More than once he saw a white sedan in his rear-view mirror and riled, stopped his car and walked back to confront the agents. He even dared to complain to Saddam’s secretary: “Why am I being followed?”
Saddam’s secretary blithely told him that it was for his own protection.
One morning Dr. Hassan spotted Kamel Sachet’s Mercedes ahead of him on the highway as he was driving to work. He did not want to drive up alongside him and wave, it would seem rude and brief, so he hung back and tried to drive slowly. For several kilometers Kamel Sachet also drove slowly, he had noticed the car following him. Dr. Hassan decided to end this awkward chase by pulling into a petrol station for a few moments, but when he drove off again he soon caught up with Kamel Sachet. Finally he ended up drawing alongside him at a traffic light. Kamel Sachet turned and recognized his old friend and when Dr. Hassan explained his embarrassment the two of them laughed like boys with relief.
But the shoulder hunch knotted. Dr. Hassan said that in these years the only times he was able to talk openly with Kamel Sachet was when he came to his office and Kamel would release his driver from waiting so that he would have an excuse to ask him for a lift home and they could chat in the car. When they arrived at his house, Kamel no longer invited him in. Dr. Hassan said once or twice he tried to urge him to leave the country, but that he always refused to consider flight. “Let them arrest me. I have nothing to be afraid of because I have done nothing wrong.”
He drew his family close under siege. He would not let Ali join the army although national service was obligatory. Ali admired the strutting officers he saw visiting his father, he envied their pistols and their new cars, their privilege and superiority. He asked his father if he could enroll in the Military College, but his father refused, stating unequivocally the inversion and negation of the value of the entire patriotic effort of his career: “Those who become close to them become criminals just like them.” To get Ali out of conscription Dr. Hassan wrote a report stating that Ali Sachet was suffering from depression and was mentally unfit for service. The Amn came to ask him questions about this, but he defended his diagnosis and the investigation lapsed.
Shadwan had gone on to university after completing high school, but Kamel Sachet forbade it for his younger daughters. He said that the universities were not safe places, especially for girls, that male students would try to befriend them or lure them—they were the daughters of a man in his position—and he could not allow it.
Amani was tall and pale and wan and she limped slightly when she walked. I saw her several times at the Sachet house, she would smile shyly in greeting, but she never spoke to me directly except to nod Salam aleikum and she never came down to sit and chat as the other members of the family did. Something had happened that could not be talked about. Whatever it was—or wasn’t: I have no desire to repeat rumor and falsehoods here—it should have been a private family matter. But Kamel Sachet had made too many enemies in the regime who wished to exploit his discomfort, undermine his position, provoke his temper with conspiracies and cast suspicion on his loyalty. In that ratting atmosphere, a scandal splintered into stabbing mirror shards that reflected the shadows and searchlights, some real, some spectral: Mukhabarat agents, Iranian Shia spies, Saddam himself.
“What happened with Amani was the major thing that destroyed Kamel Sachet,” Dr. Hassan told me, sitting in his Abu Dhabi office. “For something to happen with a daughter is a very big thing according to Arab mentality. Even if his son Omar had died it would have been easier for him. The thing with Amani was a catastrophe.”
Kamel Sachet was in torment over it. When it first happened, Dr. Hassan found his friend sitting in the dark alone, unshaven. The atmosphere was bitter and funereal. He saw that the general was close to tears, white with anger; his shock seemed to be beyond bereavement. He saw his strong brave friend crack.
“It would have been better if she had died,” said Kamel Sachet simply.
Dr. Hassan saw the danger of his retribution and reasoned with him, “Think of your duties as a father before Allah, believe in your own mercy and trust in the will of Allah.”
Sheikh Adnan, like Dr. Hassan, tried to calm him, to rationalize and soothe.
“The wisest thing to do, Kamel,” he told him, “is not to blow up the issue. As a believer, you know sometimes things happen to test the moral mettle of people. Allah would not ask you to shoulder something that you could not manage.”
Kamel Sachet found little solace in his words. The kingdom of God was a far dream, in the meantime he had to navigate the social fall out, weft and warp, tribe and party.
“I need not only to pray to God, I need the understanding of my people,” he said.
Adnan offered him the advice of wise men, he exhorted his friend to “handle the situation humanely.” He reminded him that death was not sanctioned by the Koran, it was an older Bedu salve, it was an anachronism…
AFTER SEVERAL MONTHS of public and private anguish Amani fell out of a second-story window and into a coma. Her legs had absorbed the brunt of the fall, her feet were broken up, a femur was cracked, she had internal bleeding, a ruptured spleen and a fractured skull. Suddenly, all of Kamel Sachet’s bitterness was washed away with the crisis. He went from hospital to hospital summoning doctors and specialists for second opinions and he became again just a father who wanted to help and protect his daughter. He asked Dr. Hassan to talk to doctors to help him understand the complications of her medical condition. For a long time it was not clear that she would wake up and if she woke up whether she would be brain damaged and if she had her mind intact whether she would walk. Kamel Sachet prayed hard for her survival. He did everything he could to get her the medical care and attention she needed. Dr. Hassan was surprised. “He was not angry. I saw him as a kind father. He was anxious. He did not betray any guilt; guilt would have been an alien emotion to him, but this was the other side of the coin, the worried parent.”
He stayed by her side for many days and after two weeks, when she finally came out of the coma, he made sure her mother could visit her often. Dr. Hassan tried to explain to me the trauma he observed in his friend, but he said he was not a social psychiatrist and his English could not master the technical terms.
“Honor is very important for any Arab man. For a good man. And for Kamel Sachet, a famous general, a hero, it was something even more. Honor included his whole family. These are the kind of men who would not even tolerate talk about their daughters…it is the structure of the Arab personality, it depends on honor and on the honor of their women.”
Kamel Sachet never really recovered his old self: even after Amani had returned home and learned to walk again in convalescence, the episode seared him like a brand that was stamped onto the pages of reports that found their way to the desk of the director of Qusay’s Special Amn. He withdrew from people and kept away even from those he had been close to. When his friends asked him why he no longer encouraged visitors, he told them, “to avoid the problems.” Dr. Hassan saw less and less of him. When he went to his house one of his sons would tell him Kamel was away even though he could see his car parked outside. He thought perhaps Kamel wished to protect him, that association would bring him also under suspicion. Dr. Hassan had a cousin who was a neighbor of the Sachets and he told him that there was always a Mukhabarat car parked on the corner.
“One time,” remembered Shadwan of that difficult period, “he was going to the farm near Hilla with his driver. He had fallen asleep and when he woke up, out of the blue he said, ‘Qusay is going to kill me.’ Maybe it was the end of a dream.”
Chapter 15
WAITING
KAMEL SACHET’S APPREHENSION WAS BOUND TO Saddam’s. Security was a noose that tightened into a garrote. The closer to the throne, the greater the risk. Dr. Hassan had described the atmosphere of fear in the later Saddam era, ever thicker paranoia, dread, a constant unbroken tension—suspicion, surveillance, cars in the rear view mirror, agents, eavesdropping, reports
…But a general could never debase himself with fear. Whatever that stomach prickling feeling was, Kamel Sachet suppressed it.
It was a time of plots and plotters and the conspiracies Saddam imagined were real enough. The senior military commanders had never recovered their faith in him after the Kuwait disaster and the subsequent cull; Saddam knew this and was careful to keep their power in check. He kept the regular army in the provinces, diluted with conscription and pressed volunteers, effectively starved of weapons and resources. Even the Republican Guard found their status slipping in favor of the new regiments of Saddam Fedayeen, Saddam’s men of sacrifice, commanded by Uday, who swore loyalty not to Iraq but to its president. These units were raised throughout Iraq but Saddam kept a cohort of them close, a personal paramilitary bodyguard death squad, and fattened their officers with bounties of cash, land, and Toyota pick-ups. Throughout the nineties, the years of constriction, a steady stream of disgruntled senior commanders, men who had fought through the Iran-Iraq war, who had survived Kuwait, left, walked through minefields, smuggled in the boots of cars into Kurdistan or bribed exit visas and drove across the desert to Jordan. The defector-traitors told and sold information (real, exaggerated and bullshit) to the CIA and the Jordanian General Intelligence Department, UNSCOM (United Nations Special Commission) and the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) or to the Kurds or Saudi agents or Iranian middlemen in exchange for cash, stipends, backing, visas, residency permits, passports for their families and protection.
Saddam was penned between two no fly zones, militarily emasculated by the teams of UN weapons inspectors destroying missile stockpiles and any nuclear and biological capabilities he may have hung on to, and impoverished by sanctions. Meantime machination abroad: exile groups and parties, the Shia militias backed by Iran, the Kurds in their rivalrous, but de facto independent northern crescent, the old scions—Chalabi, Allawi, various pretenders to the throne—mingled with the new defecting arrivals, set up think tanks and committees, wrote political manifestos and reports, went to conferences, lunched chummily with their friends in Washington, smoked cigars with the mandarins in Whitehall, entertained journalists with their own agendas. Each boasted of networks and support within Iraq; much of it was power dreaming, they could say anything when there was no voice to contradict them; those who remained in Iraq were locked in isolation and no one could ask their opinions.
ADNAN JANABI HAD told me to look up Nabil Janabi when I was next in London. Nabil Janabi was a Janabi acquaintance of his; “He has some television program now, he is kind of a player, he knew Kamel Sachet, he might be able to tell you something about him.”
I found Nabil Janabi’s number through a friend and we arranged to meet at a café on the Edgware Road. I recognized him immediately; he looked like the synthesis of his middle-aged exile demographic: dyed black hair (for the television cameras), beige suit, mustache, cigar. He wore a badge on the lapel of his suit: “I love Iraq” written across the outline of his country. He was helpful, genial, pleased with himself and talked in vague self-aggrandizing terms. He had reinvented himself as a presenter on an Iraqi cable news channel, hosting a daily show of interviews and views. He told me it was the most popular television program in all of Iraq. “All Iraqis, they love me!” He received thousands of emails every day, his mobile rang constantly from Baghdad, from Diala, Mosul, friends, contacts and well-wishers. “They call me the father of Iraq!” he declared, pumping his platform, “I have a great vision for Iraq…I am under pressure to return…I have told Prime Minister al-Maliki this: ‘I know all of Iraq now.’—He doesn’t hear as much of Iraq as I hear!” He revealed that there was a secret meeting convening in Iraq of “several groups” who wanted to promote him as a new leader of Iraq, someone who could negotiate with the Americans for them, “We will have a new general election, reconciliation! Not this false al Maliki reconciliation!”
He smiled, mock self-deprecating, as if to say, it was a long shot, yes, but who else could save the country?
His English was accented with a genial growl as he outlined his biography for me, careful to highlight the key self-mythologized episodes and characteristics that Iraqi men of his generation valued: poetry writing, intelligence, bravery, financial success, respect and popularity. I had listened to other stories like Nabil Janabi’s; always roughly the same three acts: Life in Iraq, Prison, Flight.
He grew up in Baghdad well-off and well connected. In his youth he pursued intellectual passions and on 26 February 1976 he was arrested for writing a seditious poem entitled “Blue Democracy.” (Iraqis often don’t know their own birthdays, but they always seem to remember exactly, clearly and without hesitation, the date on which they were arrested, the date on which they were released, and the date on which they left Iraq; such are the real milestones of an Iraqi lifetime.) He told me he had laughed at the judge who sentenced him to eight years, been released after two years during a Presidential Amnesty, then set up a construction-import-export company (“I was so successful in that business. I became rich enough to help the sons of the needy!”), which the government subsequently closed, claiming he was using the premises for illegal meetings. By 1982 he was under almost constant surveillance when a Janabi cousin of his, who was an Amn Colonel, told him he had received the order for his arrest. Because they were relatives, he said, he could “lose” the warrant on his desk for three days, but no longer.
Escape stories vary in their details, but they are usually abetted by conniving corruption and end in a heart stopping traverse, across a minefield or a checkpoint or a border. In the next forty eight hours, Nabil found another Janabi relative in the passport office to issue him with an urgent passport under his grandfather’s name, managed to get an on-the-spot visa from the Lebanese embassy and bought a ticket to Beirut via Amman. He asked his Colonel cousin to give him an Amn officer to escort him through the airport because he was worried Mukhabarat officers stationed in the terminal would recognize him. This Amn officer wanted his brand new Mercedes for payment. Nabil told him he couldn’t give him the Mercedes because it was in his brother’s name; the Amn officer then said he wanted money, $10,000. Nabil got him down to $7,000. 25 February 1982. His brother drove him to the airport and the paid-off Amn officer escorted him inside and then he waited, hiding in the toilet, until the last call for the Middle East Airlines flight to Beirut, his heart thumping, nerves taut. He carried only a briefcase containing $50,000 in cash and three kilos of gold.
He got off the plane in Amman, almost delirious with stress and exhausted with adrenaline. He could still see his brother waving through the terminal window and he could still hear the Amn officer telling him never to come back or they would kill him for sure. He went to a hotel and collapsed on the bed with his mind veering freedom. “And then I was the happiest man in the world.” He stopped and caught himself; he had not told his wife he was leaving or said goodbye to his children. “But still not very happy.”
The Amn officer who had accompanied him at the airport, Nabil added, as postscript, was executed some years later.
He was eventually granted asylum in Britain and he lived twenty years, the patched up half-life of the exile. Back in Iraq, his wife was forced to divorce him and his children were always denied exit visas. He settled in London, studied at the Open University and eventually gained a Ph.D. in linguistics from London University. In time he remarried an Iraqi woman and had two daughters. He kept in touch with the Iraqi community abroad. He saw Jalal Talabani, leader of the PUK (Patriotic Union) faction of the Kurds when he visited London and formed a connection with the Jordanian Royal family. “King Hussein was a close friend.” He wrote articles for Arab newspapers calling for regime change and democracy in Iraq and passed on information heard through the exile network and those go-betweens who traveled in and out of Iraq, to the British intelligence service MI6 (on at least one occasion that he admitted to me) and the Americans and the Jordanians.
He was involved. He penned articles and letters,
published bits of poetry, connected connections, phone calls, old friends, networks of dissidence and proto-politics. He tried to find links and paths between the outside and the inside, but it was always fraught. Phone calls were monitored, expensive and cracked by terrible lines, fax machines were in the ministries and subject to power cuts and paper shortages, email was virtually non existent. Messages passed friend to friend, cousin to cousin, ear to mouth, but communication of any real kind was slight. Everyone wanted to get rid of Saddam—kill or coup—but still he remained, as implacably absurd as a heavy stone at the center of a web.
In the nineties, Nabil recounted, he visited Sweden several times to send letters from a neutral postmark, part of a broad letter writing campaign, urging officials and officers inside the regime to organize themselves against Saddam. One time he posted three thousand pamphlets exhorting democracy from several post boxes around Stockholm. Nabil Janabi’s grandfather had been Sheikh of the Albu Hassoun subdivision of the Janabi tribe, and it was through this family connection that he had known Kamel Sachet well as a young man. He told me that in July 1998 he sent, from Sweden, a handwritten note addressed to Kamel Sachet’s address in Saidiya. He knew Kamel Sachet’s reputation and standing among the military class from other exiled officers and he hoped to enlist his leadership. He did not write Kamel Sachet’s name on the envelope, nor did he sign the letter; recipient and sender were thus anonymous, and no interlocutor was used. “Between two people there can be a secret,” explained Nabil, “but between three?—No.” Kamel Sachet, he hoped, he claimed, would recognize his handwriting and know, in turn, that Nabil, his old friend and relative, was close to the Jordanian Royal Family and lived in London and therefore his missive would carry the implicit support of these two governments. Kamel Sachet was undoubtedly too intelligent to fall for such a ruse. The letter asked, in general terms, to try to coordinate a cadre of opposition officers.
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