The U.S. Intelligence Community by Jeffrey T Richelson

Author:Jeffrey T Richelson [Richelson, Jeffrey T]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780813349190
Publisher: Westview Press
Published: 2015-07-14T06:00:00+00:00

DEFECTORS AND ÉMIGRÉS

Defectors and émigrés also sometimes serve as valuable intelligence sources. During the Cold War, the United States established a coordinated Defector Program managed by the CIA-led Interagency Defector Committee (IDC).50

A defector may be able to resolve uncertainties concerning data acquired through technical collections systems. In one instance, a Soviet defector was asked to “look at an elaborate analysis of something U.S. cameras had detected by chance when there was an opening in the clouds that normally shrouded a particular region. Learned men had spent a good deal of time trying to figure out what it was and concluded that it was something quite sinister, an Air Force officer said. ‘Viktor took one look at it and convincingly explained why what we thought was so ominous was in fact comically innocuous.’”51

During the 1980s, CIA sources included a defector from Nicaragua, Roger Miranda Bengoechea, a senior military officer and chief contact for all military advisers in Nicaragua, which probably gave him knowledge concerning the Cuban presence in that country. He had toured all Sandinista military bases the week prior to his defection. Miranda, who made frequent trips to Mexico for medical reasons, may have been passing information to the CIA before his defection. According to the Nicaraguan defense minister, Miranda had made copies of Air Force plans as well as documents concerning artillery brigades and other installations in Managua.52

Iraqi defectors provided U.S. intelligence agencies with information on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in the years between the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, although much of the information was fabricated. A senior Iraqi scientist, Khidhir Abdul Abas Hamza, who fled his country in 1994, provided the CIA with important details concerning the Iraqi nuclear program. Hamza, the highest-ranking scientist ever to defect from Baghdad, was able to provide information on the origins of the nuclear program, the role of foreign suppliers, the treatment of nuclear scientists in Iraq, and Iraqi success in perfecting methods of uranium enrichment.53

In October 1994, the Iraqi National Congress (INC) “provided a steady stream of low-ranking walk-ins from various Iraqi army and Republican Guard units who generally had interesting information,” according to a Senate report. Then, in the summer of 1995, two of Saddam Hussein’s sons-in-law defected to Jordan, where they were interrogated by U.S. officials. One defector was Lieutenant General Hussein Kamel Hassan, who headed the Industry Ministry and military industrialization program, which included the nuclear weapons and biological weapons program. The other, Lieutenant Colonel Saddam Kamel Hassan, headed the presidential security detail. (Not surprisingly, after they decided to return to Iraq, they were killed.)54

Among the best known of the Iraqi defectors, code-name CURVEBALL, resided in Germany under the care of that nation’s Federal Intelligence Service, or Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). CURVEBALL claimed to be a project manager “with intimate details of an Iraqi mobile BW program” who “was specifically involved in the design of mobile production facilities,” according to a DIA memo. The CIA did not have direct access to CURVEBALL

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