NO JOKE: CIA Had Plan to Portray Saddam Hussein as Pedophile

(May 25) -- The CIA had a bag of dirty tricks ready for Saddam Hussein in preparation of the 2003 American invasion of Iraq that included making him look like a pedophile. It also had something similar planned for Osama bin Laden.

The Washington Post blog Spy Talk, citing former CIA officials, said one devious tactic involved creating a video showing the Iraqi strongman purportedly having sex with a teenage boy.

"It would look like it was taken by a hidden camera," one ex-CIA official told Spy Talk's Jeff Stein. "Very grainy, like it was a secret videotaping of a sex session."

Courtesy INA / Getty Images

The CIA had plans to create videos making it look like then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was a pedophile.

The ex-CIA officials said the idea was then to "flood Iraq with the videos."

The CIA also had a plan to interrupt Iraqi television programming with a fake special news bulletin, and use a Saddam Hussein lookalike to announce he was resigning and handing over the reigns to his elder and erratic son, Uday, Spy Talk reported.

"I'm sure you will throw your support behind His Excellency Uday," the impostor Hussein would tell the Iraqi people.

For bin Laden, Spy Talk reported, the agency actually took things one step further and used actors to make a video of the al-Qaida leader and others sitting around a campfire drinking liquor and bragging about their conquests with boys.

The blog reported that the CIA's Office of Technical Services collaborated on the ideas, but in the end none ever took off because of internal disagreements over the dirty tricks, plus the CIA "didn't have enough money and expertise to carry" them out.

A U.S. Official said in a statement today to AOL News: " We can't confirm these accounts, but if these ideas were put forward at any time they clearly didn't go very far."

Some strong opposition came from James Pavitt, the now-ex-head of the CIA's Operations Division, and his deputy, Hugh Turner.

One of the ex-CIA sources told Spy Talk that the ideas were ridiculous and came from people who had spent time in Latin America and East Asia and didn't understand Middle Eastern culture.

"Saddam playing with boys would have no resonance in the Middle East -- nobody cares," one former CIA official told Spy Talk. "Trying to mount such a campaign would show a total misunderstanding of the target. We always mistake our own taboos as universal when, in fact, they are just our taboos."

Hussein was eventually captured in late 2003 and was hanged Dec. 30, 2006. His sons Uday and Qusay were killed in a shoot out with troops in Iraq in July 2003.


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