U.S. searching for State Department officials who incited Georgia to aggression against South Ossetia

PanARMENIAN.Net - A new front has opened between Georgia and Russia, now over which side was the aggressor whose military activities early last month ignited the lopsided five-day war. At issue is new intelligence, inconclusive on its own, that nonetheless paints a more complicated picture of the critical last hours before war broke out,



According to the publication, Georgia has released intercepted telephone calls purporting to show that part of a Russian armored regiment crossed into South Ossetia nearly a full day before Georgia's attack on the capital, Tshkinvali, late on Aug. 7.



The intercepts circulated last week among intelligence agencies in the United States and Europe, part of a Georgian government effort to persuade the West and opposition voices at home that Georgia was under invasion and attacked defensively. Georgia argues that as a tiny and vulnerable nation allied with the West, it deserves extensive military and political support.



The back and forth over who started the war is already an issue in the American presidential race, with Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, the Republican vice presidential candidate, contending that Russia's incursion into Georgia was "unprovoked," while others argue that Georgia's shelling of Tshkinvali was provocation. Georgia claims that its main evidence - two of several calls secretly recorded by its intelligence service on Aug. 7 and 8 - shows that Russian tanks and fighting vehicles were already passing through the Roki Tunnel linking Russia to South Ossetia before dawn on Aug. 7.



By Russian accounts, the war began at 11:30 that night, when President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia ordered an attack on Russian positions in Tshkinvali. Russian combat units crossed the border into South Ossetia only later, Russia has said.



General Lieutenant Nikolai Uvarov of Russia, a former United Nations military attach?, who served as a Defense Ministry spokesman during the war, insisted that Georgia's attack surprised Russia and that its leaders scrambled to respond while Russian peacekeeping forces were under fire. He said President Dmitri Medvedev had been on a cruise on the Volga River. Putin was at the Olympics in Beijing.



"The minister of defense, by the way, was on vacation in the Black Sea somewhere," he said. "We never expected them to launch an attack."



Matthew Bryza, the deputy assistant secretary of state who coordinates diplomacy in the Caucasus, said the contents of the recorded conversations were consistent with what Georgians appeared to believe on Aug. 7, in the final hours before the war, when a brief cease-fire collapsed.



"During the height of all of these developments, when I was on the phone with senior Georgian officials, they sure sounded completely convinced that Russian armored vehicles had entered the Roki Tunnel, and exited the Roki Tunnel, before and during the cease-fire," he said. "I said, under instructions, that we urge you not to engage these Russians directly."



By the night of Aug. 7, he said, he spoke with Eka Tkeshelashvili, Georgia's foreign minister, shortly before President Saakashvili issued his order to attack, The International Herald Tribune reports.



Meanwhile, according European media reports, certain intercepts prove that some high-ranking American officials were inciting the Georgian leadership to aggression against South Ossetia. An investigation initiated by the U.S. Congress is underway, the reports say.
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