The Central Intelligence Agency was no less two-faced in 1975 than it is 40 years later in being on more than one side in Middle East strife brought about largely as a result of CIA subterfuge. Today, the U.S. military is coordinating its attacks on Islamic State forces in Iraq with Iranian ground forces in the country, who are defending the Shi’a Iraqis and Kurds, while, at the same time, the U.S. is providing logistical and intelligence assistance to a Saudi-led coalition, which includes Islamic State and Al Qaeda forces, fighting against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who seized control of the country from a U.S. puppet regime whose president fled to Saudi Arabia.
In Syria, the CIA is providing weapons and training to paramilitary units allied with the Islamic State while the Pentagon coordinates air strikes on Islamic State targets with the forces of President Bashar al Assad who is fighting the Islamic State and CIA-backed rebels loyal to it.
The CIA’s only mission is to sow dissension around the world. This was seen in the Cold War’s Operation Gladio in Western Europe where the CIA engaged in terrorist acts that were blamed on left-wing guerrilla groups, themselves of the CIA’s making. The same double game was seen in the “Arab Spring” in the Middle East.
In 1975, when Henry Kissinger served as both national security adviser and secretary of state, the CIA set about to stamp out Kurdish separatism against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Earlier in 1975, Iran and Iraq signed the Algiers Agreement, which pulled Iranian (and CIA) support for the Kurdish separatists in Iraq. Some 100,000 followers of the CIA- and Israel-supported Kurdish leader Mustapha Barzani, as well as Barzani himself, left Iraq for Iran. The Kurds always felt that Kissinger, who supported their cause, pulled the rug out from under them in order to bring about a Baghdad-Tehran detente. The U.S. House Pike Commission later determined that the CIA was only using Barzani and the Kurds as tools and had no intention of supporting an independent Kurdistan.
Meanwhile, Kurdish leftist leader Jalal Talabani, who would become president of the post-U.S. invasion government of Iraq after Saddam’s ouster, went to Damascus and set up the Kurdistan National Union with the support of Syria’s president Hafez al-Assad, the father of the current Syrian president. Meanwhile, Massoud Barzani, the son of the Kurdish leader who died at Georgetown Hospital in Washington, DC, in 1979 while being treated for lung cancer, is now the president of the Kurdish Regional Government which finds itself besieged by Islamic State forces that have been armed by the CIA, British, and Saudis.
A SECRET NO FOREIGN DISSEM CIA report from 1975 indicates that the CIA set about to ensure that Talabani remained sidelined in Iraq. The CIA referred to Talabani in the report as “a leftist who is seeking to rebuild the Kurdish rebel movement after its suppression by Baghdad last Spring,” adding, “Talabani is a longtime rival of the now vanquished Kurdish conservative leader Mulla Mustapha Barzani.”
The CIA warned that Talabani was trying to rally to his new group Kurds in Iraq and “the more than 100,000 Kurdish refugees in Iran.” The CIA was alarmed at Talabani’s calls for Iraqi leftists to join his new group in ousting the rival Baathist regime in Baghdad from power. Syria’s government was also Baathist but was a rival wing of the pan-Arab movement.
Such situations are always ripe for maximizing the CIA’s true mission in the world: to sow dissension and create the necessary conditions for massive bloodshed to satiate the desires of the powerful military firms that dominate Wall Street.
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
Copyright © 2015 WayneMadenReport.com
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
