by Con Coughlin
The July Revolution was a classic military coup, a coup d’état rather than a popular revolution, and the Iraqi public remained wary. Iraqis had not forgotten the orgy of violence that had proceeded from the last Baathist takeover of the country in 1963, and few people were inclined to be too enthusiastic about the new regime until they had a good idea about who was in government, and how good were its prospects of survival. Over the next two weeks, however, it became clear that the military takeover was merely a prelude for a more far-reaching change of regime. Having ridden on a tank to the Presidential Palace to make sure that the Baathists’ military collaborators did not depart from the agreed script, Saddam and his fellow conspirators lost no time consolidating their position in the new government. The services of Nayif and Daud were required to gain power, and once that had been achieved the Bakr/Saddam Hussein alliance was determined to get rid of them, a sentiment that was warmly reciprocated by Nayif and Daud. Immediately after the coup, General Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr was appointed president, while Nayif and Daud assumed the portfolios of prime minister and defense minister respectively. Bakr, who remained secretary-general of the Baath Party, also became chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), the body set up the morning after the coup that assumed supreme executive and legislative authority. For a party that had made its name fighting communism, the Baath Party in power quickly acquired all the attributes needed to govern a one-party state. Saddam, a high-ranking member of the Baath, might have been disappointed not to have figured in the new cabinet, but he was given responsibility for national security, a position that would be crucial to the new government’s survival. Saddam was ideally suited for the position, having served his apprenticeship setting up the Jihaz Haneen paramilitary organization, which was dissolved once the Baathists came to power to be replaced by more formal security structures. Even though he did not enjoy official recognition, Saddam had a far more important power base that would ultimately deliver him the presidency.
Within days of the coup a bitter power struggle developed between Bakr and Nayif for control of the country, with both men believing that they could now dispense with the services of the other. Technically Nayif and Daud, who were both career officers, should have had the upper hand, as they were well-known and respected figures within the Iraqi military establishment. Bakr had demonstrated considerable political cunning in persuading Nayif and Daud to help the Baathists overthrow Arif. He had gotten Hardan al-Tikriti and Saadoun Ghaydan, two of the Baath’s leading military figures, to employ their powers of persuasion. Tikriti and Ghaydan had persuaded them that the new government would be run by the military, with the Baath playing a secondary role, and it was on this basis that they had participated in the coup. But once Bakr was established in power, he was determined to bring the Baath into the government at the expense of Nayif and Daud, who had underestimated the Baathists’ superior organizational skills. Bakr was prepared to allow military officers who were also Baath members, such as Hardan al-Tirkiti, to participate in the new government, and in the days following the coup he increased the Baathists’ military influence by appointing more than 100 Baathist officers to positions in the Republican Guards and other key units. Saddam, meanwhile, was busy helping to organize the Baathists’ security apparatus and paramilitary units, which he believed were essential for keeping the Baath in power. On July 29, Daud, completely misreading the situation in Baghdad, left for a tour of inspection of Iraqi troops that were stationed in Jordan, part of the garrison that had been sent to reinforce the Jordanian border following the Six Day War with Israel. While Daud was away from Baghdad, Bakr, with Saddam’s assistance, was able to strike. As one of Saddam’s official biographers commented: “He [Saddam] felt that Abdul Razzak Nayif’s participation [in the government] was an obstacle.”5
Given the dire threats Saddam had made at Bakr’s house on the eve of the coup, Nayif’s removal was a relatively civilized affair. On July 30, the day after Daud went to Jordan, Nayif was invited to lunch with Bakr at the Presidential Palace. As the lunch drew to a close, Saddam, acting in his new position as the country’s head of internal security, burst into Bakr’s room brandishing a gun and accompanied by three accomplices. When Nayif saw the revolver pointed at him, he put his hands over his eyes and cried out, “I have four children.” Saddam, according to the official biographers, was conciliatory. “Do not be afraid,” he replied. “Nothing will happen to your children if you behave sensibly.” Saddam then proceeded to give Nayif a short lecture on why he was being deposed from office: “You know you forced your way into the revolution, and that you are a stumbling block in the way of the Party. We have paid for this revolution with our blood, and now it has come out. The decision of the Party is that you should be put out of the way. You should leave Iraq immediately.”6 Precisely whose decision it was to remove Nayif is debatable. Saddam’s biographers give the impression that it was all Saddam’s doing, but most of the surviving participants say the decision was made by Bakr, who then gave Saddam the order to intervene. Nayif was persuaded to accept an ambassadorial post, and Saddam personally escorted him to the airport to catch his flight. As they left the palace, Saddam kept a concealed gun in his pocket to make sure Nayif did not try to make contact with any of the guards, some of whom would have been loyal to him.
The official account of Saddam’s involvement in the removal of Nayif reads thus: “He warned Nayif that his gun was in his jacket, and that if he saw the slightest sign that Nayif was about to disobey his orders he would end his life there and then. He asked some of his comrades to remain at the Palace to protect President Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr. Saddam sat next to Abdul Razzak Nayif all the way to Rashid Military Camp. The plane was waiting. After it took off, Saddam Hussein felt tears come to his eyes. One shot could have aborted the whole operation to get rid of Nayif, but fate decreed that the operation went without a hitch from beginning to end.”7
Saddam’s tears were shed more out of relief that the mission was a success, rather than sadness at Nayif’s departure. The tension that accompanied Nayif’s removal from office suggests that the July 30 coup, or “correctional coup” as it became known, was a close-run affair. Had any of the forces loyal to Nayif and Daud been aware of what was taking place they may well have tried to intervene, prompting an ugly bloodbath in Baghdad, similar to what had occurred when the Baathists launched their attack to remove Qassem in 1963. As Daud, in particular, had widespread support in the military, it is by no means certain that the Baathists, relying heavily on the ill-disciplined paramilitaries trained by Saddam, would have prevailed, and the history of Iraq might have been very different. With fate on their side, however, the Baathists won the day, and Nayif was forced into exile in Morocco (Nayif’s personal preferences for Beirut or Algiers having been dismissed on the grounds that these capitals were too politicized, places where he might have found allies to help him launch a countercoup). Daud was arrested in Jordan by the commander of the Iraqi detachment, General Hassan Naquib, and was returned to Baghdad on a military plane and sent into exile to Saudi Arabia. Nayif was regarded as such a potential threat that, ten years later in 1978, he was shot dead on Saddam’s orders in London, having survived a previous assassination attempt in 1973.
The removal of Nayif and Daud finally allowed the civilian Baathists, rather than the military, to declare themselves the real driving force behind the July revolution. Bakr further consolidated his position by assuming two new posts to go with the presidency and his chairmanship of the RCC; he became prime minister and commander in chief. It was at this point, following the completion of the “second stage,” as Baathist historians refer to it, of the July revolution, that the Tikriti wing of the Baath emerged as a force in its own right. Apart from Bakr himself, many of the key appointments in the new government went to Tikritis. Hardan al-Tikriti, who had been instrumental in appointing Saddam a principal full-time organizer of the nonmilitary wing of the Baath in 1964, became minister of defense, while Abdul Ka
rim al-Shaikhly, Saddam’s “twin” who had participated with Saddam in the failed assassination attempt on Qassem in 1959 and had joined him in exile in Cairo, became foreign minister. Even Saddam’s uncle Khairallah, who was not a Baathist, was made mayor of Baghdad. Not only were there a large number of Tikritis in key government positions, many of them were Tikritis with whom Saddam was intimately connected.
The most intriguing appointment of them all, however, was that of Saddam himself. Although, as his biographers clearly state, Saddam played a key role in both the removal of Arif and Nayif, he was the only member of the conspirators’ hierarchy who was not officially rewarded with a government position. Saddam was appointed deputy chairman of the RCC, the all-important body that would control the government of Iraq, but, at Saddam’s insistence, the appointment was not made public. He claimed that he declined to accept an official government position. This reticence may have been because of Saddam’s relative youth—he would only have been between twenty-nine to thirty-one years old. A more likely explanation is that Saddam preferred to stay in the shadows, working quietly away from the spotlight to ensure that the revolution was a success, and that any elements hostile to the Bakr regime were liquidated. Saddam’s biographers ascribe his refusal to accept an official position to the fact that “he had fulfilled his role in bringing the Baath party to power.” A measure of Saddam’s anonymity at this time can be drawn from the fact that he made no impression whatsoever on the legion of Western diplomats based in Baghdad during the July revolution and its aftermath, most of whom were filing lengthy dispatches on the turbulent events unfolding in Iraq.
The murder of a lawyer in Baghdad at dawn on July 17, just as the revolution was beginning, provided a more telling insight into the precise nature of Saddam’s activities at this time. While in general terms the coup was a bloodless affair, the one exception was the killing of Harith Naji Shawkat, who was murdered inside his home in Baghdad. At first no one could understand why Shawkat had been shot. A respectable middle-class man with a family, he had briefly flirted with membership of the Baath, but had not been involved directly in the July coup, which he neither supported nor opposed. Inquiries carried out by local officials, however, led them to the conclusion that Saddam had ordered the killing, which had been carried out by members of his new security service. It transpired that when Saddam was released from prison in 1966 Shawkat had been looking after funds worth some 20,000 dinars, a sizable sum, on behalf of the party. Saddam approached Shawkat and asked him to hand over the money, which he claimed he needed to help rebuild the party. Shawkat, however, refused, claiming that the money belonged to a different, left-wing group. Saddam, never one to forget, or forgive, a grudge had him killed the moment the Baath was reestablished in power. According to a Baath Party activist who worked closely with Saddam at this time, the killing was typical of Saddam’s behavior. “Saddam was never an ideologue. He was the tough guy who was brought in to do the dirty business. But no one took him very seriously in the party. That was our big mistake, and that is why he was able to work quietly behind the scenes and eventually take us all over.”8
Another example of Saddam’s readiness to commit violence is provided by Saadoun Shakir, the army deserter who drove his escape car in 1966 and was appointed to the RCC after its formation. He recalls that Saddam had decided to remove Nayif “on the first day of the revolution.” During the initial planning Saddam asked Shakir “to have ten committed party members ready to assassinate Abdul Razzak Nayif if he asked them to.” Apart from gate-crashing the Baathists’ takeover of the country, Nayif’s main offense was that he “had links with foreign forces and that he would have sabotaged the revolution.”9 After his own flirtation with the CIA in Cairo, Saddam was not taking any chances that a fellow collaborator might be in a position to reveal unwelcome details of his own involvement with “foreign forces.”
Even if Saddam’s methods lacked sophistication, they clearly had a place in Bakr’s new regime, which is why Saddam, who was still young and inexperienced compared with other senior members of the Baath, such as General Hardan al-Tikriti, found himself deputy chairman of the RCC. This appointment must have seemed especially pleasing to Saddam given that he had so abjectly failed in his youthful ambition to enroll at Baghdad Military Academy and pursue a career in the armed forces, the established channel for young men from the provinces seeking social mobility. He had been forced to watch on numerous occasions as rivals such as Tikriti made use of their military standing to further their political objectives. Bakr, however, who was more than capable of controlling the military side of things, needed someone who could take care of civilian affairs, in particular making sure that the military’s recent stranglehold on Iraqi politics was broken. With his secretive security force and paramilitary storm troops, Saddam was perfectly suited for the task. And if Bakr had any doubts about Saddam, they were quickly allayed by Khairallah Tulfah, his friend and companion from Tikrit, who rarely missed an opportunity to reemphasize his nephew’s many qualities. “Saddam is your son,” Khairallah, the newly appointed mayor of Baghdad, would constantly advise Bakr. “Depend on him. You need the family to protect you, not an army or a party. Armies and parties change direction in this country.”10
Saddam’s dramatic transformation from jailbird to revolutionary leader in the space of just two years is a remarkable achievement by any standard. With Bakr’s patriarchal backing, and with his own security apparatus at his disposal, there was only one likely trajectory for the young Tikriti’s future career, and that was up. It is a testament both to the depths of Saddam’s ambition and his ruthless sense of purpose that he managed to overcome the considerable disadvantages of his birth and background to reach the heights of Iraq’s revolutionary establishment at such a young age. None of the other key players who emerged during the coups of 1968 were fatherless, indigent peasants without any formal training. Ever since he moved to Baghdad with his uncle Khairallah in the mid-1950s, the only qualifications that Saddam had acquired were in the dubious arts of gangsterism and political survival. His personal ideology, such as it was, consisted of an innate patriotism that bordered on the xenophobic, a condition much encouraged by Khairallah, and a profound understanding that political success in Iraq was determined simply by the acquisition, and retention, of absolute power, by whatever means.
Before his imprisonment in 1964 Saddam had acquired a standing of sorts in the Baath Party, having secured his appointment to its Regional Command in 1964 as a result of the enthusiasm he had displayed for persecuting Iraqi communists. The collapse of the Baath Party through internal bickering had played into Saddam’s hands in late 1963 and early 1964, and circumstances conspired to move in his favor both during his imprisonment and after. In political terms the most important development was the deterioration in relations between the Syrian and Iraqi parties, which was precipitated in February 1966 when the Marxist wing of the Syrian Baath seized power in Damascus in a military coup. Michel Afleq and other, more traditional, Syrian Baathists were arrested and the party’s National Command, which technically oversaw control of Baathists throughout the Arab world—including Iraq—was dissolved. Not only did the success of the Marxists in Damascus raise fears of a communist revival in Baghdad, but the new Syrian government made it abundantly clear that it intended to assume control of all Baathist policy, a move that meant all Iraqi Baathists would be placed under Syrian control.
The notion of taking orders from Syrian communists was deeply unappealing to Iraqi nationalists such as Bakr and Saddam, and soon after his jail escape Saddam organized what was called an Extraordinary Regional Congress, which was convened in Baghdad in September 1966. The congress has come to be regarded as a watershed in Baath history, the moment when the Iraqi Baathists irrevocably parted company with their Syrian counterparts, a rift that determined the strained relations that were to develop between the rival ruling Baath factions in Baghdad and Damascus. The congress decided to abandon the system of a unified
command, based in Damascus, with regional commands established in various member countries. It was replaced by two rival National Commands in Iraq and Syria, which both claimed to be the heirs of the original party, and which claimed leadership over Baathists throughout the Arab world. Having effected this initial schism, the Iraqi Baathists followed it up in February 1968 by insisting on the supremacy of their own National Command, with Bakr appointed as secretary-general and Saddam working as his deputy.
Apart from playing a key role in facilitating the establishment of an independent Baath Party in Iraq, Saddam, again with Bakr’s support, spent the two years leading up to the July 1968 coup assisting with the party’s reconstruction after the disasters of 1963, and purging the party of any surviving leftists. He completed the formation and organization of Jihaz Haneen, the party’s neo-Nazi militia. The organization itself was the brainchild of Abdul Karim al-Shaikhly, although Shaikhly himself was more of an ideologue, an intellectual figure who, having argued for the creation of a paramilitary wing, was quite content to leave the day-to-day administration to Saddam. The paramilitary organization, under Saddam’s guidance, came to be composed of individual cells of committed and trusted party workers, with each cell working in isolation from the others. Many of those recruited by Saddam to run the Jihaz Haneen cells had worked with him in the torture chambers at the Palace of the End in 1963. An indication of how the Baath was taking shape under Saddam can be drawn from the fact that all three of Saddam’s half brothers—Barzan, Sabawi, and Watban—all passed through his training camps, learning skills such as firing machine guns and abducting opponents. Another head of a Jihaz Haneen cell was Saadoun Shakir, Saddam’s friend who had driven the getaway car for his jailbreak. The Baath under Bakr and Saddam was very much a family concern, and Saddam’s main goal was to make sure that the next time the Baathists made a bid for power, they not only succeeded but remained there.