A fifteen-year Iraqi-Soviet "treaty of friendship and cooperation" was signed in April 1972. The Soviets assisted the Iraqis in the development of the Rumaila oil field, and Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin participated in the ribbon-cutting ceremony. Soviet arms were also used by the Iraqis to crush the Kurdish uprising led by Mustafa Barzani. Iraqi secret police received training from Soviet and East German agents. Ties between the two nations "weakened in the mid-1970s as Baghdad sought to mend fences with its Gulf neighbors and get access to Western technology." The Russian Federation provided Iraq with intelligence information on the impending US attack until recently. For about forty years until the Gorbachev perestroika in the late 1980s, Soviet-Iraqi cooperation was both close and multi-faceted, and for most of the period it was even officially called a "strategic partnership". In 1967, Iraq signed an agreement with the USSR to supply the nation with oil in exchange for large-scale access to Eastern Bloc arms. In 1972, Egypt ordered the Soviet military personnel in the country to leave and Iraq soon became one of the Soviet Union's closest allies in the Middle East. During this time, the USSR and Iraq had signed a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation in which both countries promised to help each other under threat and to avoid entering hostile alliances against one another. However, this did not mean that during all that time their mutual relations had always been equally friendly and without serious political differences. Canadian scholar Andrej Kreutz explains because of their support of the national-liberation movements, a number of important Third World countries, including Iraq, "declared their friendship for and improved relations with the USSR and sided with it on a number of international problems". In no instance, however, did their leaders "compromise their own national interests or become Soviet stooges." Baghdad's interest in cooperation with Moscow "was based on the need for a powerful patron in its efforts to shed all the remnants of Western colonialism and to establish Iraq as an autonomous member of the world order of nation states." At the same time, however, the Iraqi "ruling elite had shown stubborn resistance towards anything which could be regarded as an intrusion into the country's internal affairs or as an infringement upon Iraq's sovereignty over its international policies." Starting in the 1970s, in order to maintain an independent foreign policy, the Iraqi government began to diversify its relationship with military arms suppliers. By purchasing arms from France, China, Brazil, South Africa and the United States, Iraq sought ton ensure that it could fulfill its military needs while avoiding over-reliance on the Soviet Union.