Russians fed Saddam intelligence: US

Washington: According to a Pentagon report, as American troops moved toward Iraq, Saddam Hussein was receiving information about US battle strategy and troop movements from a Russian ambassador.

The Russians claimed they obtained the information from sources inside the US Central Command headquarters in Doha, Qatar, and conveyed it to Hussein via the Russian ambassador to Iraq, the report states.

Brig General Anthony Cucolo, one of the Pentagon officials who helped put the report together, was quick to say that there was no indication the Russians had a spy inside Central Command.

Also, key details provided to Hussein by the Russians were wrong -- not that it would've mattered because the Iraqi dictator ignored the intelligence in formulating his losing war strategy, Cucolo said.

Word of Russian-Iraqi collaboration came as part of an analysis by US Joint Forces Command, which looked at combat operations from an Iraqi perspective as a tool for shaping future US operations. An unclassified version of the analysis was released.

Thousands of Iraqi documents and postwar interviews with more than a dozen Iraqi officials, not including Hussein, provided the basis for the report.

One of those documents, the report states, came five days after the invasion of Iraq -- March 24, 2003 -- and was sent to Hussein by the Russians.

It warned that as US forces moved north from neighboring Kuwait, troops would bypass Iraqi cities and instead occupy the countryside, thereby isolating the rest of the country from its western border, according to the report.

The Russians further told Hussein that the US Army's 4th Infantry Division, which was not allowed to stage its invasion from Turkey as hoped, would move into the country from the west via Jordan.

On April 2, 2003, Iraq's foreign minister sent a memo to Hussein telling him he had been given more information from the Russian ambassador in Baghdad, the report states.

The memo said that US forces would not invade Baghdad until after the 4th Infantry Division arrived, which would be sometime around April 15.

That intelligence proved wrong.

US troops already were approaching the capital and took the Baghdad

International Airport the next day. A week later, Baghdad itself fell, and the 4th Infantry Division was still on board ships in the eastern Mediterranean Sea.