IRAQ - Factionalism In Iraqi Intelligence Services.

The official Iraqi National Intelligence Service (INIS) was set up in February 2004 as a non-sectarian force which has since recruited its officers and agents from all of Iraq's communities. Its chief, Gen. Muhammad Shahwani, is a Sunni from Mosul married to a Shi'ite and his deputy is a Kurd. But Iraq's Shi'ite politicians loyal to the theocracy of Iran in 2006 got PM Maliki to create a rival spy agency in the Ministry of Security under the direction of Sheerwan al-Wa'eli. Wa'eli, a former colonel in the Iraqi Army who served in Nasiriya under Saddam's Sunni/Ba'thist dictatorship, is a Shi'ite said to have received training in Iran and to maintain liaison with Iranian and Syrian intelligence agents in Baghdad.

Shahwani, a commander of Iraqi special forces during the Iran-Iraq war, has worked closely with the CIA for more than a decade - first in trying to topple Saddam, then in trying to build an effective intelligence network. In an article published on June 15 by The Daily Star of Beirut, David Ignatius said there was pressure from pro-Iran Shi'ite politicians to abolish Shahwani's agency. The duel between the rival spy agencies is one more sign of the sectarian rage which is destroying Iraq, as in the macabre July 13 repeat bombing of the Samarra' shrine revered by Shi'ites.

Ignatius wrote: "Maliki...is said to vacillate between supporting the official spy service and its Iranian-backed challenger. US officials, who strongly back the official service, are upset about the bickering but seem unable to resolve it".

Wa'eli's service, like Shahwani's organisation, has about 5,000 officers. Ignatius then said: "Shahwani is now in the US. Unless he receives assurances of support from Maliki's government, he is likely to resign, which would plunge the INIS into turmoil and could bring its collapse.

"The CIA had hoped that Shahwani's INIS could be an effective national force and a deterrent to Iranian meddling. To mount effective operations against the Iranians, Shahwani recruited the chief of the Iran branch of the Saddam-era Mukhabarat. That made the Iranians and their Shi'ite allies nervous".

Ignatius added: "Shahwani's operatives discovered in 2004 that the Iranians had a hit list, drawn from an old Ministry of Defense payroll document that identified the names and home addresses of senior officers who served under the former regime.

Shahwani himself was among those targeted for assassination by the Iranians. To date, about 140 officers in the INIS have been killed. Though many in Maliki's government regard Shahwani with suspicion, his supporters say he has tried to remain independent of the sectarian battles in Iraq. He has provided intelligence that has led to the capture of several senior al-Qaeda operatives, according to US sources, as well as regular intelligence about the Sunni insurgency.

Ignatius said: "Several months ago, Shahwani informed Maliki of an assassination plot by a bodyguard who secretly worked for Shi'ite militia leader Muqtada al-Sadr". He said Shahwani's service uncovered a similar plot to assassinate Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh, a Kurd.

Ignatius, a US columnist who formerly worked for the CIA, said Shahwani's saga illustrated a little-understood part of the Iraq story: the CIA's attempt to mobilise Iraqi officers. At the centre was Shahwani, a charismatic commander who made his reputation in 1984 with a helicopter assault on Iranian troops atop a mountain in Iraqi Kurdistan. His popularity made him dangerous to Saddam, and he was arrested and interrogated in 1989. He fled the country in May 1990, just before Iraq invaded Kuwait. In 1991, he began efforts to organise a military coup utilising former members of the special forces, which had been disbanded by Saddam.

Shahwani's coup plans suffered a setback in June 1996, when the Mukhabarat killed 85 of his operatives, including three of his sons. But he continued plotting over the next seven years, and on the eve of the US invasion in March 2003, Shahwani and his CIA supporters were still hoping to organise an uprising among the Iraqi military. Shahwani's secret Iraqi network was known as "77 Alpha", and later as "the Scorpions". The Pentagon was wary of the Iraqi uprising plan, so it was shelved, but Shahwani encouraged his network in the Iraqi military not to fight - in the expectation that the soldiers would be well treated after the American victory. Then came the decision in May 2003 by the US administrator of Iraq, Paul Bremer, and his Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to disband the Iraqi military and cut off its pay.

Ignatius concluded: "Instead of the one good intelligence service it needs, Iraq today has two - one pro-Iranian, the other anti-Iranian. That's a measure of where the country is: caught between feuding sects and feuding neighbors, with a superpower ally that can't seem to help its friends or stop its enemies".