World

Report: Russia Gave Iraq U.S. War Info

March 25, 2006 / 12:31 PM EST / CBS/AP

The Russian government provided Saddam Hussein with intelligence on U.S. military movements and plans during the opening days of the war in 2003, according to a Pentagon report released Friday.

The unclassified report does not assess the value of the information or provide details beyond citing an Iraqi document that says the battlefield intelligence was provided to Saddam through the Russian ambassador in Baghdad.

Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for Russia's U.N. mission in New York, said the allegations were false.

"To my mind, from my understanding it's absolutely nonsense and it's ridiculous," she said, adding that the U.S. government had not shown Russia the evidence cited in the report. "Somebody wants to say something, and did - and there is no evidence to prove it."

An official in the office of Foreign Intelligence Service spokesman Boris Labusov in Moscow quoted him saying Saturday, "We don't consider it necessary to comment on such fabrications."

A classified version of the Pentagon report, titled "Iraqi Perspectives Project," is not being made public.

Documents released as part of a Pentagon's report show the Russian government had sources inside the American military command as it planned and executed the 2003 invasion.

U.S. officials said none of information was of any real strategic value, and large parts of it were incorrect. U.S. officials, however, were "surprised by the Russians' actions."

CBS News correspondent Bob Orr reports that military analysts think the bad information actually helped feed Saddam's delusions.

Whether by chance or design, one piece of Russian intelligence actually contributed to an important U.S. military deception effort. By telling Saddam that the main attack on Baghdad would not begin until the Army's 4th Infantry Division arrived around April 15, the Russians reinforced an impression that U.S. commanders were trying to create to catch the Iraqis by surprise.

The attack on Baghdad began well before the 4th Infantry arrived, and Saddam's regime collapsed quickly.

In other recent developments:

Drive-by shootings, roadside bombings and sectarian killings left 29 dead in Iraq Friday. A bombing outside a Sunni Muslim mosque after prayers killed at least five worshippers and wounded 15 people in Khalis, the army said. Baghdad police said they discovered 13 bodies, blindfolded and shot, on Friday in the Binok, Kazimiyah and Sadr City neighborhoods.

Soldiers of the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division joined Iraqi troops in a sweep of five villages outside the city of Kirkuk, 180 miles north of Baghdad. Forty suspected insurgents were picked up in Hawija, police said.

Two U.S. soldiers were killed in combat in Iraq's insurgent-ridden Anbar province, the American military reported Friday. The soldiers, assigned to the 2/28th Brigade Combat Team, were killed on Thursday. Their names were withheld until relatives were notified.

President Bush urged Americans not to lose heart in the face of the recent violence in Iraq. "The only way that we can lose is if we lose our will," he said. "It's the only way we can lose. The stakes in Iraq are high."

The war on terror will continue long after Iraq and Afghanistan are stable, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Friday. Pace also said military action alone will not be enough. Economic growth, good education systems and solid governments also are necessary to quell terrorism.

U.S. and British forces freed three Christian peace activists Thursday who were bound but unguarded. An American in the group was killed on March 11. Military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, said the rescue of the Briton and two Canadians from a "kidnapping cell" was based on information divulged by a man during interrogation only three hours earlier.

An aide to radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr reported late Thursday that U.S. forces raided a radio station run by the religious leader's followers and detained all the staff on duty. In April 2004, al-Sadr launched an uprising after U.S. occupation authorities closed his newspaper, Al-Hawza, arrested a key aide and announced a warrant for the cleric's arrest in the April 2003 murder of a moderate cleric.

As originally planned by Gen. Tommy Franks, the Central Command chief who ran the war, the 4th Infantry was to attack into northern Iraq from Turkey, but the Turkish government refused to go along. Meanwhile the 4th Infantry's tanks and other equipment remained on ships in the eastern Mediterranean for weeks — a problem that Franks sought to turn into an advantage by assaulting Baghdad without them.

Based on a captured Iraqi document — a memo to Saddam from his Ministry of Foreign Affairs, dated April 2 — Russian intelligence reported through its ambassador that the American forces were moving to cut off Baghdad from the south, east and north, with the heaviest concentration of troops in the Karbala area. It said the Americans had 12,000 troops in the area, along with 1,000 vehicles.

In fact, Karbala was a major step on the U.S. invasion route along the Euphrates River to Baghdad. The Karbala assault was launched April 1. A key bridge over the Euphrates, near Karbala, was seized on April 2, permitting U.S. forces to approach Baghdad from the southwest before Iraq could move sufficient forces from the north.

The Pentagon report also said the Russians told the Iraqis that the Americans planned to concentrate on bombing in and around Baghdad, cutting the road to Syria and Jordan and creating enough confusion to force Baghdad residents to flee.

The Pentagon report, designed to help U.S. officials understand in hindsight how Saddam and his military commanders prepared for and fought the war, paints a picture of an Iraqi regime blind to the threat it faced from the U.S. invaders, hamstrung by Saddam's inept military leadership and deceived by its own propaganda.

"The largest contributing factor to the complete defeat of Iraq's military forces was the continued interference by Saddam," the report said.

While Saddam disastrously miscalculated, the U.S. military also erred in areas beyond the well-known failure to realize that the Baghdad regime had no weapons of mass destruction, according to the 210-page report.

U.S. officials believed Iraq would set its oil wells on fire as part of a scorched-earth policy, and the invasion plan was constructed in ways meant to get U.S. troops to the southern oil wells before they could be torched.

The new report said, however, that while captured Iraqi documents show that there were plans made at the regional or local level to destroy the northern and southern oil wells, Saddam had expressly forbidden it.