“You will be able to make these yourselves by the end of today. The detonators and time pencils you will carry and store in these,” the Bedou said.
He took an aluminum cigar tube, wrapped the detonator in cotton batting, and inserted it into the tube, then screwed the top back on.
“The plastic you will carry like this.”
He took the wrapper of a bar of soap, rolled four ounces of explosive into the shape of a soap bar, and wrapped it, sealing it with an inch of sticky tape.
“The cigar boxes you acquire for yourselves. Not the big kind for Havanas—the small kind for cheroots.
Always keep two cheroots in the box, in case you are stopped and frisked. If an Iraqi ever wants to take the cigar tube or the box or the’ soap off you, let him.”
He made them practice under the sun until they could unwrap the “soap,” empty out the cheroots, prepare the bomb, and wind the rubber band around the box in thirty seconds.
“You can do it in the back of a car, the men’s room of a café, in a doorway, or at night behind a tree,”
he told them. “Pick your target first. Make sure there are no soldiers standing well to one side who will survive. Then twist the butterfly, close the box, rubber-band it, walk up, toss the bomb, and walk away.
From the moment you twist the butterfly, count slowly to fifty. If at fifty seconds you have not parted company with it, throw it as far as you can. Now, mostly you will be doing this in darkness, so that’s what we’ll do now.”
He made the group blindfold each member one by one, then watch as the student fumbled and dropped things. By late afternoon, they could do it by touch. In the early evening he gave them the rest of the contents of the haversack, enough for each student to make six bars of soap and six time pencils. The tobacconist’s son agreed to provide all the small boxes and aluminum tubes. They could acquire cotton batting, soap wrappers, and rubber bands for themselves. Then he drove them back to town.
Through September, AMAM headquarters in the Hilton Hotel received a stream of reports of a steadily escalating level of attacks on Iraqi soldiers and military equipment. Colonel Sabaawi became more and more enraged as he became more and more frustrated.
This was not the way it was supposed to be. The Kuwaitis, he had been told, were a cowardly people who would cause no trouble—a touch of the Baghdad methods, and they would do as they were told. It was not working out quite like that.
There were in fact several resistance movements in existence, most of them random and uncoordinated.
In the Shi’a district of Rumaithiya, Iraqi soldiers simply disappeared. The Shi’a Moslems had special reason to loathe the Iraqis, for their coreligionists, the Shi’a of Iran, had been slaughtered in hundreds of thousands during the Iran-Iraq war. Iraqi soldiers who wandered into the rabbit warren of alleys that make up the Rumaithiya district had their throats cut, and their bodies were dumped in the sewers. They were never recovered.
Among the Sunnis, the resistance was centered in the mosques, where the Iraqis seldom ventured. Here messages were passed, weapons swapped, and attacks planned.
The most organized resistance came from the leadership of Kuwaiti notables, men of education and wealth. Mr. Al-Khalifa became the banker, using his funds to provide food so that the Kuwaitis could eat, and other cargos hidden beneath the food that came in from outside.
The organization aimed at six goals, five of them a form of passive resistance, and each had its own branch. One was documentation; every resister was supplied with perfect documentation forged by resisters within the Interior Ministry. A second branch was for intelligence—keeping a stream of information about Iraqi movements heading in the direction of the Coalition headquarters in Riyadh, particularly about Iraqi manpower and weapon strength, coastal fortifications, and missile deployments.
A third branch kept the services functioning—water, electricity, fire brigades, and health. When, finally in defeat, Iraq turned on the oil taps and began to destroy the sea itself, Kuwaiti oil engineers told the American fighter-bombers exactly which valves to hit in order to turn off the flow.
Community solidarity committees circulated through all the districts, often contacting Europeans and other First World residents still holed up in their flats and keeping them out of the way of the Iraqi trawl nets.
A satellite phone system was smuggled in from Saudi Arabia in the dummy fuel tank of a jeep. It was not encrypted like Martin’s, but by keeping it constantly on the move, the Kuwaiti resistance could avoid Iraqi detection and contact Riyadh whenever there was something to pass. An elderly radio ham worked throughout the occupation, sending seven thousand messages to another ham in Colorado, which were passed on to the State Department.
And there was the offensive resistance, mainly under the leadership of a Kuwaiti colonel who had escaped the Ministry of Defense building on the first day. Because he had a son called Fouad, his code name was Abu Fouad, or Father of Fouad.
Saddam Hussein had finally given up trying to form a puppet government and appointed his half-brother Ali Hassan Majid as Governor-General.
The resistance was not just a game. A small but extremely dirty war developed underground. The AMAM responded by setting up two interrogation centers, at the Kathma Sports Center and the Qadisiyah Stadium. Here the methods of AMAM chief Omar Khatib were imported from the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad and used extensively. Before the liberation, five hundred Kuwaitis were dead, of whom two hundred fifty were executed, many after prolonged torture.
Counterintelligence chief Hassan Rahmani sat at his desk in the Hilton Hotel and read the reports prepared by his on-the-spot staff. He was making a brief visit from his Baghdad duties on September 15.
The reports made gloomy reading.
There was a steady increase in attacks on Iraqi outposts on lonely roads, guard huts, vehicles, and roadblocks. This was mainly the AMAM’s problem—local resistance came under them, and—predictably, in Rahmani’s view—that brutal oaf Khatib was making a camel’s breakfast out of it.
Rahmani had little time for the torture to which his rival in the Iraqi intelligence structure was so devoted.
He preferred to rely on patient detective work, deduction, and cunning, even though he had to concede that in Iraq it was terror and nothing else that had kept the Rais in power all these years. He had to admit, with all his education, that the street-wise, devious psychopath from the alleys of Tikrit frightened him.
He had tried to persuade his president to let him have charge of internal intelligence in Kuwait, but the answer had been a firm no. It was a question of principle, Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz had explained to him. He, Rahmani, was charged to protect the state from espionage and sabotage from foreign sources.