So We Have This NSA Presence In Iraqi Kurdistan Apparently

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So We Have This NSA Presence In Iraqi Kurdistan Apparently
By: Spencer Ackerman Wednesday November 18, 2009 12:00 pm	Tweet

Marc Ambinder has a gem today in a post about intelligence wars between Leon Panetta and Dennis Blair:

The conflict became public earlier this year, after the CIA protested when the Director of National Intelligence appointed a senior National Security Agency representative to be the DNI’s representative in Kurdistan. Traditionally, the CIA’s chief of station had served as the foreign nation’s principal intelligence representative. But the NSA has a bigger footprint in Kurdistan, and the DNI decided that he would be better served by appointing an NSA officer to be his representative.

As I wrote over at the Windy — wow. I can’t prove it, and I have no actual additional information, but you can bet that that NSA presence does a whole lot of communications intercepts aimed at nearby Iran. And I wonder what happens to it under the Status of Forces Agreement. The Kurds are the only Iraqis openly solicitous of a prolonged U.S. military presence, largely because they want to leverage it into U.S. acquiescence to a generational plan for ultimate independent statehood. And when did this NSA presence develop?

2 Comments

2 Responses to “So We Have This NSA Presence In Iraqi Kurdistan Apparently”

Endymion November 18th, 2009 at 3:03 pm

In 2003 I believed that the actual Bush Admin plan going in to Iraq was to break up the country and sell the pieces to the neighbors in return for natural resource concessions and a wedge into controlling their foreign and domestic policies. I even drew up a guess–double the size of Kuwait; Anbar to Syria if they’d work with us, to Jordan if Syria wouldn’t; other Sunni-Arab parts to Saudis(I actually thought this was the impetus for the invasion, that the only ‘concession’ would be to keep the relationship we already had with the Saudis); Shia-Arab sections to Iran…the most fanciful part of this scheme was a deal in which Iran would take Baghdad in exchange for recognizing Iranian-Iraqi-Turkish autonomy as a sort of joint protectorate, officially part of Turkey but under de facto American control and full of US military. In what I envisioned as the most likely scenario, Syria would object to the whole thing and we’d use their protests as an excuse to invade and dismantle them next.
I was crazy right? Nobody in power wanted any part of that sort of thing, right? Tell me I was nuts, please.