azeri oil ªelds, conªrming what Ken- nan’s boss, Ambassador Walter Bedell Smith, had suspected all along. Stalin’s meddling in Kurdish affairs was a “smoke screen” for Soviet petro-diplomacy, not a blank check issued to a band of “feuding nomads” who were “not wholly dependable instruments of Soviet policy.”8 Meanwhile, Archie Roosevelt, a U.S. military intelligence ofªcer and budding Middle East specialist who was the grandson of Theodore, arrived in Kurdistan, where he conªrmed that the Soviet Union was indeed ªshing in troubled waters. Nonetheless, Roosevelt insisted that the Kurdish leaders he met were not Soviet puppets. Although the Iranian Kurds “had managed, with Soviet help, to set up a virtually independent Kurdish republic” in Mahabad, Roosevelt recalled long afterward, “the Soviets were not visibly interfering in the internal affairs of Kurdistan.” In short, “Qazi Mohammed’s movement was nationalist, not Communist, and was accepted by a consider- able number of Kurds in other countries,” including Mustafa Barzani and the

6. Robert Rossow (Tabriz) Telegram to Department of State (DOS), 5 March 1946, U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, Vol. VII, p. 340 (hereinafter referred to as FRUS, with appropriate year and volume number). 7. Kennan Telegram to DOS, 17 March 1946, in FRUS, 1946, Vol. VII, pp. 362–364. 8. Smith Telegram to DOS, 17 June 1946, in FRUS, 1946, Vol. VII, pp. 824–825.

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KDP in Iraq.9 The Republic of Mahabad was not accepted by the Shah of Iran, however, and once Soviet forces were safely out of his realm, he sent Ira- nian troops into Kurdistan, where they captured Qazi Mohammed and drove Mustafa Barzani and several hundred Kurdish guerrillas into exile in the USSR. Appalled by the Shah’s decision to have Qazi Mohammed hanged in March 1947, Roosevelt returned to Washington later that spring to join the newly established Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), where he spent the next decade planning a series of counterinsurgency campaigns and covert actions from Iran to Greece.10 Roosevelt and other U.S. ofªcials worried that the Shah’s heavy-handed treatment of the Kurds would backªre. Fearful that a new round of violence in Kurdistan in September 1947 might mark the “start of Greek-type guerrilla warfare on [the] Iran-Soviet border, probably involving the Barzanis,” Under- secretary of State Robert Lovett urged the Iranians to consider some form of autonomy for the Kurds, “who, if alienated from Iran Govt by Army policy of recrimination, might well become [a] Soviet weapon against not only Iran but Turkey and Iraq as well.”11 The Shah, however, pursued a hard line over the following decade, jailing Kurdish leaders, banning the Kurdish language, and, with help from the pro-Western regime in Baghdad, destroying the re- maining Kurdish strongholds along Iran’s border with Iraq. Powerless to resist this Tehran-Baghdad axis, Mustafa Barzani bided his time in Moscow, learn- ing Russian, conferring with Soviet experts on guerrilla tactics, and plotting his return to Kurdistan.12 On 14 July 1958, left-wing ofªcers led by Colonel Abdul Karim Qassim stunned Roosevelt and his CIA colleagues by seizing power in Baghdad, mur- dering the royal family, and turning to the Soviet Union for support. Four months later, Qassim invited Mustafa Barzani to return to Iraq, hoping that the exiled KDP leader would serve as a counterweight to a rival tribe of pro- Western Kurds with close ties to Iran. Barzani, however, began pressing the new regime almost at once to grant autonomy to all of Iraq’s Kurds, something that Qassim was unwilling to consider because it would have eventually meant giving the KDP control over the oil ªelds near Mosul and Kirkuk. Un- able to achieve autonomy at the bargaining table, Barzani returned to the bat-

9. Archie Roosevelt, For Lust of Knowing: Memoirs of an Intelligence Ofªcer (Boston: Little Brown, 1988), p. 282. 10. Archie Roosevelt, Jr., “The Kurdish Republic of Mahabad,” The Middle East Journal, Vol. 1, No. 3 (July 1947), p. 268. 11. Lovett Telegram to George Allen (Tehran), 26 September 1947, in FRUS, 1947, Vol. V, pp. 960– 962. 12. Randal, After Such Knowledge, pp. 134–137.

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tleªeld in September 1961, ordering the KDP’s peshmerga (a Kurdish word meaning “those who face death”) to open ªre on Qassim’s troops in northern Iraq.13 Qassim was convinced that the Kurds were receiving support and encouragement from the United States. U.S. policymakers had been discussing ways to depose Iraq’s self-proclaimed “Sole Leader” for almost three years. As early as May 1959, British diplomats in Baghdad reported that recent “American intelligence contacts with Kurds” in the no-man’s-land between Iraq and Iran meant that “Qasim deªnitely suspected [the] Iranians and Americans of plotting against him.”14 Seven months later, a secret CIA report conªrmed that “the Iranian Kurds are capable of creating disturbances in Iraq if urged to do so by their government” and that “most Kurdish leaders in Iraq do not support the Qasim government.”15 By the spring of 1960, the agency was evidently considering even more extreme measures to achieve regime change in Baghdad, including exposing the Sole Leader to a lethal biotoxin.16 In the end, the CIA opted for political action rather than assassination. Although no evidence has yet surfaced indicating that the Kennedy administration actually gave the KDP a green light to launch a guerrilla war in the autumn of 1961, an April 1962 CIA report on the “ºuid” situation in Kurdistan did predict that “Mustafa Barzani may give Qasim some real trouble this year” in the far north. “[T]he ‘sole leader’ doesn’t have to worry about Barzani invading Baghdad,” the CIA concluded, but “he can’t afford to have a couple of battalions of Iraq’s bravest and boldest slaughtered in the mountains.”17 Later that year, a KDP representative contacted Roy Melbourne, the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Baghdad, with a message from Barzani. “Kurd made [a] strong plea for US support of [the] revolution movement,” Melbourne reported, and “said it needs money now and possibly arms later.” Although Barzani much preferred to have this support come from Washington rather than from Mos- cow, his people were facing “racial extinction,” and “before [the] Kurds will

13. Avshalom H. Rubin, “Abd al-Karim Qasim and the Kurds of Iraq: Centralization, Resistance and Revolt, 1958–63,” Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 4, No. 3 (May 2007), pp. 353–382. Massoud Barzani, Mustafa Barzani and the Kurdish Liberation Movement (1931–1961), ed. by Ahmed Ferhadi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) includes dozens of documents describing Kurdish tribal politics in the late 1950s and the KDP’s growing disaffection with the Qassim regime. 14. Ambassador Humphrey Trevelyan (Baghdad) to Foreign Ofªce (FO), Telegram, 21 May 1959, in PREM 11/4317, The National Archives of the United Kingdom (TNAUK). 15. CIA/RR SR 60-2:1, “The Kurds,” January 1960, RDP63-00314R000200140069-2, in CIA Re- cords Search Tool (CREST), National Archives and Records Service, College Park, MD (NARA). 16. On U.S. efforts to destabilize Qassim’s regime in 1959 and 1960, see Douglas Little, “Mission Im- possible: The CIA and the Cult of Covert Action in the Middle East,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 28, No. 5 (November 2004), pp. 694–695. 17. Sherman Kent to John McCone, “Qasim’s Troubles in Kurdistan,” 10 April 1962, in RDP79R00904A000800020023-9, in CREST, NARA.

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permit this they would take help from [the] USSR or from [the] devil himself.” Melbourne followed procedure in telling his visitor that the United States never meddled in the internal affairs of other countries.18 Nevertheless, after the Sole Leader announced plans in January 1963 to nationalize the Iraqi Petroleum Company (IPC), whose owners included several Western oil ªrms, British ofªcials reported that “the U.S. Government was beginning to look with more interest at rumours that the Kurds and Arab nationalists might col- laborate against Kassim.”19 On 8 February, while most of the Iraqi army was mired in the mountains of Kurdistan, a small group of military ofªcers linked to the underground Ba’ath Party staged a bloody coup d’état in Baghdad that culminated in the arrest and public execution of Abdul Karim Qassim the next day. Ba’ath is an Arabic term meaning “rebirth” or “renaissance,” and the Iraqi Ba’athists em- braced a radical pan-Arab ideology whose battle cry, “Freedom, Unity, and Socialism,” echoed the rhetoric of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. In the days that followed, Ba’athist death squads led by the 26-year-old Saddam Hussein butchered hundreds of Qassim’s supporters using hit lists allegedly provided by the CIA. Although the Kurds did not take part in the military coup, they shed no tears for Qassim. Neither did U.S. policymakers. “While it’s still early, [the] Iraqi revolution seems to have succeeded,” White House Middle East expert Robert Komer informed President Kennedy a few hours after Qassim’s fall. “It is almost certainly a net gain for our side.” A Pentagon ofªcial predicted that “if the coup is successful, relations between the U.S. and Iraq will be considerably improved.”20 Soon thereafter, however, U.S. ties with the new Ba’athist regime were complicated by developments in Iraqi Kurdistan, where Mustafa Barzani insisted that the reward for his help in weakening Qassim should come in the form of Kurdish autonomy. On 1 May, U.S. diplomats in Baghdad warned that unless the Ba’athists “make serious counterproposals to Kurdish de-

18. Melbourne Telegram to DOS, 20 September 1962, in FRUS, 1961–1963, Vol. XVIII, pp. 116– 117. 19. Alan Donald (U.K. Representative to NATO) to FO, 23 January 1963, in FO371, General Corre- spondence of the Foreign Ofªce, Vol. 170428, TNAUK. During a meeting in Paris, Donald had dis- cussed the deteriorating situation in Baghdad with U.S. ofªcials assigned to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. For evidence that Barzani and the KDP were in contact with the Ba’athists and other opponents of Qassim’s regime as early as the summer of 1962, see Sa’ad Jawad, Iraq and the Kurdish Question, 1958–1970 (London: Ithaca Press, 1981), pp. 109–111. 20. Komer to President Kennedy, 8 February 1963, in FRUS, 1961–1963, Vol. XVIII, p. 342; and Stephen Fuqua (Department of Defense), “Iraqi Coup,” 8 February 1963, in FRUS, 1961–1963, Vol. XVIII, p. 343. On the CIA’s role in the overthrow of Qassim, see Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 974–986; Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett, Iraq since 1958: From Revolution to Dictator- ship (London: KPI, 1987), pp. 85–86; and Andrew Cockburn and Patrick Cockburn, Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 75–76.

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mands, . . . early resumption of revolt appears very likely,” which would mean “protracted guerrilla warfare...with every likelihood of Soviet support for [the] Kurds.”21 Admitting that the “new Iraqi regime has its faults,” the State Department remained convinced that “it [is] far better than [any] probable successor.” U.S. envoys tried to broker a deal between the Ba’athists and the Kurds using surplus wheat from the U.S. Food for Peace program. “We consider Kurdish problem most serious GOI [government of Iraq] must deal with,” the State Department’s Iraq experts argued on 17 May, “and gesture by [Ba’athist] Govt for general relief and rehabilitation efforts in Kurdish areas might go a long way to encourage [a] peaceful settlement.”22 Rejecting the U.S. proposal out of hand, the Ba’athists sent the Iraqi army back into Kurdistan in early June with orders to shoot to kill. Before the summer was out, the Iraqi regime also endorsed Nasser’s pan-Arab agenda and vowed to help liberate Palestine. The Iraqis also sought arms from the So- viet Union. In early July, representatives of Barzani’s KDP approached CIA operatives in Beirut with an offer the Americans found hard to refuse. The Kurds stood ready to resume all-out guerrilla war, this time against the new Ba’athist regime in Baghdad, provided they received guns and dollars from the United States. “If given the cold shoulder by [the] West,” the KDP’s Shawqat Aqrawi warned the CIA, “[the] Kurds would join hands with [the] Soviets, call for international volunteers and turn their cause into ‘another Cuba [or] another Spanish Civil War.’”23 Three months later, U.S. intelligence con- ªrmed that unless the Kurds received outside help, they were doomed. “The Baath government last June moved against the rebellious Kurds in northern Iraq in an offensive which has been far more ruthless and far more successful than any under Qasim,” CIA analysts explained on 27 September 1963. “The regime appears to believe that indiscriminate bombing, weight of numbers, and the army’s overwhelming ªrepower will eventually sap Kurdish morale and cause a breakup of Barzani’s ªghting tribal coalition.”24 Kurdish morale took an unexpected turn for the better on 18 November 1963 when General Abdul Salam Arif and a group of anti-Ba’athist ofªcers seized power in Baghdad in yet another military coup. Far more open to com- promise than the Ba’athists, Salam Arif arranged a ceaseªre with the Kurds on

21. Embassy Baghdad to DOS, Telegram, 1 May 1963, in Pol 26 Iraq, State Department Alpha- Numeric File, Record Group (RG) 59, NARA. 22. DOS Circular Telegram, 4 May 1963, in Pol 26 Iraq, State Department Alpha-Numeric File, RG59, NARA; and DOS to Embassy Baghdad, Telegram, 17 May 1963, in Pol 26 Iraq, State Depart- ment Alpha-Numeric File, RG59, NARA. 23. Armin Meyer (Beirut) to DOS, Telegram, 3 July 1963, in Pol 26 Iraq, State Department Alpha- Numeric File, RG59, NARA. 24. CIA Special Report, “The Baathist Regimes in Syria and Iraq,” 27 September 1963, in RDP79- 00927A004200040003-1, CREST, NARA.

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10 February 1964 and agreed to discuss Kurdish autonomy with Mustafa Barzani shortly thereafter.25 When these discussions broke down in June, the ubiquitous Shawqat Aqrawi contacted U.S. diplomats in Cairo to request “assistance to Kurds through third country in event [that] ªghting renewed in Iraq.”26 The State Department’s initial answer was “no,” but evidently some- time later that year the CIA began to encourage Israel and Iran to assist the Kurds. Neither Tehran nor Tel Aviv required much encouragement. The Shah of Iran opposed all forms of Iraqi nationalism and was eager to regain full access to the Shatt al-Arab, the waterway that marked the ancient boundary between Persia and the Arab world. He regarded the KDP guerrillas as a key asset in his campaign to keep the military regime in Baghdad off balance. Despite the im- pending ceaseªre in Iraqi Kurdistan, the Shah informed U.S. ofªcials in Janu- ary 1964, “we have reason to expect that the ªghting will ºare up again in the spring.” To that end, he instructed his CIA-trained intelligence service, the State Information and Security Organization (SAVAK), to provide Barzani’s peshmerga with machineguns, artillery, and jeeps. In April 1965, U.S. diplomats conªrmed that Tehran was also beeªng up its military presence along the Iraqi border to discourage Baghdad from stirring up trouble in Iranian Kurdistan.27 The Israelis, for their part, hoped that another rebellion in Kurdistan would keep the Iraqi armed forces tied down and prevent Salam Arif from re- deploying his troops to the west, where they might become part of a united Arab command directed against the Jewish state. Mossad, the legendary Israeli intelligence service, which had established contact with Barzani when he ªrst took up arms against Qassim in the late 1950s, did not doubt that the peshmerga guerrillas could hold their own against the Iraqi military. “Put a Kurd atop a mountain with a riºe, pita bread, and onions,” a Mossad operative recalled long afterward, “and he’ll stop a column of troops for you.” In the mid- 1960s the Israelis provided the Kurds with everything from anti-tank guns to a mobile ªeld hospital, sometimes delivered via cargo plane and sometimes via mule train.28 According to Eliezer Tsafrir, who oversaw Israel’s covert oper-

25. Farouk-Sluglett and Sluglett, Iraq since 1958, pp. 102–103. 26. DOS Telegram to Embassy Baghdad, 5 June 1964, in FRUS, 1964–1968, Vol. XXI, p. 337. 27. Shah to President Johnson, 7 January 1964, 23 April 1965, in FRUS, 1964–1968, Vol. XXII, pp. 7–8; DOS Memorandum of Conversation, 23 April 1965, in FRUS, 1964–1968, Vol. XXII, p. 144; and Trita Parsi, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the U.S. (New Ha- ven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 52–53. 28. Andrew Cockburn and Leslie Cockburn, Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Co- vert Relationship (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), pp. 104–106; and Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman, Every Spy a Prince: The Complete History of Israel’s Intelligence Community (Boston: Houghton Mifºin, 1990), pp. 82, 153. The Mossad veteran is quoted in Randal, After Such Knowledge, p. 185.

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ations in Kurdistan: “We told the Kurds . . . [that] whatever they do, we are supporting them—in war and in peace.”29 As early as December 1964, Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Talib conveyed his displeasure to U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk. “The Kurds are poor people,” Talib told Rusk. “Where are they getting money ...tobuystaple foods, arms, and equipment?” According to the State Department note taker, “[Talib] did not wish to suggest that the US was supporting the Kurds, but he did wish to emphasize that his Government was sore-perplexed by the machi- nations of some mysterious force which is supporting the Kurds.”30 Far from being a mystery, however, covert U.S. support for ethnic and racial groups that opposed left-wing leaders or Soviet-backed regimes had become a fairly predictable Cold War story by 1964. In the late 1950s, for example, the CIA not only passed suitcases full of cash to Lebanese Christians in order to prevent pro-Nasser Muslims from gaining the upper hand in Beirut but also trained and equipped a small army of Tibetan insurgents who fought and lost a secret war to liberate their homeland from the Communist regime in Beijing.31 Likewise, in the 1960s the Kennedy and Johnson administrations exploited racial tensions between blacks and Asians in British Guiana to keep Cheddi Jagan, a socialist comrade of Fidel Castro, out of ofªce in Georgetown and mobilized thousands of non-Vietnamese “Montagnard” tribesmen in South Vietnam’s central highlands in a futile effort to disrupt the ºow of the war matériel that Hanoi was sending down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to Com- munist guerrillas battling the pro-American regime in Saigon.32 What made covert U.S. ties with Barzani’s peshmerga distinctive was the complexity of Iraqi politics, the persistence of Kurdish tribalism, and the involvement of third parties such as Iran and Israel. Thanks in part to sporadic violence in Kurdistan, Iraq rapidly descended into political gridlock among warring groups of military ofªcers, who proved adept only at making and then dissolving cabinets with dizzying speed. In April 1966, Abdel Salam Arif died when his helicopter went down in a sand- storm near Basra. He was succeeded by his older brother, Abdul Rahman Arif,

29. Tsafrir quoted in Parsi, Treacherous Alliance, p. 53. 30. DOS Memorandum of Conversation, 10 December 1964, in FRUS, 1964–1968, Vol. XXI, pp. 343–344. 31. On the CIA’s covert activities in Lebanon, see Wilbur Crane Eveland, Ropes of Sand: America’s Fail- ure in the Middle East (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), pp. 245–55. For a superb account of Ameri- can support for the Tibetan guerrillas, see Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison, The CIA’s Secret War in Tibet (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2002). 32. On America’s secret campaign against Cheddi Jagan, see Stephen G. Rabe, U.S. Intervention in British Guiana: A Cold War Story (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). For a detailed account of the Montagnard tribal militias and their tragic fate, see John Prados, The Hidden His- tory of the Vietnam War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1995), pp. 71–87, 165–175.

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a former Ba’athist who adopted a more hawkish approach to the Kurdish rebellion. A month later, Barzani’s peshmerga, with help from Mossad advisers, ambushed an Iraqi army brigade near Mount Hendrin in Kurdistan. When the shooting stopped, more than 2,000 Iraqi soldiers lay dead, whereas the Kurds lost just twenty guerrillas. Stunned by this debacle, Rahman Arif agreed to a ceaseªre that lasted nearly two years. Eager to keep the Iraqis off balance, the Israelis continued to stir the pot by sending Barzani more weapons on the eve of the Six-Day Mideast War in June 1967. After the war, rumors ºew that the Shah had also resumed arms shipments to the Kurds. “Should any Israeli or Iranian involvement become known,” State Depart- ment intelligence chief Thomas Hughes warned Rusk on 1 September, “Arab radical propaganda would no doubt claim that this is a new ‘plot’ against the Arabs instigated by the United States.”33 Yet the indirect U.S. intervention paid big dividends by preventing Iraq from meddling in the Arab-Israeli conºict. “The bulk of the Iraqi army is in the North watching the Kurds,” not in the west facing Israel, the CIA reported on 22 May 1968, “but it remains unable to subdue them in the event of new ªghting.”34 The U.S. policy of watchful waiting while revolving-door Iraqi cabinets made blunder after blunder in Kurdistan ªnally came to an end when Hassan al-Bakr and his distant cousin, Saddam Hussein, seized power in July 1968 and began to lay the foundations for a ruthless Ba’athist dictatorship. U.S. State Department ofªcials noted in February 1969 that the new regime had moved quickly to regain the upper hand in Kurdistan by supporting “the ‘progressive’ rival Kurdish group of Jalal Talabani in a rather crude divide-and-rule campaign designed to undermine Barzani.”35 Two months later, while Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) looked the other way, the Ba’athists sent Iraqi troops back into the Zagros Mountains for the fourth time in ten years to destroy Barzani’s KDP and its guerrilla army.36 On 13 June 1969 a ªve-man KDP delegation arrived at the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, where they informed Talcott Seelye that unless the Kurds received covert support directly from the United States for “decisive action against the Iraqi Government,” Barzani was prepared to strike at the Ba’athist regime’s primary source of revenue by ordering the peshmerga to

33. Hughes to Rusk, “Kurdish Insurgency Threatens,” 1 September 1967, in FRUS, 1964–1968, Vol. XXI, pp. 384–386. 34. CIA, “Iraq: The Stagnant Revolution,” 22 May 1968, in RDP85T00875R002000160010-8, CREST, NARA. 35. Hughes to William Rogers, “Iraq: Internal Stresses and the Search for the Bogeyman,” 14 Febru- ary 1969, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. E-4, Item 251. 36. Ismet Sheriff Vanly, “Kurdistan in Iraq,” in Gerard Chaliand, A People without a Country: The Kurds and Kurdistan (New York: Olive Branch Press, 1993), p. 153.

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“attack IPC oil installations and interrupt the ºow of oil.” When Seelye encouraged the KDP to turn elsewhere for support and suggested seeking “Ira- nian and Israeli assistance,” his visitors “acknowledged help from these sources but said it was insufªcient.” The bottom line, Seelye concluded, was that “the Kurds are completely fed up” and “have absolutely no trust in the Iraqi Arabs.”37 Despite this abiding mistrust, a series of Ba’athist military victories in the north eventually forced Barzani to accept a ceaseªre and sign a “transitional” agreement on Kurdish autonomy with Saddam Hussein on 11 March 1970. Under this arrangement, which was to go into effect no later than 11 March 1974, the peshmerga would surrender their heavy weapons and Barzani and the KDP would formally recognize Baghdad’s sovereignty over Kurdistan. In return, the Iraqi government agreed to permit the Kurds to elect their own local ofªcials, to express their “linguistic and cultural rights,” and to share in the revenues from oil ªelds in Mosul and Kirkuk. Before the ink was dry on the transitional agreement, however, the Kurds were seeking external support for yet another rebellion. “There are signs that the situation between Barzani and Baghdad is already deteriorating,” one U.S. diplomat observed in December 1970 after KDP representatives made the rounds in Tehran, “though neither side apparently wants the ªghting to begin again.”38 A month later, Barzani’s agents contacted Ambassador Malcolm Toon in Prague, prompting Assistant Secretary of State Joseph Sisco to remark that “in a typical Kafkaesque way the Middle East and Mitteleuropa have now ªnally converged on your door- step.”39

Kissinger and the Kurds: Covert Action Is Not Missionary Work

Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were far too busy during their ªrst three years in ofªce handling détente and the Vietnam War to pay much attention to the steady stream of Kurds who approached U.S. ofªcials in Washington, Tehran, and Prague. But when Saddam Hussein decided to sign a ªfteen-year “Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation” with the Soviet Union in April 1972, Iraq quickly caught the attention of the White House. Six months earlier, the Soviet Union had agreed to provide Iraq with roughly 250 million dollars’

37. Seelye Memorandum of Conversation, 13 June 1969, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. E-4, Item 259. 38. Donald R. Toussaint (Tehran) to Ambassador Douglas MacArthur, II, 19 December 1970, in Item 0746, Iran Revolution Collection, Digital National Security Archive (DNSA). 39. Sisco to Toon, 28 January 1971, in “Top Secret—1971,” Records of the Bureau of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, Lot 80D234, Box 1, RG59, NARA.

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worth of Soviet military hardware, including T-52 tanks, surface-to-air mis- siles, and MIG-23 jet ªghters. In February 1972, Saddam Hussein had visited Moscow, where he met with Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev and Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin and laid the groundwork for the Soviet-Iraqi alliance.40 On 31 March, CIA Director Richard Helms informed the White House that the agency’s Kurdish sources were reporting that Saddam Hussein would sign a treaty with Soviet leaders in early April and that he also intended to “nationalize all foreign oil installations in Iraq” before the year was out.41 Nixon and Kissinger were scheduled to ºy to Moscow in late May 1972 for a summit meeting with Brezhnev and Kosygin before making a brief stop in Tehran to see the Shah of Iran on their way home. In a brieªng paper dated 18 May 1972, the National Security Council (NSC) staff emphasized that the stakes in Iraq were extremely high. “Iraq has produced a generation of wildly nationalistic and erratic military dictators” whose most recent incarnation was Saddam Hussein, “a hardliner” and “virtual king of the Iraqi security appara- tus.” Much to the chagrin of Iran and other neighboring states, Iraq had received Soviet military hardware worth nearly $1 billion in recent years, which meant that the Ba’athist regime “has the potential for trouble-making in the Gulf if it can adeptly use Soviet support.”42 Although it is unclear whether these issues came up during the Moscow summit, potential trouble in the Persian Gulf was high on the Shah’s agenda in Tehran. “Soviet leaders,” Nixon told the Iranian monarch on 30 May, “were trying to outºank the Middle East” and stir up trouble for the United States among Arab radicals and Arab oil producers. Noting that these were one and the same in the case of Iraq, the Shah expressed concern about Mos- cow’s growing inºuence in Baghdad. Nixon insisted that “we would not let our friends down,” and Kissinger asked the Shah: “What could be done?” For starters, the Iranians must “have the most modern weapons,” came the reply, but in addition “Iran can help with the Kurds.” By the time Nixon and Kissinger departed on Air Force One the next day, they had promised to sell the Shah anything in the U.S. arsenal he wanted except nuclear weapons and to explore ways of assisting the Kurds in their struggle against the Ba’athist regime in Iraq.43 Among the items awaiting Nixon and Kissinger upon their return to Washington was a State Department report titled “The Kurds of Iraq:

40. CIA, “Moscow and the Persian Gulf,” 12 May 1972, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. E-4, Item 307. 41. Helms to Kissinger, Rogers, and Laird, 31 March 1972, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. E-4, Item 303. 42. NSC Staff Report, “Iraq,” 18 May 1972, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. E-4, Item 308. 43. Kissinger, Memorandum of Conversation, 30 May 1972, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. E-4, Item 200.

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Renewed Insurgency?” With pressure mounting among the restless peshmerga to resume the guerrilla struggle against Baghdad, the department’s Middle East experts prophesied that “the added strain of another Kurdish war could bring down the unpopular Ba’th [sic] government.” The report noted that “on at least two occasions, apparently with Iranian advice, the Kurds have also been in touch with the alienated, socially and religiously conservative Shia, trying unsuccessfully to raise a second front in southern Iraq.” The report concluded that the “chances look better than even that Mulla Mustafa [Barzani] will ªnd sufªcient outside support to renew his insurgency.”44 Those odds were about to grow even better, not only because of recent U.S. commitments to the Shah of Iran but also because of Iraq’s decision to nationalize the IPC on 1 June without compensating the oil consortium’s U.S. and British owners. Harold Saunders, the NSC staffer who monitored the Middle East, soon learned that the Shah wanted Kissinger to meet secretly with two of Barzani’s representatives. Saunders worried that such a meeting would “mislead” the Kurds “into excessive expectations of direct U.S. support,” but he also saw strong reasons to encourage another uprising. First, Iran and Israel “have intermittently over time supported the Kurds as a means of tying down Iraqi forces at home,” and “there is now the prospect of active Iraqi meddling in the Gulf which domestic instability would help weaken.” More important, foreign intelligence agencies “may be able to relate the Kurdish efforts to contacts they have among Iraqi military dissidents who might overthrow the government that signed the treaty with the USSR” and expropriated the IPC. On the other hand, even with modest U.S. help, the best outcome that Barzani and the KDP could realistically expect was “a standoff with the government in Baghdad.” The worst case, Saunders warned Kissinger on 7 June, was much grimmer: “If the battle turned against the Kurds, we would have neither the assets nor the interest to provide decisive support.”45 Barzani’s representatives never spoke to Kissinger, but they did meet with CIA Director Helms and with Kissinger’s chief deputy, Alexander Haig, at CIA headquarters in July. According to Mahmoud Othman, the KDP’s “foreign minister,” Helms did most of the talking. “The Shah wanted the American Government to help” the Kurds, the CIA director informed Othman, and “as long as the Shah continued that policy, the U.S. would,

44. DOS, “The Kurds of Iraq: Renewed Insurgency?” 31 May 1972, in Pol 23-9 Iraq, State Depart- ment Alpha-Numeric File, RG59, NARA. 45. Saunders to Kissinger, 7 June 1972, in Nixon Presidential Library and Museum (NPLM), Yorba Linda, CA, http://www.nixon.archives.gov/virtuallibrary/documents/mr/060772_iraq.pdf. The names of the foreign intelligence agencies have been redacted, but Saunders was most likely referring to the SAVAK and the CIA.

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too.”46 Meanwhile, Barzani’s agents contacted U.S. diplomats in Beirut to report that another Iraqi offensive in Kurdistan was imminent. “Emboldened by Soviet support and its successful nationalization of IPC,” the Ba’athist regime in Baghdad was preparing “to increase pressure on Barzani and nibble away at gains he acquired in March 1970.” For his part, the KDP leader was working out “ªnal arrangements for [a] wholesale Kurdish revolt with his allies in Tehran.”47 Well aware of what Barzani and the Shah were arranging, Richard Helms sent the White House a detailed proposal on 18 July outlining what to do next. “It is clearly in the interest of the USG and its friends and allies in the area that the present Iraqi regime be kept off balance, or even overthrown if that can be done without escalating hostilities on the international level,” the CIA chief explained. The Ba’athist dictatorship was “despotic internally” and “aggressively hostile in its intentions toward Iran, Kuwait, Jordan, [and] Saudi Arabia.” In particular, the “adventurist, pseudo-Marxist ideology” preached by Saddam Hussein and his “Ba’thi clique” was fast becoming “an increasingly signiªcant factor in the area because of the steadily deepening Soviet support for Iraq,” symbolized by the treaty that Moscow and Baghdad signed in April. In light of all this, Helms recommended that the White House authorize $5.4 million of covert assistance to fund and arm the Kurdish peshmerga as part of “a spoiling operation designed at least to harass the Ba’th [sic] and perhaps to contribute to conditions favorable to its replacement by elements less hostile to our interests and those of our friends in this area.”48 Ten days later, Alexander Haig gave Kissinger a memorandum recom- mending approval of the CIA plan, with the guns and dollars to be delivered to the Kurds via Iranian intermediaries. Haig emphasized that covert action in Kurdistan seemed “more important than ever due to the recent events in Egypt,” where the government’s decision to expel Soviet military advisers would “probably result in more intense Soviet efforts in Iraq.” Moreover, because two of America’s friends—Israel and Iran—were willing to make sub- stantial contributions of their own, the Kurds should have the $18 million necessary to keep 25,000 guerrillas in action for the next year. This Cold War logic persuaded Kissinger and Nixon to approve the plan on 31 July 1972.49 “Our perfectly clear strategy was to weaken any country tied up with the So-

46. Randal interview with Othman, 9 Oct. 1991, in Randal, After Such Knowledge, p. 153. 47. Houghton (Beirut) to DOS, Telegram, 13 July 1972, in Pol 23-9 Iraq, State Department Alpha- Numeric File, RG59, NARA. 48. Helms, “Assistance to Iraqi Kurdish Leader, Mulla Mustafa Barzani,” 18 July 1972, and “Prospects and Problems of Assistance to the Kurds,” 18 July 1972, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. E-4, Item 321. 49. Haig to Kissinger, 28 July 1972, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. E-4, Item 321; and Kissinger to Helms, 31 July 1972, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. E-4, Item 322.

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viet Union,” Kissinger recalled long afterward. “Since the Soviets had just made a military tie with Iraq, we were very receptive to helping the Kurds.”50 Thanks to “excellent cooperation [from] the Shah,” by early October CIA Di- rector Helms was able to conªrm that “money and arms have been delivered to Barzani via the Iranians without a hitch,” enabling the KDP’s peshmerga to tie up two-thirds of the Iraqi army in the mountains of Kurdistan.51 “Exten- sively supported by Iran—and Israel—the charismatic Mulla Mustafa Barzani has successfully overcome traditional tribal rivalries to weld together disparate Kurdish groups into a more or less homogenous movement capable of standing off Baghdad’s thrusts,” CIA analysts concluded as 1972 drew to a close. The KDP leader, they claimed, “would like direct assistance from the U.S. to complement the weapons, money, and military instructors received from Is- rael and Iran.”52 Whether they knew it or not, Nixon and Kissinger were playing with ªre. For one thing, the Kurds remained much more factionalized than the CIA re- alized. Jalal Talabani and the PUK, for example, refused to cooperate with Barzani and the KDP, established secret ties with the Soviet Union, and, on more than one occasion, passed information about peshmerga operations to Saddam Hussein. Other tribes like the Zibaris and Yazidis hated both the PUK and the KDP. Moreover, even if the querulous Iraqi Kurds someday overcame their differences and established a uniªed anti-Ba’athist front, they would almost certainly urge Kurdish separatists in Turkey and Iran to join them. Not only did Saddam Hussein monitor and encourage factional rivalries among the Kurds, he pointed to the deepening unrest in northern Iraq to extract still more military assistance from the USSR. James Schlesinger, whom Nixon had recently tapped to succeed Helms as CIA director, reported on 31 March 1973 that “the upgrading of the Iraqi arms inventory, coupled with in- creased Soviet training of Iraqi airborne forces clearly has direct relevance to the improvement of Iraqi military capabilities against the Kurds.”53 Arthur Lowrie, the highest-ranking U.S. diplomat in Baghdad and a frequent visitor to northern Iraq in the weeks after Schlesinger’s report, conªrmed on 17 April that the “situation between Baath and Kurds remains tense,” pitting two sides “heavily armed with automatic weapons” and engaged in what was clearly “only [an] armed truce.”54

50. Randal interview with Kissinger, 23 Aug. 1992, quoted in Randal, After Such Knowledge, p. 151. 51. Kissinger to Nixon, 5 October 1972, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. E-4, Item 325. 52. CIA, National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) 36.2-72, “Iraq’s Role in Middle Eastern Problems,” 21 1972, in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. E-4, Item 330. 53. Schlesinger to Kissinger, “Soviet Inºuence in Iraq and Southern Arabia,” 13 March 1973, in RDP80M01048A000300330005-0, CREST, NARA. 54. Lowrie to DOS, Telegram, 17 April 1973 (1973BAGHDA00214), in State Department Elec-

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By the summer of 1973, skirmishes between the Ba’athist regime and the Kurdish peshmerga were becoming more frequent. On 28 June, Richard Helms, who had become Nixon’s ambassador to Iran after leaving the CIA, reported that a “ºare-up has occurred [that] is bigger than anything in recent months” and that all signs “point to Iraqi army in initiating the ªghting.”55 Determined to avoid ªring the ªrst shot, the Kurds played on traditional U.S. sympathy for the underdog. “We can become your 51st state and provide you with oil,” Mustafa Barzani told The Washington Post’s Jim Hoagland in early July 1973.56 Later that month, the Shah of Iran arrived in Washington, where he reviewed covert operations in Iraqi Kurdistan with high-ranking U.S. policymakers. “On the Kurds, we could both show a little more direct support,” he told Kissinger on 27 July. Barzani and the KDP,the Shah said, were on the verge of a showdown with the Ba’athists in Baghdad, “but if we are going to ask that of them, we will have to give them some more money.” Ever eager to make trouble for Moscow’s friends in Iraq and elsewhere in the Arab world, Kissinger assured the Shah that the Nixon administration was ready to expand clandestine funding for the Kurds: “You can count on it in principle.”57 The word from Kurdistan was that the sooner Nixon and Kissinger could trans- form principle into practice, the better. “The Kurds are very disturbed over re- ports that the Iraqi military has received shipments of ‘poison gas’ from the Soviets,” the KDP minister of information, Chaªq Qazzaz, informed U.S. State Department ofªcials on 5 September 1973.58 That same day, CIA analysts reported that Saddam Hussein was relying on “committees of public safety” for the ruthless consolidation of his personal power and that “virtually all the Baath’s opponents, except the Kurds, have been terrorized or neutralized.”59 Saddam and his Soviet patrons hoped that once the transitional Kurdish autonomy agreement ªnally went into full effect in early 1974, Barzani and

tronic Telegrams 1/1/1973–12/31/1973, Central Foreign Policy Files, RG 59, Access to Archival Da- tabases (AAD), NARA, http://aad.archives.gov/aad/. Although Iraq severed diplomatic relations with the United States following the Six Day Mideast War in June 1967, the Ba’athist regime permitted Washington to open a “U.S. Interests Section” in Baghdad, headed by Arthur Lowrie, in September 1972. 55. Helms to DOS, Telegram, 28 June 1973, in State Department Electronic Telegrams 1973, AAD, NARA. 56. Barzani’s quip was not disclosed until 30 years later in Jim Hoagland, “The Kurdish Example,” The Washington Post, 27 July 2003, p. A17. 57. The Shah and Kissinger are quoted in Harold Saunders (NSC), Memorandum of Conversation, 27 July 1973, in NPLM, http://www.nixon.archives.gov/virtuallibrary/documents/jun09/072773 _memcon.pdf. 58. DOS Memorandum of Conversation, 5 September 1973, in Item 0004, Iraq-Gate Collection, DNSA. 59. CIA, “Some Notes on Iraqi Politics,” 5 September 1973, in RDP80M01048A000300330002-3, CREST, NARA.

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the KDP would be neutralized, just as other anti-Ba’athist groups had been. An “increasing number of Kurds realize that their best hope for [the] future lies with Iraq,” Soviet Ambassador Venyamin Likhachev assured Arthur Lowrie on 30 December 1973, and the Iraqi government “was now attempt- ing to resolve [the] problem through economic means and spreading around oil wealth.”60 But in early March 1974, Barzani dispatched his son Idris to Baghdad to inform Saddam Hussein that the peshmerga would not be turning their weapons over to the Iraqi army as scheduled. “We are determined to live up to our commitments,” Saddam told his Kurdish visitor, “and we expect you to live up to yours.” Sensing that “Barzani had evil intentions,” the Ba’athist dictator sent Idris home with these words of warning for his father: “If there is war, we will win.”61 Within six weeks, Iraqi troops armed by the Soviet Union had begun to gain the upper hand over the Kurds in a series of ªerce battles with the badly outgunned peshmerga. The Israelis, having narrowly averted defeat themselves at the hands of Soviet-backed Arab armies the previous October, urged U.S. ofªcials not to forget that the ethnic warfare in the mountains of Kurdistan was fraught with Cold War overtones. Noting that “the Soviet Union [had] apparently decided to throw its full weight behind the Baath regime in Bagh- dad,” Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir warned Henry Kissinger on 7 May 1974 that “our friends, the Kurds...areintrouble” and said the United States must “urgently supply” Barzani and the KDP with arms and ammuni- tion “through the usual Iranian channels.”62 The Shah was quite willing to oblige and on 27 July forwarded Kissinger “an urgent plea from Barzani for assistance,” adding “a warning of his own regarding the grave consequences— for Iran and the entire [Persian] Gulf—should the Kurdish resistance collapse.” A month later, Kissinger informed his new boss, Gerald Ford, that “the Shah was considering sending regular forces” to assist SAVAK agents and other Iranian “auxiliaries” who were already inside Iraq “dressed in Kurdish garb.” As the situation grew more desperate, Ford approved a scheme hatched in Washington and Tel Aviv calling for “the transfer of Soviet equipment captured by Israel in the 1973 war to the Kurds.” According to Kissinger, in the ªnal months of 1974 “some $28 million worth of Soviet equipment was

60. Lowrie to DOS, Telegram, 30 Dec. 1973, in State Department Electronic Telegrams 1973, AAD, NARA. 61. Saddam Hussein recounted his March 1974 conversation with Idris Barzani during a controversial meeting with U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie on the eve of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait sixteen years later. For the Iraqi text of the 25 July 1990 Saddam-Glaspie meeting, see Elaine Sciolino, The Outlaw State: Saddam Hussein’s Quest for Power and the Gulf Crisis (New York: Wiley, 1991), pp. 277–278. 62. Meir, “The Situation in Kurdistan,” 7 May 1974, attached to Kissinger-Meir Memorandum of Conversation, 7 May 1974, in Item 1143, Kissinger Transcripts Collection, DNSA.

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transferred” to the Kurds “until the Israelis ran out of Soviet weapons suitable for warfare in Kurdish terrain.”63 With the Kurdish arms pipeline running dry and with tensions between Iran and Iraq threatening to heat up, U.S. ofªcials detected signs that the Shah was having second thoughts about the not-so-secret war. From Baghdad, Arthur Lowrie conªrmed just before Christmas 1974 that the current word out of Kurdistan was that SAVAK regarded Barzani’s peshmerga as little more than “spoilers” and “will not give them enough assistance to take [the] offensive” against the Iraqi army. “Neither Kurdish nor Shia communities [in Iraq] have either the institutions or personnel to govern and continue the modern- ization process,” Lowrie explained. “[The] majority of both communities are still living in essentially tribal, medieval societies.”64 Ambassador Helms, who had developed close ties with SAVAK during his time as CIA director, lobbied hard in Tehran to sustain “the secret help the United States, Israel, and Iran were giving the Kurd separatists in their struggle against Iraq,” but by early 1975 he warned leaders in Washington that “the Shah was becoming restive about the drain on Iranian resources.”65 The Shah himself told Kissinger during a tête-à-tête in Zurich that the “Kurdish resistance is weakening” and its leaders “have no guts left.” Faced with this grim outlook, Kissinger informed President Ford on 19 February 1975 that the Shah “is planning on meeting [Iraqi] strong man, Saddam Hussain” very soon and “seems tempted to try to move in the direction of some understanding with Iraq regarding the Kurds.”66 Kissinger, however, saw no reason to mention this disturbing bit of information in the reassuring message he sent to Barzani the next day. As a result, the Kurdish leader remained in the dark about Iran’s intentions.67 Soon thereafter, the Shah and Saddam Hussein agreed to meet in Algiers, where on 5 March 1975 they struck a deal that would have made Machiavelli proud. In exchange for a cutoff of Iran’s covert aid to the Kurds, Iraq would relinquish its exclusive claim to the waters of the Shatt al-Arab. Saddam had explained his own thinking on this matter a year earlier during his meeting with Idris Barzani. “Iran’s dispute with Iraq is over its ambition to get half of the Shatt al-Arab,” not an Iranian desire to create an independent Kurdistan.

63. Henry Kissinger, Years of Renewal (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), pp. 589–592. 64. Lowrie to DOS, Telegram, 23 December 1974, in Other FOIA, State Department Electronic Reading Room, http://www.foia.state.gov. 65. Richard Helms, with William Hood. A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: Presidio Press, 2004), p. 417. 66. The Shah and Kissinger are quoted in Brent Scowcroft (NSC) to Gerald Ford, 19 February 1975, in Kurds (3), Box 19, Kissinger-Scowcroft West Wing Ofªce Files, National Security Adviser Series, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, Ann Arbor, MI (GRFL). 67. Kissinger to Barzani, 20 Feb. 1975, in Kurds (2), Box 19, Kissinger-Scowcroft West Wing Ofªce Files, National Security Adviser Series, GRFL.

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“If we had the option of keeping all of Iraq, including the Shatt al-Arab, all being well, we would not relinquish sovereignty,” Saddam Hussein told Mustafa Barzani’s son. “However, if we were to ªnd ourselves in a corner faced with the choice of either giving up half of the Shatt al-Arab or the whole of Iraq, we would give up the Shatt al-Arab in order to keep the whole of Iraq in the shape we want.”68 The day after the Shah announced the “Algiers Accord,” one of his aides privately asked: “What about the idea of an autonomous Kurdistan?” The Iranian leader’s cynical answer conªrmed that Saddam Hussein’s analysis had been well-founded: “Moonshine from the word go.”69 Kurdish leaders were stunned and outraged by the Algiers Accord. Be- cause Mustafa Barzani and Mahmoud Othman happened to be in Tehran in early March 1975, they received the bad news directly from SAVAK chief Nematollah Nasiri, who informed them on 5 March that the Iranian intelligence service would be halting arms shipments to the Kurds within 48 hours. Barzani took the news “stoically,” but Othman “berated Nasiri roundly for his ‘impudence’ and for [the] Shah’s ‘betrayal’ of [the] Kurdish cause.”70 Iran’s sudden break with the Kurds also angered the Israelis, who had been ªshing in the troubled waters of Kurdistan for more than a decade. The Shah “did what Chamberlain did with Hitler in abandoning Czechoslovakia,” the Mossad’s Eliezer Tsafrir recalled long afterward. Yaacov Nimrodi, the Israeli military attaché in Tehran, agreed, telling an interviewer in 2004 that selling out the Kurds had been a “big mistake” that conªrmed Israel’s worst suspi- cions about the Iranian monarch: “He was an idiot.”71 A CIA postmortem summed up the debacle well: “Since the mid-1960s, Iran aided and abetted Israeli help to the Kurdish rebels. Israel provided ªnancial and material assistance and sent military and intelligence advisers to train Kurdish tribesmen at sites in Iraqi Kurdistan and Iran.” In the absence of Iranian logistical support, “armed resistance by Kurds on the scale of 1974 is now out of the question.”72 On 1 April 1975, after thousands of Kurdish guerrillas and their families poured into Iran, the Shah abruptly sealed the border with Iraq. Within days, the U.S. consul in Tabriz conªrmed that the Kurds “fear increasing isolation

68. Saddam Hussein quoted in the Iraqi text of meeting with April Glaspie, 25 July 1990, in Sciolino, Outlaw State, pp. 277–278. 69. Diary entry for 7 March 1975, in Asadollah Alam, The Shah and I: The Conªdential Diary of Iran’s Royal Court, 1969–1977 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), p. 417. 70. Godley (Beirut) to DOS, Telegram, 15 March 1975, in State Department Electronic Telegrams 1975, AAD, NARA. 71. Tsafrir and Nimrodi quoted in Parsi, Treacherous Alliance, p. 57. 72. “The Implications of the Iran-Iraq Agreement,” 1 May 1975, in DCI/NIO 1039-75, CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room, http://www.foia.cia.gov.

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from [the] outside and possible Iranian mistreatment” and warned that unless the United States provided humanitarian assistance for the refugees the “U.S. could be accused of having turned a blind eye to such conditions.”73 The Ford administration responded to the Kurdish crisis not only with a blind eye but also with deaf ears. When Saddam Hussein’s army moved deeper into Iraqi Kurdistan in early March 1975 to snuff out the rebellion, Barzani reminded the White House that “the United States has a moral and political responsibil- ity toward our people, who have committed themselves to your country’s policy.”74 Kissinger, who was serving simultaneously as national security adviser and secretary of state and who was overseeing operations in Kurdistan, did not even bother to respond. Instead, he blamed the debacle on the Shah and ruled that the Kurds were not eligible for U.S. refugee assistance.75 “Let me re- fresh you on the Kurdish affair,” Kissinger told Ford as a congressional committee chaired by New York’s Otis Pike prepared to hold hearings in October 1975. After the Shah “pleaded” for U.S. aid for Barzani’s KDP three years earlier, “we agreed, in order to absorb Iraqi energies,” not to achieve self- determination for the Kurds. With an odd blend of pride and self-pity, Kissinger argued that the Pike Committee was looking for a scapegoat and was determined “to show that I am the evil genius.” Although Ford urged him to “keep your cool,” Kissinger bristled when he was questioned about U.S. re- sponsibility for 300,000 desperate Kurdish refugees shivering in makeshift camps inside Iran.76 “Covert action,” he told the Pike Committee, “should not be confused with missionary work.”77 Far from being confused, Pike and his colleagues were dismayed by the Ford administration’s betrayal of the Kurds and said so in their ªnal report. “Even in the context of covert action,” they concluded, “ours was a cynical en-

73. AmConsul Tabriz to DOS, Telegram, 10 April 1975, in State Department Electronic Telegrams 1975, AAD, NARA. 74. Barzani to Kissinger, 10 March 1975, in U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Select Com- mittee on Intelligence, CIA: The Pike Report (Nottingham, UK: Spokesman Books, 1977), pp. 215– 216. The Village Voice published a bootleg copy of the Pike Report (under the title “The Report on the CIA That President Ford Doesn’t Want You to Read”) on 16 February 1976. 75. DOS Circular Telegram, 23 July 1975, in State Department Electronic Telegrams 1975, AAD, NARA; and DOS Circular Telegram, 19 December 1975, in State Department Electronic Telegrams 1975, AAD, NARA. 76. Kissinger Memorandum of Conversation, 31 October 1975, in Item 1821, Kissinger Transcripts Collection, DNSA. 77. The House Select Committee on Intelligence attributed the remarks about covert action and missionary work to an unnamed “high U.S. ofªcial” (Pike Report, p. 198). New York Democrat Otis Pike, who chaired the committee, and others then in positions to know later conªrmed off the record that the comments were Kissinger’s. For more on this episode, see John Prados, Safe for Democracy, pp. 393–394; Vanly, “Kurdistan in Iraq,” pp. 165–173; and Bulloch and Morris, No Friends but the Mountains, pp. 136–141.

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terprise.”78 William Colby, who had become the CIA’s third director in as many years in the midst of the Kurdish crisis, did not disagree. Pulling the plug on the Kurds was “always an option for the Shah,” Colby told a reporter long afterward. “It was a tragic story, not a pretty story,” he added with a trace of regret, “but that spring we had several other tragic tales in Southeast Asia of considerably greater moment.”79 Brent Scowcroft, Kissinger’s chief deputy and eventual successor as national security adviser, echoed Colby’s views. Af- ter Iran ceased delivering arms to the Kurds, “we had no practical way to support them” and were forced to follow the Shah’s lead, Scowcroft recalled many years later. “It was just small potatoes.”80 Where the stakes seemed larger, as in Angola, or where access seemed eas- ier, as in Lebanon, Kissinger, Scowcroft, and others in the administration still hoped to manipulate ethnic rivalries to U.S. advantage. In the mid-1970s, Angolan tribalism helped the CIA mobilize Bakongo and Ovimbundu resistance to the Soviet-backed regime led by Agosthino Neto, an ethnic Mbundu, who responded by inviting Fidel Castro to send Cuban troops to Luanda. Halfway around the world in Beirut, long-standing religious tensions enabled the CIA to establish close ties with the Christian militias that were ªghting a brutal civil war against Lebanon’s anti-American Muslim majority. Had An- gola’s Ovimbundu chieftain Jonas Savimbi or Lebanon’s Christian warlord Bashir Gemayel pondered the fate of the Iraqi Kurds, they might well have wondered whether the ruthless calculus of the Cold War would one day make them as expendable as Mustafa Barzani.81 U.S. ofªcials tried to put the best possible face on the debacle in Kurdistan. In a recap of U.S. relations with Iraq completed just days before Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford in the November 1976 presidential elec- tion, the CIA attributed Saddam Hussein’s assault on the Kurds to “power and oil,” not outside interference. Although “Barzani [had] received assistance from Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel and the US” for many years, the agency insisted that “the revolt most probably would have occurred at some point, given the nature of Kurdish demands and the reluctance of any Iraqi Govern- ment, be it Baathist or not, to accede to those demands.”82 Iraqi of-

78. Pike Report, p. 197. 79. Randal interview with Colby, 21 December 1991, quoted in Randal, After Such Knowledge, p. 163. 80. Lawrence interview with Scowcroft, 25 July 2006, quoted in Lawrence, Invisible Nation, p. 28. 81. For an account of tribal politics in Angola in the 1970s by a long-time CIA Africa hand, see John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), pp. 52, 64–65, 141– 146. On CIA ties to Gemayel, see Bob Woodward, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981–1987 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), pp. 204–205, 217–218. 82. CIA, “Iraq under Baath Rule, 1968–1976,” November 1976, in RDP79T00889A000900040001-6, CREST, NARA.

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ªcials, however, claimed otherwise. In late November, Peter Bourne, one of President-Elect Carter’s closest friends, met Saadoun Hammadi, Iraq’s foreign minister, in Baghdad at an international conference on drugs. “The Iraqis are particularly angry about our past support to the Kurds,” Bourne told Carter on 1 December 1976. “Hammadi says that he once confronted Kissinger with the fact that he was arming the Kurds and thereby interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq, and he claims that Kissinger told him straight out that it was because he, Kissinger, thought the Iraqis were moving too close to the Soviets.”83

From Carter to George H. W. Bush:

Eager to break with the Cold War logic of the Ford administration, President Carter chose not to include the Kurds among the issues requiring his immediate attention in January 1977. Arab-Israeli peace negotiations overshadowed ethnic tensions in northern Iraq, making Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin household names while leaving Saddam Hussein and Mu- stafa Barzani largely unknown even to trivia buffs. Then, two years later, while the chain-smoking Kurdish leader was hospitalized with lung cancer in Washington, DC, anti-American revolutionaries inspired by the Aya- tollah Ruhollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah of Iran. Khomeini soon un- veiled an ambitious Islamic agenda that was anathema to the secular Ba’athist regime on the other side of the Shatt al-Arab. In February 1979, Khomeini even agreed to permit Mustafa Barzani to return to Tehran and hinted that the new Islamic regime might resume Iran’s earlier support for the Iraqi Kurds. Too sick to make the trip, Barzani died at Georgetown University Medical Center on 1 March.84 Later that spring, however, Mohammed Dosky, the “KDP rep” in Washington, informed the State Department that Massoud Barzani, Mustafa’s son and heir, was interested in possible Iranian assistance for a new Kurdish uprising against Saddam Hussein. Meanwhile, Dosky added, “Iraq is using Jalal Talabani [and the PUK] to stir up the Kurds in Iran.”85 The steady deterioration of relations between Khomeini’s Iran and the United States in the summer of 1979 sparked renewed U.S. interest in

83. Bourne to Carter, 1 December 1976, in Declassiªed Documents Reference System, 1993/1701. 84. Randal, After Such Knowledge, pp. 179–181. 85. David Reuther (DOS), “Memorandum for the Files,” 9 May 1979, in Item 2540, Iran Revolution Collection, DNSA.

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Kurdish affairs. On 21 August the CIA dispatched a German-based Kurdish- speaking agent code-named “SDFickle” to Iranian Kurdistan to take the pulse of the local population and look for signs of foreign arms and money.86 How- ever, before SDFickle could even ªle a report, Khomeini ordered the Iranian army to occupy Mahabad, Baneh, and other Kurdish towns, prompting peshmerga veterans of previous battles in northern Iraq to call for “protracted guerrilla warfare” against Iran.87 Sorting out the chaotic situation in Kurdistan was extremely difªcult, but by November 1979 U.S. intelligence believed that the Iranian Kurds were ready to move against the Khomeini regime and that they “will not lack weapons.” Saddam Hussein’s role in all this was far from clear. “A hands-off policy would seem to make the most sense for Iraq,” CIA experts concluded, because the Ba’athist regime was “susceptible to a Kurdish insurrection of its own.”88 Yet with Saddam Hussein evidently pressing the Iranian Kurds to take up arms against Tehran and with the ayatollah secretly encouraging Barzani and the KDP to resume their guerrilla war against Baghdad, Kurdish politics made less and less sense to U.S. ofªcials. The Kurdish political kaleidoscope ªnally began to come into focus after Iraqi troops invaded Iran on 9 September 1980. Saddam Hussein termed the invasion a preemptive strike against an expansionist theocracy that was using every imaginable tactic, including support for Kurdish guerrillas, to weaken secular regimes like Ba’athist Iraq and to spread Islamic revolution throughout the Middle East. Although U.S. ofªcials regarded Saddam as the aggressor, the Carter administration publicly adopted a policy of strict neutrality and privately hoped that Iran’s desperate need for spare parts for its American- built tanks and aircraft would force the ayatollah to release the 54 U.S. diplomats whom Iranian “students” had taken hostage ten months earlier.89 No swap of spare parts for hostages ultimately materialized, however. Massoud Barzani, for his part, scoffed at neutrality and led the KDP’s peshmerga into battle alongside the ayatollah’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard in what would become a gruesome eight-year war whose principal subplot was the Kurdish

86. CIA (Langley) to CIA (Bonn), Telegram, 21 August 1979, in Item 2918, Iran Revolution Collec- tion, DNSA. 87. DOS Circular Telegram, 5 September 1979, in Item 2982, Iran Revolution Collection, DNSA. For more on Khomeini’s repressive policies toward Iranian Kurds, see McDowall, Modern History of the Kurds, 261–263. 88. CIA, “Military Situation in Kurdistan,” November 1979, in RDP81B00401R000500080005-7, CREST, NARA. 89. Jimmy Carter, “Remarks in Tacoma, Washington,” 23 September 1980, in Public Papers of the Presidents: Jimmy Carter, 1980–81 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Ofªce, 1982), Vol. 2, pp. 1905–1906; and Dilip Hiro, The Longest War: The Iran-Iraq Military Conºict (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 71–72.

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struggle for independence from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. “Better to live like a hawk for a day than like a hen all your life,” the Kurds reminded themselves as the bloodshed worsened in the early 1980s.90 Worried that a prolonged conºict in the Persian Gulf would disrupt world oil supplies and invite superpower involvement, Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Ofªce in January 1981 convinced, as Carter had been, that strict neutrality was the proper course. All this would change, however, after Iran supported terrorist attacks on U.S. marines stationed in Lebanon and adopted “human wave” tactics in its own war with Iraq. Operating on the principle that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Reagan sent his special Middle East envoy, Donald Rumsfeld, to Baghdad for a meeting with Saddam Hussein in December 1983. “Rumsfeld told Saddam [that the] US and Iraq shared interest in preventing Iranian and Syrian expansion.” He also hoped to see Iraq “increase oil exports” through a “new pipeline across Jordan” and proposed restoring the formal diplomatic ties that Iraq had severed in June 1967. In the wake of Rumsfeld’s visit, the two sides agreed to exchange ambassadors and Washington quietly tilted toward Baghdad in the Iran-Iraq War, with ghastly results for the Kurds.91 Ruthless, brutal, and power-hungry, Saddam Hussein eventually resorted to everything in the Iraqi arsenal, including chemical weapons, to defeat Iran’s much larger army and its Kurdish allies. By the late 1980s, he was waging a “search and destroy” counterinsurgency campaign against KDP guerrillas that required the expulsion of thousands of Kurds from Kirkuk and Mosul, which his Ba’athist regime methodically resettled with ethnic Arabs. These “were the worst years for Kurdistan since Alexander the Great invaded in 331 b.c.,” one of Massoud Barzani’s followers later told a Western reporter.92 In May 1987, David Newton, Reagan’s newly appointed ambassador in Baghdad, conªrmed that “Iraqi evacuation and destruction of Kurdish villages is pro- ceeding on a large scale” and that “mustard gas and possibly more lethal forms of gas are being used” against the peshmerga and the Iranian troops who fought along side them. Having decided “that the time for talk is over,” the Ba’athists had unleashed “a scorched earth policy throughout Iraqi

90. Quoted in Randal, After Such Knowledge, p. 210. For details on the Kurdish role in the Iran-Iraq War, see M. R. Izady, “Between Iraq and a Hard Place: The Kurdish Predicament,” in Lawrence G. Potter and Gary G. Sick, eds., Iran, Iraq, and the Legacies of War (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004), pp. 80–83. 91. Shultz to Rumsfeld, 8 December 1983, in Rumsfeld Middle East Mission 11/83–3/84 (1 of 4), Executive Secretariat, NSC Records, Country File, Box 45, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, CA; and Rumsfeld Mission to DOS, Telegram, 21 December 1983, in Item 0156, Iraq-Gate Collection, DNSA. 92. Quoted in Randal, After Such Knowledge, p. 212.

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Kurdistan.”93 Newton’s chilling report went largely unnoticed in Washington, where Reagan and his top advisers were preoccupied with the Iran-Contra scandal, but it described the early stages of what came to be known as Opera- tion Al Anfal, named for a seventh-century Muslim victory over the inªdels recounted in the eighth chapter of the Koran. Over the next eighteen months, more than 50,000 Kurds died and another 150,000 were displaced.94 The most brutal and notorious episode in Al Anfal came at Halabja, a city of 80,000 inhabitants in Iraqi Kurdistan, just ªfteen miles from the border with Iran. On the morning of 16 March 1988, Saddam Hussein’s cousin, Ali Hassan Majid, ordered Iraqi armed forces under his command to release large doses of nerve gases above Halabja. When the smothering cloud of sarin, tabun, and VX lifted a few hours later, more than 5,000 Kurdish men, women, and children lay dead.95 Because the badly outnumbered Iraqi garri- son outside the city had been on the verge of being overrun by Kurdish and Iranian forces, “Chemical Ali” insisted that the gas attack was a desperate military tactic, not an act of genocide. A U.S. State Department postmortem titled “Swan Song for Iraq’s Kurds” subsequently conªrmed Majid’s claim that he had authorized the use of chemical weapons only after “Iranian Revolu- tionary Guard...commandos joined the Kurdish rebels in actions...inthe Halabcheh and Darband-Ikhan areas.”96 Yet U.S. ofªcials also recognized that the Ba’athist regime had violated international law and was continuing to do so, despite the end of the Iran-Iraq war on 20 August 1988. “Baghdad,” State Department analysts concluded two weeks later, “is likely to feel little restraint in using chemical weapons against the [Kurdish] rebels and against villages that continue to support them.” On 8 September, the Reagan administration publicly branded Iraq’s gas attacks “abhorrent and unjustiªable.”97 That same day, Secretary of State George Shultz privately lambasted Iraqi Foreign Minister Saadoun Hammadi, telling him that “we have incontrovertible proof the Iraqis used chemical weapons against [the] Kurds.” Retorting that Shultz’s claims were unproven,

93. Newton to DOS, Telegram, 19 May 1987, in Other FOIA, State Department Electronic Reading Room, http://www.foia.state.gov. 94. The most thorough account of the Al Anfal campaign is Human Rights Watch, Genocide in Iraq: The Al Anfal Campaign against the Kurds (New York: Human Rights Watch Inc, 1993). See also McDowall, Modern History of the Kurds, pp. 357–360; Randal, After Such Knowledge, pp. 231–235; and Lawrence, Invisible Nation, pp. 33–34. 95. On the incident at Halabja, see Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Great Terror,” The New Yorker, 25 March 2002, pp. 52–55; and Bulloch and Morris, No Friends but the Mountains, 142–147. 96. Morton Abramowitz (INR) to George Shultz, “Swan Song for Iraq’s Kurds,” 2 September 1988, in Item 0625, Iraq-Gate Collection, DNSA. 97. George P.Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Scribner’s, 1993),

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Hammadi called the Kurds “a group of radical traitors” who had repeatedly “collaborated with the invader in a clear-cut case of treason” and warned that “if the U.S. sees Iraq as a threat to be ‘tamed,’ that is a mistake.” Shultz replied that “we have no time for traitors either—they should be arrested and tried,” but he reiterated that the “use of chemical weapons is unacceptable.” As the meeting broke up, “Hammadi nodded slightly and hesitatingly grunted an afªrmative.”98 Reagan welcomed Shultz’s blunt talk. “George Shultz really laid it on [the] Iraq Ambas[sador] about gassing civilians—the Kurds,” Ronald Reagan conªded in his diary the next day. “He tried to deny it but George really laid it on him. We have the evidence.”99 Nonetheless, despite having evidence that Saddam Hussein had used poison gas against the Kurds, the Reagan administration remained eager to do business with Iraq in the autumn of 1988. “Saddam Hussein is clever, ruthless, and extremely ambitious,” State Department analysts pointed out the day after Shultz’s heated conversation with Hammadi, but “the regime he heads is disciplined and relatively free from corruption: an Arab East Ger- many.” To be sure, the Al Anfal campaign, “which included the destruction of hundreds of villages” in Kurdistan, would have made even the East Germans blush, but “human rights and chemical weapons use aside, in many respects our political and economic interests run parallel with those of Iraq.” In particular, Shultz’s Middle East advisers explained, “we have an interest in access to the Iraqi market for U.S. business” and a strong desire “to see Iraqi inºuence in the Arab world used constructively.”100 George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s vice president and frequent emissary to the Arabs, found this line of reasoning persuasive, and once he moved from the vice presidency to the presidency on 20 January 1989, his own administration proved quite willing to overlook the recent atrocities in Kurdistan in order to do business with Iraq. “We should not revive Iraqi memories of the U.S.- Israeli-Iranian alliance of the 1970s that supported the Kurdish rebellion,” a State Department transition team pointed out in early 1989, and “in no way should we...oppose Iraq’s legitimate attempts to suppress it.” Rather, the United States should strive for “businesslike, proªtable, and above all stable rela-

pp. 241–242; and Abramowitz to Shultz, “Swan Song for Iraq’s Kurds,” 2 September 1988, in Item 0625, “Iraq-Gate Collection,” DNSA. 98. DOS to Glaspie (Baghdad), Telegram, 10 September 1988, in Item 0633, Iraq-Gate Collection, DNSA. 99. Entry for 9 September 1988, in Ronald Reagan, The Reagan Diaries, ed. by Douglas Brinkley, (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), p. 645. 100. DOS, “Overview of U.S.-Iraqi Relations and Potential Pressure Points,” 9 September 1988, in Item 2540, Iran Revolution Collection, DNSA.

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tions with Iraq,” which would mean “edging us closer to Iraq in trade and political dialogue while addressing our military and human rights concerns.”101 These preliminary guidelines became ofªcial U.S. policy on 2 October 1989, when President Bush signed National Security Directive (NSD) 26, “U.S. Policy toward the Persian Gulf.” During the ªnal autumn of the Cold War, the United States remained “committed to defend[ing] its vital interests in the region, if necessary and appropriate through the use of U.S. military force, against the Soviet Union or any other regional power with interests in- imical to our own.” To this end, the Bush administration wanted to isolate the radical Islamic regime in Tehran while seeking “normal relations” with Baghdad by offering “economic and political incentives for Iraq to moderate its behavior.” Although “human rights considerations should continue to be an important element in our policy toward Iraq,” NSD 26 made no speciªc mention of the Kurds. Over the next ten months, U.S. and Iraqi ofªcials met numerous times, but they usually chose to discuss agricultural credits and high-technology exports and seldom mentioned words like “peshmerga” or “poison gas.”102 Having narrowly defeated Iran in the east and having temporarily gassed the Kurds into submission in the north, Saddam Hussein turned his attention southward to the Persian Gulf, where on 2 August 1990 he stunned Washing- ton by invading Kuwait. The Iraqi dictator’s motives for this reckless and ultimately fatal move were complex—to remind his neighbors that he was ªrst among equals in the Arab world, to resolve a messy dispute with Kuwait over the Rumailah oil ªeld that straddled the ill-deªned border between the two countries, and, perhaps, to reduce U.S. inºuence in the region. Desperate to keep Saddam off balance, George Bush and his advisers toyed with the idea of encouraging Massoud Barzani’s peshmerga to resume their guerrilla war against the Ba’athist regime. In early October, however, Izzat Ibrahim, Saddam’s second-in-command, arrived in Kurdistan with a chilling message for Barzani: “If you have forgotten Halabja, I would like to remind you that we are ready to repeat the operation.”103 Not surprisingly, the Kurds remained on the sidelines while the Pentagon prepared to evict the Iraqi army from Ku- wait in early 1991. As Operation Desert Storm began to subside, however, U.S. ofªcials hinted that the Kurds and other opponents of the Ba’athist dictatorship should be ready to deliver the knockout blow. “There’s another way for the

101. DOS, “Guidelines for U.S.-Iraq Policy,” n.d.[January 1989], in Item 0761, Iran Revolution Col- lection, DNSA; emphasis in original. 102. NSD 26, “U.S. Policy toward the Persian Gulf,” 2 October 1989, in George Bush Presidential Library, College Station, TX, http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/pdfs/nsd/nsd26.pdf. 103. Quoted in Bulloch and Morris, No Friends but the Mountains, p. 9.

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bloodshed to stop,” President Bush declared on 15 February, “and that is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands— to force Saddam Hussein ...tostep aside.”104 Nine days later, the Voice of Free Iraq, a clandestine CIA-controlled radio station, broadcast a call for all Iraqis to “hit the headquarters of the tyrant and save the homeland from destruction” by “put[ting] an end to the dictator and his criminal gang.”105 Over the next two weeks, Shia militias seized Basra and wrested control of the southern marshes from the Iraqi army, and in the north the peshmerga guerrillas forced Saddam’s troops to abandon Erbil, Kirkuk, and other Kurdish towns. By mid-March 1991 the Ba’athist Republican Guard had regained the upper hand in the south, but the Kurds seemed to have established an autonomous proto-republic in the Zagros Mountains that called into question the existence of the multiethnic Iraqi state established 70 years earlier. Then at the eleventh hour, Saddam Hussein struck back viciously. On 27 March, elite units of the Republican Guard supported by helicopter gun ships launched a scorched-earth offensive against the Kurds. “Where is George Bush?” one peshmerga leader screamed. “Tell him he must do something.”106 Bush and his top advisers, however, chose to stay on the sidelines because they feared that a Kurdish victory would mean the end of centralized control in Baghdad, creating a political vacuum and opening the door to foreign intervention. “We are not prepared to go down the slippery slope of being sucked into a civil war,” Secretary of State James Baker told reporters on 8 April 1991. “We cannot police what goes on inside Iraq, and we cannot be arbiters of who shall govern Iraq.”107 Brent Scowcroft, Bush’s national security adviser, likewise counseled caution, as he had during the Ford administration. “We recognized that the seemingly attractive goal of getting rid of Saddam would not solve our problems, or even necessarily serve our interests,” he recalled long afterward. “So we pursued the kind of inelegant messy alternative that is all too often the only one available in the real world.”108 The Bush administration’s inelegant rationales for doing nothing could not conceal the human costs in northern Iraq, where hundreds of peshmerga lay dead in the

104. George Bush, “Remarks to the American Association for the Advancement of Science,” 15 Feb- ruary 1991, in Public Papers of the Presidents: George Bush, 1991 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Ofªce, 1992), Vol. 1, p. 145. 105. Quoted in Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), p. 646. For more on the Voice of Free Iraq, see Nader Entassar, Kurdish Ethnonationalism (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1992), p. 146. 106. Peshmerga leader quoted in Bulloch and Morris, No Friends but the Mountains, p. 24. For more details on the March 1991 uprising in Kurdistan, see Lawrence, Invisible Nation, pp. 48–51. 107. Baker quoted in Bulloch and Morris, No Friends but the Mountains, p. 33. 108. Scowcroft quoted in Randal, After Such Knowledge, p. 299.

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snow and hundreds of thousands of Kurdish refugees ºed to safety along crowded mountain roads leading to Turkey. The brutal endgame to the First Gulf War that was played out inside Iraqi Kurdistan made Bush and Baker seem even more cynical than Nixon and Kissinger. “President Bush encouraged us to rise up,” Qazi Atrushi, a peshmerga commander, recalled bitterly, “but he allowed Saddam to ºy his helicopters—which he used to massacre us!”109 An unnamed U.S. diplomat offered an even blunter postmortem shortly after the shooting stopped. “A cli- mate was created which seemed to say: ‘If some of you people get together and rise up against Saddam, we won’t dump you in the shit.’ Well, we did.”110 Although George Bush steadfastly denied having betrayed the Kurds, exten- sive media coverage of the mass exodus soon forced him to launch Operation Provide Comfort. “I can well appreciate that many Kurds have good reason to fear for their safety if they return to Iraq,” Bush told reporters on 16 April. For that reason, 3,200 U.S. soldiers were en route from Turkey to Iraqi Kurdistan where, assisted by blue-helmeted United Nations peacekeepers, they established a “safe haven” protected by U.S. Air Force F-16 jets.111 “We all trust America to stand by us, to defend us,” a Kurdish chieftain observed in late May. “It is true that America sold out the Kurds in 1975, but now it is different because the United States will lose its credibility. Either because of its hu- manitarianism or because the Kurds are lucky, America is trapped.” Opera- tion Provide Comfort seemed to suggest that the Bush administration recognized this. “It is unlikely that a civilized world, like the West & America, the defenders of human rights throughout the world, would give hope to the Kurds and then let them face an enemy like Saddam.”112 The comfort that the Bush administration provided, however, was short- lived and strictly humanitarian and did not extend to controversial political issues like autonomy or independence. “We’ve told the Kurds from the ªrst day that we’re here for two things,” General Jay Garner, who oversaw the operation, told a Western reporter, “to stop the dying in the mountains and to create an environment in which they could resettle. We never signed up to be a north Iraq security force.” Then, in words that preªgured his ill-fated second mission to Iraq twelve years later as the ªrst U.S. proconsul in post-

109. Atrushi quoted in Kevin McKiernan, The Kurds: A People in Search of Their Homeland (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006), p. 58. 110. Quoted in Bulloch and Morris, No Friends but the Mountains, p. 12. 111. George H. W. Bush, “Remarks on Assistance for Iraqi Refugees,” 16 April 1991, in Public Papers of the Presidents: George Bush, 1991, Vol. 1, pp. 380–381. 112. Kurdish leader quoted in Kanan Makiya, Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), p. 87.

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Saddam Iraq, Garner observed that “the Kurds are Iraqi citizens [and] I don’t think you should keep [U.S.] forces to protect citizens from their own government.”113 True to his word, the commander of Operation Provide Comfort declared victory in July 1991, secured Pentagon approval to redeploy U.S. troops back across the border in Turkey, and assured nervous Kurdish leaders that “we are just a telephone call away.”114 Although the Kurds had played important supporting roles at the height of the Cold War with U.S. support, their aspirations once again went unmet. Preoccupied with managing the ªnal stages of the prolonged U.S.-Soviet standoff that sputtered to a surprisingly peaceful conclusion punctuated by the collapse of the USSR at the end of 1991, the Bush administration paid less and less attention to Kurdish affairs. The Senate Foreign Relations Com- mittee responded to this latest U.S. betrayal of the Kurds by issuing Kurdistan in the Time of Saddam Hussein, a hard-hitting report “revealing the horrors of a quarter century of Ba’ath rule.” Insisting that “the U.S.-led coalition needs to afªrm its intention to use airpower to deter attacks on Kurdish-held terri- tory,” the committee urged the White House to consider “providing the Kurdish guerrillas with limited military assistance to enhance their self- defense.”115 The Bush administration hesitantly obliged, and by the summer of 1992 most of the refugees had returned home to Iraq, where they began to put their lives back together, shielded from a vengeful Saddam Hussein by a “No Fly Zone” policed by the U.S. Air Force north of the 36th parallel.116

Kurdistan or Absurdistan?

Undaunted by decades of repression and betrayal, the Kurdish dream of self- determination remained alive and well after the Cold War. Indeed, after the Kazakhs, Uzbeks, and Turkmen succeeded in fashioning independent “stans” from the wreckage of Soviet Central Asia, most Kurds saw no reason to refrain from establishing a state of their own—a free and united Kurdistan. In Sep-

113. Quoted in Fisk, Great War for Civilization, p. 683. 114. Quoted in Randal, After Such Knowledge, p. 107. 115. U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Kurdistan in the Time of Saddam Hussein, 102nd Cong., 1st Sess., 1991, p. vii. During a visit to northern Iraq in the wake of the First Gulf War, committee staffer Peter W. Galbraith collected fourteen tons of records documenting Ba’athist atrocities in Kurdistan. The highlights were published in Peter W. Galbraith, Saddam’s Docu- ments: A Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations of the U.S. Senate (Washington, DC: Govern- ment Printing Ofªce, 1992). 116. Christopher Hitchens, “The Struggle of the Kurds,” National Geographic Magazine, August 1992, pp. 32–60.

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tember 1992 the CIA issued a national intelligence estimate titled “The Kurds: Rising Expectations, Old Frustrations” that forecast instability in the Zagros Mountains. “The Gulf war and rising ethnic consciousness and conºict around the world have created a new context for the longstanding struggle of the Kurds to achieve autonomy if not outright independence,” the agency pointed out, and peshmerga guerrillas based in Iraq were already stirring up unrest in Turkey and Iran. Moreover, prolonged instability was likely to tempt outsiders once again to meddle in Kurdish affairs. “Israel,” for example, “may be emboldened to work more openly with the Kurds, as it has done in the past, to create counterforces to Arab nationalism.” The CIA analysts contended that “an effective Pan-Kurdish movement” was not yet on the hori- zon, but the future looked grim. “Ankara, Baghdad, and Tehran will use repressive military means to contain Kurdish insurgent activity,” but “they will not succeed in stiºing the Kurdish nationalist sentiment.”117 The Kurds, for their part, never stopped hoping that the United States would help them top- ple the Ba’athist regime in Baghdad. “Allo Mistair,” a peshmerga guerrilla, told a Western journalist shortly after Bill Clinton took ofªce as president in Janu- ary 1993. “When [will] you cut Saddam’s throat for us?”118 The guerrilla got his answer when the Clinton administration mounted a woefully inept covert operation against Saddam Hussein. In late 1994, Robert Baer, a veteran CIA Middle East hand, arrived in northern Iraq, where he brought together a motley crew of Kurds, Iraqi exiles led by Ahmed Chalabi, and dissident military ofªcers to plot the overthrow of the Ba’athist regime in Baghdad. In no time at all, the conspirators were at one another’s throats, with the PUK’s Jalal Talabani alleging that the KDP’s Massoud Barzani was in Saddam Hussein’s pocket and that Chalabi had betrayed them both by shar- ing operational details of the scheme with Iranian intelligence.119 On 3 March 1995, National Security Adviser Anthony Lake instructed Baer to warn the Kurds that the CIA plan “has been totally compromised,” that “there is a high risk of failure,” and that they would be “on their own” if they chose to pro- ceed. “At the last minute we look[ed] into it, and it’s clear to everybody—the CIA, Defense State—that there was no chance,” Lake explained a decade later. “It was inªltrated by Iran and Iraq, a potential Bay of Pigs.”120

117. CIA, NIE 92-27, “The Kurds: Rising Expectations, Old Frustrations,” September 1992, in CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room, http://www.foia.cia.gov. 118. Quoted in Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), p. 192. 119. Robert Baer, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism (New York: Crown Publishers, 2002), pp. 177–99. 120. Lawrence, Invisible Nation, pp. 72–76, esp. 74 (emphasis in original).

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Massoud Barzani agreed that Saddam Hussein was the new Fidel Castro, but Jalal Talabani did not. “We didn’t listen to the advice from Tony Lake,” the PUK leader told a reporter long afterward, because Kurdistan in 1995 was very different from Cuba in 1961. Instead, “We said, ‘We will go.’” For the next eighteen months, PUK guerrillas conducted hit-and-run attacks on Iraqi military outposts just south of the 36th parallel. Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein bided his time, arresting and executing several hundred suspected plotters in Baghdad before savagely striking back in the north, with a huge assist from Kurdish tribalism. On 31 August 1996, border guards from Barzani’s KDP looked the other way while 40,000 Iraqi troops entered Kurdistan and shot their way into the PUK stronghold at Erbil. “We knew Saddam would attack,” Talabani recalled. “The Americans told us, ‘Don’t worry. If Saddam attacks, we will hit them.’ We were depending on this.” President Clinton, however, refused to authorize air strikes against Iraqi forces, and when the shooting stopped in early September 1996, 7,000 of Talabani’s followers hud- dled near the Turkish border, where they were airlifted to Guam for debrieªng and eventual resettlement in Tennessee and Virginia. For the third time in twenty years, U.S. ofªcials had stirred up trouble among the Kurds only to stand aside while Saddam Hussein settled old scores.121 Having tried but failed to cut Saddam’s throat, the Clinton administration soon faced another daunting challenge: how to prevent Turkey, a long- time U.S. ally, from invading Iraqi Kurdistan. A decade earlier, the Turks had launched a counterinsurgency campaign in southeastern Anatolia against the Soviet-backed Partia Karkaris Kurdistan (PKK), the Kurdistan Workers Party. Inspired as much by Mustafa Barzani as by Karl Marx, the PKK’s Abdullah Öçalan led a guerrilla army based in Iraqi Kurdistan in a war of national liberation against Turkey. In the mid-1990s, Turkish President Süleyman Demirel sent Turkish troops into the Kurdish “safe haven” in northern Iraq in hot pur- suit of Öçalan and his guerrillas, whose arsenal by this point was more likely to bear the initials “KDP” or “PUK” than “USSR.” U.S. ofªcials cringed when the Turks attacked pro-PKK villages with helicopter gunships supplied by the United States. Yet despite the end of the Cold War, the United States remained unwilling to confront Demirel over what most neutral observers regarded as wholesale Turkish violations of human rights in Kurdistan. Instead, the Clinton administration hoped to break the back of the PKK insurgency

121. Ibid., pp. 74–85. Talabani is quoted on pp. 74 and 81. For a ªrst-hand assessment of Kurdish tribalism and Barzani’s duplicity from someone who watched the debacle unfold in Erbil, see Kanan Makiya, “The Politics of Betrayal,” The New York Review of Books, Vol. 38, No. 15 (17 October 1996), pp. 10–12.

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by helping the Turkish authorities track down Öçalan in Kenya, where Turk- ish intelligence, with an assist from the CIA, captured him in early 1999.122 Öçalan’s increasingly brutal tactics had alienated some of his Iraqi friends, but Kurds old enough to remember Nixon and Kissinger were hardly sur- prised that U.S. policies continued to reºect the legacy of the Cold War. Nor were Kurdish leaders shocked when the Turkish government refused to permit U.S. troops to use their bases in Turkey as staging points for Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. After all, Turkish leaders worried that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would trigger the disintegration of Iraq, and any Kurdish successor state freed from Baghdad’s control was likely to regard the PKK as a potential ally in the creation of Greater Kurdistan. For many Kurds, U.S. plans for post-Saddam northern Iraq did not seem to differ much from the earlier Cold War “spoiling operations” authorized by Nixon or George H. W. Bush. Barhan Salih, a British-educated PUK leader who served as the de facto governor of Iraqi Kurdistan on the eve of the U.S. invasion, probably put it best. “Until 1975, the Kurds looked at the West as saviors,” Salih told a reporter in late 2002, “but after the Kurdish rebellion collapsed, the United States became synonymous with the notion of betrayal.” Now with U.S. soldiers poised to march on Baghdad, “we’re afraid the United States will get in- volved, make promises, and then betray us again.”123 Nowadays, more than seven years after the fall of Saddam, the Iraqi Kurds are in a far better position than Barhan Salih could ever have imagined. Once U.S. troops occupied Baghdad in the spring of 2003, an independent Kurdistan seemed like a sure thing. “We Kurds have always been kept at bay by four dogs—Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey,” one jubilant Kurdish leader told an American friend. “The Iraq dog is dead. The Turkish dog is in the dog- house. The Iranian and Syrian dogs cower in their corners.”124 As of August 2010, the Kurds cannot claim formal independence, but the PUK’s Jalal Talabani is president of Iraq, the KDP’s Massoud Barzani is president of the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government, and the Kurdish peshmerga remain among the most disciplined and effective units in the new Iraqi army.125 Some 90 years after the peacemakers at Versailles failed to deliver self-determi-

122. Graham E. Fuller, “The Fate of the Kurds,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 2 (Spring 1993), pp. 114–117; Christopher de Bellaigue, “Justice and the Kurds,” The New York Review of Books, Vol. 41, No. 10 (24 June 1999), pp. 19–24; and McKiernan, The Kurds, p. 171. 123. Quoted in Robin Wright, Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (New York: Pen- guin Press, 2008), p. 388. Salih as of 2010 was prime minister of Iraqi Kurdistan. 124. Quoted in Peter Galbraith, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War without End (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), pp. 158–159. 125. For more on Jalal Talabani’s activities as president of Iraq, see Jon Lee Anderson, “Mr. Big,” The New Yorker, 5 Feb. 2007, pp. 46–57.

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nation, the Kurds for all intents and purposes have ªnally seized control of their own destiny. Nevertheless, thanks in part to the misguided U.S. manipulation of ethnic tensions in Iraq after 1945, Kurds and Arabs remain at loggerheads today in places like oil-rich Mosul Province. It has been convenient to explain away the upsurge of ethnic violence in the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia after 1989 as merely the inevitable return of ancient hatreds that the Cold War superpowers had actually managed to hold in check. But when one examines chronic political instability in Guyana, the brutal civil war in Angola, the sad fate of the Montagnards in Vietnam, or the ongoing turmoil in Kurdistan, the painful legacy of the Cold War becomes obvious. Indeed, there are signs that at least in Kurdistan covert efforts to exacerbate ethnic friction have outlived the age of U.S.-Soviet confrontation. Washing- ton’s friends in Tel Aviv, for example, reestablished their ties with the Kurds soon after Saddam’s ouster in order to keep Arab radicals in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon off balance. “Look, Israel has always supported the Kurds in a Ma- chiavellian way—as a balance against Saddam. It’s Realpolitik,” a retired Mossad ofªcer told a reporter in June 2004. “What Israel was doing with the Kurds was not so unacceptable in the Bush administration.”126 Yet rather than consulting Machiavelli, anyone seeking insights on con- temporary Kurdish affairs might be better served by reading Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan, a tragicomic novel set in a strife-ridden newly independent nation-state in Central Asia that resembles Kurdistan. Although Shteyngart’s chief villains are murderous clans of “Sevos” and “Svanis” motivated by vi- cious ethnic hatred and hell-bent on mutual destruction, they are abetted and encouraged by a sleazy cast of foreign oil men, diplomats, and spooks who would have been right at home in Cold War America.127 On three occasions during the ªrst 50 years after 1945, Washington used the Kurds to further U.S. interests in the Middle East and then cynically abandoned them to their own fate. To be sure, Eisenhower and Kennedy did not force Barzani onto his collision course with Abdel Karim Qassim, nor did Nixon, Kissinger, or Bill Clinton invent the ethnic rivalries that pitted Kurdish freedom ªghters against an Arab nationalist like Saddam Hussein. But by resorting so fre- quently to covert action in Kurdistan, U.S. Cold Warriors helped ensure that those long-standing conºicts would morph into the savage violence unleashed by George W. Bush’s fool’s-errand in Iraq.

126. Mossad agent quoted in Seymour Hersh, “Plan B,” The New Yorker, 28 June 2004, p. 65. 127. Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan (New York: Random House, 2006).

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Salim Yaqub, who provided incisive comments on an earlier version of this essay, to Steve Rabe, who suggested placing the story of the Kurds into the broader context of the ethnic politics of the Cold War, and to David Langbart, who helped me navigate the CIA’s amazingly useful electronic database, the CIA Records Search Tool.

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