The CIA and Kuwaiti conspiracy - 2 November 1990

Last Wednesday afternoon, the Iraqi ambassador to the United States called a press conference in Washington and, by courtesy of the cable news network, I was able to attend it.

It lasted a full hour and the point of it, to which the ambassador returned again and again, was the document he said his government had found in a file of secret documents, abandoned and not destroyed by Kuwaiti officials who had fled their country after Saddam Hussein's invasion.

Now this document, marked top secret, was purported to be, I think I'd better say at the beginning that instead of having this story stumble through thickets of allegedlys and reportedlys and purported tos, I shall simply recite as fact what the Iraqi Ambassador said was fact, being understood that it's the Iraqi version and nobody else's.

Well then, the document is a memorandum, written in November 1989 by the then security chief of Kuwait and reporting a meeting he held somewhere near Washington with the director of the United States Central Intelligence Agency, Mr William Webster, in which they agreed to share military, social and political information about Iraq, with the purpose, in the long run, of bringing it down or – in the jargon of diplomatic memoranda – destabilising the economy of Iraq.

There was one actual quote from the Kuwaiti official, one General Fahad Ahmed Al-Fahad, saying that he and Mr Webster agreed that it was important to take advantage of the deteriorating economic situation in Iraq.

On Wednesday, the Iraqi ambassador, Mr Al-Mashat, said this document was one of other proofs in Iraqi hands, proofs to substantiate Iraq's claim that the invasion of 2 August was undertaken to forestall a conspiracy, involving among others Kuwait and the CIA, to drive down the price of oil and greatly damage the economy of Iraq. Mr Al-Mashat spoke darkly of other – what at one point he called physical evidence – of this conspiracy.

Now this document, which I must say in the recital sounded plausible at the very least, had been handed over to the Secretary General of the United Nations. The original was in Arabic and the Secretary General obliged by having it translated into English. Both texts were made available to the media people assembled in the Iraqi embassy.

It's the first time, I believe, that we've had any official, or that we've been offered any official, version from the Iraqi government, of a rumour that has been running rife through Baghdad, as we saw the other Sunday in a remarkable series of interviews by an American reporter with many Iraqi housewives, young and old.

The rumour, which sounded more bizarre than ridiculous, since it was being confidently repeated by obviously serious women, the rumour was that the whole crisis in the Persian Gulf had been contrived mainly by the CIA, that Saddam Hussein had consequently been baited into his assault on Kuwait, to provide President Bush with a pretext for sending a huge military force into Saudi Arabia with the intention of bringing down Saddam Hussein.

On Wednesday, when the ambassador had finished reading the text of the alleged memorandum, he went on to moralise or rationalise his government's attitude to the United States. Baghdad, he said, posed no threat to the United States, but if the United States chose to go to war, any attack would be catastrophic.

You're going to receive major destruction, thousands of people killed on all sides, mass murder against Iraqi civilians. It would be a long and murderous war, he said, and the United States would bear the consequences of it throughout the Middle East, for many generations.

Apart from the ambassador's predictable editorialising, the document seemed to me, and I'm sure to other reporters present, to be serious enough, plausible enough, to require an answer from Mr Bush, from Secretary Baker, from Defence Secretary Cheney, perhaps.

But on Thursday morning I could find no mention of the ambassador's press conference or of the document and its serious charges in the New York Times or the evening New York Post and only the briefest mention of it in a Long Island newspaper, inserted in a despatch from Baghdad, which carried the headline "Iraqis ready for war".

Of course Mr Al-Mashat said that once his document had been released, it would be instantly condemned by the American government as a fake, a forgery, an absurdity. And sure enough, the only official response here was from an anonymous spokesman for the CIA, who said that the allegations and, by implication, the document, were total fabrications.

I suppose most of us, most of us citizens of any of the, what is it, ten nations supporting the United Nations embargo, I suppose we'd say the document probably is a fake, but the only point I wish to make now is that it was given to the Secretary General of the United Nations, it was translated by the UN and issued from its headquarters and I'd have thought it deserved some recognition, if only by way of denunciation from Mr Webster, the director of the CIA.

By the way, there was at that Iraqi press conference, a moment of quiet hilarity. The ambassador ended his reading of the so-called document by calling off, presumably for the benefit of the Kuwaiti security chief, Mr Webster's private telephone number, something even the onlooking reporters don't have and a few of them, of course, immediately started to copy it down, when Ambassador Al-Mashat cocked his head, implying it would do them no good.

The number, he said, was changed last Friday, the day apparently that the Iraqis handed the document over to the UN for translation. Now this may well be a red herring, a fake, a fraud, a bare-faced fabrication, but it will be given the widest possible publicity throughout the Arab world. It ought to have been reported seriously, in serious papers and the White House must surely have learned long ago that silence in such matters implies guilt.

Well these, what is it now, or soon to be, 380,000 American troops in the desert cast a long and menacing shadow across this country and its domestic affairs and no doubt will play a part, impossible now to guess, in next Tuesday's congressional elections.

President Bush, once the curtain came down on the budget farce, took up his campaigning for besieged Republicans, by reverting to the Gulf crisis and talking tougher than ever about Saddam Hussein, saying he was deeply concerned and doing something about the American hostages in Kuwait.

Rather rash talk, you might say, considering how little such talk helped President Carter and President Reagan on the same infuriatingly impotent theme. Mr Bush's popularity, which a couple of months ago was up in the low 70s, 74% I believe, a record at this stage of a presidency, is now down to 48% and free falling.

Every town he goes into, to campaign for a Republican, of course the faithful applaud. Noticeably they don't cheer, they applaud politely, they hope he's right. But in several places something has happened that I don't believe has happened to Mr Bush before, deeply embarrassing.

Most conspicuously it happened up in Vermont, on a late fall day in an old town with the fading scarlet of the maples and the dying gold of the oaks, an ideal setting for a couple of Republicans to appeal for a revival of the old values. Hard work, frugality, close family life, loyalty to neighbours, the values, in truth, which most of Mr Bush's audience live by.

He'd gone there to give aid and support a Republican congressman who is reported to be in trouble from his opponent, the former mayor of Burlington, always known as the former socialist, yes socialist mayor of Burlington. Well you'd certainly believe that this congressman would be grateful for the president's help, considering that he's not only a young chap, at the end of his first term in Congress, but also he's Vermont's only congressman.

Can you believe it? Vermont is one of only six states, some of them out west, quite large, that are so sparsely populated that they rate only one congressional district. Vermont is the only state in the north-east that has only one congressman. Two senators, of course, like every other state, but only one congressman, as against New York's 34. California has 45 and when the re-districting is finished on the basis of the 1990 census, it will have 50-odd.

Well, young Mr Peter Smith, the lone Vermont congressman and a Republican, must have been in a daze of pride and joy when he heard that the President of the United States was coming to speak on his behalf.

However, the damage done to the President by his dithering, flip-flopping over the budget talks was so evident that Mr Smith got up and spoke against his distinguished sponsor, telling the crowd he was all for a super tax on the very rich, which the president had been hotly against and eventually talked down.

An embarrassed president followed Mr Smith and, the Washington Post reported, looking flustered, the president stumbled in and out of a speech text and then said, "We have a sluggish economy out there nationally, that's one of the reasons why I favour this deficit so much".

He looked down at his text and his brow crinkled. Favoured the deficit, is that what he meant? The crowd, it said, looked puzzled.

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