* * *
On February 15,1990, President Saddam Hussein called a full meeting of his group of inner advisers at his palace at Sarseng, high up in the Kurdish mountains.
He liked Sarseng. It stands on a hilltop, and through its triple-glazed windows he could gaze out and down to the surrounding countryside, where the Kurdish peasants huddled through the bitter winters in their shacks and hovels. It was not many miles from here to the terrified town of Halabja, where for the two days of March 17 and 18 in the year 1988, he had ordered the seventy thousand citizens to be punished for their alleged collaboration with the Iranians.
When his artillery had finished, five thousand Kurdish dogs were dead and seven thousand maimed for life. Personally, he had been quite impressed with the effects of the hydrogen cyanide sprayed out from the artillery shells. The German companies that had helped him with the technology to acquire and create the gas—along with the nerve agents Tabun and Sarin—had his gratitude. They had earned it with their gas, similar to the Zyklon-B which had so properly been used on the Jews years before and might well be again.
He stood before the windows of his dressing room and gazed down that morning. He had been in power, undisputed power, for sixteen years, and he had been forced to punish many people. But much also had been achieved.
A new Sennacherib had risen out of Nineveh and another Nebuchadnezzar out of Babylon. Some had learned the easy way, by submission. Others had learned the hard, the very hard way and were mostly dead. Still others, many others, had yet to learn. But they would, they would.
He listened as the convoy of helicopters clattered in from the south, while his dresser fussed to adjust the green kerchief he liked to wear in the V above his combat jacket to hide his jowls. When all was to his satisfaction, he took his personal sidearm, a gold-plated Beretta of Iraqi make, bolstered and belted, and secured it around his waist. He had used it before on a cabinet minister and might wish to again. He always carried it.
A flunky tapped on the door and informed the President that those he had summoned awaited him in the conference room.
When he entered the long room with the plate-glass windows dominating the snowy landscape, everyone rose in unison. Only up here at Sarseng did his fear of assassination diminish. He knew that the palace was ringed by three lines of the best of his presidential security detail, the Amn-al-Khass, commanded by his own son Kusay, and that no one could approach those great windows. On the roof were French Crotale antiaircraft missiles, and his fighters ranged the skies above the mountains.
He sat himself down in the throne-like chair at the center of the top table that formed the crossbar of the T. Flanking him, two on each side, were four of his most trusted aides. For Saddam Hussein there was only one quality he demanded of a man in his favor: loyalty. Absolute, total, slavish loyalty. Within this quality, experience had taught him, there were gradations. At the top of the list came family; after that the clan; then the tribe. There is an Arabic saying: “I and my brother against our cousin; I and my cousin against the world.” He believed in it. It worked.
He had come from the gutters of a small town called Tikrit and from the tribe of the Al-Tikriti. An extraordinary number of his family and the Al-Tikriti were in high office in Iraq, and they could be forgiven any brutality, any failure, any personal excess, provided they were loyal to him. Had not his second son, the psychopathic Uday, beaten a servant to death and been forgiven?
To his right sat Izzat Ibrahim, his first deputy, and beyond was his son-in-law, Hussein Kamil, head of MIMI, the man in charge of weapons procurement. To his left were Taha Ramadam, the Prime Minister, and beyond him Sadoun Hammadi, the Deputy Premier and devout Shi’a Moslem. Saddam Hussein was Sunni, but his one and only area of tolerance was in matters of religion. As a non-observer (except when it suited), he did not care. His Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz, was a Christian. So what? He did what he was told.
The Army chiefs were near the top of the stem of the T, the generals commanding the Republican Guard, the Infantry, the Armor, the Artillery, and the Engineers. Further down came t
he four experts whose reports and expertise were the reason he had called the meeting.
Two sat to the right of the table: Dr. Amer Saadi, technologist and deputy to his son-in-law, and beside him Brigadier Hassan Rahmani, head of the Counterintelligence wing of the Mukhabarat, or Intelligence Service. Facing them were Dr. Ismail Ubaidi, controlling the foreign arm of the Mukhabarat, and Brigadier Omar Khatib, boss of the feared Secret Police, the Amn-al-Amm, or AMAM.
The three secret service men had clearly denned tasks. Dr. Ubaidi conducted espionage abroad; Rahmani counterattacked foreign-mounted espionage inside Iraq; Khatib kept the Iraqi population in order, crushing all possible internal opposition through a combination of his vast network of watchers and informers and the sheer, stark terror generated by the rumors of what he did to opponents arrested and dragged to the Abu Ghraib jail west of Baghdad or to his personal interrogation center known jokingly as the Gymnasium beneath the AMAM headquarters.
Many had been the complaints brought to Saddam Hussein about the brutality of his Secret Police chief, but he always chuckled and waved them away. It was rumored that he personally had given Khatib his nickname Al-Mu’azib, “the Tormentor.” Khatib, of course, was Al-Tikriti and loyal to the end.
Some dictators, when delicate matters are to be discussed, like to keep the meeting small. Saddam thought the opposite; if there was dirty work to be done, they should all be involved. No man could say:
“I have clean hands, I did not know.” In this way, all around him would get the message: “If I fall, you fall.”
When all had resumed their seats, the President nodded to his son-in-law Hussein Kamil, who called on Dr. Saadi to report. The technocrat read his report without raising his eyes. No wise man raised his eyes to stare Saddam in the face. The President claimed he could read into a man’s soul through his eyes, and many believed it. Staring into his face might signify courage, defiance, disloyalty. If the President suspected disloyalty, the offender usually died horribly.
When Dr. Saadi had finished, Saddam thought for a while.
“This man, this Canadian. How much does he know?”
“Not all, but enough, I believe, to work it out, sayidi .”
Saadi used the honorific Arabic address equivalent to the Western sir, but more respectful. An alternative acceptable title was Sayid Rais , or “Mr. President.”
“How soon?”
“Soon, if not already, sayidi .”
“And he has been talking to the Israelis?”
“Constantly, Sayid Rais ,” replied Dr. Ubaidi. “He has been friends of theirs for years. Visited Tel Aviv and given lectures on ballistics to their artillery staff officers. He has many friends there, possibly among the Mossad, though he may not know that.”
“Could we finish the project without him?” asked Saddam Hussein.
Hussein Kamil cut in. “He is a strange man. He insists on carrying all his most intimate scientific paperwork around with him in a big canvas bag. I instructed our counterintelligence people to have a look at this paperwork and copy it.”