OxBlog

Thursday, April 17, 2003

# Posted 1:21 AM by Patrick Belton  

BUT DID THE IRAQI SPIES LIKE BORSCHT? .... The Moscow Times picks up on this AP story indicating Moscow's involvement in teaching surveillance and eavesdropping techniques to Iraqi intelligence agents on Russian soil, including at least five agents who received training in September 2002. Documents currently being unearthed by U.S. personnel in the Mukhabarat's former headquarters in Baghdad are shedding light on the precise form and extent Russian-Iraqi intelligence cooperation took under the Hussein regime.

By way of personal sidenote: My last few posts on the subject notwithstanding, anyone who knows me can vouch for my credentials as a long-standing and ardent Russophile. But my admiration for the culture which within a century produced Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Akhmatova, and Bulgakov contrasts sharply with my disappointment with a government which helped to sharpen the covert talons of this hidious regime. Perhaps my feelings toward Russia broadly parallel my sentiments toward France: a wholly magnificent and cultured nation, the vast majority of whose political manifestations over history have to greater or lesser extents been evil.
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