Iraq Notebook
CIA chief in Baghdad removed

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A senior U.S. official acknowledged that the CIA station chief in Baghdad was removed in December after weeks of increasingly deadly and sophisticated attacks against U.S.-led coalition forces and civilian targets.

"There was just a belief that it was a huge operation and we needed a very senior, very experienced person to run it," the official said.

The official declined to disclose the number of CIA personnel in Iraq, but other sources said it exceeded 500. The CIA's Baghdad station has become the largest in agency history, eclipsing the size of its post in Saigon at the height of the Vietnam War, a U.S. official said.

The high-profile post has been held by three senior officers since Bush declared an end to the major-combat phase of the war last May, sources said.

The first had served in the Baghdad station before the Persian Gulf War in 1991, went to "run operations (from) across the border" before the invasion last year, was fluent in Arabic and was "extraordinarily experienced" in setting up and running large intelligence operations, according to a former senior intelligence official. But that officer had always planned to leave the job in June 2003.

His replacement had served as station chief in a neighboring country and was pushed out in December amid internal personnel problems and growing concern in Washington that the agency was failing to get an adequate grip on the insurgency. Some speculated that the officer may have angered officials in the Bush administration with a report he produced in November saying that a growing number of Iraqis believed the U.S. coalition could be defeated.

The current station chief is a highly regarded officer who "rose rather meteorically" during operations in Kosovo, which was the agency's last major buildup of assets, a former CIA officer said.

Several sources said the CIA has been drawn too much into troop-protection work ordinarily done by the military. As a result, some are concerned that the agency has not been able to concentrate on recruiting spies.

Civil Defense Corps members detained in pair of attacks

WASHINGTON — Two members of Iraq's new Civil Defense Corps have been detained in connection with weekend attacks in Fallujah that left 25 Iraqis dead, Pentagon officials said yesterday.
 
The action followed the detention of the mayor of Fallujah, who had submitted his resignation a few days before the Saturday assaults. The two attacks took place simultaneously against an Iraqi police station and a Civil Defense Corps compound.

Brig. Gen. David Rodriguez, the deputy director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he had no conclusions on the degree to which insurgents had infiltrated Iraq's new security agencies.

"They were obviously vetted and were able to slip through somehow," Rodriguez said. But he added the detainees were suspected only of having information about the attacks, and were being interrogated.

Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said one of the dead attackers was a former major in the Iraqi army under Saddam Hussein. There had been some earlier suggestions that the attackers were foreigners, perhaps al-Qaida, but senior military officials have since said all were Iraqis.

Report warns of tensions as Kurds return to homes

GENEVA — Some 100,000 Arabs have fled ethnically mixed northern Iraq as Kurds, forced out by former President Saddam Hussein's Arabization program, return to reclaim their homes, a U.N.-sponsored report said yesterday.

The report by the Geneva-based Global IDP Project warned that the unregulated return of thousands of Kurds could inflame simmering tensions in the oil-rich towns of Mosul and Kirkuk, where Arabs and Turkmen have protested growing Kurdish political influence.

Some 800,000 Kurds and members of other non-Arab ethnic groups were forced out of areas around Kirkuk and Mosul under Saddam's Arabization program, and Arabs, seen as more loyal to his government, were settled in their place.

Many Kurds and members of the smaller Turkmen minority fled north to Kurdish-controlled areas. After U.S.-led forces toppled Saddam last year, the movement reversed.

The internal displacement report said Arabs had left areas around Mosul and Kirkuk either as a direct result of the return of some 30,000 Kurds "or out of fear of revenge attacks."

Many of the displaced Arabs are now living north of Baghdad in abandoned army camps and public buildings, largely without access to health care, electricity or running water.

Kurdish leaders say Kirkuk is a Kurdish city and should be part of a Kurdish region in a new federal Iraq.

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