SADDAM'S CIA COUP

On Ain Kawa street in Erbil, just beyond the green arch bearing the inscription FREE KURDISTAN, there stands a gray house, No. 23-7. Everyone in this Christian suburb whispers about the six "unknown Americans" in their fancy white Landcruiser who used to visit No. 23-7 regularly. They were CIA case officers, and until they fled on Aug. 31, just as the Iraqi army was rolling into the Kurdish city, this was their base in Erbil. When they departed--driving fast, well before dawn-- they left three things behind. The first was the rent, four months' worth paid in advance. Second was hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of computers, scramblers and satellite phones, as well as equipment used by a TV-radio station that beamed anti-Saddam propaganda into Iraq 11 hours each day. Finally, they also left behind 1,500 members of the Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group based in Erbil, to whom the CIA had given financing, arms and--the I.N.C. now claims--an implicit understanding that if anything went wrong, these U.S. allies would not be abandoned to fend for themselves.

CIA officials say the agency offered no such guarantee. But in any case, as the Americans raced their Landcruiser toward the Turkish border and Iraqi troops began flooding the streets of Erbil, senior I.N.C. military officer Colonel Mukkadam Abu Khadim and his men were busy trying to stay alive. "The Mukhabarat [Iraq's secret police] had names and addresses," says Abu Khadim. "Those who didn't get away were seized." Of the 100 employees who worked for the rebel TV station, only 12 survived. Between 97 and 100 I.N.C. members were also killed on the spot; Abu Khadim says he interviewed an eyewitness who watched the execution of 30. "The Iraqis arrived at 4 p.m., interrogated his comrades, then blindfolded them and shot them at 5 p.m." Meanwhile Abu Khadim and 250 comrades fled to the mountain town of Salahuddin, a stronghold of Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani, the very man who had invited Saddam Hussein into northern Iraq. Asked if they felt betrayed by the CIA, an Abu Khadim aide shook his head in disbelief and replied, "I was astonished that the U.S. Air Force did not come to our rescue."

For five years, the CIA has been running a modest mission to bind diverse factions of Kurdish and Iraqi dissidents into an opposition against Saddam Hussein. With Baghdad's re-entry into northern Iraq, that mission was obliterated. "Saddam has knocked out many of America's eyes and ears, and your good name was tarnished," says Professor Amatzia Baram of Israel's Haifa University, a leading Iraq expert. "U.S. credibility and reputation for protecting its friends has suffered a terrible blow." Even as the U.S. deploys F-117 Stealth fighter-bombers to temper Saddam's erratic outbursts, the CIA must rebuild its Iraqi operation from the bottom up.