Conflicting accounts of CIA and Saddam, 1959-1963

"My posting last Saturday, For Whom the Bell Tolls: Top Ten Ways the US Enabled Saddam Hussein has elicited a very interesting account by a US government insider contesting the allegations about CIA-Saddam connections early in his life, specifically 1959-1963, and which denies CIA complicity in the first Baath coup of 1963 or the use of the Baath to destroy the Iraqi Communist Party.

The former official reports that Agency case officers in Cairo in 1960-1962 maintain that they never had heard of Saddam Hussein and that it was impossible that meetings should have been held with him without their knowledge. He says that he had looked into these allegations and had also contacted a number of Foreign Service Officers who were in the Cairo embassy at that time, and they also had no recollection of any contact with Saddam. (Another retired USG official who was in Cairo in this period also denied any such contacts, so I have it from two insider eyewitnesses.)"
Juan Cole

Damn, Cole admits he was wrong...that's big.