RUSSIAN AGENTS CLEANING HOUSE IN BAGHDAD

Russian intelligence agents are holding daily meetings with Iraqi officials in Baghdad, and may be interested in gaining control of Iraqi secret service archives if Saddam Hussein's regime falls, the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported Friday.

The newspaper said the archives could be highly valuable to Russia in three major areas: in protecting Russian interests that remain in a postwar Iraq; in determining to what extent the Saddam regime may have financed Russian political parties and movements; and in providing Russia access to intelligence that Iraqi agents conducted in other countries.

...The report speculated that the archives were a key topic of discussion when Russian President Vladimir Putin sent Yevgeny Primakov to Baghdad last month to meet with Saddam.

Primakov, a Middle East expert, once headed the foreign intelligence service in the Soviet era. Later, as Soviet foreign minister, he attempted to negotiate an agreement to avoid the 1991 Gulf War.

His meeting with Saddam in February was given little publicity, with the Foreign Ministry issuing only a brief statement saying he had received Saddam's promise to cooperate with United Nations resolutions, and the trip has remained cloaked in mystery and speculation.

The other purpose of this ongoing operation is to ensure the most damning documents showing Russia's involvement in supporting Saddam's regime are shredded. France was reported during the UN inspections to have agents in Baghdad making sure invoices from French chemical companies were shredded. The Russians will have to destroy most sensitive documents now because our Special Forces will try to intercept them if they move archives north or west, and the CIA along with free Iraqis will spend years trying to find anything hidden in the city. What I worry about is operational computers and power in the middle of a war. The Russians can seriously encrypt anything they want to keep out of our hands. Depending on how powerfully encrypted, and the volume, the NSA won't have much chance to decode it all.