My unusual visit had begun a day earlier, under equally unusual circumstances. In the late evening of December 19, 1983, I traveled to the Iraqi Foreign Ministry building in Baghdad with a small staff for a preliminary meeting with Saddam’s deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz. Our group—which included Bill Eagleton, the experienced chief of the United States Interests Section in Baghdad, and Robert Pelletreau, a senior State Department official—had helped to prepare me for the visit.
But as we exited an elevator and started down a hall on an upper floor of the Foreign Ministry headquarters, two armed, unsmiling Iraqi guards broke me off from the group. While my startled staff was led straight down the hall, I was turned down a dark corridor to the right. I couldn’t help but wonder for the briefest of moments how many Iraqi citizens had been taken alone down dark hallways by men with guns, wondering what might be next.
I was led into a bright but windowless room. The walls were padded in what looked to be white leather. Standing alone was a medium-sized, gray-haired man in thick horn-rimmed glasses, wearing military fatigues and a pistol on his hip.
“Welcome, Ambassador Rumsfeld,” he said in flawless English. “I am Tariq Aziz.” He motioned for the guards to leave us and we stood across from each other.
Tariq Aziz later became a familiar figure in Saddam’s regime, the man who often appeared on television to defend his government. But Aziz was certainly not the typical Middle Eastern official. His manner was erudite and polished. He had been educated at Baghdad University’s College of the Fine Arts and seemed to live quite comfortably as an Assyrian Christian in a Muslim country. He was one of Saddam’s most trusted senior officials—which, considering Saddam’s rampant paranoia, was no small achievement—and one of the few to survive long in his orbit. As a sign of his stature, he was serving in the dual roles of deputy prime minister and foreign minister.
It was never explained to me why the Iraqis decided to part with the arrangements we had agreed on and pull me away from my staff. My sense was that Aziz thought we could be more direct without others present. That indeed turned out to be the case.
For the next two-plus hours we had an intense, candid, rapid-fire discussion about my mission to Baghdad and the relationship between our two countries. Aziz seemed well versed on the Reagan administration and my role as the President’s envoy. I found myself favorably impressed by his knowledge and interest in the world beyond Iraq.
Our long conversation covered a host of issues. Most important was our mutual interest in keeping both Syria and Iran contained. Iran was of particular interest to Aziz, for understandable reasons: He had survived an assassination attempt a few years earlier that had been attributed to Iranian agents, an attack that Saddam used as one of the pretexts for launching the Iran-Iraq war. Aziz asked for our help in dissuading America’s friends and allies from supplying arms to Iran. I told him, as Reagan administration officials had previously, that any efforts to assist Iraq were hampered by the regime’s use of chemical weapons and human rights abuses.2 I had questions as to exactly how Iraq might be helpful to us. Nonetheless, it was still clear that Iran’s leadership, due to their bitter hostility toward the United States and their history of holding Americans hostage, remained unapproachable.
I made the point that the United States and Iraq had some shared interests. “It seems unnatural,” I said, “to have a whole generation of Iraqis growing up knowing little about America and a whole generation of Americans growing up knowing little about Iraq.” Aziz nodded in agreement.
My meeting with Saddam, which took place the next morning, has been the subject of gossip, rumors, and crackpot conspiracy theories for more than a quarter of a century, particularly after I was involved in the administration that removed him from power in 2003. Supposedly I had been sent to see Saddam by President Reagan either to negotiate a secret oil deal, to help arm Iraq, or to make Iraq an American client state. The truth is that our encounter was more straightforward and less dramatic.
As I met with the Iraqi leader, we sat at opposite ends of a gold and burgundy–upholstered couch amid plush surroundings. The large room had intricately carved wooden doors and walls inlaid with marble. In a country where the people didn’t receive reliable electricity or water, it was discordantly ostentatious.
Our meeting was considerably more formal than my long session with Aziz. This time I wasn’t pulled off alone. Two members of our mission were included—Bill Eagleton and Robert Pelletreau—along with Aziz and an Iraqi interpreter.
The war with Iran was naturally uppermost in Saddam’s mind. Iraq’s capital, Baghdad, was a mere one hundred miles from the Iranian border and suffering frequent shelling and rocket attacks. Even the presidential complex where we were meeting was protected by sandbags and barriers. Though Saddam was in a difficult situation, he made no direct request for American military assistance. Like Aziz, Saddam said he was concerned about other nations providing military and financial assistance to Iran and clearly hoped that the United States might have some influence with them.3 In addition, at the State Department’s request, I discussed a proposal to funnel Iraqi oil through a pipeline that ended in Aqaba, Jordan.4 Saddam said he would consider the idea but indicated it would require American assurance that Israel would not attack it.5 Though officially most Arab nations didn’t even acknowledge Israel as a nation, they tended to view its formidable military with respect.
Saddam indicated a surprising amount of openness to cooperation with the West. “France in particular,” he said, “understood the Iraqi view.”6 Over the years that followed, that particular remark came to my mind on more than one occasion, and I never had cause to doubt it.
At one point, Saddam motioned me over to a window and pointed toward a tall building on the city’s skyline.
“See that building?” he asked, as we looked out at Baghdad’s sprawling vista. I nodded.
“When an elevator in that building breaks, where do we look to have it repaired?” he asked. I waited for his conclusion.
“I look for help in the West,” he continued. His point was clear: Iraq needed the West to make his country part of the modern world. Looking back, I wonder how much of our recent history would have changed if his perspective at the time had outweighed his other goals and appetites.
As Saddam and I began to discuss the prospects for U.S.-Iraqi relations, he said something quite interesting.
“It seems unnatural,” he said, “to have a whole generation of Iraqis growing up knowing little about America and a whole generation of Americans growing up knowing little about Iraq.”
I concealed a smile. Those, of course, were my exact words late the night before. Certainly Saddam’s repeating them was no coincidence. I didn’t know how Saddam had heard my statement—if Aziz had told him personally or if, as was not at all unlikely, the room Aziz and I met in was bugged. In any event, I was pleased and encouraged that he repeated it so pointedly. I began to think that through increased contacts we might be able to persuade the Iraqis to lean toward the United States and eventually modify their behavior.
After Saddam repeated my words back to me, I nodded. “I agree completely,” I replied, as if it were the first time I had heard those thoughts.
Over my decades of public service I received a number of unusual gifts from foreign leaders and heads of state, but none was stranger than the one Saddam presented to me. It was a videotape that may well have been put together specifically for my visit, though the production values weren’t going to win it any Oscars. The tape contained two to three minutes of amateurish footage of Syria’s dictator, Hafez al-Assad, reviewing Syrian troops and applauding. Then it showed people purported to be Syrians strangling puppies. This was followed by a line of young women biting the heads off of snakes. The video appeared edited in a way that indicated Assad was present and applauding these gruesome acts. I suspect Saddam wanted me to see the Syrians, and Assad in particular, as savages. Considering the Assad regime’s history, that wasn’t a difficult sell.
After about ninety minutes, Saddam thanked me for coming, and I expressed my appreciation. As odd as it might sound, he came across as rather reasonable. For his part, Saddam seemed gratified to have had a visit by a senior American official representing President Reagan. He knew it would increase his stature both at home and in the region.
I did not expect that Saddam’s regime would play such a prominent role in our country’s future—and in my life—in the years ahead. After a hiatus of seventeen years, U.S.-Iraq diplomatic relations were reestablished in 1984 shortly after my meeting. We had convergent interests: America could assist Iraq by discouraging other countries from selling arms to Iran, and Iraq could assist America by holding the line against an ascendant radical Islamist and terrorist-supporting regime in Iran. Ultimately, of course, the United States was unable to reorient our relations with Iraq, and my visit to Baghdad was something of a side event. America’s primary concern in the region at the time was not Iraq but the small, troubled nation of Lebanon, which was being ripped apart by terrorism and civil war. No experience better prepared me for the challenges I would face many years later, as secretary of defense in the George W. Bush administration, than the crisis in Lebanon. Many times, in fact, I looked back on the hopes and disappointments of that period, the consequences of which still reverberate.
CHAPTER 1
Smiling Death
On October 23, 1983, as dawn broke in the Middle East, a water delivery truck was headed for an American military facility at Beirut International Airport. The truck had been hijacked and loaded with explosives, the equivalent of some twelve thousand pounds of TNT.1 An eyewitness who caught a glimpse of the driver characterized him as “smiling death” for his chillingly cheerful expression as the truck headed toward his target—a four-story building that housed sixteen hundred men and women in uniform and flew the flag of the United States of America.2 After the truck barreled through the building’s entrance, it ignited an explosion so massive that it briefly lifted the entire structure into the air, until it collapsed upon itself. A second bomb, targeting French military personnel, had gone off almost simultaneously, killing fifty-eight.
By the time the rubble settled, 241 Americans were dead.* They had been part of a Marine contingent and multinational force deployed to Lebanon to serve as a check on the warring factions of that country. The Beirut airport bombing was the largest loss of Marines in a single incident since the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II. And until September 11, 2001, it was the worst terrorist attack ever committed against American citizens.
At the time of the Beirut attack I was home in Chicago and serving as chief executive officer of G. D. Searle & Co., a pharmaceutical company. As I watched the pictures of the huge plume of smoke over the bomb site on television, I was stunned by the scale of the attack. So was President Reagan, who appeared grief-stricken as one after another flag-draped coffin containing murdered Americans returned home. The Marine barracks bombing, Reagan later said, was the saddest day of his presidency and maybe the saddest day of his life.3
Many groups immediately claimed credit for it, but eventually the attack was linked to a fledgling terrorist group backed by Iran and Syria. The group called itself Hezbollah, Arabic for “Party of God,” even as they committed this brazen act of mass murder. The bombing clearly had been intended to spark an American withdrawal from Lebanon so that Syria, Hezbollah’s sponsor, which already occupied a third of the country, could gain even more influence.*
In an effort to show America’s resolve, Vice President George H. W. Bush was dispatched to Beirut. “We’re not going to let a bunch of insidious terrorists, cowards, shape the foreign policy of the United States,” Bush vowed.4 As I watched the scene, I was uncomfortable with his word choice. I have never thought people willing to drive a truck bomb into a building and kill themselves were “cowards.” Rather, I saw them as dangerous fanatics willing to do anything for their cause. I did agree with him that we should not let terrorists shape the foreign policy of the United States.
As America continued to bring the dead home, there was a profound sense that the country should respond forcefully to the atrocity. In the aftermath of the attack, the most powerful nation in the world did not.†
With no substantive military response in the offing, the only other way the United States could react to the terrorist challenge was through aggressive diplomacy. The President decided that a fresh set of eyes might be useful in the Middle East, and that it would at least demonstrate his and our country’s concern.
Shortly after the Beirut bombing, I received a phone call from Secretary of State George Shultz, who I first had met in 1969 when we served in the Nixon administration, and who had been a friend ever since. Shultz was President Reagan’s second secretary of state, replacing Alexander Haig, another colleague of ours from the Nixon years. A former Marine with a low-key demeanor, Shultz spoke plainly. He said the President needed to appoint a new special envoy to the Middle East to work on the Lebanon crisis and help with the American response to the terrorist attacks. Shultz said they wanted someone who had standing outside of the government. “I’d like you to do it,” he said.
If I agreed, the task would be to support the Lebanese government, to work with our allies on encouraging the Syrians to ratchet down their aggressive behavior, and to signal America’s commitment to the region.
I knew the history of presidential envoys to the Middle East was not a happy one. I had observed the challenges of America’s diplomacy in the region over my years in Congress and my service in the Nixon and Ford administrations, during which a number of experienced foreign policy officials worked in the region with hopes of breakthroughs, generally to return disappointed. I requested and received a leave of absence as CEO of Searle. Then I prepared to go to Washington to meet with President Reagan as he coped with the biggest national security crisis his administration had yet encountered.
Ronald Reagan had been in office for more than two years when he faced the Lebanon crisis. I had come to know him when he was governor of California and I was serving in the Nixon and Ford administrations. I was used to seeing him on television or being with him at more formal events when he had the aura of a movie star. Instead, as I entered the Oval Office on November 3, 1983, he looked quite different. The President welcomed me into the room with horn-rimmed granny glasses perched on his nose and a stack of papers in his hand, which he referenced occasionally while talking.
The caricature often used by Reagan’s critics was that he was good-hearted but not particularly bright—an “amiable dunce,” one said. I had heard the same charge of low candle power made against nearly every Republican president in my adult lifetime, usually by those on the other side who couldn’t imagine how anyone intelligent could possibly disagree with them. In Reagan’s case, as in others, the caricature simply wasn’t true. The President was not a detail-oriented manager, to be sure. He enjoyed telling a humorous anecdote, even during the most serious of meetings. He lacked the hard-charging style so often common among Washington politicians, and his approach took some getting used to. But as I came to know Reagan over the years, it was clear that he had the strong, long-range strategic sense so essential to successful leadership. Now that Reagan’s letters and other writings have been published, it is instructive to see his insightful mind at work.
Some presidents allow themselves to get lost in minutiae. Reagan’s predecessor, Jimmy Carter, was a famous micromanager. Ronald Reagan didn’t have that problem. He knew where he wanted to lead America, and set the course for his administration around large principles. He left it to others to sort out the details while standing ready to provide course corrections and calibration as necessary. While that didn’t always serve his best interests, for the most part it worked exceedingly well.
“My idea of American policy…is simple,” he told aides when asked his view on the Soviet Union. “We win and they lose.” Critics scoffed at that statement as simplistic bravado, but i
n truth it was a big idea, bold and transformative. For a number of years before Reagan took office, the architecture of the federal government and the foreign policy establishment had been built around the notion of peaceful coexistence, or “détente,” as it was called, with the Soviets. It was not fashionable to look at the Cold War as a win-lose proposition. The Soviet Union was considered more an unfortunate fact of life. But Reagan knew that major strategic changes in U.S. policy could be made by a president who had thought the subject through, was determined to redirect policy, and had an effective team of senior officials ready to implement his vision. The ultimate confirmation of his wisdom toward the Soviets, of course, is that President Reagan accomplished what he set out to do.
With regard to the crisis in Lebanon, Reagan’s words were similarly straightforward, even if things ended up turning out quite different than he’d initially hoped. On the Middle East, Reagan’s instincts were consistent with his policy against the Soviets: to use American strength to protect and encourage the aspirations of free people and to deter those who would break the peace. The President said we could not allow terrorists to drive us from Lebanon. At the same time, he was aware that when it came to the maneuverings of the Middle East, the United States was holding a difficult hand that would require substantial time and patience to play successfully. Those two commodities were in short supply. Reagan’s major national security focus was the Soviet Union, as it should have been at the height of the Cold War. For the time being at least, his goal in the Middle East was to try to bring about some modest degree of stability.
I told Reagan I would do my best to represent our country’s interests in the region. He thanked me for agreeing to come onboard at a difficult time for the country and pledged his support for the mission. Yet it was apparent that the “mission” wasn’t all that clear.
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