Intelligence switching in the Iran–Iraq war describes a practice John Kiriakou has said went beyond arming both sides of a conflict.
The United States was, by then, supporting Saddam Hussein against Iran while also selling weapons to Iran. Kiriakou says the intelligence relationship was worse than the arms relationship, because it was actively rebalanced as the war moved: “As soon as one would get a leg up on the other, we would increase the level of intelligence cooperation.”[1]
The mechanism he describes is symmetrical. If the Iranians moved into Iraqi territory, the United States began giving the Iraqis top-secret overhead imagery; if the Iraqis pushed into Iranian territory, it began giving the Iranians overhead imagery.[1] His assessment of it is one line: “So it was hideous.”[2]
Where it sits in the oversight story
Kiriakou raises the episode as part of an argument about how briefly the post-Church Committee reforms held. The oversight committees seemed, in 1975 and 1976, like the answer to an intelligence establishment that had become too big and too powerful — one that killed people who got in its way and experimented on Americans with LSD. That lasted about six years, he says, before the same establishment was selling weapons to Iran through a Saudi middleman who laundered the money, using the proceeds to buy weapons routed through a man in Cyprus to the rebels in Nicaragua, and hoping nobody would notice.[3][4]