We anticipated that they would be with us for dinner and a night’s rest, so sandwiches were made, soft drinks cooled, and mattresses spread throughout the house. With preparations complete, we waitied. And waited. And waited. Finally, at about three A.M. on the morning of the 24th, the convoy pulled in to our embassy compound, twenty hours after they had begun their trip from Kuwait. Once again I had underestimated the time involved in travel by convoy. I had been on edge since eight the previous evening, but—at last—they had arrived. I was so pleased to see them that I ran down from my office, clipboard in hand, and ran right into the biggest man I had seen since Rosie Grier quit playing defensive tackle for the Los Angeles Rams. His name was Vern Nored, and he was a civilian employee of the Defense Department. He was unhappy, to say the least; and when he saw my clipboard, he assumed I was the general services officer, responsible for his care and feeding. He let me know in no uncertain terms of his displeasure at the hardships he and the others had endured the previous day. It took me a while to get him calmed down, and after he realized who I was and everything we had tried to do to get them to safety, he was mightily embarrassed at his conduct.
We became great friends and he really grew in my esteem a few weeks later when he took on his dream job as escort officer for Muhammad Ali during the charismatic champ’s visit to Baghdad. At the time of our first meeting, I was just happy not to have been crushed in his massive grip. Our intrepid local staff moved everybody to their sleeping quarters, and Melvin Ang, the embassy consul, took their passports to secure the necessary exit visas before we sent them on their way the following morning
At 6:00 A.M., Ang showed up at the Baghdad immigration office with the 120 passports to obtain the exit visas, only to be refused. The double-cross Nat Howell warned of had taken place. I stormed to the foreign ministry and was told that the Americans who had come up from Kuwait would not be permitted to leave until the embassy in Kuwait had been closed, in line with Iraq’s demand. Since Kuwait was no longer a sovereign country, I was told there was no justification for diplomatic representation there and that those Americans who had been accredited there would no longer benefit from diplomatic protections and immunities. I was furious and went looking for Tariq Aziz. He was not in the building, but his deputy chief of protocol took my message for Aziz stating that he lied to me when he had promised that his government would abide by its international obligations. The protocol official suggested that perhaps “liar” was not the best choice of terms for a diplomat, so I substituted “prevaricator” for liar, turned on my heel, and stomped out. A couple of days later, I crossed paths with the protocol official again. He was all smiles as he took me aside to whisper that he had passed my message to Aziz. I never did learn whether he had quoted me calling the foreign minister a liar or a prevaricator.
Our Kuwait colleagues were naturally very disappointed. We tried to ease their frustration with a cookout at the Marine House that evening, complete with swimming and volleyball. The nine of us accredited to Baghdad were now overwhelmed by 120 people who did not want to be with us and who had been staring at the barrel end of Iraqi guns for the previous three weeks. Their loyalty was to their comrades in Kuwait, not to our mission in Baghdad. Our task would be to turn this dispirited bunch into effective officers in our embassy, not because we needed them but because we could not permit them to just sit around and fume.
But first things first. We had not given up on getting at least the women and children out, and within a day we had arranged for the departure of all the women and children under eighteen. Males eighteen and above could not leave. So the caravan loaded up again—only this time, because of Iraqi intransigence, the women would have to drive themselves unaccompanied by their husbands. On August 27 they headed off north to Turkey, a difficult eighteen hours away, escorted by one of our political officers. Just like our previous evacuees, the family members proved to be tough and resilient as they faced the tribulations of their journey.
For the rest, our challenge was to put them to work in our small mission and give them something meaningful to do, so that they could be assets—rather than additional burdens. Their senior member was an economics officer by the name of Emil Skoden. Emil was level-headed, thoughtful, and a quiet leader. He was on good terms with the sixty-three remaining men from Kuwait and had been accepted by them as their chief. It was vital, if we were to succeed in the management of the new combined organization, that the loyalty of my new colleagues be transferred to our operation. The means to that end was through Emil; so together we mapped out a plan to make maximum use of everyone.
I made it clear that my objective was to see that their stay in Baghdad was as brief as I could possibly make it. I would continue working to secure their release. In the meantime, Emil would put his people to work and would serve as their conduit to me when necessary. Emil became my deputy and, by so doing, brought the Kuwait contingent into the fold with me. In one early talk with him, I described our “in your face strategy.” He nodded knowingly and offered, “I’m from the public playgrounds of Chicago. I know exactly what you’re talking about. It is how I grew up.” He was a slight man, so it was hard for me to imagine him confronting toughs on the streets of Chicago. But toughness could not be assessed merely from appearance, and Emil Skoden proved to be as tough as they come.
Once, when I commented that the good news was that at least we had been trained throughout our careers for just such a situation, where our decisions had a big impact on global events, he responded, with refreshing humor, “Of course, the bad news is that we are in charge, and what the hell are we going to do?” He and I had an easy relationship that helped to encourage the best performance from everybody working with us. He was the one indispensable person in our operation, the perfect Mr. Inside to my Mr. Outside. He and I could not have achieved even a fraction of our successes without him.
The Marines who had come up from Kuwait were reconstituted as a new Baghdad detachment. We needed supplies and food for the population at the ambassador’s residence and for our new arrivals, so we set up a veritable office of scavenger affairs, leaving them to procure everything we needed. This system was so effective that by the time we left in January 1991, we estimated that we had enough supplies to support 150 people for close to a year. Our scavengers located the thieves’ markets in Baghdad that were reselling goods looted from Kuwait, and eventually were even able to recoup some items stolen from American houses in Kuwait. Purchases were by wholesale lot, so whatever was in a pile of goods was exactly what we got, even if we did not need it all. One such lot contained several cases of Japanese sake. It came in handy later when we learned that a former Japanese prime minister was coming to Baghdad to negotiate the release of his country’s hostages. I sent the cases to the Japanese ambassador and made a friend for life.
Another office was established to maintain contact with the hostages, whose number was now up to around 125. We published a weekly newsletter with innocuous information like football scores, and created a pen-pal program where every hostage had an embassy officer trying to communicate with him, as well as between him and his family. Weekly, we would deliver big boxes of letters to the Iraqi foreign ministry to be forwarded to the hostages. We never knew if they reached them, but we never stopped trying. These tasks also provided our stranded colleagues with something meaningful to do. They responded with consummate dedication, treating the names on the letters as family members, so concerned did they become about their charges.
Perhaps our most successful office was the one we created to monitor the movement of the hostages. We had learned that they were routinely being moved from one strategic site to another inside Iraq. As some were released they brought purloined letters from others to us, so that after a while we were able to identify some fifty-five sites that were being used around the country. We sent this information to Pentagon planners for their use.
As it turned out, Saddam had unwittingly shown us, by where he put the hostages,
which locations were most important to him. I was gratified when several months later, on the first night of Desert Storm, long after the hostages had been released, many of those sites were ones hit by American bombs.
When the Iraqi government announced on August 28, 1990 that foreign women and children could leave, we launched another operation to evacuate those Americans who were now permitted to leave. Since the Iraqis had banned the flying of Western aircraft into Iraq or Kuwait, we were forced to charter planes from Iraqi Air. For the next several weeks, we flew close to a dozen evacuation flights from Baghdad down to Kuwait City, to load up Americans first, then anybody else who could leave, until the plane was full. We would then bring them back to Baghdad for exit visas and finally onward by air to safety in Amman.
The first flight contained several American wives of Kuwaiti nationals who were trying to leave with their children. However, the children were considered under Iraqi law to carry the nationality of their father, so when they arrived in Baghdad they were not permitted back on the plane to continue to Jordan. The mothers, who were American citizens, could go, but we were told the children would have to stay. When it became apparent that the Iraqi authorities really intended to separate the children from their mothers, I immediately confronted the senior Iraqi immigration official. I stepped into his office at the airport and insisted that he contact the foreign ministry at once.
When I had Nizar on the line, I told him, in controlled fury, “Your president did not permit the release of women and children because he cares about them but rather because he hoped to gain a public relations benefit from the gesture. CNN, CBS, NBC, and ABC have cameras set up just outside the immigration area. If all the American wives and their children, irrespective of the nationality of the children, are not permitted on the plane when it departs in half an hour, I have every intention of stepping in front of those cameras to describe how you have cruelly separated mothers from their young children. I don’t think Saddam will be pleased with that publicity.”
I hung up and settled back in the small windowless room to smoke the biggest cigar I had, with the Iraqi immigration official no more than a couple of feet across the desk from me. I was determined that he would get no satisfaction from his efforts to split up families and that his smug countenance would be obscured by a heavy cloud of smoke as I puffed away steadily. In Saddam’s Iraq, there were four symbols of machismo: the ubiquitous pistol on the hip, the moustache, Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses, and big cigars. This official may have had his pistol and his moustache, but I had my cigar.
Twenty-five minutes later the phone rang, and after a few seconds, the official passed it through the thick haze to me as he raced out the door to execute the order he had just received. While the sunglasses masked his eyes, there was no mistaking the tension in the alacrity with which he moved. Whatever order had been given had come from the top. I put the receiver to my ear and Nizar informed me that the women and their children were all free to leave.
After the plane was off the ground and the wheels were up, I stepped in front of the microphones to announce that the first of our evacuation flights had been successfully completed. We did not have a full manifest of passengers or nationalities (the press was a stickler for those kinds of details), but I was pleased to confirm that the Iraqis had honored their word and had facilitated the exit visa process and other formalities. A corollary to “in your face” was a conscious decision to be gracious in victory and not to rub more salt in their wounds. It was enough that American women and their Kuwaiti offspring were on the plane. There was no need to gloat about the brinksmanship behind closed doors in the immigration official’s office.
September was a blur of activity as we ran two or three flights a week out of Kuwait, filled with women, children, and men of nationalities not subject to Iraqi hostage-taking. Every flight had its own set of problems, and the Iraqis found new and ingenious ways to harass evacuees, tactics that we continually fought to preempt.
One flight contained a number of Kuwaiti mothers of American children. The Iraqis again invoked the rule that Kuwaitis, who were now deemed Iraqis after the annexation of Kuwait, could not travel and removed them from the aircraft; according to Iraqi law, the children could leave, but not their mothers. There was nothing I could do for them at this point. My responsibility was to the Americans, but I could not urge mothers to let their children fly out while they remained in Baghdad.
One such family had a Palestinian father accompanying his Kuwaiti wife and children born in America. He was enraged at what was happening and accosted me in the airport while I was in the middle of my own argument with the immigration authorities. He shouted in my ear that if I couldn’t get his family on the plane, he was going to call Yasser Arafat. The humor in the idea that the head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, who had thrown in his lot with Saddam over the invasion of Kuwait, was going to have some influence on how we ran our evacuation flights stopped me in mid-sentence.
As I laughed ruefully, the man then threatened to commit suicide. I turned back to my own argument and suggested to him that he do what he had to do. What I meant, of course was that he call Arafat if he thought that might help. A colleague later told me that the timing of my comment right after his suicide threat made it sound like I was encouraging the man to take his own life. Fortunately, he did not take my suggestion. And if he called Arafat, it did not affect the outcome. That family and others in the same straits were not permitted to travel, though they were not taken hostage and were able to move about the city freely for the remainder of their stay until the borders were reopened.
There was a law of diminishing returns at play in the evacuation flights. After an initial surge, fewer and fewer Americans came forward to be evacuated. Our flights, now running about once a week, would routinely return from Kuwait with just a few Americans on them, but filled with people of other nationalities. We ended up evacuating citizens from all over the world, from Filipino maids to Libyan businessmen, in addition to almost 1,900 American citizens stranded in Kuwait. Our approach was: if there is a seat, put a person in it. In the end, when the evacuation flights came to a close in mid-December, we were confident that every American who wanted to leave and could leave had done so. There were a number of Americans married to Iraqis who had taken Iraqi citizenship and therefore were subject to Iraqi travel restrictions. Most had been in Baghdad since the 1950s and had every intention of staying with their families.
There were also a few child custody cases where Iraqi men, divorced from American women, had returned to Iraq with their offspring. These were heartbreaking, since, short of kidnapping the children, there was nothing we could do other than to encourage, cajole, and pressure the fathers to do the right thing and let their children escape to safety. From back in the United States we received plaintive pleas from the mothers, and in Iraq encountered the steely determination of the fathers and their families to have the children remain with them.
September marked the beginning of the “celebrity statesmen tour” by prominent personalities who traveled to Baghdad in violation of U.N. and American sanctions to meet with Saddam and helped create an illusion of legitimacy for the dictator. They would be photographed sitting attentively next to him, would make some inane antiwar comments to the camera and, as a reward, Saddam would bestow a few hostages on them, enabling them to claim that they had been on an errand of mercy. American visitors included former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, former Texas Governor John Connally, and an already ill Muhammad Ali. Former British Prime Minister Edward Heath, German Prime Minister Willy Brandt, and Yousef Ibrahim (the former Cat Stevens) also came.
We were of two views regarding these visits. For the most part, they were well intentioned but misguided. Officially, we discouraged Americans from coming to Baghdad. It was a violation of American law and international sanctions, and it was dangerous, as Saddam had clearly demonstrated his penchant for taking hostages. At the same time, we applauded each new r
elease as we continued to press for the safe departure of all Americans. We concluded that we would be as supportive as possible; after all, even if the visitors were in technical violation of American law, they were our citizens and, as such, were legitimate beneficiaries of whatever consular support we could provide.
We also tried to take advantage of the visits to secure the release of those hostages whom we knew suffered from medical problems. We prepared priority lists of hostages for release, with health and age our top two criteria, and forwarded them to the foreign ministry. Often, the hostages high on our list were released. Other times, hostages who happened to be incarcerated at sites near the capital were brought in and handed over to the visitors. We encouraged the family members of all hostages to make us aware of any medical problems, which we then transmitted to the foreign ministry as justification for early release. Eventually, we had a medical reason to justify the early release of virtually every hostage.
The first of our celebrity visitors was the inimitable Reverend Jesse Jackson, who arrived at the end of August, ostensibly to make a television program. I had first met Jesse in the Congo, several years previously. He was well known for his skill at upstaging events, and I had seen him do this in Brazzaville. His arrival there had coincided with President Sassou Nguesso’s National Day reception. Jackson was whisked directly from the airport to the reception, where within a few minutes he managed to turn the event into a party for him rather than for the country. As a bemused Sassou stood by, Jackson carried on as if the gathering was in his honor, a welcome befitting his stature as a son of Africa.
The joke about Jackson was that the most dangerous place ever to be was between Jackson and a camera or a microphone. For all that, however, he was extraordinarily effective in Baghdad and later in Kuwait City, as he refused to take no for an answer and used some of his civil disobedience techniques, honed in the American Civil Rights movement, to confront the Iraqi army in Kuwait and secure the release of twenty sick and injured Americans from our embassy compound there. He also provided considerable comfort to our besieged embassy staff in Kuwait City. It was a task ideally suited to Jackson’s larger-than-life public persona, and he deserved considerable credit for being willing to put himself in danger by directly confronting Iraqi troops to secure the release of the sick Americans.
The Politics of Truth_Inside the Lies That Put the White House on Trial and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity Page 15