A blog of the History and Public Policy Program
On October 28, 2024, the Hoover Institution Library and Archives made available the digital records of the former Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC).
On October 28, 2024, the Hoover Institution Library and Archives announced its acquisition and opening of the digital records from the former Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC), which included both the Saddam Hussein Regime and Al-Qaeda and Affiliated Movements collections.
As I reported in August, this development was the culmination of renewed talks regarding the records between the Hoover Institution and the Department of Defense, which the latter had been on the brink of transferring to the former in 2015, before US government lawyers halted the deal. After being dormant for several years, despite private advocacy accompanied by public appeals, the issue finally returned to the fore thanks to the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Steve Coll, who was represented by Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. The case was favorably dismissed by the presiding judge when Department of Defense officials in the Biden administration Pentagon agreed to provide Coll a trove of Iraqi records from the former CRRC, which he in turn used in the research for his book The Achilles Trap, and then donated to the Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program.
The Hoover Institution Library and Archives’ online finding aid confirms that it received a more complete version of the CRRC than Coll did in his settlement with the Pentagon. Although the latter is a subsection of the former, certain records Coll received appear to be missing from Hoover’s collection, most prominently some of the audio tapes of Saddam’s meetings.
The distinction between the trove of records obtained by Coll and the archive obtained by Hoover is not exact. The context of an ongoing data recovery operation, as the original physical disk containing the files reportedly deteriorated after 2015, along with the turnover of Pentagon personnel and their staffs working on the issue between 2022 and 2024, appear to have been the primary factors. While Coll’s settlement paved the way for the resumption of talks between the Pentagon and Hoover for the transfer of the CRRC, these events seem to have transpired in relative isolation from one another due to the aforementioned turnover in Biden administration personnel. Office of the Secretary of Defense records administrators I contacted, albeit supportive, were unfamiliar with the details of Coll’s settlement and the ongoing Wilson Center project involving the trove of CRRC records he received.[1]
The CRRC joins the other digitized collections of Iraqi Baʿth records available at the Hoover Institution, which include documents from Iraq’s 1990-1991 occupation of Kuwait, files from northern Iraq seized by Kurdish rebel parties in 1991, and the archive of the Baʿth Party headquarters retrieved in Baghdad by the Iraq Memory Foundation in the wake of the 2003 US-led invasion. Hoover makes its digital Iraqi collections available at both its Stanford University and Washington, D.C. locations, where they are a valuable resource for civilian academic and US government researchers alike. The latter category includes the Homeland Security Investigations-led Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center, an inter-agency effort of the federal government, aimed at identifying, removing, or prosecuting, when possible, war criminals and human rights violators residing in the United States.
Like with its other Iraqi collections, Hoover requires researchers to sign a user agreement for accessing the CRRC and prohibits taking pictures or downloading copies of documents. The primary focus of these agreements is protecting the Personally Identifiable Information (PII) of private individuals. This concern has considerably greater bearing with respect to the Baʿth Party collections, which contain membership files and document the state’s interactions with a much wider range of Iraqis. The CRRC, on the other hand, both in terms of written documents and the audio recordings of Saddam’s meetings, generally relates to the activities of party members and military officers serving in an official capacity, along with foreign dignitaries who visited Iraq, subjects that that usually fall outside the immediate purview of PII considerations. Further illustrating this point, the online release and hosting of records from the same archive by the Wilson Center to date has required minimal PII redactions, demonstrating a responsible and accessible way of making these historical sources freely available to all who are interested in them.
This fact should offer some reassurance to the intelligence community, which is still very cautious due to the fallout from the unrestricted release of Iraqi records on the internet by the Director of National Intelligence in 2006.
Going beyond the CRRC, the complementary efforts of the Wilson Center and Hoover Institution could serve as template for introducing the immensely greater number of similar Iraqi records from the Pentagon’s Harmony Database into the public domain. Such a venture would recall and be in the spirit of the collaboration between the United States National Archives and Records Administration and the American Historical Association to microfilm and facilitate research using captured German records in the decades immediately after World War II.
The latest release in the Saddam Files adds 20 new CRRC records to the Digital Archive. As has been discussed previously, this release contains some records of conversations that have parallel disconnected Arabic transcriptions with English translations or only English translations, as government contractors were racing against the clock to process as many records as possible before funding ran out. The History and Public Policy Program has been working to make the original audio files available as well and to link these to their corresponding transcriptions and translations on the Wilson Center Digital Archive.
Picking up where the fourth installment in this series left off, the fifth returns to a subject of the third batch of records, introducing additional letters from Saddam Hussein’s half-brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti.
In March 1990, writing from his United Nations post in Geneva, Barzan informed Saddam about Israeli diplomatic outreach to Iraqi officials in Switzerland. He also warned his half-brother to keep an eye on two officials, former Interior Minister Saadoun Shakir and former Iraqi Intelligence Service chief Fadhil al-Barrak, both of whom he suggested the United States and Iraq’s other enemies may try to cultivate as alternatives to Saddam’s rule.
Another file from September 1989 contains letters from both Barzan and his brother Sabawi Ibrahim al-Tikriti, the latter of whom had recently replaced Barrak as intelligence chief. Barzan echoed Saddam’s views of a looming conflict, writing, “Therefore, the real danger is the United States and its follower Israel. The Americans want to control the region and we are the only ones in front of them.” Sabawi, while agreeing with Barzan that the United States and Israel were Iraq’s main potential adversaries, found his brother’s letter overly “pessimistic” and didn’t think either’s vital interests were threatened by Iraqi power.
In a third file, dated from October 1992, Barzan returns to his tendency to complain to Saddam about family affairs and marriage politics, especially his determination to arrange the marriage of his son Muhammad to Hala, his half-brother’s youngest daughter. He bemoaned, “I have never heard of, read or seen a person with your capabilities of persuasion and psychological influence. I just cannot convince myself that you are incapable of convincing Hala to marry her cousin.”
Like prior releases, the records in this one are heavily centered on Iraq’s armed conflicts. Only a handful of records deal directly with the Iran-Iraq War. The first is a meeting that took place after Israel’s 1981 bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor. Saddam explained to the attendees that Israel’s primary objective was “is to prevent the Arab nation from being developed, advanced, and living on a suitable humane level.” He also suggested that Iraq’s pursuit of nuclear weapons was defensive, aimed at preventing Israel’s use of them against Iraq and the Arab nation.
The second meeting, from 1982, touched on relations with both the United States and Jordan. Turning to the subject of King Hussein’s recent visit to Baghdad, Saddam and his cabinet told him that volunteers for Iraq’s war effort against Iran were welcome, which took the form of the Yarmouk Brigade dispatched from Jordan.
The third record is of a meeting held shortly after the end of the war with Iran. The participants addressed the logistics for a victory parade in Baghdad, along with such outstanding issues as prisoners of war and Iraq’s foreign debt burden that had financed the conflict as its own reserves dwindled.
Other records pertain to the regional and global geopolitical environment in the period between the Iran-Iraq War and the 1990-1991 Gulf War. In a 1989 meeting, Saddam and his officials discuss the unraveling of the Eastern Bloc while speculating about the future of European integration and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Muhammad al-Sahhaf, the future foreign minister and information minister, opined that “The Americans have expressed in many different ways that they are not for a politically strong European union. Therefore, it will be the end of the North Atlantic Treaty.”
In early 1990, indicative of his growing suspicions, Saddam told the Revolutionary Command Council, “The Americans and in particular the Zionists are preoccupied with finding out what does Iraq have.” He then joked, “We said to them, if you give us nuclear bombs to balance the Israel nuclear bombs, either as a loan or gift, we will not be upset, but thankful.”
On the subject of regional diplomatic efforts to deescalate rising tensions between Iraq and Kuwait during the summer of 1990, a file from Iraqi signals intelligence reports on a phone conversation between Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Saudi King Fahd.
The drafts of Saddam’s speeches following his decision to invade and occupy Kuwait include immediate score settling with Arab leaders, especially Mubarak, accusing him of “wanting to comfort” the Americans and the Zionists. The text goes on to state, “It was him and nobody else who had stirred the media” and its “pencils of suspicion” to “stab Iraq and to describe President Saddam Hussein as a con man.” In a speech from the same time, Saddam made note of the immediate US response to dispatch available forces to the region, declaring, “America has been mobilizing war fleets and squadrons of planes and has been beating the war drums against Iraq under the pretext of confronting the Iraqi threat to Saudi Arabia.” And as remained the case throughout the 1990-1991 Gulf War, he quickly linked the question of Iraq’s future in Kuwait to Syria’s occupation of Lebanon and Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. On a more practical level, Saddam and his officials quickly grappled with the administrative future of Kuwait, where the population was accustomed to a higher standard of living, official rhetoric about it being Iraq’s nineteenth province notwithstanding.
In October 1990, records from a meeting with a visiting Soviet delegation indicate that Saddam sought to justify his actions, explaining that “Even if we did not have a historical background with Kuwait, we would have done the same thing because the only choice that was presented to us was to collapse, so the Americans and the backward ones can do what they wish. Our only choice was to go after the involved circle of conspirators tasked with this mission.” Even before Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, “There were mobilizations by the West against us; in conjunction with the Zionist's desires. The Zionist's mobilizations in Israel reached the extent of targeting our leadership personally.”
In December, Saddam struck a similar tone with a visiting Jordanian delegation. As he told his Jordanian guests, “It was obvious that they act out from American commands. There was no doubt that the conspiracy was plotted by Americans and Zionists too.” And in a January 1991 meeting with Palestinian Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat, Saddam announced that not only would America’s impending attack against Iraq fail, but also, “We will fight them and kick them out of the whole region.”
The last group of records in this release come from the years following the 1990-1991 Gulf War. One dispatch discusses the effects of sanctions against Iraq and the resulting rise in prices for goods. In a curious aside, Saddam observed the growing presence of Nestle products in Iraq, bluntly stating, “They destroy the health of the child.” A 1992 meeting with military commanders revolved around contingency plans for confronting uprisings like those that erupted in southern and northern Iraq following Iraq’s retreat from Kuwait in 1991. Saddam mused, “I never expected that some of our people, small in number, would betray us and unite with those came across from Iran.”
Turning to the subject of ongoing weapons inspections, he remarked on the seeming contradictions of this situation against the backdrop of continued confrontations with the US military, “These countries are at war with us and hurting us and we let them collect information on us? How is this happening?” Looking to the future, Saddam said, “We've planned to isolate the Americans in this struggle. The plan is that other countries won't participate with them,” a strategy that achieved growing success by the turn of the millennium.
On the same subject, a 1995 meeting covered the growing fissures over Iraq policy between the United States and Great Britain on the one hand, and France, Russia, and China on the other, along with how Iraq could exploit this dynamic to its benefit.
A meeting from October of the same year detailed the status of the Republican Guard, along with lessons learned since 1991. Saddam expressed his view that the officers needed to learn from historical military figures, such as Erwin Rommel and Charles De Gaulle, and that they should all be required to read at least a book a month.
Like previous releases in the Wilson Center’s Saddam Files series, this introduction is merely a superficial engagement with the wide range of subjects contained within the newest records, which researchers are encouraged to explore more fully in their own research. The releases, which have now made one hundred former CRRC records available on the Wilson Center Digital Archive, underscore the value of the more complete version of the archive obtained and recently opened by the Hoover Institution for in-person research. As we process and release additional records, those interested in these historical sources will continue to have greater online access than ever before, along with renewed in-person research access that had been curtailed for nearly a decade when the CRRC shut its doors in 2015.
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