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By Kathy Sawyer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 29, 1999; Page A08

U.S. intelligence has information that Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, an old acquaintance of Iraq's President Saddam Hussein, accepted an $800,000 payment from the Iraqi government in 1997, presumably in return for Russian assistance with strategic weapons technologies, according to an article in the April 5 issue of the New Yorker magazine.

"This is rock solid -- like John Gotti ordering a whack on the telephone. Ironclad," investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh quotes an American intelligence source as saying.

The source was describing what he said was an electronically monitored bank transfer between Tariq Aziz, Iraq's deputy prime minister, and Primakov, then foreign minister. U.S. intelligence learned of the exchange in November 1997 from a British intercept, Hersh says.

"There was a wire transfer to an account" traceable to Primakov "of eight hundred thousand dollars," Hersh quotes a second official as saying, adding that the official assessed the intelligence as top quality.

"It is not clear how the intelligence community was able to identify Primakov as the beneficiary," Hersh notes, since, as a former high-level intelligence official, the Russian leader would be unlikely to accept a payoff in his own name or in a way easy to trace.

Some experts responded skeptically to the report on similar grounds. "It doesn't ring true," said a U.S. arms control official. He has seen no such intelligence reports, he said, but added that does not mean they do not exist.

John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists said, "Given Primakov's familiarity with [intelligence] trade craft, I'd have some difficulty believing that he would accept a personal gratuity of such a trivial amount of money -- that's chump change! -- and that he would do so in a way that would be so easily detected."

A spokesman at the Russian Embassy in Washington "vehemently" denied all charges of corruption against Primakov, the New Yorker reports. A State Department spokesman said officials would have no immediate comment.

National security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger said on ABC's "This Week" that he had just taken a first hasty glance at the article. "I have no evidence to support that, no," he said. "I don't know whether Mr. Hersh has."

Primakov has had ties to Saddam Hussein since the late 1960s, when Primakov was Middle East correspondent for Pravda and the Iraqi leader was chief of intelligence in Baghdad.

In addition, Russia has been a source of sophisticated ballistic missile guidance devices and other technology for Iraq in its efforts to rebuild weapons of mass destruction. Russian officials have repeatedly denied that they breached U.N. sanctions by selling arms to Iraq but have acknowledged some Russian shippers may have acted independently.

Hersh also reports that, during the December 1998 U.S. bombing attacks on Iraq, American forces attempted to kill Saddam Hussein by bombing two sites where they had information that the Iraqi president met his mistresses, a retreat at Auja, near his ancestral home of Tikrit, and at his daughter's home in a Baghdad suburb.

"The targeting of Saddam had grown, in part, out of an extraordinary intelligence coup by a team of UNSCOM arms inspectors," Hersh writes, referring to the team commissioned by the United Nations to monitor Iraq's compliance with 1991 cease-fire terms requiring it to dismantle its strategic weapons programs.

Headed by Scott Ritter, the team had unscrambled encrypted exchanges Saddam Hussein generated from secure telephones and from his car, through aides, with his private bodyguards from a group known as the Special Security Organization.

While the Ritter team was interested in the bodyguards' role in concealing stockpiled weapons, Hersh says, the CIA had other ideas: "Its goal, authorized by President Clinton, was to work with Iraqi dissidents, in Saddam's Special Security Organization and elsewhere, to overthrow the regime, by any means possible."

After a National Security Agency team first reviewed the new UNSCOM intercepts revealing this information, Hersh said an official told him, the American reaction was, "Here's the best intelligence that we've ever had! Saddam is suddenly exposed for the first time. He's the Godfather! He gets drunk, starts raving like a madman, and his secretary will get on and say he lost his mind -- ordering murders. We never had him on this level before."

Correspondent David Hoffman in Moscow contributed to this report.