Russia Denies Slipping U.S. War Plans to Iraq

MOSCOW â€”  Russia on Saturday dismissed a new Pentagon report that said Russian diplomats shared information about U.S. war plans in Iraq with the government of Saddam Hussein.

In a series of official denials, Russian authorities asserted there was no truth to the captured Iraqi documents cited in the study, which was released Friday. However, military analysts in Moscow said it was well known that Russian intelligence agents and retired Russian generals were operating in Iraq before the war and were in close contact with the Iraqi government.

Retired Col. Gen. Igor Maltsev, the former deputy commander of Soviet air defense who made several trips to Baghdad on the eve of the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, told The Times that he advised the Iraqis on how to improve their air defenses but was not involved in concrete aid to the Iraqi regime.

The Russian Information Agency quoted Boris Labusov, head of the Foreign Intelligence Service’s press office, as calling the U.S. revelations “unsubstantiated allegations.� The agency quoted an unnamed official who said they were “a form of revenge on the part of the U.S. for Russia’s firm position in regard to hostilities on Iraq’s territory.�

Maltsev and other Russian officials, including the former Russian ambassador apparently cited in the documents, have long been at the center of controversy over allegations that Russian diplomats and intelligence agents hauled secret cargo out of Iraq in the early days of the war.

One news report said they removed Iraqi intelligence files. Other reports suggested they took samples of U.S. military equipment recovered during the invasion, and one military analyst suggested to The Times that they took confidential Russian Embassy papers that the Kremlin did not want to fall into U.S. hands.

“Common sense suggests that if Russians had something they wanted to carry out from Iraq, they certainly did it. But it’s a waste of time to talk about it, if no one knows about it for sure,� Maltsev said.

Russia’s ambassador to Iraq at the time of the invasion, Vladimir Titorenko, was shot and wounded in April 2003 along with three other people when their convoy came under U.S. fire as they were leaving Baghdad.

The Pentagon study, which examined the Iraqi military’s decision-making, included one document that purported to summarize information on U.S. troop movements provided by the Russian ambassador to Iraqi officials. Another claimed Moscow had “sources� inside the U.S. military’s headquarters in Qatar during the invasion. Some of the information about U.S. troop movements and intentions later proved inaccurate.

Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent military analyst in Moscow, said he noticed similarities between the information in the study and a series of postings on a Russian website in 2003 that purported to come from a group of retired intelligence officers who claimed to have contacts with “special informational structures.�

It was common knowledge that agents of the Russian GRU, or military intelligence, were then operating in Iraq. But Felgenhauer said the Internet postings did not appear to be the kind of top-level information that was going to the Kremlin.

Still, Felgenhauer said the postings revealed “obvious military intelligence connections,� so the documents in the Pentagon study seemed plausible.

But another senior military analyst at a Russian think tank, Dmitry Trenin of the Carnegie Moscow Center, said it was highly unlikely that the Kremlin would have done something as risky as passing intelligence to Iraqi officials.

“I think Russia was essentially trying to avoid at that time a major clash with the United States over Iraq,� he said. “But in any situation like this, there are things that countries were doing ... that will be kept secret for a long time, if not forever.�

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Yakov Ryzhak of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.