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In an office suite on a quiet street in Amman, Jordan, an exile group called the Iraqi National Accord is working feverishly to implement the latest CIA-backed plan to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Equipped with a powerful new radio station and claiming contacts at high levels of the Iraqi military, the group is trying to engineer a coup by senior officers close to Saddam, according to U.S. and Saudi officials and members of the organization.
The outlook is far from promising, however. The Iraqi opposition movement is hopelessly splintered. Similar efforts have failed miserably in the past. Six other radio stations already are spewing anti-Saddam propaganda. And Saddam is nothing if not a survivor, having weathered the constant crushing pressure of international trade sanctions stemming from Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
In an office suite on a quiet street in Amman, Jordan, an exile group called the Iraqi National Accord is working feverishly to implement the latest CIA-backed plan to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Equipped with a powerful new radio station and claiming contacts at high levels of the Iraqi military, the group is trying to engineer a coup by senior officers close to Saddam, according to U.S. and Saudi officials and members of the organization.
Besides running the radio station, which can blanket much of Iraq with propaganda, the group has aided the defection of several high-ranking officers, including a former army chief of staff, and claims to be using stolen military field radios to maintain contact with Iraqi army units.
"We think that any uprising should have as its very center the armed forces," said the group's leader, Ayad Alawi, a physician and former confidant of Saddam who fled to London in 1971. "We don't preach civil war. On the contrary, we preach controlled, coordinated military uprising supported by the people that would not allow itself to go into acts of revenge or chaos."
The outlook is far from promising, however. The Iraqi opposition movement is hopelessly splintered. Similar efforts have failed miserably in the past. Six other radio stations already are spewing anti-Saddam propaganda. And Saddam is nothing if not a survivor, having weathered the constant crushing pressure of international trade sanctions stemming from Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
"The opposition is more active in a kind of very diffuse way than it has ever been," said a U.S. intelligence officer who spoke on condition of anonymity. "There are all sorts of opponents to the regime. . . . But they don't coalesce. They have different agendas, different constitu encies both inside and outside Iraq. They're really more gnats and mosquitoes to Saddam rather than anything serious."
But the United States, among others, is taking Alawi's group seriously. In January, President Clinton authorized $6 million in covert aid to support its activities, according to Iraqi opposition sources familiar with the CIA plan. CIA spokesman Dennis Boxx declined to comment because the agency does not confirm or deny operational activities. A senior administration official also refused to discuss the reported covert operation.
The amount is in addition to a similar or larger sum provided by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and several other Arab countries, according to a high-ranking Saudi official and opposition sources.
"It's not a secret that a few people are working to create a climate {favorable to a coup}," a senior government official in Saudi Arabia said last month. "We are not asleep, we are not sitting on our fannies doing nothing. Things are happening."
Previous efforts to overthrow Saddam centered largely on another opposition organization, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), formed with CIA backing in 1992 as an umbrella group for Sunni Muslim, Shiite Muslim and Kurdish factions, including the National Accord.
The United States supported the INC in hopes of encouraging a broad-based uprising in which rebellion would spread from resistance groups to army units. But the INC, based in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, has been paralyzed by infighting, including a virtual civil war between the two main Kurdish factions.
The National Accord, formed with Saudi backing in 1990, has sought to encourage a quick coup by high-ranking generals that effectively would decapitate the regime while leaving the rest of the body intact.
Alawi, the secretary general of the National Accord, is a figure of considerable stature in the opposition movement. A graduate of Baghdad University medical school, he was a leading activist in Iraq's ruling Baath Party before he fell out with the regime and fled to London.
He criticized the regime from afar, and his standing in the opposition was enhanced when, in 1978, an Iraqi hit man broke into his bedroom and attacked him with an ax. During a 10-minute struggle, Alawi fought off his attacker, but not before suffering deep wounds in his torso, leg and head that left him hospitalized for a year.
A member of a wealthy Shiite family, Alawi spent four years in hiding in London, then emerged to build a successful business in hospital management and the oil industry. He maintained contacts with the Iraqi opposition as well as with friends inside the regime in order to build "passive support" for a coup, he said in the interview.
His initial efforts got nowhere, however, and the National Accord had a reputation in the early 1990s as being heavily infiltrated by Iraqi agents, according to U.S. intelligence sources.
The group's new prominence stems in part from the August 1995 defection of Hussein Kamel Hassan Majeed, Saddam's son-in-law and the former head of his weapons complex. Hussein Kamel's spectacular appearance in Amman with an entourage that included two of Saddam's daughters was widely interpreted as a sign that the regime was near collapse -- and that more could be done to hasten the process.
In particular, the defection had a galvanizing effect on Jordan's King Hussein. Over the next six months, he abandoned his customary deference toward Iraq, stepped up his contacts with opposition leaders and began pressuring the Clinton administration to take a more active role.
At a meeting in Saudi Arabia in mid-January, U.S., British, Saudi and Jordanian intelligence officers agreed that the center of operations for the Iraqi opposition would become Amman and that the newly anointed group would be used as "the magnet" to attract Iraqi army and intelligence officers into defecting or, better yet, taking action against Saddam, according to Iraqi opposition sources. "The number one criteria we chose was credibility," said Jordanian Information Minister Marwan Muasher, speaking in Washington last week. "The INC has no credibility in Iraq or in Jordan."
In late January, Clinton signed a new presidential "finding" authorizing an initial $6 million project to finance a more powerful opposition radio station capable of covering all of Iraq and to pay for the National Accord's operations out of Amman, according to Iraqi opposition sources familiar with the CIA plan.
Called al-Mustaqbal, or "the Future," the new radio station broadcasts propaganda prepared at studios in Amman and London from a powerful transmitter in the Kurdish city of Salahuddin, according to a spokesman for the group. It went on the air April 28, Saddam's birthday.
The newly prominent National Accord has attracted support from senior Iraqi defectors, including Lt. Gen. Nizar Khazraji, a former chief of staff of the Iraqi army who arrived in Amman on March 21 after the group helped him escape with his family through northern Iraq, according to Alawi.
The National Accord also claims ties to senior active-duty officers inside Iraq. Until his defection last November, one of them was Brig Gen. Najib Salahi, who commanded a division near northern Iraq. He provided the group with intelligence on such matters as the condition of tanks, troop morale, loyalty of fellow officers to the regime and access to ammunition, Alawi said.
As described by Alawi, one of the National Accord's most daring feats occurred last year, when disaffected army officers arranged the theft of field radios and other broadcasting gear from a depot of the army's 4th Corps in Amarah in southern Iraq.
Spirited into the Kurdish enclave, the transmitters were mounted in four-wheel-drive vehicles, Alawi said. The vehicles now make regular forays via "smugglers' routes" into government-controlled Iraq, where the radios are used to contact Iraqi army units, he said.
"This is what differentiates us from the rest of the opposition groups," he said. "We do not advocate any civil war inside Iraq. . . . We are working towards disengaging the army, the civil service apparatus and the party apparatus from Saddam and making them revolt against him."
Still, some U.S. intelligence officials remain skeptical. "What we're not seeing is cells of officers, groups of them organizing and doing something against the regime," said one official. "Instead, they get out and try to work alone or with some of the opposition groups to no particular effect right now."
Given Saddam's obsession with security and the atmosphere of fear that surrounds him, many analysts believe that no amount of opposition scheming can influence events inside the regime. According to this view, change would come only with an unanticipated event such as Saddam's dying of natural causes or being killed by a disgruntled relative acting alone.
There are indications, moreover, that King Hussein's enthusiasm for the National Accord may be waning. After Saddam decided last month to accept a U.N. resolution that permits Iraq to sell oil and use the revenues for food and medicine, Jordanian businessmen appealed to the king to avoid a rupture in relations that would hurt prospects for expanded trade.
Significantly, the king has backed away from a plan to hold a conference of opposition groups in Amman, and he has not granted permission for any additional groups to set up shop there, although 24 others have applied. Hussein Kamel's decision to return to Baghdad in February, and his subsequent murder there, seemed to underscore Saddam's staying power.
But Alawi has little time for such talk. "We believe the end is near," he said. "We have entered the final chapter in salvaging Iraq."
Lancaster reported from Amman, Jordan, and Ottaway from Washington.
PHOTO,,Ap CAPTION: With U.S. funding, a Jordanian-based group of Iraqis hopes to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Credit: Washington Post Foreign Service
Copyright The Washington Post Company Jun 23, 1996