Tuesday, December 23, 2008

SADDAM'S SPIES

Excerpt from today's local-news section of the Washington Post:
Man Admits to Secret Work for Iraq's Hussein
Md. Restaurateur, Identified in Captured Documents, Helped Intelligence Service Beginning in 1980s


A 67-year-old Iraqi who has been living in the United States since the 1980s pleaded guilty to a federal conspiracy charge yesterday and admitted that he secretly served for more than a decade as an agent of the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Saubhe Jassim Al-Dellemy, who came to the United States as a student and became a permanent resident in 2000, was identified as an agent through documents recovered after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, prosecutors said. The recovery of such records has led to charges against at least a dozen Iraqi agents, according to the Justice Department.

Given the code name "Adam," Dellemy provided information to Iraq and its intelligence agency about the identities and activities of people and groups opposed to Hussein and his government, according to a factual summary that accompanied his plea agreement.

...Dellemy used the restaurant's proximity to the NSA to "gather information" about the U.S. government, the documents say.

[...]

Dellemy's work in the United States began two decades ago....
All those years Dellemy has been living in the United States, and for what? To enjoy the freedoms here? Only so far as those freedoms allowed him to subvert the United States.

This story does make one wonder how many more spies are among us, spies having come in as students and staying to do something else entirely.

And I'm willing to bet that Dellemy's clientele at the restaurant he ran thought he was a wonderful guy, too.

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