by Con Coughlin
Not all Saddam’s terrorist activities during this period were confined to freelancers on the payroll of the Iraqi intelligence services. Dr. Ayad Allawi, a former senior member of the Baath who had fled to London in protest of Saddam’s brutalization of the country, awoke one night at his Epsom home with his wife to find one of Saddam’s assassins armed with an ax standing over their bed. “We were both subjected to an horrendous attack by this masked man,” recalled Dr. Allawi, who became a leading Iraqi campaigner for Saddam’s overthrow. “He hit us several times and left us for dead. Fortunately after he left I managed to drag myself to the phone and call for help.”22 Abdul Razzak Nayif, the former Iraqi prime minister who had helped the Baathists seize power in 1968, was not so fortunate. In July 1978 he was murdered as he left the InterContinental Hotel in London. The assassins fired two bullets into his head at point-blank range. The police later arrested two Iraqis who were charged with his murder. It later transpired that they were members of the Estikhbarat, the Iraqi equivalent of Britain’s Special Air Service (SAS), military intelligence agents responsible for conducting overseas operations. The assassination sparked a diplomatic row between London and Baghdad, particularly as the British government was in the process of hosting the latest round of peace talks between Israel and Egypt. Britain expelled eight Iraqi intelligence officers and barred three others from entering the country, citing its “increasing concern at the threat posed by terrorist activities in London, particularly against Arab targets. The presence in London of a number of known Iraqi intelligence officers has led us to the conclusion that it would be best that they should leave.”23 The Iraqis did not take the expulsions lying down. A similar number of British diplomats were expelled from Baghdad. The Iraqis arrested British businessmen who were working in Iraq on contracts. The businessmen were charged and convicted on trumped-up spying charges, and given lengthy prison sentences. Saddam also issued a directive instructing ministries and state organizations not to do any business with Britain, and a total trade embargo on British goods was immediately enforced.
When diplomatic channels were eventually reestablished between London and Baghdad, and British diplomats made representations asking for the release of the jailed businessmen, the Iraqis made it clear that there would be no deal unless Britain first agreed to release the two Iraqi intelligence officers jailed for Nayif’s murder. “We received several Iraqi delegations in London and they could not understand why we would not free the killers,” recalled a British diplomat who handled the negotiations at the time. “They thought it was simply a matter of a trade-off. But there was no way the British government could interfere with the due process of law.”24 More than twenty years later the two assassins were still serving their life sentences in British jails.
Saddam’s first flirtation with the world of international terrorism gradually came to an end in late 1978. The signing of the Camp David Accords in September 1978 between President Anwar Sadat of Egypt and the Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, was a watershed moment in the history of Middle East diplomacy. While much of the world applauded the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, Saddam saw it as an opportunity to reposition Iraq as the figurehead of Arab opposition against Israel, a position that had once been held by Nasser. The previous year Saddam had gone on the record in a rare interview with an American newsmagazine in stating his opposition to the peace deal being mooted by the Carter administration. By far the most significant message to emerge from the interview was Saddam’s personal antipathy toward the existence of the state of Israel. While stressing that he personally had nothing against the Jewish people, he nevertheless declared himself to be a committed anti-Zionist. “We will never recognize the right of Israel to live as a separate Zionist state,” he declared.25 A year later Saddam saw in Sadat’s “betrayal” an opportunity to assert his own position in Arab politics, and to that end he organized a summit in Baghdad in late 1978 to discuss how best to respond to Egypt. This required Saddam to improve relations with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, and to make overtures to President Asad of Syria to set aside the Baathist schism that had poisoned relations between the two countries for much of the 1970s. It was also in Saddam’s interests to repair his relations with Yasser Arafat, who was still regarded as the undisputed leader of the Palestinian cause. Arafat, of course, felt badly betrayed by the outcome at Camp David, having been led to believe that the Palestinian issue would be resolved during the peace talks, only to discover that Sadat had in effect opted for a unilateral peace deal with the Israelis. While the Baghdad summit was in progress, Saddam called Arafat into his office to outline his new policy. According to Palestinian officials who were present at the meeting, Saddam promised to drop his support for Abu Nidal, who was still busily assassinating Arafat’s key officials, if Arafat promised to support Iraq’s anti-Sadat initiative. “I can tell you at once that we will sanction no further operations against you mounted from Baghdad,” Saddam assured Arafat. “We will no longer take responsibility for his [Abu Nidal] actions—and we have told him so.”26
Saddam’s decision to scale down his involvement with terror groups provided him with an opportunity to reassess Iraq’s international standing. The diplomatic spat with Britain in the summer of 1978 had meant that Baghdad now found itself facing diplomatic isolation from two of the West’s key powers as it had already severed relations with the United States following the 1967 Six Day War. From the mid-1970s onward, however, there had been signs of a sea change taking place in Baghdad’s diplomatic orientation. Saddam, who had been responsible for negotiating the Soviet pact in 1972, had been increasingly skeptical about the necessity of maintaining good relations with Moscow, particularly after the Soviets let him down so badly during his offensive against the Kurds in 1974–1975. An early indication of Baghdad’s softening position toward the United States had been provided in April 1975 when Saddam granted an interview to the distinguished New York Times correspondent C. L. Sulzberger. Although the official Iraqi position remained staunchly anti-American because of Washington’s support for Israel, Saddam was keen to send out a softer message because he wanted to incorporate the best Western technology, particularly that from the United States, in his master plan for modernizing Iraq. Even without formal diplomatic ties, trade with the United States had grown almost tenfold between 1971 and 1975. So far as Saddam was concerned, he saw no contradiction between Iraq maintaining its position as a fierce critic of American policy and being one of the largest consumers of American goods in the Middle East. “American policy as it is now conducted is our enemy,” he informed Sulzberger. “But the Arabs, of whom we are a part, are not against the American state or the American people; only against American policy. We feel uncomfortable about U.S. meddling in our internal affairs, in the regional policy of the Middle East. If there is a change in this, we shall respond immediately.”27 Saddam returned to this theme again during his Newsweek interview in 1978. When asked about the prospect of a restoration of diplomatic ties between Baghdad and Washington, Saddam repeated his insistence that the United States must scale down its commitment to Israel. “There are other major issues, such as your complete support for the Zionist entity [Israel] and your deliberate strategy of dividing the Arab world, that stand in the way of normal relations.”28 As the American diplomat on the ground whose task it was to make sense of Baghdad’s flirtation with Washington, David Mack found it hard to know just how seriously to take Saddam. “On one level they were supporting all these terrorist groups who were running around bombing Europe, and they never missed an opportunity to berate us for our policy on Israel. But on another level they were very keen to do business with the U.S. Our basic problem, though, with the regime at that time was Baghdad’s support for all those terror groups. Until they sorted that out we were not going to play ball, and we made that perfectly clear.”29 Indeed, relations between Washington and Baghdad would not be properly restored until the summer of 1984, when the ruinous toll of the Iran-Iraq War wo
uld force Saddam to drop his opposition to Washington’s pro-Israeli stance.
By the late 1970s Saddam’s position as “the strongman of Baghdad” had gained general acceptance in the outside world and any Western diplomat or journalist seeking a meeting with the Baath leadership was steered toward Saddam, and not Bakr. Certainly by this time Saddam had taken complete control of foreign policy, as he was to make abundantly clear in his increasingly fraught dealings with Moscow. Saddam was determined to wean Iraq off its dependency on Soviet support, and in the May 1978 he fired another shot across Moscow’s bows by executing twenty-one communist military officers who had been languishing in jail in Baghdad since 1975. The Baath had already declared that no political activity was allowed within the military other than Baath political activity. Even though the communists had been arrested before the Baath ruling was announced, in their cases Saddam decided to enact the ruling retroactively, and the officers were executed. To start with, a half dozen of the officers were shot. The Soviet ambassador was outraged and personally visited Saddam to protest. As a consequence of his visit ten more of the officers were shot. The Soviets then ordered the heads of the East bloc missions to plead for mercy. They too were ignored and the remaining five prisoners were marched before a firing squad. Not content with this humiliation for the Soviets, Saddam banned Soviet transport planes from using Iraq airspace to ferry military supplies to Ethiopia, which Moscow was backing in its war against Eritrean rebels. For good measure, Saddam supported the Eritrean campaign, and let rebel groups train in Baghdad. Finally Saddam demanded that the Russians relocate their embassy, which was situated next door to the Presidential Palace. Saddam suspected the KGB, no doubt correctly, of monitoring his conversations inside the palace and at the adjoining Baath Party headquarters. When the Soviets refused to move, Saddam reacted by cutting off the water and electricity supplies to the Soviet compound. A few days later the Russians announced that they would, after all, be moving into new premises.
Iraq’s worsening relations with Moscow was one of the main subjects of discussion when Saddam agreed to be interviewed on the anniversary of the July 17 revolution, exactly a year before he was to seize power from Bakr. When asked whether the Iraqi officers had been executed as a warning to Moscow to keep out of Iraq’s internal affairs, Saddam replied unhesitatingly: “Yes, it was.” Then, giving vent to the visceral hatred of communism that had been the most compelling feature of Saddam’s career in the Baath, he remarked: “They [the Soviets] won’t be satisfied until the whole world becomes Communist.” And asked whether, in view of Baghdad’s uncompromising hostility to Israel, he believed that war was the only solution, Saddam replied simply: “Correct.” He also predicted that in ten years time—i.e., by 1988—the Arab states would be strong enough to defeat Israel. “The Arabs won’t always be weak. Their strength is growing daily. In ten years you will see a completely different equation.”30 This was a clear reference to Saddam’s secret project for Iraq to develop its own nuclear arsenal, a project about which the outside world still knew very little.
While Camp David prompted the Iraqis to undertake a reassessment of their foreign policy goals, it was the waning fortunes of the shah in neighboring Iran that was to be the decisive factor in Saddam’s calculation that the time had arrived for him to make his move against President Bakr. Saddam came to the conclusion that the aging Bakr would be unable to deal with the menace posed by the new radical Islamic government in Teheran. All the reforms carried out by the Baathists during the 1970s were designed to turn Iraq into a modern, secular state, albeit one governed by an autocracy. The prospect of an Islamic revolution enveloping neighboring Iran filled the Iraqi Baathists with deep conern. As the world’s largest Shiite Muslim nation, an Islamic regime in Teheran would inevitably destabilize Iraq’s large Shiite community in the south, which felt alienated from the Sunni Muslim, and secular, Baathist regime in Baghdad. Despite the Baathists’ cynical attempts to buy them off with free television sets and refrigerators, the Shiites, like the Kurds and the communists, remained a perpetual thorn in the side of the regime. In 1977 bloody confrontations had broken out in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, which was then the home of the exiled Iranian Islamic leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Clashes between the Shiites and the government resulted in eight Iraqi clerics being arrested, tried by a revolutionary court, and executed. More than two thousand Shiites were arrested, and an estimated two hundred thousand were expelled to Iran by Saddam on the grounds that they were non-Iraqis. In October 1978 the Iraqis, at the request of the shah, expelled Ayatollah Khomeini, who had been living in exile in southern Iraq since the 1960s. In an attempt to shore up the shah, Saddam received Empress Farah in Baghdad, amid much pomp. Although the shah had not always been well disposed toward Iraq’s Baathist regime, he was nevertheless the signatory, with Saddam, of the Algiers Agreement on the Shatt al-Arab dispute, and Saddam believed that maintaining the agreement, and therefore keeping the shah in power, was crucial to his own survival.
By now all these gestures of support were of no avail as it soon became clear that the Pahlavi dynasty was doomed. In February 1979 Khomeini returned in triumph to Teheran, signaling the start of the revolution that was to turn Iran into one of the world’s most uncompromising Islamic regimes. The challenge posed by both the Camp David agreement and the emergence of a radical Islamic government in Iran persuaded Saddam that he could no longer afford to run the country from his position as “Mr. Deputy.” The challenges ahead would require firm government, and Bakr was no longer capable of providing the leadership needed. Due to the gradual erosion of his authority by Saddam, Bakr was now reduced to a rather pathetic figure signing the pieces of paper Saddam placed on his desk. Bakr had become so ineffectual that Saddam was overheard complaining that Bakr did not even merit the salary he was receiving. A measure of the contempt Saddam felt for Bakr at the end of their professional relationship is provided by one of his biographers: “The military man spends his spare time on things that have no bearing on affairs of state. He wakes up early in the morning and goes into his garden; he waters the plants and trims the bushes. When he tires, he rests awhile in the company of his grandchildren. He lives with his memories.”31
SEVEN
Mr. President
All the patience, all the hard work, all the plotting and scheming, all the betrayals, murders, executions, and assassinations finally paid off in July 1979 when Saddam became president of Iraq. The announcement was made, with exquisite timing, by the outgoing president, Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, on the eve of the annual celebrations to mark the July 17 revolution. The date had been carefully chosen by Saddam to symbolize the continuity of the revolution, and was the culmination of months of carefully considered plotting. Saddam kept the precise details of his accession a closely guarded secret; the highly suspicious “Mr. Deputy” knew that a last-minute hiccup could ruin everything. Saddam’s masterstroke, however, was to persuade Bakr himself not only to consent to the handover, but to appear on Iraqi television and portray his own purging as a natural transition of power. “For a long time,” the sixty-five-year-old president told his listeners, “I have been talking to my Comrades in the Command, particularly cherished Comrade Saddam Hussein, about my health, which no longer allows me to shoulder the responsibilities with which the Command has honored me. My health has recently reached the stage where I could no longer assume responsibility in a manner that satisfies my conscience.” In a voice shaking with emotion, Bakr went on to nominate Saddam as “the man best qualified to assume the leadership.” Before bowing out of public life, Bakr paid a final tribute to Saddam, his erstwhile protégé.
“During the bitter years of struggle prior to the revolution, Comrade Saddam Hussein was a brave and faithful struggler who enjoyed the respect and trust of the party’s strugglers. On the eve of the revolution, he was at the head of the brave men who stormed the bastions of dictatorship and reaction. During the revolution’s march he was the brilliant leader who was
able to confront all the difficulties and shoulder all the responsibilities.”1
At the age of forty-two (or thereabouts) Saddam had taken control of one of the wealthiest countries in the Middle East. Buoyed by the oil wealth, Iraq was rapidly emerging as one of the region’s dominant political, military, and economic powers. The government could boast some $35 billion in foreign exchange reserves, and the oil riches were beginning to permeate every aspect of Iraqi life. The armed forces were expanding rapidly and starting to benefit from the new, sophisticated equipment purchased from countries such as Spain and France. The Baathists had created the Arab world’s first welfare state, with free education for all children from kindergarten to university, and a free national system of health care. The standard of living for ordinary Iraqis was gradually rising; basic foodstuffs were plentiful and cheap. For Iraqis who did not challenge the Baathist system, there had never been a better time to be an inhabitant of Iraq. The Baathists’ success in diverting the new oil wealth toward building a modern, industrialized nation, a nation that was strong militarily and politically united, had prompted some commentators to describe Iraq as the Prussia of the eastern Arab world. Saddam could not have chosen a better moment to assume control of the country. Unlike his predecessor, however, Saddam had no intention of sharing power. His was to be an absolutist dictatorship. Apart from his position as president of the republic, Saddam held all the country’s top positions: he was chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, secretary-general of the Baath Party Regional Command, prime minister, and commander of the armed forces. Modeling himself on Stalin, Saddam had become the supreme leader of Iraq.