Talk:Covert cell

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Just as a case study, the only successful (as far as I am aware) Saddam-era Iraqi covert cell was called "al-Nahdah" - The Awakening - and was founded in 1991. They studied how left-wing Latin American groups survived under repression by military dictatorships and modeled themselves accordingly. They organized themselves into hermetically sealed cells in order to survive any arrests-and the inevitable torture. It had so-called "dead cells," which were inactive until needed to replace those that were eliminated.

Their primary success was an assassination attempt on Saddam's son Uday in December 1996. While they failed to kill him, he was grieviously wounded, and the covert cell "proved that the Iraqi people could still act after the crushing of the uprising in 1991". The attackers escaped "undetected and unscathed" to Iran. - Out of the Ashes - The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein by Andrew Cockburn & Patrick Cockburn, Perennial, 1999.