How to Betray Your Country by James Wolff (spicy books to read .TXT) 📕

Al Tikriti, known more widely as Chemical Ali for his use of mustard gas and sarin in the genocidal Anfal campaign against the Kurds, can be seen hunting down and personally executing rebels in the marshlands around Rumaytha, and defector reporting from both POLARITON and HEPTAHEDRON (a former head of security at the presidential palace) indicates that LEG IRON can be seen in the footage on at least two occasions.

4. Once the rebels in the south had been defeated, Iraqi forces were redirected north to deal with the Kurdish uprising. POLARITON credits LEG IRON with the idea of throwing ordinary baking flour from helicopters onto crowds of Kurdish civilians in order to create the impression they were being attacked with chemical weapons, which led to widespread panic and hastened the mass flight of refugees into Iran and Turkey. This was viewed in Baghdad as a masterstroke, and HEPTAHEDRON reporting (in addition to multiple SIGINT strands) indicates that LEG IRON was among those presented with a medal by Saddam Hussein in a ceremony at the presidential palace in early 1992. In what quickly became a part of the folklore surrounding LEG IRON, a junior officer present at the event is reported to have jokingly described him in passing as “the baker of Baghdad”, in a reference to his use of flour against the Kurds, his father’s humble profession and to the widespread description of Saddam Hussein in Western media as “the butcher of Baghdad” – a description in which Saddam himself apparently took some pleasure. The “baker of Baghdad” epithet circulated widely in military and intelligence circles until the junior officer was beaten to death several weeks later during the routine search of what was believed to be an abandoned property in a Shia neighbourhood of Mosul.

5. An internal investigation into the incident exonerated LEG IRON, but the episode – heightened by the bereaved family’s demand for retribution – is likely to have been behind LEG IRON’s sudden posting in May 1992 to the Iraqi Cultural Centre in London to take up the unlikely position of Assistant Administrator.

6. MI5 was unaware at the time of LEG IRON’s military background and so did not designate him as a person of interest until six months after his arrival. Subsequent coverage (it appears from the files that investigators relied upon sporadic surveillance, telephone and postal intercept and a handful of agents within the Iraqi diaspora) indicated that LEG IRON lived with his wife and young child in a house in St John’s Wood, drove a brown Vauxhall Astra, attended monthly classical concerts in his local church hall and carried out his administrative duties in a quietly professional manner.

7. He is also assessed to have been responsible for an increase in the number of killings (attempted and otherwise) of Iraqi dissidents in London. These included the murder of a Kurdish poet whose mutilated body was found floating in the Thames near Chelsea Bridge; the apparent suicides – both by hanging, both in the month of March – of two journalists writing for an opposition publication; a third suicide, this time by overdose, in which the coroner noted unexplained bruising around the deceased’s neck and mouth; and the stabbing of an Iraqi defector in Highgate Cemetery. On that occasion the attacker was disturbed by a dog walker and fled the scene before completing his task. The victim later provided a statement to police in which he described seeing a blind man with a cane shortly before the attack; a white stick was later found discarded and wiped clean of fingerprints in a nearby flower bed.

8. During this period there were also seven assaults on Iraqi dissidents, for which a resident of the Isle of Dogs was later convicted. Given the accused’s membership of a gym within a hundred metres of the Iraqi Cultural Centre, a psychiatric assessment indicating he was profoundly impressionable and eyewitness reporting suggesting he had been seen in public with LEG IRON, detectives pressed him to implicate LEG IRON in the assaults, but the man maintained to the end that he had acted alone and went on to receive the maximum sentence possible.

9. LEG IRON fled the UK in October of 1994 after becoming involved in a pub fight in which a man lost an eye.

10. Coverage of LEG IRON in the years following his return to Iraq is patchy, but records indicate that he was a casualty of the disastrous de-Baathification process insisted upon by the Coalition Provisional Authority in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion, in which thousands of military and intelligence officials were stripped of their positions, salaries and pensions. Despite the fierce competition during this period for stretched resources, we retained some coverage of LEG IRON because of his activities while in the UK, and CX reporting suggests a certain drift: a brief and unsuccessful stint running a haulage company, some fuel smuggling and extortion, a month or two in prison for kidnapping. His eldest brother, a former infantry colonel, was linked to Abu Musab Al Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda in Iraq and later detained by the US in Abu Ghraib, which may have provided LEG IRON with a route into the armed Islamist insurgency. Even if there was no connection, however, this was a transition undertaken over the following years by many hundreds of former Iraqi military and intelligence officials who had suddenly found themselves without work and excluded from the now Shia-dominated state, and welcomed by the likes of Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, who recognized with considerable foresight the contribution their skills could make on the battlefield and in the building of the fledgling IS state.

11. Things went quiet until the autumn of 2012, when GCHQ voice analysis confirmed that an IS commander using the kunya Abu Laith was in fact LEG IRON. Reliable reporting on him during this time is scarce. Like many former professionals who had moved across, LEG IRON exhibited extremely high levels of operational security, changing his location every day, avoiding mobile phones, using multiple