The Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq

Chapter 1: The Search is On (pp1-22)

Saddam Hussein was born on April 28, 1937 in the tiny village of Tikrit, along the Tigris river north of Baghdad. He grew up to the sound of cannon fire from British soldiers, who used the country as a bridgehead for the occupation of Iran. Unlike Europe, the Middle East was not transformed into a pile of smouldering rubble by the war. The Nazi conflagration left Arab dreams and Arab resentments intact.

By the time he was eight, Saddam Hussein had already marshalled the boys from his village into a mock militia, marching up and down the dusty streets of Tikrit with wooden guns. At ten, he found a mentor in his maternal uncle, Khairallah al-Tulfah, a recently-cashiered army officer whose hatred of British colonial rule was only matched by his admiration for Adolf Hitler and his Nazi ideals.

Saddam turned toward his uncle at least in part because of problems at home. His father had deserted the family when he was young, and his mother's second husband, an illiterate shepherd named Ibrahim Hassan, took to beating the boy if he wasn't out tending the sheep. By the time he was twelve, Saddam took refuge in his uncle Khairallah's house. He learned to read by the light of an oil lamp, and fed his spirit on tales of his uncle's exploits with pro-German officers in the Iraqi army. Khairallah al-Tulfah had a dream that Arabs would one day be free of foreign occupation and foreign rule. The Germans, Khairallah said, were the only ones who respected the Arabs as equals. The British were just after their oil.

In the early fifties, Khairallah al-Tulfah decided to pick up roots. The tiny village of al-Auja, near Tikrit, had become too provincial for his tastes, so he packed up house and belongings and headed for Baghdad, where many Tikritis were emigrating to become merchants. He took his young nephew, Saddam, along with him, where he soon became known as "al-Tikriti," after the t own of his origin. It was a common thing for provincial Arabs to do, since it gave them a bond of common heritage.

Saddam grew into manhood with Khairallah's son, Adnan. The two boys were the same age, and resembled each other physically in many ways. But because he had started school late and his grades were poor, Saddam could only look on in admiration as his cousin went on to join the National Military Academy, one of the oldest and most prestigious in the Arab world.

Baghdad in the early 1950s was a hotbed of political revolt, and Saddam soon recovered from his disappointment. The Anglo-French invasion of Suez in 1956 had galvanized the Arab world. Moved by his uncle's fierce anti-British sentiments, Saddam joined the newly-formed Baath Party. Two years later he committed his first political murder, the assassination of a distant cousin who had become a police informer. (The Iraqi leader has always been proud of this fact, which gets prominent mention in all the official hagiographies). Saddam's early life was a paradigm of an old Arabic saying: I and my brother against my cousin, I and my cousin against my neighbor, I and my neighbor against the world.

The Baath Party, or the Party of Arab Renaissance, called for the creation of a single Arab political union, stretching from North Africa to the Iranian border. Formed in 1947 as a response to the emerging state of Israel, it fired the imagination of many young Iraqis like Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti. For the young Baathists, the primal scene that forever marked their way of looking at the world was what they called "the takeover of Palestine by international Zionism." As one Baathist writer put it, the influx of Jews to Palestine during the Holocaust in Europe "was bound to generate a great deal of bitterness, resentment, hostility. This sort of feeling naturally led certain sectors of Arab public opinion to sympathize with the Axis" powers allied to Hitler's Germany.

British colonialism bore an unspeakable responsibility for the "disaster" of Palestine, the Baathists felt, and in their speeches and ideological writings they consistently identified the two. "It is our unshakeable belief," the founder of the Baath Party, Michel Aflak, wrote in 1956, "that if the battle takes place sooner or later, it will not be to liberate Palestine alone but the whole of the Arab homeland." This struggle for freedom against foreign domination was, as Saddam would put it later, "the mother of all battles."

One curiosity of Baathist ideology helps shed some light on the origins of Saddam Hussein's political culture in the Baghdad of the mid-1950s. To the Baathists, the Arab world formed a single "nation," united by language, culture, and religion. (That religion was Islam,the Baath founders insisted, even though they themselves were Christians). Opposed to this single Arab "nation," which had been split apart by a imperialist conspiracy, were the Arab "regions." These were the Arab states that had come into being during the 20th century, and whose borders the Baathists considered as artificial relics of the colonial era. When the Baathists talked about the "Regional Command," what they meant was the Iraqi or the Syrian Baath Party. When they spoke of the "National Command," they were referring to a theoretical body where "regional" leaders (drawn from the various Arab states) would meet to determine the fate of their larger "nation." Like many prophets before them, the early Baathists believed that their prayers would become flesh in the body of a great man, a great leader who was destined to rule the Arab nation with an iron will. Under his thumb, fifty million Arabs would rise up and expel the Jews and the colonial powers from the Middle East. Until then, the Arab world would remain fragmented, weak, submitted.

Hero worship was not the only similarity between Baathist and Nazi ideology. Both believed in racial identity. Both believed in foreign devils. And both believed in the purity of war. As Aflak wrote on the eve of his party's creation, at a time when the ashes of the Nazi dream had not yet gone cold, "Real struggle can never be destruction, negativeness, or inaction. It is creativeness, building, a fruitful and positive action." War was great, the young Baathists surrounding Saddam believed: long live its purifying fire.

The great event occurred on July 14, 1958, when a group of Free Officers headed by Brigadier General Abdel Karim Qassem and Colonel Abdel Salaam Arif, took Baghdad by storm. With their jack boots and tanks, they stamped out the pro-British Hashemite monarchy. Crowds cheered when the death of King Faisal II was announced. They leered when his pro-British Prime Minister, Nuri Said, was captured trying to escape the city disguised as a veiled woman. He, too, was instantly put to death.

The young Baathists saw in the 1958 revolution an historic opportunity to achieve their goal of Arab unity. But their dreams soon turned into bitter disappointment. Iraq's new leader, General Qassem, allied himself with the pro-Soviet Iraqi Communist Party, a foreign force which the Baathists considered just as dangerous as British colonialism. Communist and Baathist gangs began fighting in the streets of Baghdad; in parts of the north, law and order broke down entirely. Special "Red Terror" courts were set up by Qassem's communist allies to hunt down the Baathists and bring them to trial. The very existence of the small Party was at stake.

The young militant from Tikrit, Saddam Hussein, was at the forefront of the street battles with the communists. In October 1959, he got wind of an assassination plot being hatched against Abdel Karim Qassem, and begged to be given a part. The Baathists were planning to take over the government by force, and Saddam Hussein wanted a piece of the action.

The plan was to lay an ambush on Baghdad's principle thoroughfare, Rasheed Street, as Qassem drove through the narrow shopping district. With Qassem out of the way, the Baathists intended do a little blood-letting of their own against their bitter rivals, the Communists They would make Qassem's "Red Terror" courts look like models of democratic justice.

According to Saddam's semi-official biographer, Fouad Matar, the future Iraqi President was told to cover the four-man hit team as they made their escape. But he was "too enthusiastic to control himself" and opened fire with the others on Qassem's motorcade. The would-be assassins fired wildly, excitedly, with their brand-new machine guns, but failed to kill Qassem. In the ensuing melée, as Qassem's bodyguards fired back and the Baathists tried to escape, Saddam was wounded in the left foot (Some say he shot himself by accident in the excitement). The legend has it that Saddam extracted the bullet himself with a knife later on that night, after hobbling to a Baathist safe house in a popular quarter of the city. Later, the 22-year old future hero escaped over the border to Syria, with help from his family in Tikrit.

In exile first in Damascus, later in Cairo, the young man from Tikrit climbed the ranks of the clandestine apparatus of the Baath Party and made the friendships and alliances that would serve him well in later years. His most powerful ally in the Baath was a distant cousin from Tikrit, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr. Al-Bakr was one of the Free Officers who had taken part in the 1958 Revolution, but had grown disenchanted with the Qassem regime and threw his lot in with the Baath. He was a welcome addition to the ranks, since he was an outspoken admirer of the then-popular Egyptian leader, Gamel Abdel Nasser. More importantly, however, he gave the Baathists access to the Army. Without the Army they would never manage to seize power, let alone hold onto it.

While in Cairo, Saddam wrote to his uncle, Khairallah al-Tulfah, asking for his daughter's hand in marriage. It was difficult in most Arab households for young men and women to get acquainted, without going through a tedious, formal courtship. The sexes were separated, and the girls forbidden from showing their faces to outsiders. Saddam had come to know Sajida without a veil as a teenager, when he had lived in the Khairallah house as a member of the family. The two were married in Cairo in 1963. Saddam may also have been counting on Sajida for political support, since her brother, Adnan Khairallah, was by now a commissioned officer in the Iraqi Army, a corps Saddam knew he could never join.

In February 1963, fate struck again, when Baathists joined forces with Qassem's former partner, Army Colonel Abdel Salaam Arif, in a successful coup. Just to make sure the message of the Baathist victory got through to the Iraqi people, they exhibited Qassem's bullet-ridden body on national television.

The news of Qassem's death reached Saddam in his exile in Cairo, and he rushed back to take part in the new regime. A love for conspiracy and a talent for psychological manipulation opened up a new vocation for the 26-year old Saddam: as a torturer in the Baath Party's main prison for political opponents, the Qasr al-Nihayyah, or Palace of the End.

The 1963 Baathist regime was a two-headed Hydra. Arif became President, while Saddam's cousin, Ahmed Hassan al Bakr, became Prime Minister. "The real power, however, was held by the [Baath] party leader," Ali Salih as Saadi." Saadi and the Baath leadership were inexperienced, and had to rely on a brutal armed militia to track down, terrorize, and assassinate their enemies. The active membership of the Party was estimated at a mere 1,000.

Within months, the alliance between the Baathists and the military fell apart. Al-Bakr launched a bloody war of attrition against the Kurds in the mountains of the north, garrisoning troops who fell prey to determined guerilla bands at night. The Kurds were led by Mustapha Barzani, and were openly receiving arms and aide from the USSR, where Barzani was living in exile. The Iraqi military bridled at the Baathist policy, which turned them into targets without giving them the means to fight. In November, General Arif ousted the Baathists from his government, and once again Saddam Hussein was forced to flee the country. He took refuge in Damascus, and worked his best suit: the blood tie to Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr. In 1965, al-Bakr became the Baath Party General Secretary. As a reward for his loyalty, Saddam was promoted to the Party's number two spot. His long march to absolute power had begun.

From 1965 on, until the Baathists successfully grabbed power on July 30, 1968, Saddam Hussein became the Party's principle organizer. He was the apparatchik who forged the Baath into a powerful subversive tool, capable of staging a military coup and holding power thereafter. His tactics were a mixture of Trotsky and Goering. Returning to Baghdad in secret, he purchased weapons, rented safe houses, and organized clandestine training bases for Baathists fighters. He also set up a Special Security Section called the Jihaz Haneen, or "Instrument of Yearning," whose main task was to police the party, weeding out potential dissenters and breeding a fierce personal loyalty based on fear. The Baathists, who had begun their careers as pan-Arabists, now found themselves opposing a planned union between Iraq and Egypt because of differences with Egyptian President Nasser, and supporting a war against the Kurds that threatened to break apart Iraq. With the Party line in confusion, "the Baath increasingly was pervaded by cliques from the same village, town, or tribe." Primary among them were the Tikritis of Saddam Hussein. It was the old Arab saying all over again: I and my brother against my cousin, I and my cousin against my neighbor, I and my neighbor against the world.

Working underground was a capital experience that would form the basis of Saddam's political culture later on, leaving him with a strong taste for secrecy and a flair for intelligence work. Although Saddam later transformed the Baath into a mass movement, and successfully used Goering's principle of the Big Lie to manipulate public opinion at home and abroad, he never abandoned the secretive cell structure of the Baath. The Baath was his ace in the hole, just in case he was forced to go underground again.

After a plot to overthrow the Aref regime failed, Saddam was tracked down by police to a safe house in Baghdad and jailed. By all accounts, however, the Deputy Secretary General of the Baath Party was considered a privileged "guest" at the jail, and was helped by Baathist agents he had infiltrated among the prison guards. Friends and family members were allowed to visit, bringing him newspapers, food, and coded letters from his cousin and patron, Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr. One day his wife arrived with a particularly sensitive note. "Feel under the baby's diaper," she whispered, as she pinched their first-born son so he would cry. The concerned father reached a hand inside the baby's clothes and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. It was from al-Bakr. The Baath had learned that disaffected Army officers were planning another coup against Aref, the note read. It was an occasion the Party should not miss. Saddam was ordered to break jail. The note from his cousin contained a detailed plan.

The jail break was the handiwork of Saddoun Shaker, a childhood friend from Tikrit. Shaker still recalls the story well. Baathist agents inside the prison had informed him that Saddam was to be transferred to another jail on a given day, and Shaker planted himself in a get-away car along the route. As the "jailers" were driving him through the streets of Baghdad, Saddam was instructed to ask that they stop for lunch at a popular restaurant on Abu Nawas street. While the guards waited at the table, he excused himself to the lavatory and walked out the back door. Shaker picked him up on a deserted side street, and they were gone. The Baathist intelligence apparatus had scored its first success.

On the morning of July 17, 1968, Saddam Hussein burst onto the grounds of the Presidential palace on top of a tank. Although he was not an army officer he had donned military garb, and his Army companions must have thought he was one of them. Other Baathists, posing as soldiers, seized control of the radio, the television, and the gendarmerie. In fact, the 1968 coup was the work of two former supporters of Arif, Colonel Abdel Razzaq an Nayef, and Ibrahim ad Daud. The Baathists merely "piggy-backed" their efforts, offering the support of their clandestine apparatus, to position themselves for a power play later on.

Saddam Hussein and his older cousin, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr were determined not to make the same mistakes as they had five years before. They knew the Baath could never rule in a coalition with the Army. So the first thing they had to do was to get rid of an-Nayef.

Many details of the Baathist putsch against the officers have been provided by Saddoun Shaker, who told the story with some pride to Saddam's semi-official biographer many years later. After winning the approval of al-Bakr, Saddam organized a showdown at the Presidential palace. When an-Nayef naively agreed to enter al-Bakr's office alone after lunch, Saddoun Shaker and his ten bodyguards sealed off the corridors and neutralized an-Nayef's men. Inside, Saddam drew his revolver and began beating officer in the face until he broke down. "I've got four children,"he wailed. "Why are you doing this to me?"

"You and your children will be fine if you leave Iraq and accept an ambassadorship," Saddam said coldly.

After some discussion, an-Nayef accepted an honorary position as Ambassador to Morocco. But that was not enough for Saddam. He insisted on driving an-Nayef to the Baghdad airport to catch a plane. "Just act normally," Saddam hissed as they passed through the army checkpoints, many of which were manned by an-Nayef's men. "Don't forget: the pistol is inside my coat."

As Saddam watched the plane prepare for takeoff, Shaker recalls, tears welled in his eyes. It was not from sympathy for the new exile. "I suddenly realized that a single bullet could have killed the entire operation," Saddam said later "It was fate that decreed it would happen like this."

But Saddam Hussein was never one to trust in fate alone. Not long after an-Nayef's departure, he sent killers from the Istikhbarat, or Military Security, to track him down. They followed him on every step of his exile, reminding him that he was a marked man who could never return home. In the end, Saddam's killers gunned down an-Nayef as he was leaving his London apartment. Saddam Hussein had learned one lesson well: never give you opponents a second chance.

The second Baathist regime began on a fragile footing. The political climate inside Iraq in 1968 was rife with intrigue, rivalries, and corruption. Less than two months after seizing power in the July 30 putsch, a coalition of Aref supporters and pro-Nasserite officers attempted a coup. In October, the regime announced they had broken up a "Zionist" spy ring. On January 7, 1969, they organized the public hanging of eleven Iraqi Jews . It was a way of galvanizing public support against an "external" enemy, when in fact Iraq was plagued with deep internal divisions.

Al Bakr and Saddam ruled Iraq through a unique power-sharing formula, a dual leadership they maintained for the next eleven years. Al Bakr, who commanded a certain respect from the public as an army officer and well-known supporter of the Arab nationalist call, played the good cop as Iraq's President. He signed decrees, received visiting heads of state, and gave rabble-rousing speeches denouncing Jews, Zionists, and foreign "plots." In reality, however, his power was limited. By the time the Baathist putsch elevated him to the Presidency, the Party had fallen under the control of his younger cousin, Saddam Hussein. Nominally only Iraq's Vice President when the duo began their rule in July 1968, it was Saddam who inherited the most difficult task of all: ensuring the survival of the regime.

Saddam's principle talent, and the one that would keep him in power against tremendous odds, was an uncanny ability to scent out potential rivals and physically eliminate them before they could ever mount a serious challenge to his rule. Like a cancer specialist, he tried to localize the disease of dissent and cut large swathes through his body politic to keep it from spreading. From the very start, he relied heavily on a wide range of secret police organizations to enforce his rule. Principle among them was the Jihaz Haneen. In the days following the 1968 putsch, it was expanded and given a new name: the Mukhabarat, or General Intelligence Department. The mission of this powerful state organization was to keep an eye on virtually every aspect of Iraqi society, starting of course with the Iraqi Communists. Saddam placed his trusted childhood friend, Saddoun Shaker, at the helm of this key institution. And just to make sure Shaker didn't get any ideas, Saddam ordered his oldest half-brother, Barzan Ibrahim Hassan al-Tikriti, to become Shaker's deputy. You could never be too sure.

Al Bakr had Saddam cut and purge. According to Samir al-Khalil's chilling account of the Baathist Republic of Fear, in 1969 alone public executions of the regime's opponents took place on January 5, February 20, April 14, April 30, May 15, August 21, August 25, September 8, and November 26. "The great and immortal squares of Iraq shall be filled up with the corpses of traitors and spies! Just wait!" one Baathist minister told the crowds after the first execution of Iraqi Jews on January 5. Al Bakr was no less practised in the arts of demagoguery. "We shall strike mercilessly with a fist of steel at those exploiters and fifth columnists, the handmaidens of imperialism and Zionism," he told Iraqi television viewers when he unveiled the "Zionist plot."

The Baathists faced threats from several corners. The most dramatic, in these early years of their rule, was the guerilla war in Iraq's northern province of Kurdistan which had raged for more than ten years. By early 1969, when the hangings began down in Baghdad, it threatened to split the nation apart.

The Kurds were a distinct ethnic minority from the Arabs. They spoke a different language, had different habits and customs. During the final years of Ottoman rule, the vast majority of Kurds lived in what has today become Turkey, and participated in the massacres of their Christian Armenian neighbors that culminated in the genocide of 1915-16, when half of Turkey's three million-strong Armenian population was decimated. At the end of the World War I, the Kurds were denied statehood by the victorious Allied powers at Versailles. The lands they had occupied for generations were split among four states: Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran.

Iraq's Kurdish minority, which accounted for slightly less than 20% of the total population, had been waging a guerilla war against successive regimes in Baghdad for years. When Saddam Hussein first tackled the problem in early 1969, the principle Kurdish guerilla force was led by "General" Mustapha Barzani, who was receiving arms and political support from the USSR.

The Soviets used aid to Barzani as a means of putting pressure on Saddam, who had never been their favorite candidate to rule Iraq. When they wanted something from Saddam, such as an exclusive oil concession, they stepped up aid to Barzani. When Saddam became more pliant, they slacked off. The Soviets never came out in the open and opposed the rule of Saddam Hussein. But for years they did their best to keep him off balance. The idea was to remind the Iraqi leader that he owed his power to Moscow. Iraq was not the only country where the Soviets were meddling in internal politics, but it was one where they knew the players exceptionally well. Ever since the overthrow of the monarchy by General Qassem in 1958, the Soviets had been playing rival groups against one another in an effort to keep Iraq weak and divided. Saddam had tasted Soviet iron during the street battles between Baathists and Communists ten years earlier. Now he was about to taste it again.

Saddam's first instinct was to confront the Kurds on the battlefield. In April 1969 he called out garrison troops and the small Iraqi Air Force, and declared war on the Kurds. On August 8, the army razed to the ground the Kurdish village of Dakan, near the northern city of Mosul. But the rugged terrain in Kurdistan was not propitious for the tanks and heavy armor vehicles of the Iraqi troops. Kurdish guerillas, called peshmergas ('those who walk before death,') used the high mountain passes and steep valleys to their advantage. When the Air Force tried to bomb them, they simply dug in or hid in caves. The valleys were so narrow that the Iraqi pilots had difficulty in maneuvering. Sometimes they crashed their planes into the mountain peaks, unable to pull up in time. To make matters worse, the Iraqi Communist Party (with Moscow's blessing) threw in its lot with the Kurds. It was a potentially deadly alliance for Saddam.

After several months of heavy fighting, Saddam realized he was headed for a humiliating defeat. Instead of fighting on, he sought a compromise. In January 1970, he made his first pilgrimage to Moscow, the patron of many radical Third World states and revolutionary movements and Iraq's principle arms supplier, hoping to negotiate a deal with the Soviet President, Alexei Kosygin. But the Russian gave him the cold shoulder. As Saddam would explain it in a conversation years later with U.S. Congressman Steven Solarz, Moscow's decided lack of sympathy to his difficulties provided a rude awakening. "We were, of course, young Baathists," he told Solarz. "We had conflicts with the Communist Party in Iraq, some of which were bloody. Yet we kept thinking the Soviet Union could behave differently."

On March 11, 1970, after returning from Moscow, Saddam announced with great fanfare a new "Autonomy Plan" for Kurdistan, which promised the Kurds many of the political and cultural rights they had been demanding for years. So much for the bait. The hook was in the application. As his condition for relinquishing control over the three oil-rich Kurdish provinces, Saddam insisted that the Autonomy agreement not go into effect for another four years. Warily and reluctantly, Kurdish leader Mustapha Barzani agreed. The four-year grace period would give Saddam a chance to solve the problem--his way.

The Kurdish war forced Saddam into a formal allegiance with the Soviets, which took the form of a 15-year Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation. In April 1972, Alexei Kosygin made a historic trip to Baghdad, to sign the Treaty documents with al-Bakr and Saddam Hussein. As he strolled through the marble hallways of the Presidential palace in Baghdad, a handsome blonde (provided by Saddam) on his arm, the Russian strategist savoured his victory. By using Barzani and the Kurdish rebellion, he had succeeded in "breaking" Saddam. He had won extensive oil concessions for the USSR and stepped up arms sales. But for Alexei Kosygin, the geopolitical gains were even sweeter. Without firing a shot he had gained a new ally, who with a little coaching could be used to counter American influence in the Persian Gulf. The Treaty allowed for Soviet warships to pay port calls to Iraq's small naval base at Oum Qasr at the head of the Gulf, steaming right under the noses of the U.S. Navy in Iran. To Kosygin's mind, this brought the Russian empire one step closer to its centuries-old goal of reaching the warm southern seas. The Treaty guaranteed Soviet access to Iraqi airbases, and called for the training of thousands of Iraqi officers in Soviet military academies. It also referred to the "harmonization" of Soviet and Iraqi foreign policy, a polite way of saying that Saddam would have to take orders from Moscow on issues such as Iraq's vote at the United Nations. In return for Saddam's allegiance, the Soviets agreed to maintain him in power. They also agreed to help him nationalize Western oil interests in Iraq. That was a fatal mistake.

Saddam Hussein was well aware of the enormous political strings the Treaty entailed, but he had little choice. Without appeasing Moscow, which had already shown it was capable of plunging Iraq into civil war, the Baathists were doomed. "We never expected that the Soviets would support us without guarantees that our friendship would serve their strategic interests," Saddam explained later. The new Treaty was an encroachment on Iraqi sovereignty and it was a bitter pill to swallow. But it was better than utter defeat. Besides, Saddam Hussein had more than one iron in the fire. At the same time he was forced into the alliance with Moscow, he was negotiating his freedom with the French. His salvation lay in Iraq's virtually untapped underground wealth. By winning control over Iraq's oil, he hoped to buy freedom from outside domination.

French President Georges Pompidou was only to happy to welcome Saddam Hussein to Paris in June 1972, to discuss plans to help the Iraqi wriggle out of the Soviet embrace. Like Britain and the U.S., the French had been angered by the nationalization of the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), a three-year effort that had been orchestrated by Kosygin's top troubleshooters, Valentin Chachin and Ivan Arkhipov. But Pompidou was willing to forgive and forget--at a price. In return for his acquiescence to the nationalization of the French share in the IPC, Pompidou demanded guaranteed oil deliveries from Iraq at concessionary prices. "Already," the French daily Le Monde noted, there was talk of secret negotiations for an arms sale estimated at 6 billion FF." In exchange for the oil, Saddam wanted arms. It was the type of deal the French simply couldn't refuse.

For the Iraqi, this first arms-for-oil deal with a Western nation was a test. The actual equipment he agreed to purchase--sixteen Alouette attack helicopters, and some 128 Panhard armored cars--would scarcely tip the military balance in his favor against his internal enemies, and even less so against Iran, which the Nixon Administration was arming at an alarming rate. Instead, it was a political experiment. He wanted to send the Soviets a clear message that Iraq did not intend to become a vassal state, and would seek arms and technology elsewhere as it saw fit. Beyond that, he wanted to discover whether the French were valid partners for his long-range scheme.

Saddam Hussein's driving ambition was to build Iraq into the greatest military power the Arab world had ever seen. Bred on the humiliation the Arabs felt at the hands of the British, and on the defeat his Arab brothers had suffered at the hands of the Israelis, Saddam Hussein was determined to vindicate Arab honor. He felt the only way to do that was by the force of arms. Iraq would have to become Israel's equal on the battlefield.

"Our nation has a message," he liked to say. "That it why it can never be an average nation. Throughout history, our nation has either soared to the heights or fallen into the abyss through the envy, conspiracy and enmity of others." Saddam Hussein was driven by no ordinary vision. Again and again he would refer back to Nebuchanezzor, the Biblical King of Babylon. His favorite episode in the Nebuchanezzor saga was when his ancient forebearer brought the Jews into captivity in Babylon. Saddam Hussein was hoping to repeat that feat.

On October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria launched a combined attack on Israel. It was Yom Kippour, the Day of Atonement, one of the most holy days for Jews. The attack took the Israeli army by surprise. It also came as a surprise to Saddam Hussein, who was picqued that he had not been informed ahead of time of the intentions of his Arab brothers. That Sadat, whom he scarcely knew, kept the attack secret he could accept. But that Syrian President Hafez el Assad, a fellow member of the Baath Party, should fail to consult with Baghdad was an unforgivable slight.

The Yom Kippour war drove another point home to Saddam Hussein. In its dramatic come-back following the surprise Arab attack, Israel made good use of the Mirage fighter planes it had purchased from France. These aircraft, in Saddam's eyes, had vastly outperformed the Syrian and Egyptian MiGs provided by the USSR. Israel's American-built M60 tanks made mincemeat of the ageing Soviet T-54s the Arabs could muster. The Soviet Union was supplying inferior and outdated equipment to the Arab world, Saddam suspected. If the Arabs were ever to rise up against Israel, they would have to acquire Western technology. And they would have to acquire Western arms.

By 1974, the Baathists felt confident of their grasp on the State. The Soviets had agreed to diminish support for the Kurds, while Saddam secretly prepared his army for the coming battle. As head of Iraq's powerful security apparatus, which had just been reinforced thanks to a secret intelligence agreement with KGB chief Yuri Andropov, Saddam Hussein had purged the Baath Party of his rivals and had virtually succeeded in neutralizing most other threats to the Baath. With his cousin, Ahmad al-Bakr, in failing health, Saddam became the undisputed power in Iraq. He was the man to be reckoned with, the boss who was calling the shots.

The quadrupling of OPEC oil prices following the Yom Kippur war convinced Saddam that the time had come to jump-start his economy. He signed contracts with the USSR to expand Iraq's oil industry. He signed contracts with the French to build huge "turn-key" factories, industrial complexes equiped with everything from the machinery and production jigs to the pencils on the director's desk . He called on the Brazilians to build railroads, on the Belgians to build a phosphates complex, on the Yugoslavs, the Bulgarians, the Germans, the Japanese. He built schools and a powerful radio network, capable of broadcasting Baathist propaganda throughout the Arab world. He extended Iraq's electricity grid into the most remote areas of the countryside. Foreign observers began pointing to Iraq as one of the rare success stories of the Third World. Its vast new revenues were not squandered on useless prestige projects, like the famous "white elephants" of Africa. They had actually improved the standard of living of the Iraqi people.

Saddam's favorite tactic was to get Soviet and Western companies bidding on the same contracts, so Iraq would wind up with a better deal. The catchword for this Iraqi policy was "non-alignment." Saddam Hussein wanted above all to preserve his freedom of action, which was why he had worked so hard to nationalize Iraqi oil. He was happy to become a client, but not a client state.

When he called in the foreigners, Saddam kept up his guard. His security services were careful to isolate foreign workers in Iraq, using many of the same tactics on them he had used with success to terrorize his own population. He was intent on maintaining his ideological virginity, on preventing any contact between "contaminating influences" and ordinary Iraqis. Foreigners were followed, interrogated, warned away from social contacts. Foreign newspapers and magazines were confiscated. Foreign engineers were required to apply for "exit visas" to leave the country, and these permits were routinely withheld as a means of intimidation. (One Belgian engineer was forced to remain in Iraq without his family for nearly three years, until the construction project he was supervising was completed). The money was good. But Iraq was a prison with golden bars.

Saddam explained his vision of cooperation with the West to a group of Arab journalists visiting Baghdad in 1974. The billions of dollars in fresh revenues gave Saddam new confidence that Iraq could break the bonds of dependence, the political strings. The West was a gigantic industrial super-market, and Saddam was a cash and carry customer.

We have no fear of dealing with any State in the world, with the exception of the Zionist entity which we do not consider as a state and with whom with have no intention of cooperating, ever. The severing of diplomatic relations with the United States of America [in the wake of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war] was a political attitude based on principle... But we have no reservations about dealing with companies anywhere in the world, on a basis that guarantees the respect of our sovereignty and ensures both parties a legitimate profit.

Our country has large-scale projects, prodigious projects, and we have great ambitions. The idea that we might isolate ourselves from the world to live according to our own devices is foreign to us and we refuse it categorically.

We must therefore cooperate and deal with States and companies who implement for us, here in Iraq, projects that our experience and capabilities cannot handle in their entirety or which are beyond our technical capabilities.

Iraq today has contracts with American and West European companies. We are co-operating with numerous Western states, and with all the Socialist states, without exception. But our dealings with all of them are determined by our national interest. Sometimes we deal with them on the basis of a strategic conception, as is the case with the socialist countries; other times on the basis of temporary mutual interest, as is the case with some Western, even some American companies. A contractor comes forward and carries out a certain project for us within a specified period. We agree on the price, the timing, and the technical specifications. He carries out his obligations, and we settle ours by paying him. And then he leaves. There is therefore no contraction between our decision to sever diplomatic relations with America and to deal commercially with some American companies on these bases. The presence of these American companies will never open the door to a change in our political program, but neither will our political position toward the United States prevent us from dealing with American companies in the way I have just mentioned.

At the same time Saddam turned to the West for technology and turn-key industrial projects, he sent thousands of young Iraqis abroad to get an education. At home, he transformed the dusty University of Baghdad into a respectable institution of higher learning. Particular emphasis was placed on science and engineering. Over the next ten years, the number of Iraqi students in technical fields would increase by 300 percent, to more than 120,090. A Foundation of Technical Institutes was established, as well as a specialized University of Technology. Graduates paid back the state for their education by going to work in Saddam's top secret military industries. For without the specialists, you couldn't build arms.

The last real threat to Baathist rule was the festering revolt up in the northern provinces of Kurdistan. The Autonomy agreement Saddam Hussein had negotiated with Mullah Mustapha Barzani in 1970 was scheduled to go into effect. As the four year grace period drew to a close, tensions mounted. Saddam had no intention of allowing the Kurds to set up a truly autonomous government, and was seeking to exclude the oil-rich area around Kirkuk from the future Kurdish region to deprive the Kurdish region of a major financial resource. He felt he was now strong enough to resolve the Kurdish problem once and for all--by force. He was wrong. And the humiliation he suffered during the military campaign that ensued would condition his behavior for the next fifteen years.

On the morning of March 11, 1974, Saddam Hussein met for the last time with Idriss Barzani, the son of the Kurdish leader. "I know when you leave here, you will set off an uprising," Saddam told him. "But you will regret it, because your calculations are wrong." When Barzani left Baghdad that afternoon, the Kurdish politicians Saddam Hussein had invited to join the central government went with him. It was a mass walkout, and Saddam was furious. Some accounts say he ordered the Amn al Amm (State Internal Security) to assassinate Barzani and his father a few days later, once they were reunited up in Kurdistan. Toward the end of March, Saddam called out the army, and his orders were clear. They were to crush what had now become a full-blown Kurdish rebellion, even if it meant devastating the entire region.

Events soon turned against the government troops. Saddam had made two major miscalculations. He had overlooked the depth of Soviet rancor for his repeated purges of the Iraqi Communists, and the determination of U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissenger to punish him for having signed the Friendship and Cooperation agreement with Moscow, which gave the USSR a foothold in the Gulf. The results were devastating. The Soviets cut off arms supplies to Baghdad, despite Saddam's temporary alliance with the ICP. Meanwhile, the CIA helped the Kurds by massive arms deliveries through Iran. It was one of the wierd tacit alliances of the Cold War. It nearly brought Saddam down.

As the 1974 Kurdish war progressed, Saddam's army was pushed back on every front. It incurred large losses in men and equipment. Even the areas nominally in its control were unsafe at night. Foreign engineers were told to remain in Baghdad. If they had to travel to Kurdistan, they were ordered to move only during the day, in convoys escorted by the Army. At night, the government troops returned to barracks in fear. The Kurds controlled nearly one-third of the country.

By the end of the year, the Soviet arms embargo added to Saddam's troubles, as the government forces gradually ran out of arms and ammunition. Iraqi ground troops hunkered down in their barracks. Iraqi pilots flew fewer and fewer sorties. What irritated Saddam Hussein the most was the fact that the Soviets simply refused to discuss the issue. They rejected requests to meet with Saddam's Chief of Staff, Lt. General Abdel Jabbar Shenshall, who had prepared a list of weapons Iraq desperately needed in order to wage the final offensive against the Kurds. It didn't help that Shenshall himself was a Kurd (in fact, he was doggedly faithful to Saddam). Alexei Kosygin supported the Autonomy Plan for Kurdistan. He did not support a war against the Kurds.

The Soviet attitude was debilitating, morally and militarily. Ever since they had replaced Great Britain as Iraq's principal arms supplier in 1958, the Soviets had very carefully built up Iraqi dependence. Lavish arms supplies over more than fifteen years were coupled to a strict policy concerning maintenance and training. The Iraqi Air Force had been the first customer outside the Warsaw Pact to receive the MiG 21 fighter, but was never allowed to learn how to service the plane by themselves. It was the same with the T-54 tanks, the workhorce of the Iraqi Army. Iraq could not wage a military campaign without active Soviet support; like a drug pusher, the Soviets had created a dependence. They knew that in a matter of months, Saddam would run out of munitions and spare parts. And so with a marked absence of polemic--there was not even a reproach--Kosygin simply turned a deaf ear to Saddam's pressing requests for more arms.

The Soviets never called it an embargo per se. But for Saddam, it was humiliating. It was this bitter experience with the USSR that convinced Saddam Hussein to go shopping elsewhere.

With the approval of his ailing cousin, President al-Bakr, Saddam set up a three-man Strategic Planning Committee toward the end of 1974, whose aim was to guarantee Iraq's long-term independence. Never again, Saddam vowed, would Iraq depend so heavily on a single arms supplier. If his nation was going to be truly independent, it would have to diversify its sources of weaponry. More importantly, it would have to build up a powerful domestic armaments industry in Iraq. Saddam's goal was to make sure that any future embargo attempted by foreign suppliers failed. Iraq was going to be the first Arab country capable of relying on itself.

"We know very well, my brothers," Saddam explained to his Baath Party colleagues, "that the sale of arms today, especially sophisticated arms, does not obey commercial considerations. Their delivery depends on the purpose it serves the supplying country. The equipment of our army depends essentially on the Soviet Union. In recent years, when we were fighting the rebel clique in the north, this country offered us sophisticated weapons. By revealing this historical truth, we are not trying to criticize anyone or to seek justifications. We are simply trying to shed light on a historical truth, and to put responsibilities in a more general context."

The Soviets, Saddam was saying, had let Iraq down, and were solely responsible for the "dramatic lack of munitions" the Iraqi forces had suffered during the Kurdish campaign. Other suppliers could be expected to do the same, if an embargo met their political agenda. Iraq had no other recourse but to rely on itself. It needed to build up vast stockpiles of weapons and an extensive military industrial base to make it impervious to future arms embargoes.

Saddam turned to two men to help him map out his strategy: Adnan Khairallah, his cousin and brother-in-law, and first Deputy Prime Minister, Adnan Hamdani. Khairallah, now a General, was in charge of the purely military aspects of their venture. Hamdani, the Deputy Premier, was Saddam's bag man and chief negotiator. Together with Saddam, they worked out a long-range plan that included a massive build-up in conventional weapons, and the construction of Iraq's strategic weapons industries.

Hamdani had good commercial contacts, and turned almost immediately to a Palestinian consulting group in Beirut, called Arab Projects and Developments (APD). APD was set up as a non-profit organization aimed at "promoting the economic, social and cultural progress of Arab countries." It was run by two fabulously successful businessmen, Kamel Abdel Rahman and Hasib Sabbagh, who believed that fellow Palestinians should pay back their Arab supporters by putting their brains to use for the Arab cause.

Rahman and Sabbagh were close to PLO leader Yasser Arafat. Through Arafat, they were plugged into the Palestinian diaspora. Thousands of well-educated Palestinian engineers and technicians were spread across the world. Many had graduated from U.S. technical institutes, like M.I.T. What APD could offer Iraq was a vast pool of of highly-qualified engineers. Until they were forced to close in 1976 by the heavy fighting of Lebanon's Civil War, APD served as Saddam Hussein's talent scout. It tracked down Palestinian and other Arab researchers, offering them work in Iraq on petrochemicals and infrastructure projects. According to an account in London's Independent newspaper, APD hired as many as 4,000 Arab scientists and researchers to work in Iraq. They were Egyptians, Moroccans, Palestinians, Algerians, Syrians and other Arabs. They left good jobs in the U.S., Britain, Canada, Brazil, and dozens of other countries. They offered Iraq a wealth of technical expertise. And while Hasib Sabbagh denies that he ever advised the Iraqi authorities "about projects for the production of nuclear, chemical or bacteriological weapons, or participated in the procurement of teams of scientists for such activities," his consulting firm played a key role in Saddam Hussein's game plan.

The real service ADP provided, Sabbagh revealed, was to have "designed Iraq's entire higher education system. We delivered them an entire system, a turn-key project." Sabbagh says the deal was handled through a team of outside consultants led by ADP staffer Dr. Antoine Zahlan, a Lebanese engineer of Palestinian origin. "We saw that Iraq needed an educated elite," Sabbagh commented. "We showed them how to train that elite themselves."

"That was the crucial first phase of Saddam's long-range game plan," said a Pentagon analyst who had studied the development of Iraq's defense industry closely. "Before you can build weapons, and before you can build factories, you need the skilled labor force to make it work."

ADP helped Iraq lay the foundation for the future. The ADP plan called for the overhaul of the entire education system, with particular emphasis on technical schools and universities. It provided the blueprint for the only type of "development" that interested Saddam--the development of a powerful Arab army and war industry. The first tangible result was the opening not long afterwards of the al-Bakr Military University.

Saddam Hussein was attracted early on to bacteriological weapons. They were cheap, relatively simple to manufacture, and potentially deadly. A single vial of anthrax vaccine dropped in an urban water system was enough, in certain conditions, to launch a full-scale epidemic. It was a terrorist's weapon if there ever was one.

Iraq's first attempt to acquire bacteriological weapons seemed innocent enough. The committee turned to a trusted Baathist, Izzat al-Douri, then serving on the ruling Revolutionary Command Council as Minister of Agriculture. On November 2, 1974, al-Douri signed a ground-breaking contract with the Paris-based Institut Merieux, to set up Iraq's first bacteriological laboratory. The Iraqis explained they needed to be able to manufacture large quantities of vaccines in order to develop agricultural and animal production. The official Iraqi purchasing agency was called the General Directorate of Veterinary Services. No one in France batted an eye. But for the Iraqis, the vaccine protocol was so important that visiting Agricultural Minister, Christian Bonnet, was invited to meet with the Vice President of the Revolutionary Command Council, Saddam Hussein.

Al-Douri's success won him a promotion, and made him a de facto member of the "team," the three-man Strategic Planning Committee. By the end of the year he was shifted over to the Ministry of Interior, all the while retaining his responsibilities for "agricultural" development.

When French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac faced the press in Baghdad on December 2, 1974, his three-day talks with Saddam Hussein had just ended. The young French Premier was exhuberant. Saddam had just told him that Iraq intended to turn to France for billions of dollars worth of civilian and military contracts. It was great news to announce, at a time when quadrupling of oil prices that resulted from the 1973 Arab-Israel war had plunged the French economy and the rest of Europe into deep recession.

Chirac had another reason to be pleased. His appointment as Prime Minister a few months before had deeply upset his Gaullist party. The Gaullists had opposed Valery Giscard d'Estaign in the 1974 presidential elections. But their candidate lost, because of Chirac's last minute defection. By bringing in new Arab business, and being seen as the prime mover behind Iraq's defection from the Soviet Union, Chirac hoped to appease party heavyweights back in Paris. And perhaps, to fill up the party coffers.

Chirac met with Saddam and the other two members of the Strategic Planning committee, Adnan Khairallah, and Adnan Hamdani. Civilian contracts were certainly announced, and when Chirac met the press he spoke of a "veritable bonanza." But two subjects topped the list of Iraqi requests: Mirage fighters like those of the Israeli Air Force, and nuclear technology.

With oil revenues suddenly worth billions of dollars, Saddam Hussein now had the means to realize his dream of building Iraq into a modern military power. His search to achieve military superiority over Israel was on. Prime Minister Jacques Chirac convinced him he could turn to France for help. The French were more than willing to meet his needs.

Saddam Hussein had always been attracted to General Charles De Gaulle, for the French leader's insistence on national sovereignty and the agile dance he performed between the super powers. Jacques Chirac had spoken that same language. Even better, he was Saddam's own age and understood what it was like to work in the shadow of another politician. France could help Iraq break out of the Soviet embrace, Chirac said, without thrusting it into America's arms. The principle means of doing this, of course, was by selling arms. But because the French never liked to see themselves as salesmen of any sort, let alone purveyors of death, they put it all into a nice little theory. French arms export policy, one influential scholar wrote at the time, was particularly oriented "toward helping those countries desiring to throw off the yoke of a super power." What better way of proving this high-minded ideal than by offering billions in high-tech weaponry to Saddam's Iraq.