by Con Coughlin
From the autumn of 1991 onward the American and British intelligence services explored various options for removing Saddam. The first priority was to find a person or group who would present an acceptable alternative to him. To this end the CIA made an approach to Saddam’s half brother Barzan, who was still living in exile in Geneva,14 an unlikely candidate in view of his previous activities as head of the Iraqi Mukhabarat and his personal involvement in the executions of fellow Baathists that took place after Saddam assumed the presidency in 1979 (see Chapter Seven). The next significant initiative was undertaken in June 1992 when, under CIA auspices, an estimated forty Iraqi opposition groups, including the Kurds, were brought together in Vienna to form a new organization called the Iraqi National Congress (INC), which committed itself to Saddam’s overthrow. The publicly declared aim of the INC was to create a democratic Iraq with a government that would represent all races and creeds. The INC was little more than a propaganda vehicle, and most of its more realistic members were well aware that Saddam would not easily be dislodged. The INC was funded almost exclusively by the CIA, to the tune of $23 million in its first year alone.
The most serious threat to Saddam still lay with his own armed forces. In the summer of 1992 two mechanized Republican Guard brigades were linked to a plot to depose him. The plot—assuming it existed—was foiled by Saddam’s ever-watchful security forces, and resulted in another round of executions and purges. Six officers were executed immediately, including two brigadier generals, and another four hundred were arrested.15 The following year another plot was uncovered, whose purpose was to kill Saddam during the annual July celebrations marking the Baathist revolution. The Republican Guard was again suspected of involvement, and further executions took place. Concerned that even the elite units of the Republican Guard could not be trusted, Saddam formed a special unit, mainly drawn from Tikritis, called the Golden Division of the Republican Guard. Its members were paid higher salaries and accorded special privileges, and worked closely with the president’s special security officers. Eventually the two groups merged to form the Organization of Special Security (OSS).
Saddam made some adjustments to the government, strengthening the position of his direct relatives in key positions. His half brother Watban replaced Ali Hassan al-Majid as minister of the interior, with Majid becoming defense minister. Another half brother, Sabawi, was made head of his private office and took control of the Mukhabarat. Uday, who was now twenty-eight and had effected a reconciliation with his father, was made head of national security and took control of the newspaper Babel, while continuing to run the Olympic Committee. Uday’s younger brother, Qusay, twenty-five, was given the key role of heading the newly created OSS. Saddam also tried to keep his two sons-in-law, Hussein Kamel and Saddam Kamel, happy. Hussein Kamel, who was becoming increasingly irritated by Saddam’s promotion of Qusay, continued to run the Military Industrialization Oorganization (MIO), Iraq’s main weapons procurement agency, while Saddam Kamel, a less abrasive personality, headed an unspecified security department at the Presidential Palace.
In the absence of any effective plan to remove Saddam, the United States, Britain, and France sought to increase the diplomatic pressure on him by establishing a no-fly zone over southern Iraq below the 32nd parallel, which gave the Allies effective control over one-third of Iraq’s airspace. The decision to impose the no-fly zone, similar to the one that was established to protect the Kurds in the north in 1991, was taken to protect the Marsh Arabs, the people who have inhabited the marshland around Basra for centuries, and who rebeled against Saddam in the summer of 1991. The revolt of the Marsh Arabs was unrelated to the rebellions of the Kurds and the Shiites, and was provoked by Saddam’s decision to construct a new three-hundred-mile-long water channel—called Saddam’s River—that adversely affected the marshes’ natural drainage, thereby arbitrarily destroying a culture that had existed for centuries. Saddam responded with his customary savagery, and reports soon reached the West of chemical weapons again being used against a defenseless population. An underlying motive for the creation of the no-fly zone, however, was George Bush’s desire, with the presidential election due in November, to impress the American electorate with his uncompromising stand against Saddam.
Bush’s ploy failed, however, and in November 1992 Bill Clinton defeated him in the presidential contest. Saddam responded by appearing on the balcony of his palace and firing his gun in the air in celebration. While Saddam remained the undisputed leader of Iraq, his two key antagonists during the Kuwait crisis, Margaret Thatcher and George Bush, had been unceremoniously thrown out of office. Saddam believed the change of government in Washington would be to his advantage, and that the new president would be less interested in pursuing a personal vendetta against the Iraqi leader. In this, he was disappointed. Within hours of winning the election, Clinton warned Saddam not to flout any of the UN sanctions. He responded in early January 1993, just days before Clinton officially replaced Bush, by deploying antiaircraft missile batteries inside the no-fly zone, a clear act of provocation designed to test Washington’s political will during the sensitive transition period. Again Saddam underestimated American resolve, and just six days before he handed over the presidency to Clinton, Bush responded by ordering more than 100 Allied aircraft to attack the Iraqi missile batteries.
Even after Bush stepped down as president, Saddam’s tribal instincts would not allow him to drop the vendetta. In April 1993, when George Bush made an emotional return to Kuwait, the Kuwaiti authorities revealed that they had uncovered an Iraqi plot to kill him. The Kuwaitis found a car packed with enough explosive to devastate the center of Kuwait City; the bomb was primed to detonate as Bush was driving through the city’s center. James Woolsey, Clinton’s CIA director, sent a team of forensic experts to Kuwait to examine the bomb. They concluded that it bore the hallmarks of Iraq’s Mukhabarat. Wafic al-Samurrai, the former head of military intelligence, who had much experience in carrying out such operations, said there was never any doubt that Saddam personally issued the order for the assassination attempt. “No one could do it without a direct order from Saddam Hussein himself.” Five of the six suspects were Iraqis; they were subsequently convicted and hanged by the Kuwaitis. Two months after the failed assassination attempt Clinton retaliated by firing twenty-three Tomahawk guided missiles at the Mukhabarat headquarters in Baghdad. The United States might have changed its president, but it had not altered its policy toward Saddam Hussein.
While the Iraqi people were starving, destitute, and afflicted by outbreaks of typhoid and cholera, Saddam’s ruling clique grew rich on the profits of oil smuggling. Within two years of the commencement of one of the most all-encompassing sanctions ever imposed by the UN, Saddam’s security forces had set up a complex network of companies, middlemen, and smugglers that enabled him to sell large quantities of oil on the black market and use the proceeds to finance the regime. The favored smuggling routes were through Kurdistan and Turkey, and through Jordan, where King Hussein turned a blind eye to Iraq’s illegal oil shipments through the Jordanian port of Aqaba. At the Habur checkpoint on the Iraqi-Turkish border, Iraqi trucks with specially adapted tanks capable of carrying substantial quantities of oil became a common feature of the everyday traffic. By 1992 it was estimated that 50,000 barrels of Iraqi oil were moving through this crossing point daily. The oil was then sold to Turkish middlemen for foreign currency, which was then passed back to Saddam’s coffers at the Presidential Palace. Without any hint of irony, in the summer of 1992 Saddam ordered the execution of forty-two of Baghdad’s leading merchants, who were accused of profiteering. Some of the merchants were tied to poles in public with signs declaring: “We are bloodsuckers.” They were then taken to the Interior Ministry—which was controlled by Saddam’s half brother Sabawi—and hanged.16 The Iraqi public saw the executions as nothing more than a cynical attempt by Saddam to deflect the general discontent with the high living of his elite.
Sami Salih, who for many
years was in charge of Saddam’s oil smuggling operation, said he was recruited on the recommendation of Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law. Salih said he had previously worked with Hussein Kamel at the MIO on various secretive weapons procurement projects. Because of his expertise in running export-import companies, Salih was summoned to the Presidential Palace after the Gulf War for a meeting with Saddam and was asked to set up an international sanctions-busting network. “It would have been impossible for me to refuse,” he said. “Had I declined they would not just have killed me; they would have murdered my wife, my children, my friends, my relatives—anyone remotely associated with me.” Having accepted the assignment Salih set up a number of “front” companies through which Iraq sold its oil and bought arms. “The UN could do nothing to stop us,” he said. Eventually Salih, like so many Iraqis who had contact with the West, was accused of spying and arrested.
The first he knew that he was in trouble was when a team of Iraqi intelligence officers arrived at his Baghdad office. “They told me, ‘Saddam Hussein has personally ordered your detention and interrogation.’” He was blindfolded and driven to the Presidential Palace compound. He was taken to a place called the “property room,” where he was stripped, given an old pair of blood-soaked pajamas, and thrown into a cell. At one point he managed to look beneath his blindfold. He saw that the walls of his cell were spattered with blood, and on them he found a number of inscriptions, which read “My name is so-and-so and I am to be executed on such-and-such a day.” Salih was left in the cell for a week and fed a diet of bread and water.
Eventually the guards said they were taking him to the “operations room.” He was led into the room blindfolded, and immediately heard the screams of other people being tortured. “They accused me of being a spy and demanded that I make a full confession,” Salih recalled. “I was more than willing to comply, but I had no idea what I was supposed to confess to.” The guards tied his feet together, hung him upside down, and whipped his body with lengths of cable and wire, until he was covered in blood. “I thought I was going to die then and there. But they were very expert in their trade. Just when I was losing consciousness they stopped and let me down.” He was then given ten blank pieces of paper on which to write his “confession.” As Salih lay on the ground recovering from his ordeal, he was able to look beneath his blindfold. All around him he saw other prisoners being tortured by teams of Saddam’s tormentors. In one corner he saw a naked man being lowered slowly into a vat of boiling water. In another a victim was being tortured with electric shocks to his genitals. Yet another victim was strapped to a table in the center of the room, where the guards were extracting his toe-and fingernails. Unlike most of the other victims, Salih, by making use of the contacts he had developed when he was a key figure in the regime, managed to escape.17
Another key figure in the smuggling operation was Saddam’s estranged half brother Barzan, who, from the comfort of his fortresslike villa overlooking Lake Geneva, combined his duties as Iraq’s representative to the UN mission with working as Saddam’s private financier. By 1993 it was estimated that Barzan, taking full advantage of the closed world of Swiss banking, controlled a complex web of undercover investments worth $20 billion.18 Kroll Associates, the U.S.-based firm of financial investigators, reckoned that Saddam had personally siphoned off about $200 billion from Iraq’s oil sales since 1981, and that he was able to exploit the secretive network of companies set up prior to the Kuwait crisis to circumvent the UN sanctions.
Despite the lucrative smuggling trade, however, little of the profits went to improving the lot of ordinary Iraqis. Indeed, much of the funds donated by the UN to assist the plight of ordinary Iraqi civilians went directly to Saddam and his ruling circle, and the main beneficiaries were the security forces and his family. Even the medical supplies shipped in by the UN were exploited by the regime, and ended up being sold on the black market in Jordan, the profits being channeled back to the Presidential Palace in Baghdad. The lion’s share of the substantial income Saddam received from these various illicit activities was spent on arms. Secret arms deals were negotiated with such disparate countries as China, North Korea, Russia, several former East bloc satellites, and Serbia. By the mid-1990s it was estimated that Saddam had regained 80 percent of the military hardware destroyed during the Gulf War. The rest was spent on the increasingly opulent lifestyle of Saddam’s immediate family and other leading members of the regime.
Uday was the most profligate and the most corrupt member of the ruling family, closely followed by his brother-in-law, the preening Hussein Kamel. Both men abused their power in the manner one would expect of a pair of mafiosi. Their homes were filled with valuable Persian rugs, gold fittings, and fixtures, much of which had been looted from Kuwait. Uday’s garage was filled with Ferraris and other expensive models. Uday and Hussein Kamel were also heavily involved in an international smuggling operation, which was linked both to the Russian mafia and Latin American drugs smuggling rings.19
According to Abbas Janabi, who worked as Uday’s private secretary for fifteen years before defecting to the West, by the mid-1990s Uday had become undoubtedly the wealthiest man in Iraq, and his private fortune was estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars, much of it secreted at locations throughout Iraq. Uday had no qualms about how he acquired his money. For example, he was personally involved in the resale of the humanitarian aid Iraq received from the UN on the black market. On one occasion he changed the labels on a consignment of Japanese milk, which had been donated to help Iraq’s undernourished children, and sold it, keeping the profits for himself. Aid from Spain, which was donated to the Ministry of Health, met a similar fate. In the mid-1990s he expanded Iraq’s oil-smuggling operations by forming an unlikely trading agreement with the Iranians. Uday personally controlled a fleet of barges based at the southern Iraqi port of Basra and paid an Iranian partner to protect the oil as it passed through Iranian waters. Another huge money market for Uday was cigarette smuggling, which he managed through a number of routes through Europe and Cyprus.
Despite his incredible wealth, Uday harbored a sadistic streak from which not even his closest colleagues and advisers were immune. On one occasion in 1991 Janabi inadvertently upset Uday by writing an article about the state of the Iraqi army. He was jailed and tortured. “Uday sent one of his bodyguards to the prison and he used a pair of pliers to pull out one of my teeth. Then he wrapped it in a Kleenex and took it to Uday to show he had done the job.” On another occasion Janabi saw Uday torture a man who had looked after his business interests in Jordan, beating him with a baseball bat on the soles of his feet, then suspending him from a revolving ceiling fan and flogging him with a cable. During the fifteen years he worked for Uday, Janabi was jailed on eleven separate occasions, including one spell in Uday’s office at the headquarters of the Iraqi Olympic Committee.20
The Iraqi Olympic Committee’s downtown headquarters had sufficient capacity to hold up to 520 detainees. The cells were located in the basement, and included sensory deprivation cells, which were sealed, painted red with red lightbulbs, and contained a tiny slot for the passage of food. Prisoners would be held for up to three months in these conditions. For many years Uday’s prison complex at the Olympic Committee was kept secret from his father. Many of those held in Uday’s cells had broken no law. They were mainly businessmen or the children of wealthy families who Uday thought were ripe for exploitation. Some of those held were simply ransomed by Uday—in 1995 the going rate was said to be $100,000. Others were imprisoned to force them to participate in a fraudulent scheme that Uday had devised. In one case an Iraqi businessman had arranged to import a shipment of steel for a construction project, and had deposited his payment with a bank in Baghdad to transfer to his foreign supplier. Uday arranged for the paperwork to disappear and had the man arrested. He then arranged to have the deposit transferred to his own account and the businessmen was brought in for interrogation at the Olympic Committee. He was given a stark choi
ce: either make another payment for the steel, or die.21
While the regime flourished, the people suffered. By 1995 there was still no clean drinking water, the electricity system could only provide three to four hours of power a day. The per capita caloric intake was half what it was before the war. Crime was so widespread that in 1993 alone 36,000 cars were stolen. UNICEF claimed that in 1993 between 80,000 and 100,000 children died because of the sanctions. But the regime would do nothing to help. It suited Saddam to have the population weak and fearful. Limited medical aid was provided, but only to favored party members. Abbas Janabi claimed that during the period he spent working for Uday the regime could afford to buy anything it wanted, but preferred to spend the money on arms and expensive cars for the ruling elite. Saddam’s only response to the growing desperation of ordinary Iraqis to feed themselves and their families in 1994 was to order that thieves should have their right hands cut off; frequent offenders were to have their left leg cut off from the knee and armed robbery would carry the death penalty. At the same time three high-ranking army officers were executed on Saddam’s orders for questioning Uday’s military capabilities.