Informed Speculation

Condi Rice, Stephen Hadley, and even Ted Kennedy expressed concern on the talk-show circuit this weekend about the allegation that Russia turned over American war plans to Iraq (revealed in yet another captured Iraqi document):

An unclassified Pentagon report last week said a captured April 2, 2003, document from the Iraqi minister of foreign affairs to President Saddam Hussein stated that the Russian ambassador had funneled intelligence on U.S. plans to the Iraqi government.

…Another Iraqi document, dated March 24, 2003, referred to Russian “sources” inside the U.S. military’s Central Command headquarters in Qatar, according to the report.

“We’re going to take a good, hard look at the documentation and understand a little bit better what’s there, and then we’ll raise it,” U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on CNN’s “Late Edition” program.

“Any implication that there were those from a foreign government who may have been passing information to the Iraqis prior to the invasion would be, of course, very worrying,” she said.

…Asked whether the Russians were lying when they said it was nonsense, White House national security adviser Stephen Hadley said: “We don’t know yet. We know there’s a document, we know that got into the hands of the Iraqis. We know that it dealt with war plans that we had.”

He said there were still unanswered questions about how the Russians got the information out of U.S. Central Command and whether the Russian ambassador was authorized to pass it on to the Iraqi government.

“So there are further questions that we need to raise, but it’s a serious matter and we’ll be talking to the Russians about it,” Hadley said on CBS television’s “Face The Nation.”

…Sen. Edward Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, said on ”Face The Nation” that if it turns out to be true, the United States should review its relationship with Russia and whether to attend the G8 summit in St. Petersburg this summer.

Clearly, Putin will not tell us even if the report is true, so perhaps this is just a way of getting leverage over Russia. If so, I suggest we apply pressure on the Iranian issue, due for discussion Thursday in Berlin by the members of the UN Security Council…