Saddam : His Rise and Fall

by Con Coughlin

  Saddam’s freedom in 1964 was to prove short-lived. With most of the Baath leadership either in exile or in jail, Saddam was left to his own devices, and it was not long before he was involved in yet more plots to overthrow the government. As with the 1959 plot to assassinate Qassem, Saddam was joined by his “twin brother,” Abdul Karim al-Shaikhly. Several possible scenarios were explored for assassinating President Arif in September 1964. There was a plan to shoot down his plane when it took off from the Baghdad airport, and there was another, much favored by Saddam, in which he and a group of Baathists would storm the Presidential Palace, break into a conference room where Arif and the rest of the government were meeting, and machine-gun them all to death. This plot, which gave Saddam the honor of firing the machine gun, had to be abandoned after a palace official who was to have allowed the plotters access to the palace, was transferred to another post. Finally the plotters had to resort to a crude plan to attack the Presidential Palace with homemade bombs made with TNT that they had purchased on the open market. But this plot, like the others, was foiled by the security forces. In mid-October Saddam’s hideout in the suburbs of Baghdad was surrounded by the security forces. After a brief exchange of fire, Saddam was forced to surrender after he ran out of ammunition. According to one of his official biographers, Saddam was cool and composed when Arif’s security forces burst into the room. “My dear fellow, what’s this about?” he inquired. “Machine guns? Is there no government?”36

  Salim Shakir, who was involved in one of the plots to overthrow Arif and later became one of Iraq’s most distinguished generals, met Saddam for the first time at a house in Baghdad that was being used to plan the coup attempt. “It was a rather convoluted plan, and Saddam was trying to get me to mobilize army units to support a coup attempt. Looking back it all seemed rather farcical, but I must confess that Saddam was very impressive. He came into the room to address the meeting and said quite simply: ‘We are going to take over the regime.’ I must confess I thought there was something about Saddam that made him stand out among most other Baathists of his generation. My first impression was that I was dealing with a natural leader, a man with a clear idea of what he wanted to do.”37

  As with many other episodes from Saddam’s early life, a degree of mythology has been allowed to develop about his “heroic” attempts to rid Iraq of the Arif government, and the stoicism he displayed during his two years of imprisonment. His official biographers relate how he was kept in solitary confinement for long periods, and how he was singled out for special treatment by the authorities because of his refusal to cooperate with them, the clear implication being that he was tortured. On one occasion, he claims, he was made to sit on a chair for seven days, not in itself a great hardship, and he also claims the government made several overtures to him in the hope of persuading him to join the Arif government. Just as Stalin was said to have spent his time in prison reading, generally trying to improve himself, and becoming one of the chief debaters in the prison commune, so Saddam “spent his time in prison trying to raise the morale of those comrades whose spirit had been broken by torture. He read a number of books and encouraged the others to read too; he also initiated discussions about the Party and its future.”38

  This inspiring account of Saddam’s imprisonment, however, does not square with the recollections of those surviving Baathists who were jailed with him. Ayad Allawi, a young medical student and Baath Party activist who was imprisoned at the same time as Saddam, recalls that, far from being given a hard time, Saddam received preferential treatment from the prison authorities. “Most of us were held in a special camp where the regime was very tough,” says Allawi. “Many of us were tortured, some quite badly.” Saddam’s “twin” Abdul Karim al-Shaikhly, for example, was given particularly harsh treatment. At one point his interrogators drove a nail into his back to make him confess. At another he was dragged around the prison compound, tied to the back of a jeep, and suffered appalling injuries. Saddam, however, was detained separately from the other prisoners. He was held at an old police training college, according to Allawi, where the conditions, compared with those experienced by the other Baath detainees, were similar to “being in a holiday camp. Even though the security forces had about thirty incriminating statements from witnesses denouncing Saddam—including one that he had smuggled guns from Syria to Iraq—they turned a blind eye.”39

  The preferential treatment Saddam received during his detention between 1964 and 1966 aroused suspicions in the Baath Party that he had made a secret deal with the Arif government; some former Baath Party members have claimed that Saddam was actively working with the government to inform on his own party.40 During the summer of 1963, when Saddam was involved in the persecution and torture of communists and leftists, he worked in conjunction with the state authorities. There is also the possibility that he was working in conjunction with the CIA contacts he made in Cairo. Certainly that was the suspicion shared by many of the other Baathists who were jailed by the Arif regime, but did not enjoy Saddam’s preferential treatment. Even though Saddam was actively involved in trying to overthrow the Arif regime, it seemed that he still had friends in the government, and even abroad, who were able to ensure that he was not badly treated in prison. And however much Saddam liked to think of himself as a Stalin-like figure, who looked after and helped to indoctrinate his fellow prisoners, in reality he was not well liked by his fellow inmates. Many of the other prisoners were well educated and came from better families and from a higher social class; many of them were also army officers. They tended to treat with disdain the thuggish young man from Tikrit, who was of low social standing, conversed in a strong peasant dialect, and had very modest educational qualifications. The only qualification to which he could lay claim was the secondary school certificate he obtained in Cairo, but no evidence of this was ever actually produced. Saddam developed a grudge against many of his fellow inmates for the patronizing tone they adopted toward him, and took his revenge against them once he had assumed a position of power in the Baathist government.

  Khairallah Tulfah was detained during this time, even though he was not a member of the Baath Party. For a period Allawi shared the same cell as Saddam’s uncle, and it was not an enjoyable experience. According to Allawi, Khairallah was a “tall, well-built man who was very aggressive, and whose language was littered with expletives.” Khairallah, apparently, was incensed by his arrest, and complained bitterly to the guards. “Why have they imprisoned me?” he would shout at the guards. “I am not against the regime.” Khairallah was visited by Sajida, his daughter, who had just given birth to Saddam’s first child, Uday. Apart from bringing food and books to Khairallah, she would visit Saddam who was held at a different prison. According to Saddam’s biographers, Sajida would bring him messages from Bakr, who had been released from prison, that were hidden in baby Uday’s clothes, which enabled Saddam to keep abreast of Baath Party affairs.

  Saddam’s second period of incarceration (the first had been for murdering Saadoun al-Tikriti in 1958) ended on July 23, 1966, when, together with two Baathist colleagues, he managed to escape. The official account of his escape41 claimed that Saddam had befriended the guards to the extent that he was able to persuade them to stop at a restaurant for lunch while transporting him between the prison and the court, where he was being tried for attempting to overthrow the regime. Once inside the restaurant, Saddam and his accomplices, who included Shaikhly, were able to escape through a back door to a waiting car driven by Saadoun Shakir, an army deserter from Baghdad who had befriended Saddam, in which they then sped off while the guards were waiting for them outside the front entrance. Another version of the event, which has since become firmly enshrined in the heroic myth of Saddam, was that the escape took place when Saddam and Shaikhly feigned illness in the prison, and persuaded the guards to take them to a nearby hospital for treatment, where they made good their escape with Saadoun Shakir’s assistance. The ease with which Saddam and Shaikhly escaped raise
d the obvious question of whether it was a genuine escape, or whether the authorities were complicit. Whatever the truth, his escape meant that Saddam was now free to start working on his next plan to overthrow the government and seize power.

  THREE

  The Revolutionary

  The coup of 1968, which finally brought the Baath Party to power in Iraq, was, by comparison with the violent bloodletting that had accompanied previous changes of government in Baghdad, a relatively civil affair. The secret password given to those who were to participate in the historic events of that night was rashad, or “guidance.” In the early hours of the morning of July 17, a number of military units, accompanied by civilian Baath Party activists, seized several key military and government installations, including the television and radio stations, the electricity station, the Ministry of Defense in Baghdad, all the city’s bridges, and a number of army bases around the capital. All telephone lines were cut and at 3 A.M. precisely the order was given to move on the Presidential Palace. A number of tanks then rumbled into the palace courtyard, and came to a halt beneath the windows where the president was fast asleep in bed. Sitting astride the lead tank dressed in the uniform of an Iraqi army lieutenant, his pistol in his hand, was none other than Saddam Hussein.

  One of Saddam’s fellow conspirators that night was Saleh Omar al-Ali. In 1968 Ali, like Saddam, was a member of the Baath leadership in Iraq, and had been involved in all the secret meetings leading up to the coup attempt. Having worked with Saddam since 1964 and shared a jail cell with him, Ali had formed a high opinion of Saddam’s ability. “He had a self-confident air about him. He was brave and courageous,” Ali recalled.1 The plotters were broken up into different cells that were assigned different tasks. Ali was in the same cell as Saddam, which was given responsibility for capturing the Presidential Palace. The Baath leadership had insisted that civilian activists assume this responsibility to avoid a repetition of the 1963 coup where the military, having taken a leading role in overthrowing the Qassem government, took control of the government and forced the civilian Baathists to assume a secondary role.

  Having collected weapons that had been kept at secret locations, Saddam’s group drove to the palace in private cars. Although the cell was predominantly civilian in makeup, the group was accompanied by General Hardan al-Tikriti, the former air force commander who in late 1963 had helped President Arif suppress the Baathists (see Chapter Two), who still commanded respect within the military establishment. On the way to the palace the group met up with army sympathizers, who provided them with armored cars. They then proceeded to the military headquarters at the side of the palace, where they were met by Saadoun Ghaydan, who was in charge of palace security and, although not a member of the Baath, was sympathetic to the coup. The military headquarters contained a number of tanks and the plotters, having dressed themselves in army uniforms, took control of the tanks and maneuvered them into position around the palace. “Saddam was in a very excited state,” said Ali. “This was the moment we had been waiting for, and Saddam was keen to be involved in every stage of the operation.”2

  The first that President Abdul Rahman Arif knew of the coup was when he heard some of the more exhuberant members of the Republican Guard firing their weapons in the air in a premature gesture of triumph. Saddam’s mentor, General Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, who had mastermined the plot and who oversaw the operation from military headquarters, used the military communications network to make contact with the president, informed him that his government had been overthrown, and invited him to surrender. Arif asked for time to consider the request and contacted other military units to see if anyone was willing to come to his aid. He soon discovered that his position was hopeless and that he had no alternative other than to surrender. He telephoned Bakr and offered to stand down, in return for which Bakr said he would guarantee his safety. Bakr then deputed Hardan al-Tikriti and Ali to enter the palace and escort the president off the premises. “I am empowered to inform you that you are no longer President,” Tikriti dryly informed him. “The Baath Party has taken control of the country. If you surrender peacefully, I can guarantee that your safety will be ensured.” Arif, a weak man who had only become president after his brother, Abdul Salam Arif, was killed in a helicopter crash in 1966, accepted the coup as a fait accompli. His only demand was that the coup plotters spared his life and that of his son, who was a serving army officer. Throughout the whole episode Saddam’s role was to keep guard over the palace and make sure that none of the soldiers loyal to Arif attempted to intervene.

  General Tikriti and Ali then escorted Arif to Tikriti’s house in Baghdad. By 3:40 A.M. the coup had been completed without the loss of a single life, which, by Iraqi standards, was quite an achievement. As the Baathists had no great argument with Arif, they were able to conclude the affair in an almost gentlemanly fashion. Tikriti went out of his way to make Arif comfortable at his home, making him coffee and urging him to lie down and rest before his flight to London, where he was to join his wife who was receiving medical treatment. After a few hours’ rest, Arif is quoted as saying, “I bade farewell to all the officers and wished them every success.”3 Later that morning the Iraqi people awoke to discover they had a new government. A Baath-sanctioned radio broadcast announced that the party “had taken over power and ended the corrupt and weak regime, represented by the clique of the ignorant, the illiterate, the profit-seekers, thieves, spies and Zionists.”

  Saddam’s version of his role in the events of July 17, needless to say, is rather more action-packed. He claimed that, in the heat of the battle for control of the Presidential Palace, he learned how to fire the gun on top of his tank. He has deliberately embellished the role of Barzan al-Tikriti, his half brother, who he claims was riding on the same tank as Saddam (a considerable number of those who participated in the July 17 coup were, like Saddam, Tikritis). According to others who took part in the occupation of the Presidential Palace, just two tank rounds were fired following a false report that Arif intended to resist. For the rest of the proceedings the only gunfire came from overexcited soldiers who, in keeping with the Arab custom, fired their guns in the air to celebrate the coup’s success.

  The explanation for Saddam’s appearance that day, dressed in military fatigues and riding on a tank, lies in the Baath Party’s concern that its civilian leaders, and not the military, should be installed in power if the coup succeeded, the opposite of what had happened during the 1963 coup. Ideally Saddam and his Baathist colleagues would have preferred to carry out the coup on their own, but in the crucial weeks leading up to Arif’s overthrow it became clear that they would need the support of the military if they were to succeed. Saddam’s Jihaz Haneen, the secret security force set up to combat what it described as “the enemies of the people,” was proficient at employing bullyboy tactics to intimidate Saddam’s enemies, but it had neither the muscle nor the expertise to take over the country. The Baath leaders therefore made contact with military commanders thought to be sympathetic to their cause. Some, like Hardan al-Tikriti, were already members of the Baath, and so were prepared to oblige. Others took more persuading. Two of the key converts to the cause were Abdul Razzak Nayif, the deputy head of military intelligence, and Colonel Ibrahim Daud, the commander of the Republican Guard. Although their cooperation was crucial to the coup’s success, neither of them was particularly committed to the Baathist cause, and their support was determined more by opportunism than ideology. With a president as weak as Arif in office it was clear that the regime would not survive for long. Nayif and Daud were also well aware that the coup stood little chance of success without them and, in return for lending their support, Nayif demanded that he be rewarded with the office of prime minister, and Daud that of defense minister.

  The conspiratorial nature of Baghdad café society meant that even someone as disconnected from the political currents of the day as President Arif became aware that trouble was brewing. The Baathists’ carefully laid plans for the coup
were thrown into considerable disarray when, on the afternoon of July 16, Arif summoned Nayif and Daud to the Presidential Palace, where he asked them if there was any truth in the rumors of the impending coup. Both men tearfully denied knowing anything about a coup attempt and, to demonstrate their loyalty to Arif, they fell to their knees and kissed his hand.

  When the Baathists heard what had happened, Bakr convened an emergency meeting of the Baath leadership at his house that evening. It was clear that the Baathists needed to act quickly if their plans were not to be exposed. It was equally clear that they would need the support of Nayif and Daud, as well as other key military commanders, if they were going to succeed. Thus while the Baathists were not exactly enthusiastic about the demands made by Nayif and Daud, they nevertheless agreed to them. Saddam, who claims to have been present at the meeting when the decision was made to form a tactical alliance with the officers, reached an equally cynical conclusion about the merits of the alliance. In a speech to his fellow Baathists at Bakr’s house, he declared, “I am aware that the two officers have been imposed on us and that they want to stab the Party in the back in the service of some interest or other, but we have no choice now. We should collaborate with them but see that they are liquidated immediately during, or after, the revolution. And I volunteer to carry out this task.”4 Stalin himself could not have put it better.