IRAQI SPIES STAY BEHIND : TROOPS WITHDRAW FROM NORTH.

Byline: Tim Weiner The New York Times

Saddam Hussein is withdrawing most but not all of his forces from the Kurdish enclaves in northern Iraq that he invaded over the weekend, and is leaving behind a group of spies and secret agents to reassert his power in the region, American officials said Thursday.

The director of central intelligence said that most of the troops, tanks and armored carriers that the Iraqi president sent to the Kurdish city of Irbil were heading back to their bases. ``For the time being,'' said the director, John Deutch, ``it looks like the Iraqi military has stood down.''

On Wednesday, President Clinton said the United States had achieved its goals in a military campaign that included two rounds of cruise missile strikes in an effort to force an Iraqi withdrawal from the Kurdish region, which, under U.N. protection, has enjoyed a measure of freedom from Baghdad since the end of the Persian Gulf War. But on Thursday, it became clear that, under the cover of his assault on Irbil, the Iraqi dictator had left behind ``a massive security presence,'' said a State Department spokesman, Glyn Davies.

CIA officials concurred with that assessment. Though the size of this secret police force is unclear, officials said it was big enough to intimidate those who oppose the Iraqi leadership.

``He did not simply vanish into the night in a benign fashion, leaving nothing behind,'' Davies said. ``Saddam Hussein's footprint remains very much indelibly placed over that region of northern Iraq.''

Overall, for Saddam the benefits of his incursion into the Kurdish zone far outweigh the military and economic costs, diplomats in the region and Iraqi dissidents said. He has reasserted his power in the Kurdish area and hit Iraqi opposition groups operating there, while the American military attacks and new flight restrictions may only bolster his political standing, analysts said.

On Saturday, Iraq sent at least 30,000 soldiers from its Republican Guard into Irbil, shelling and occupying the city. Witnesses said some soldiers went house to house, pulling people from their homes and executing them. Saddam ordered his forces into Irbil after one of his oldest enemies, Massoud Barzani, chief of the separatist Kurdistan Democratic Party, asked the Iraqi leader for help in ousting the rival Patriotic Union of Kurdistan from the city.

On Thursday, the warring Kurdish parties fought one another south of the city as Iraqi troops stood by, U.N. officials reported. In a statement from its Washington office, the Patriotic Union said Iraqi troops backed by tanks had attacked its Kurdish loyalists. But U.S. officials said they saw no evidence of any Iraqi attack; one intelligence official said the statement appeared to be another piece of ``agenda-shrouded misinformation that comes at us from all sides'' of the Iraqi and Kurdish groups opposed to Saddam.

From his mountain redoubt near the Iraqi town of Sulaimaniya, 80 miles south of Irbil, Jalal Talabani, the chief of the Patriotic Union, said he would gladly accept military aid from Iran and would never again make peace with Barzani.

``Barzani is an agent of Saddam Hussein,'' Talabani told Reuters. ``So why should we talk to him? We will talk to his master if anything.''

The United States has spent close to $1 billion since the end of the 1991 Gulf War trying to preserve the Kurdish enclave. Its diplomats have spent years trying to get the two rival Kurdish leaders to show some semblance of unity against the Iraqi government.

State Department officials said Thursday that the idea of the two warring Kurdish leaders of northern Iraq ever settling their differences was now at best a faint, far-distant hope.

Some 22 million Kurds live in Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria, Armenia and Azerbaijan. They are the largest ethnic group in the world without a nation to call their own, and their history is a litany of broken promises, shifting alliances, betrayals and violent oppression.

In Ankara, Turkish government officials said Turkish troops would move into northern Iraq to prevent Kurdish rebels fleeing the fighting from entering Turkey. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Kurds walked north over the mountains into Turkey during the Gulf War, creating a huge political and humanitarian problem for the Turks, who have constant battles with their own independence-seeking Kurdish rebels.

The State Department responded cautiously to Turkey's decision to create a buffer zone in northern Iraq, raising no objections on the understanding that the zone would be temporary and troops would not be stationed there. Trying to indirectly address the question of whether the move would violate Iraq's sovereignty, Davies said Turkey's presence in northern Iraq was far different from Saddam's. He also said Turkey's fight against its own Kurdish rebels would not further destabilize northern Iraq.

Deutch delivered a generally optimistic picture of the military situation in northern Iraq after the two missile attacks by the United States on southern Iraq, which were intended to damage the country's air defenses.

U.S. intelligence agencies have satellites positioned above Iraq and electronic-eavesdropping equipment at an air base in southern Turkey, all of which can record the movement of Iraqi armor and military transports with precision. But the CIA has few, if any, reliable independent sources of information on what is happening to people in the back alleys of Irbil and in the mountains and villages surrounding the city.

Deutch told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Thursday morning that the intelligence agencies were reporting ``the withdrawal of the mechanized and armored units from the Kurdish territories in northern Iraq back to their garrisons.'' He said the retreat was proceeding ``fairly systematically,'' with ``most of the units'' returning to their bases.

And Iraq is respecting the limits of an expanded no-flight zone over the southern half of the nation, the intelligence director said. U.S. pilots patrolling the zone reported that they flew unchallenged by Iraqi fighters or air defense units.

In Baghdad, the Iraqi government called on the United Nations to denounce this week's missile attacks by the United States, calling them ``flagrant American aggression on Iraq.''