It was the one opportunity of the day to relax with friends, among whom I had worked over the past two years. We would trade information and views and bring each other up to date on what our respective governments were thinking and doing, all informally over pasta and cold beer. These became cherished interludes, which frequently became quite personal as we talked about the impact of the crisis on our families and friends at home. I would mention the infrequent conversations I had with my twins, Joe and Sabrina, now twelve. They were of an age where it was awkward to talk with Dad so far away. Our phone calls were punctuated by long silences and careful avoidance of their worries about my safety, though Susan relayed how scared they were for me. They understood I was in a dangerous predicament.
I would return to the embassy every night for one last briefing with the Washington task force at eleven o’clock before finally going home for the night. Once home, I would unwind with a steady diet of movies, football tapes, and the British program Yes, Minister, the story of a hapless politician hopelessly outmaneuvered by his clever professional staff. My taste in movies during these months tended toward gratuitous violence—I probably watched Die Hard a dozen times. I could relate to its hero, trying to avoid getting killed while being responsible for saving people. The bruising contact in the football games reflected what I often wanted to do to certain Iraqis. Yes, Minister was a hysterical look at governmental bureaucracy; for all the support we received from Washington, sometimes we felt like we were dealing with similar bumbling ourselves as the static organization back home tried to cope with a fast-moving situation. This made the British comedy all the more enjoyable and funny during my off hours.
At one in the morning, I usually tuned in to the BBC World Service on radio, which every night offered superb analyses of the situation from some of the world’s leading experts on the Middle East. Finally, at one-thirty I would hit the sack.
I could never sleep the entire night, or what was left of it, however, consumed as I was with figuring out how to outfox the Iraqis. We had made progress on the margins—some of our most vulnerable hostages had been released—but every time we thought we had discovered a loophole in the hostage policy, Saddam would cinch it closed. I would get out of bed at least once during the night and pace the floors of my house, wondering what else we might do to achieve some leverage in a situation where the adversary had all the guns and all the power. I had never paced like this before. It was a new phenomenon, but one that I learned I shared with others who under pressure found it a helpful way to gather one’s thoughts. At 6:00 A.M., the cycle would begin anew.
In early November, in bed for a couple of days with a cold and flu, I opened Henry Kissinger’s book, The White House Years, the memoir of his years as national security adviser in the Nixon administration. In it, he recounted meeting Anwar Sadat in 1973 and coming away from the meeting convinced that there would be no new Middle East war, only to have hostilities break out a mere matter of weeks later in what the Israeli’s called the Yom Kippur War. I remember thinking that if Kissinger could be fooled, surely I could be, too. It was reassuring to know that better minds than mine had been confounded by their Arab interlocutors.
As we approached Thanksgiving, my embassy colleagues and I decided that the holiday provided us with a perfect backdrop for reminding Americans that there were still hostages in Iraq and that the embassy was working around the clock to obtain their release. I pitched a proposal to Washington that included an early morning visit to the Iraqi foreign ministry with diplomatic notes prepared by Emil and our ad hoc consular section, demanding the release on health grounds of each of the hostages—a separate note for each of the almost 120 hostages. This would be followed by a press conference in which I would, for once, answer questions on the record. Later, I would give the press an opportunity to film the preparations for the Thanksgiving meal at my house. The spokesman for our American guests would also speak with the journalists that afternoon.
The proposal was met with a curious silence from Washington, even after two follow-up calls. I finally pressed the task force chief for an answer. “Nobody is going to tell you not to do it,” he said, “but with the president traveling to Saudi Arabia to have Thanksgiving with the troops, the White House press office is concerned that you might step on the president’s story. That said, if you insist, feel free to go ahead. Just so you are aware of the concerns here.” The message was clear: proceed at your own risk. I thought about it for a while and asked myself, even if I were to step on the president’s message, something I could not imagine happening—after all, he was the president and I was just Joe Wilson—what could Washington do to show its displeasure? Send me to Baghdad? On the other hand, the hostage message needed to be hammered home, and what better time to do it? I decided to take my chances.
The program went as scripted, including camera shots of turkey being served and our American guests’ spokesman, Roland Bergheer, delivering a stirringly patriotic statement about how the liberation of Kuwait was more important than the lives of the Americans stuck in Iraq. Later, as I was tucking into my own holiday dinner with a few friends, very satisfied with the way the day had gone, the doorbell rang. It was CNN correspondent Richard Roth at the door with his camera crew and the news that the Iraqis had brought some American hostages to Baghdad for a government-provided Thanksgiving dinner, complete with CNN cameras to record it. The dinner had taken place less than a mile from my house. Did I have a reaction? Roth asked.
You bet, I said, and launched into a rant about the barbaric and sadistic nature of a regime that would parade hostages before the cameras as a propaganda tool while denying them access to their country’s embassy or consular officials. Roth thanked me and went on his way. A couple of days after this, a cable arrived “from President Bush to chargé d’affaires Joe Wilson.” He wrote: “I recently saw you on CNN saying what you thought of Saddam’s latest attempt to derive political gain out of understandable concern here for the hostages. I could not have said it better. It is relatively easy to speak out from the safety and comfort of Washington; what you are doing day in and day out under the most trying conditions is truly inspiring. Keep fighting the good fight; you and your stalwart colleagues are always in our thoughts and prayers.”
When I called Richard Haass, the senior director at the National Security Council, to thank him for drafting such a nice message, he told me that the president had drafted it himself. All of us at the embassy were gratified, all the more in knowing that at least the president was not concerned that we might have distracted people from his message. I had a copy of the cable made and sent over to Richard Roth with the personal note that he was at least as responsible as I was, since he had provided the means through which I had delivered the message. I understand he still has the cable in his office. I do too.
A week after Thanksgiving, on November 27, the Senate Armed Services Committee convened to debate a resolution to give the president the authority he needed to wage war to liberate Kuwait. The most notable of the witnesses, from our perspective in Baghdad, was retired Admiral William J. Crowe, President Bush’s former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He testified on November 28 that “we should give sanctions a fair chance before we discard them . . . If, in fact, the sanctions will work in twelve to eighteen months instead of six months, a trade-off of avoiding war, with its attendant sacrifices and uncertainties, would in my estimation be more than worth it.”
The reaction in Baghdad was electric. Here was one of President Bush’s former senior military officers breaking with his commander in chief. The Iraqis immediately began to voice doubt that the American military would allow the president to make war.
On substance, Crowe was flat wrong. We had sent an analysis of the effects of sanctions to Washington several weeks earlier. We had concluded that the sanctions were having a deleterious effect on Saddam’s war machine, but that they would not in and of themselves drive him out of Kuwait, not in a decade or even longer. While we
had seen ample evidence of the lack of spare parts, fuel additives, and spare tires for military equipment, it was clear that the sanctions would affect the economy and infrastructure only gradually and incrementally. The Iraqi economy, we argued, was not a fragile house of cards that would just collapse from one day to the next. On the contrary, it would grind down over time.
One year, the people might be driving Chevrolets, several years later Volkswagens, later still riding donkeys or bicycles. It would be a decade at least, we estimated, before the Iraqi infrastructure would be so run-down that Saddam might have to face the decision to withdraw from Kuwait in order to get out from under the sanctions. By that time, he would have looted the Kuwait treasury, found ways around the sanctions, and repopulated Kuwait with Iraqis so as to rig any vote on the future of the country. Sanctions would make the war easier, we believed, but not unnecessary, as long as our goal was to liberate Kuwait.
As the congressional debate in Washington opened, we had made considerable progress on securing the release of the remaining American hostages. The increasing pressure of war had made the Iraqis more amenable to some arrangement to release them, perhaps in exchange for American concessions. But we were not in the concession business. We argued instead that unless the Iraqis wanted war over the mistreatment of American citizens, they ought to see it in their interest to release all Americans in their custody. When Admiral Crowe made his ill-considered statement, Iraqi willingness to discuss the issue with us abruptly ceased for several days: the Iraqis had concluded that they might just as well hold out a bit longer to see if they could extract a better deal for the hostages.
I had remained in regular contact with my friends Al Gore and Tom Foley, now Speaker of the House, since the invasion. Gore had been the first person outside the State Department to be in touch with me. Though he had been in the midst of his Senate reelection campaign, he took time out of his schedule to reach out to me and offer his support. It was a gesture I have never forgotten. He also asked me to keep him informed about the situation as it evolved. I telephoned him, and later Foley, regularly throughout the crisis, from an open line in my office, hopeful that Iraqi intelligence was listening in on my tough talk with two of my country’s elected leaders. I wanted Saddam to know that the United States was deadly serious about the liberation of Kuwait and was willing to use force if necessary.
During the Senate debate on whether to authorize the president to use force, I phoned Gore’s office, but he was on the Senate floor. I offered to call back, but his aide insisted on patching me through to the Senate Democrats’ cloakroom. The senator came off the floor and questioned me intensely for twenty minutes about whether sanctions alone could get Saddam out of Kuwait. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the very day of the vote on the war resolution, and Gore would be one of the few Democrats to vote with President Bush. It pained me during the 2000 presidential election campaign to see former Senator Alan Simpson accuse Al of being “Prime Time Al” because of the timing of the speech announcing his support of the president. This was the same Alan Simpson who had been practically on bended knee before Saddam in April 1990, reassuring the Iraqi dictator that he had a press problem and not a policy problem. It was an outrage that a decade later he had the nerve to be critical of the one senator who had really taken the time to listen to an analysis from the field and factor that in to his decision on what most senators agreed was one of the most momentous votes of their careers.
Our efforts on behalf of the hostages, as useless as they seemed right after the Crowe testimony, did not flag. In addition to daily notes to the foreign ministry on behalf of specific cases, and quiet meetings with Hamdun to see what we might do on behalf of some of the sicker hostages, I also worked with some thoughtful members of the international press. My goal was to bring some focus to bear on the argument that holding on to the hostages was not in Saddam’s interest, unless he wanted to go to war over that issue rather than over his continued occupation of Kuwait.
I met over lunch one day with an Arab journalist who had considerable influence in the region. To her I reiterated that President Bush had clearly already concluded that, given the size of the war being contemplated, the loss of a couple of hundred American civilians was acceptable, even if lamentable. Saddam was therefore deluding himself if he thought he could prevent war by keeping hostages. And the other side of the coin was that Saddam needed to understand that should something happen to the hostages, either accidentally or as a consequence of mistreatment, American anger might be such that the president would be forced to go to war to avenge that mistreatment. It was important that the region’s leaders comprehend what the consequences might be if something went wrong with the hostages. If Saddam did not want to risk war over hostages, he should just let them go. They were not an asset to him, but rather a grave liability.
In late November, about ten days after that lunch, we received a copy of the minutes from a meeting between our ambassador to Algeria, Chris Ross, and Algerian Foreign Minister Sid Ahmed Ghozali, in which the minister expressed his concern that Saddam did not understand the risk he ran by continuing to hold the hostages. His analysis was precisely the one I had shared with the Arab journalist. I was certain that my contact had been speaking to other Arab leaders, and I saw that the thesis was gaining some traction. It would soon get back to Saddam from Arab interlocutors.
It did not matter how many times I told the Iraqis the risks they ran—they expected me to say it. But when a fellow Arab said the same thing, it would have far greater impact.
We did not have to wait long, only until King Hussein of Jordan and Yasser Arafat traveled to Baghdad in early December to meet with Saddam. According to a report we received from our ambassador in Amman, Roger Harrison, Hussein raised the issue of the hostages with Saddam and laid out the same case against continuing to hold them. The Arab journalist with whom I’d lunched was also a personal friend of King Hussein and had obviously shared our discussion with him.
That meeting with the king and Arafat was the real clincher. Saddam, who had just invited the wives of the hostages to return to Baghdad to see their husbands, announced on December 6 that Iraq’s defenses were now strong enough to withstand an American offensive, so the hostages could now go home. We were elated and went back into the charter aircraft business. In addition to evacuating the remaining hostages, we ended up flying their wives out for the second time at government expense, even though they had come back to Baghdad over our strong objections.
On December 13, I was able to go out to the airport and greet Ambassador Nat Howell and his remaining troops as they transited Baghdad on the last charter we flew from Kuwait. They would be home for Christmas, as would the TDY’ers who had been stranded with us since August and who had performed such valuable service. They had comported themselves in the finest traditions of our foreign service, with dignity and tenacity in the face of considerable hardship. They made all of us in the embassy proud. The few of us who remained in Baghdad would miss them, but we were delighted that the number of Americans in danger had dropped from close to two hundred to fewer than ten.
While the hostage issue and the safe evacuation of all Americans had been the primary responsibility of our embassy, we also regularly provided to Washington our analysis of the situation in Baghdad. This included recommendations on what we might do further to pressure Saddam to withdraw peacefully from Kuwait, although at the same time we remained steadfast in our view that only the credible threat of force could possibly convince Saddam to retreat. We reported on everything from the impact of sanctions, to the Iraqi reaction to the buildup of American forces in the Gulf, as well as the reaction in Baghdad to the inflammatory rhetoric coming out of Washington. After the departure of the hostages, the guests, and even our TDY’ers from Kuwait, we were down to six Americans—all with but one goal, which was to ensure that both sides understood the gravity of the situation and would avoid needlessly going to war if possible. I did believe, howev
er, that there were some “fig leaves” that we could offer Saddam that would not compromise our hard-line and fully justified position but that might allow him a face-saving way to withdraw. My thinking involved four such fig leaves that could be subtly suggested to him. If he chose to grab one, so much the better; if not, we had lost nothing.
The four ideas were: survival of his army if it departed Kuwait peacefully; a reduction of the heated rhetoric, including the references to Saddam as a Hitler-like figure; a commitment to work with Iraq and Kuwait on the legitimate issues of concern to Saddam; and finally, a rededication to working toward a lasting solution to the Arab/Israeli peace process—not because Saddam had tried to link the two but because it was the right thing to do.
Saddam’s effort to claim he had invaded Kuwait in order to liberate Palestine had been one of the most cynical of all of his ploys, but that did not mean that we should ignore one of the major irritants in the region.
I was not the only one thinking along these lines, and was gratified to read that in a number of television appearances during the month of December, senior administration officials let drop remarks that hinted at each of the four fig leaves. As soon as I would receive the transcript of such an interview that an administration official had given to American media, I would scour it for useful statements and pass them on to Nizar Hamdun to share with the rest of his government. The Iraqi embassy in Washington had long since ceased to be a credible conduit of information from Washington to Baghdad, so we had become the sole source of official information from Washington for the Iraqis.
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