FBI tries to deport guerrilla to Iraq

First Iraqi agents tried to poison him with thallium, a slow acting rat poison. Then the Federal Bureau of Investigation put him in jail as a danger to the security of the United States and are trying to deport him back to Iraq, where he faces execution.

Safa al-Battat, 33, a veteran guerrilla leader against the army in the marshes of southern Iraq, now has unique and painful experience of the Iraqi and US security methods. Cured of the results of taking thallium in a jar of yogurt at a party in Iraqi Kurdistan, he is in jail in California while ill-trained FBI agents try to understand his role in the complex politics of Iraq.

He is one of 600 members of the Iraqi opposition airlifted from Kurdistan by the CIA at the end of 1996 to escape Iraqi tanks which had just rolled up the Central Intelligence Agency's operation in northern Iraq, in the agency's worst defeat since the Bay of Pigs. Now Mr Battat is one of six Iraqis facing expulsion from the US to Iraq because the FBI decided he might be a double agent.

The court hearings are largely secret but The Independent has obtained a memorandum describing the three-day hearing against another Iraqi, Hashim Qadir Hawlery, held for the same reason. It reveals that Jennifer Rettig, an FBI special agent who originally interviewed him, believed he was a member of a secret organisation called "KLM".

Mr Hawlery, who had been a member of the Iraqi opposition for 30 years, was confused about why he was accused of belonging to a Dutch airline. Only after a military interpreter was called to the stand did it emerge that Ms Rettig, who had received a short briefing on Iraq, had heard the translator use the term "Kurdish liberation movement" and believed Mr Hawlery belonged to a powerful organisation with the initials KLM.

Expulsion orders on Mr Battat and five other Iraqis were handed down by the immigration court judge, who decided that the defendants could not be told the evidence against them. Their lawyers are still considering an appeal and have been joined by James Woolsey, the first director of the CIA under President Bill Clinton, who now works for a Washington law firm.

It is a strange fate for Mr Battat, who has spent a year in jail. In London, Ghanim Jawad, another long-time opponent of the Iraqi regime, says he is one of the finest of those who fought against the Iraqi regime. He blames the CIA for looking for scapegoats and imaginary agents.

Mr Battat's record of activism against Saddam Hussein is difficult to match. Born in Basra he deserted from the Iraqi army in 1991 in the wake of the uprisings in the south of Iraq for which President George Bush had called. He went briefly to Iran but then joined the Iraqi National Congress, an umbrella group for opponents of the government in Baghdad, and set up a network in southern Iraq.

It was because he was important to the opposition that Iraqi security tried to poison him two years later. But on recovering after being treated in Britain, Mr Battat went back to Kurdistan, becoming one of the leaders of the resistance. When Iraqi tanks entered the area in August, 1996 he fled again, this time to the US where FBI agents decided that he posed a danger to security, put him in jail and now propose to return him to Iraq.