October 2, 2004, "The Age" -- Fallujah -- American intelligence obtained through bribery may have seriously overstated the insurgency role of the most wanted fugitive in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

US agents in Baghdad and Fallujah have revealed a series of botched and often tawdry dealings with unreliable sources who, in the words of one, "told us what we wanted to hear".

"We were basically paying up to $US10,000 ($A13,700) a time to opportunists, criminals and chancers who passed off fiction and supposition about Zarqawi as cast-iron fact, making him out as the linchpin of just about every attack in Iraq," one agent said.

"Back home this stuff was gratefully received and formed the basis of policy decisions. We needed a villain, someone identifiable for the public to latch on to, and we got one."

Officials in Washington have linked Zarqawi to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda, casting the Jordanian extremist as leader of the insurgency, mastermind of suicide bombings and the man behind the abduction of foreign hostages.

But some critics of the war say the Bush Administration has deliberately skewed the level of Zarqawi's involvement in an attempt to portray the insurgency as a war waged by foreign Islamic terrorists.

That view could be bolstered by intelligence emerging from around Fallujah since the end of June, when the practice of paying for information was abandoned.

It suggests that the insurgency is led not by foreign-born Arabs but by members of Iraq's Sunni minority.

"The overwhelming sense from the information we are now getting is that the number of foreign fighters does not exceed several hundred and is perhaps as low as 200," one agent said.

"From the information we have gathered, we have to conclude Zarqawi is more myth than man. At some stage, and perhaps even now, he was almost certainly behind some of the kidnappings. But if there is a main leader of the insurgency, he would be an Iraqi. But the insurgency is not nearly so centralised to talk of a structured leadership."

Military intelligence officials complain that their reports to Washington are largely being ignored and accuse the Pentagon of over-reliance on electronic surveillance and aerial and satellite reconnaissance by the CIA.

In recent weeks America has claimed a series of precision air strikes on targets in Fallujah identified by the CIA as housing known Zarqawi associates.

It has denied that there were any civilian casualties, despite television pictures showing dead and wounded women and children being pulled from the rubble of flattened homes.

That is evidence, the military's spies say, of America's continued dependency on technology over old-fashioned human intelligence - an often voiced criticism since the early 1990s when Bill Clinton cut the number of field agents.

Both US President George Bush and English Prime Minister Tony Blair have, to varying degrees, conceded that intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programs - the basis on which the decision to go to war was taken - was misleading.

But both continue to maintain that the continued violence since Saddam was ousted is because the front line in the war on terrorism has formed in Iraq, a claim the Prime Minister was at pains to stress at this week's Labour Party Conference.

Yet it now seems that the intelligence on which such claims are based is as haphazard, scanty and contradictory as ever it was.

Copyright © 2004. The Age Company Ltd.

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