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But Bob was clearly intrigued by a tempting piece of intelligence. From a defector named Wafiq Samarrai, a former Iraqi Army general, the resistance fighters learned that a certain road traveled by Saddam was vulnerable to ambush. With luck and planning, the resistance could catch Saddam's convoy and kill him. Bob dutifully reported this back to CIA headquarters in Langley--and received a strong warning against assassination plots. Bob was ordered to discourage the resistance fighters from even attempting the ambush.

Still, planning for guerrilla raids went forward: Chalabi's men would hit the front line between Mosul and Kirkuk at 2200 hours on the night of March 4. Immediately, however, the rebel forces were divided by factional infighting. The two main Kurdish leaders, Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, had been squabbling over money from oil smuggling. Barzani was also mistrustful of the United States. His father had led a CIA-backed revolt against Iraq in 1975, only to be sold out and abandoned when America's client the Shah of Iran made a separate peace with Baghdad. The younger Barzani had carefully maintained ties with the Baghdad regime; other opposition leaders suspected that Barzani's top lieutenants were playing a double game, secretly feeding information to Saddam. In any case, Barzani refused to allow his men to join the INC's raiding parties. In an interview with Newsweek, one of Barzani's deputies charged that Bob had been taken in by Chalabi and the INC: "He was a cowboy. He wanted to be Lawrence of Arabia. He was deceived by them."

Back in Washington, caution was the order of the day. Deeply demoralized by the exposure of a CIA spy, Aldrich Ames, as a Soviet mole, the agency was even more secretive and withholding than usual. Incredibly, Clinton's national-security adviser, Anthony Lake, was not briefed about the INC's plan to attack Saddam's Army. Agency officials later explained that they didn't feel that the information was worth passing on to the White House, because they doubted the INC would carry through with the attack.

At the last minute, Lake learned of the INC plan through a back channel to the CIA. Furious, he sent a stiffly worded cable for Bob to relay to the Iraqi opposition leaders: "A. The action you have planned for this weekend has been totally compromised. B. We believe there is a high risk of failure. Any decision to proceed will be on your own." A sleepless Bob delivered the message to Chalabi on the morning of the attack. According to Chalabi, Bob insisted that the message was "not negative" since it did not expressly forbid military action.

The raids went ahead--and succeeded in winning over about a thousand defectors from the Iraqi Army in the north. But without support from Barzani or Washington, the INC military probes stopped after another week. Bob and his teammates were called back to Washington--where they were investigated by the FBI, which had picked up rumors that he had encouraged an illegal assassination plot. The investigation went nowhere, and the CIA decorated Bob instead for his work in Iraq.

The Iraqi dissidents were less fortunate. A separate resistance group, the Iraqi National Accord, had, with CIA backing, been trying to foment a palace coup. In June 1996, Saddam's security service rolled up this network, executing about a hundred officers. On Aug. 31, Saddam's tanks moved into northern Iraq--invited in by Kurdish leader Barzani. Bob's successors at the CIA station fled just ahead of the offensive. Some resistance leaders went with them, flying on to Guam and then the United States. But 96 Kurdish dissidents were taken out and shot by Saddam's soldiers, and an additional 2,000 Kurds were taken back to Iraqi intelligence headquarters, where they were either tortured or shot, according to the INC. Last week, on the basis of secret FBI testimony, a federal judge in Los Angeles declared that six Iraqi dissidents who had worked for the CIA were "national-security risks" and ordered them to be deported. If they return to Iraq, they face execution.

Throughout the Middle East, America's gulf war allies were watching as the CIA plots played out from 1991 to 1996. The collapse of these operations was widely seen as a failure of will: the message was that the United States was not really serious about getting rid of Saddam. Convincing them otherwise, and winning back the trust of the oft-betrayed Kurds, will take a major commitment by the United States. Said Sami Abdul Rahman, one of Barzani's top lieutenants, "Why should we tie the fate of our people to some individuals who have no responsibility?" Sending in another Bob--or Dick or Harry--will never be enough.

With Mark Dennis in Ankara