On the night of August 8, I met in my office with the embassy’s defense attaché, two of our political officers, and the consul. For five hours, from ten until three o’clock the next morning, we drew upon our collective knowledge of Iraqi history since the revolution in 1958—when several American citizens had been dragged from their hotel rooms and killed in an orgy of bloodletting—and tried to “game out” all the possible scenarios the next few weeks might hold in store. Iraqi response to high-stress situations such as this one had consistently involved lashing out at whomever they considered to be the offending parties. In addition to the Americans killed in previous uprisings, for example, an entire Iranian delegation in Baghdad at the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war in 1980 had simply disappeared, never to be heard from again. Thus, the chances were very good, we concluded, that some of us, or perhaps all five of us in that meeting, might not survive.
With that sobering thought in our minds, we turned to how we thought we should comport ourselves. If, in all likelihood, we were going to die anyway, did we want to go meekly to our deaths delivering useless diplomatic notes to a brutal regime, or did we want to be defiant, treating the Iraqi actions as the outrages they were? We opted for the latter code of conduct.
That decision—to stand up and confront Saddam at every opportunity—set the tone at the embassy from that moment on. (Months later, after I’d left Baghdad, a psychologist at the CIA told me that the only way to deal with a personality like Saddam’s is to stand up to him: to be defiant, antagonistic, and intimidating. We had not had the benefit of such CIA wisdom back in August, but our instincts were still on the mark.)
In September, several weeks after that long late meeting in my office, the Iraqis expelled four American Embassy employees. I drove these colleagues to the airport and walked them to the gate, where they would board a charter flight out of the country. As they proceeded through customs, I realized that I was saying good-bye to the other participants from the meeting where we had each recognized we might not make it out of this crisis alive. They were leaving, I was staying. I thought to myself, boy, you really did draw the short straw this time.
Chapter Six
Of Hostages and Convoys
BY THE MIDDLE OF AUGUST, we had made the embassy as secure as we could under the circumstances. Our executive suite had been transformed into a war room, complete with clipboards on the wall containing all of the cable traffic of the past forty-eight hours, which was as long as we kept anything on file. We had shredded and burned many documents and were at a point where we could destroy all remaining classified information within five minutes. We had evacuated all of our family members and most of our staff, and were running two twelve-hour shifts daily with the remaining nine employees to maintain constant contact with Washington on our hot line.
The debate over who should stay and who should go had been a very difficult one among us. Almost every employee at the embassy wanted to stay. Each felt an obligation to do his duty, and no one wanted to be considered nonessential. Washington, on the other hand, wanted as many people as possible to leave, fearing for the safety of anybody left in Baghdad. Both positions were legitimate, but this was one time when Washington was going to prevail. The fear of exposing more than the absolute minimum of Americans to danger trumped our need to ideally staff an embassy in crisis mode. We were simply going to have to do more with a lot less.
Among those deemed nonessential were our Marine security guards. We had a detachment of seven Marines assigned to the embassy to provide twenty-four-hour-a-day security coverage of the premises. Their role was to protect classified material from falling into the hands of potential intruders and did not normally extend to protecting embassy personnel, except as directed by the chief of mission in the event of a riot or attack. I had already issued orders to the Marines that they were not to use their weapons to resist unless they felt their lives were threatened. I would have forbidden use of weapons even then, but the Marine Corps standard operating procedure was that they must always have the option to use their weapons in self-defense. My rationale was that if a breach of embassy security were to take place as a result of an extremely determined demonstration, the use of force by the one Marine normally on duty would be of limited effectiveness and would only further enrage the survivors of any armed confrontation. Our chances of survival would be better if we were taken hostage than if an enraged crowd fought to avenge fallen comrades.
Confident that we could quickly dispose of the little classified material that hadn’t already been destroyed, there was no longer any reason for the Marines to remain. However, it was all but impossible to convince these young patriots, whose loyalty to the mission was paramount, that their services were no longer required and they could leave. So long as any American official was in Baghdad, they wanted to stay to defend him. I finally persuaded the gunnery sergeant in charge of the detachment that we needed his Marines in the first evacuation caravan to ensure that the convoy managed the desert crossing with a minimum of problems. Given a fresh task, the Marines rose to the new challenge.
Iraqi permission for that evacuation of our diplomatic personnel and their dependents finally came through, almost two weeks after the invasion of Kuwait. By then, we had organized the details of the convoy, including the vehicles to be used and assignments of people to those vehicles. Personal goods had been limited to a couple of suitcases per person, but that maximum was soon exceeded as every available space in the cars was crammed with items.
Although the Iraqi government had authorized the departure of Americans holding diplomatic passports and their family members, we were nonetheless very concerned about a potential double-cross. We worried that our families might be attacked or otherwise harassed en route to Jordan and were determined to do everything we could to make it difficult for the Iraqis to do so. All the evacuees, close to a hundred people, gathered at the ambassador’s residence, some three miles along the river from the embassy compound, the night before their scheduled departure so that the convoy could leave promptly in the morning and not have to wait for stragglers. We moved the departure time up several hours so that our people would be on the road well before sunrise. We wanted them to do as much driving as possible in the cool of the early morning before the desert became unbearably hot, and like the ancient Israelites’ exodus from the recalcitrant pharaoh who wouldn’t let them go, we hoped to get our convoy well outside of Baghdad before the Iraqis realized they were gone and caused some trouble.
Managing land evacuations was one of the most nail-biting activities I had to undertake. As a rule of thumb, each car added to a convoy added at least ten minutes to the time it took to arrive at the destination. The convoy, close to forty cars, could travel no faster than its slowest driver, and pit stops were inevitably time-consuming as each individual had personal needs to satisfy. We did not realize all of this at the time of that first evacuation, and so were anxious about the fate of our friends and loved ones from about eleven in the morning, six hours after their departure from Baghdad, when we thought they might arrive at the Jordanian border after their 350-mile trip across the desert.
It was not until late in the evening that we finally heard that the convoy had been stopped at the border and could not cross. Apparently, the Iraqi permission for their departure had not been transmitted to the border crossing. Telephone contact was close to impossible, since it was dependent on willing Iraqi bureaucrats, of whom there were few. I instructed the convoy to remain at the border while I raced to the foreign ministry to upbraid Nizar Hamdun. Two hours later, the appropriate approvals were transmitted, but by then it was too late; the convoy had turned around and was heading back to Baghdad. Despite our best efforts to have them stopped and turned around at one of the intermediate Iraqi checkpoints, our people arrived back at the ambassador’s residence shortly after midnight, bedraggled and angry, but still unbowed by the ordeal.
We put them to bed for four hours and sent them on their way again ear
ly the next morning, this time confident that the approvals were in place to permit their departure from the country. Late that afternoon, we received word from our embassy in Amman, Jordan, that they had arrived safely. With a heavy sigh of relief, we were able to resume our other responsibilities with our new lean staff of nine Americans, including me. I called us the expendables.
CBS news anchor Dan Rather arrived in Baghdad on the evening of August 14, accompanied by his longtime producer and friend Tom Bettag. They had been traveling in the region since early August and had finally been able to secure their visas, arriving just after the departure of Ted Koppel. Dan was intent on interviewing Saddam, as were all the journalistic heavyweights. They swept into the embassy and took over the office recently vacated by Koppel, where Rather found a piece of paper purporting to note the time of a Koppel appointment with Saddam. It had been left as a joke. I did not get to see whether Rather was amused or disconcerted by the prospect that his competitor had landed the big interview before he could.
With the departure of our families, we were able to move other Americans to whom we had offered safe haven into the ambassador’s residence, where our diplomatic rights and privileges afforded us some protection against Iraqi intrusions. So long as our citizens were on the embassy property, they could not be taken hostage. It was tough for them in the ensuing months, and some opted to take their chances in the streets of Baghdad rather than remain cooped up at the residence, which, while on a site covering at least two acres with a swimming pool, was nonetheless confining. Behind its high walls there were few diversions for the thirty-plus Americans residing on top of each other in the half-dozen bedrooms.
I invited a representative of the group to attend our daily staff meetings so they would remain abreast of what we were doing. We also held frequent meetings to address more general concerns. The daily management of their needs was delegated to other key officers in the embassy, who worked tirelessly to make their lives comfortable. Meanwhile, I was trying to get them out of Iraq as quickly as I could. We all made an effort to socialize with them as much as possible, given the other demands on our time, but I went out of my way not to learn their names, since, as I told them, I refused to concede the possibility that they were going to be with us long enough for us to get to know each other.
Above all, we tried to instill in the new arrivals the same “in your face” attitude that we ourselves had adopted toward the Iraqis. We were determined not to let the Iraqis think that we were afraid or weak. In a press conference on Thanksgiving, our efforts were rewarded when Roland Bergheer, the spokesman for the Americans, told the press that the question of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was bigger than any of them and that if it took an American counterattack to defeat the Iraqis, he was willing to sacrifice his life for the greater good. Defiance was the hallmark of our approach, and Roland expressed it perfectly.
By August 17, Saddam’s fiction that hostages were mere “guests” was laid to rest when the Iraqis announced that they were going to hold the nationals from any countries threatening Iraq until the threats ceased. At the same time, Saddam still tried to promote the idea that he was a benevolent host who cared about the welfare of those in his custody. In one notorious television appearance a few days later, “Uncle Saddam” was seen asking a seven-year-old British boy, Stuart Lockwood, if he had had his milk that day. The scared look on Stuart’s face, and his parents’ equally frightened expressions, chilled viewers worldwide.
I met with the Egyptian ambassador at his home the day after the Lockwood incident. He was very concerned about the welfare of the four million Egyptian nationals working in Iraq. As the ambassador and I were comparing notes, he mentioned that the international community needed to ratchet up its propaganda against what Saddam was doing. He commented that a statue of Saddam, the first of its kind, had recently been erected in the Arab Knight Square in Baghdad, replacing a statue of an Arab warrior on horseback. At the same time, Iraqi police had gone to businesses around the country that were named Arab Knight and had told them to change their name, since “there is only one Arab knight in Iraq, and you are not it.” So the local Arab Knight dry cleaning establishments or fast food outlets were now all called something else. Since Saddam clearly wanted to be recognized as The Arab Knight, the Egyptian continued, perhaps we ought to point out that true Arab knights do not hide behind the skirts of women or behind little children.
I thought this was a great idea and later in the evening mentioned it to Dan Rather, who was leaving the following morning for Amman. He liked the idea and agreed that he should wait until he left Iraq to file the story. While he was among America’s most respected news anchors, his reputation might not be enough to protect him against Saddam’s petulant wrath. In fact, a British journalist had been executed just a few months before on trumped-up espionage charges.
I was told later that Rather filed the story from Amman, Jordan, on August 22, shortly after his arrival there. Some days after that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher repeated on the floor of the House of Commons the insult that Saddam was hiding behind the skirts of women. On August 28, the Iraqi government announced that women and children would be free to leave. While we could not absolutely confirm that our campaign to humiliate Saddam was responsible for this decision, we were sure that our general strategy of confrontation had contributed to it.
I was also in the midst of sensitive negotiations with the Iraqi foreign ministry on the status of our embassy in Kuwait. With the “annexation” of Kuwait on August 8, Iraq had insisted that all foreign embassies be closed and the diplomats and other foreigners moved to Baghdad. Ambassador Howell was housing almost 150 Americans within his embassy compound, many of whom were private citizens who could not benefit from diplomatic protection and accordingly were potential hostages. In a meeting with Hamdun around the middle of August, I had “hypothetically” asked what guarantees the Iraqis might provide to our citizens should we decide to scale down our presence in Kuwait. I was ahead of Washington’s thinking, uncomfortably so, as Skip Gnehm told me in a later conversation, reproaching me for having broached the subject while Washington was still deciding what its position should be. However, within a few days, I received instructions to go back to the foreign ministry and raise the subject again, only this time not in the hypothetical.
On August 17, I met with Tariq Aziz and asked him what we could expect in terms of treatment of our people if we were to reduce our presence in Kuwait. Tariq replied that Iraq would honor all of its obligations under both the Geneva and Vienna Conventions; these cover the rights of people to travel out of war zones and not be held against their will without reason. I specifically asked if he was telling me that the Americans who left Kuwait could be assured that they would be permitted to travel all the way out of the region. Aziz repeated his guarantees that the international treaties would be respected.
I dutifully reported back to Washington, recommending that Americans be moved from Kuwait as soon as possible. For all the hardships we were suffering in Baghdad, they were nothing compared to what Americans in Kuwait were enduring. The nightly threats to overrun the embassy compound had ceased, but there was limited electricity and the compound’s food and water supplies were running low. Nat sent in his own analysis, in which he expressed his skepticism about Tariq Aziz’s integrity. I seem to recall something along the lines of “he is a lying son of a bitch,” but I imagine that Nat was more elegant in his characterization. I sent an additional message to Washington, seconding Nat’s assessment of Aziz, but noted that even if the Iraqis did renege on their commitment, life in Baghdad was less dangerous than in Kuwait. Diplomats in Baghdad could circulate freely, and food and water were abundant. They were not threatened by the military or subjected to the hardships being experienced in Kuwait. All in all, they would, in my judgment, be better off in Baghdad than Kuwait City.
I was later told that the decision went to President Bush. I am not surprised, since, from my later experience
at the National Security Council, I know presidents are intensely interested in the welfare of American citizens in harm’s way. And in all of my communications with President Bush both during and after the Gulf War, he was always most concerned with the human consequences of his actions. In the event, he decided in my favor and ordered the drawdown of the embassy in Kuwait, leaving Nat and a skeleton crew to keep the flag flying and to support those who could not leave because of fear of being taken hostage.
The Iraqis were not going to be satisfied with even this minimal remaining presence in Kuwait, but making them happy was not our priority. Besides, we didn’t accept their premise that Kuwait was no longer a sovereign state, no longer entitled to its own diplomatic representatives. The priority of the American government was to get as many of its citizens as possible out of danger. However, any continuing diplomatic presence in Kuwait was soon going to be an issue with the Iraqis.
A convoy of dozens of cars and more than 120 Americans left Kuwait City on the morning of August 23, their early departure predictably delayed by officious Iraqi military officers, despite the assurances of cooperation we had received. It wended its way up to Baghdad, led by one of our political officers who had traveled to Kuwait to serve as the liaison with Iraqi authorities. Meanwhile, in Baghdad, we were making arrangements to feed and house the travelers at the now empty Marine House for what would be a brief respite before we sent them on their way, north to Turkey.
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