Saddam : His Rise and Fall (12 page)

The official account of Saddam's involvement in the removal of Nayif reads thus: “He warned Nayif that his gun was in his jacket, and that if he saw the slightest sign that Nayif was about to disobey his orders he would end his life there and then. He asked some of his comrades to remain at the Palace to protect President Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr. Saddam sat next to Abdul Razzak Nayif all the way to Rashid Military Camp. The plane was waiting. After it took off, Saddam Hussein felt tears come to his eyes. One shot could have aborted the whole operation to get rid of Nayif, but fate decreed that the operation went without a hitch from beginning to end.”
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Saddam's tears were shed more out of relief that the mission was a success, rather than sadness at Nayif's departure. The tension that accompanied Nayif's removal from office suggests that the July 30 coup, or “correctional coup” as it became known, was a close-run affair. Had any of the forces loyal to Nayif and Daud been aware of what was taking place they may well have tried to intervene, prompting an ugly bloodbath in Baghdad, similar to what had occurred when the Baathists launched their attack to remove Qassem in 1963. As Daud, in particular, had widespread support in the military, it is by no means certain that the Baathists, relying heavily on the ill-disciplined paramilitaries trained by Saddam, would have prevailed, and the history of Iraq might have been very different. With fate on their side, however, the Baathists won the day, and Nayif was forced into exile in Morocco (Nayif's personal preferences for Beirut or Algiers having been dismissed on the grounds that these capitals were too politicized, places where he might have found allies to help him launch a countercoup). Daud was arrested in Jordan by the commander of the Iraqi detachment, General Hassan Naquib, and was returned to Baghdad on a military plane and sent into exile to Saudi Arabia. Nayif was regarded as such a potential threat that, ten years later in 1978, he was shot dead on Saddam's orders in London, having survived a previous assassination attempt in 1973.

The removal of Nayif and Daud finally allowed the civilian Baathists, rather than the military, to declare themselves the real driving force behind the July revolution. Bakr further consolidated his position by assuming two
new posts to go with the presidency and his chairmanship of the RCC; he became prime minister and commander in chief. It was at this point, following the completion of the “second stage,” as Baathist historians refer to it, of the July revolution, that the Tikriti wing of the Baath emerged as a force in its own right. Apart from Bakr himself, many of the key appointments in the new government went to Tikritis. Hardan al-Tikriti, who had been instrumental in appointing Saddam a principal full-time organizer of the nonmilitary wing of the Baath in 1964, became minister of defense, while Abdul Karim al-Shaikhly, Saddam's “twin” who had participated with Saddam in the failed assassination attempt on Qassem in 1959 and had joined him in exile in Cairo, became foreign minister. Even Saddam's uncle Khairallah, who was not a Baathist, was made mayor of Baghdad. Not only were there a large number of Tikritis in key government positions, many of them were Tikritis with whom Saddam was intimately connected.

The most intriguing appointment of them all, however, was that of Saddam himself. Although, as his biographers clearly state, Saddam played a key role in both the removal of Arif and Nayif, he was the only member of the conspirators' hierarchy who was not officially rewarded with a government position. Saddam was appointed deputy chairman of the RCC, the all-important body that would control the government of Iraq, but, at Saddam's insistence, the appointment was not made public. He claimed that he declined to accept an official government position. This reticence may have been because of Saddam's relative youth—he would only have been between twenty-nine to thirty-one years old. A more likely explanation is that Saddam preferred to stay in the shadows, working quietly away from the spotlight to ensure that the revolution was a success, and that any elements hostile to the Bakr regime were liquidated. Saddam's biographers ascribe his refusal to accept an official position to the fact that “he had fulfilled his role in bringing the Baath party to power.” A measure of Saddam's anonymity at this time can be drawn from the fact that he made no impression whatsoever on the legion of Western diplomats based in Baghdad during the July revolution and its aftermath, most of whom were filing lengthy dispatches on the turbulent events unfolding in Iraq.

The murder of a lawyer in Baghdad at dawn on July 17, just as the revolution was beginning, provided a more telling insight into the precise nature of Saddam's activities at this time. While in general terms the coup was a bloodless affair, the one exception was the killing of Harith Naji Shawkat,
who was murdered inside his home in Baghdad. At first no one could understand why Shawkat had been shot. A respectable middle-class man with a family, he had briefly flirted with membership of the Baath, but had not been involved directly in the July coup, which he neither supported nor opposed. Inquiries carried out by local officials, however, led them to the conclusion that Saddam had ordered the killing, which had been carried out by members of his new security service. It transpired that when Saddam was released from prison in 1966 Shawkat had been looking after funds worth some 20,000 dinars, a sizable sum, on behalf of the party. Saddam approached Shawkat and asked him to hand over the money, which he claimed he needed to help rebuild the party. Shawkat, however, refused, claiming that the money belonged to a different, left-wing group. Saddam, never one to forget, or forgive, a grudge had him killed the moment the Baath was reestablished in power. According to a Baath Party activist who worked closely with Saddam at this time, the killing was typical of Saddam's behavior. “Saddam was never an ideologue. He was the tough guy who was brought in to do the dirty business. But no one took him very seriously in the party. That was our big mistake, and that is why he was able to work quietly behind the scenes and eventually take us all over.”
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Another example of Saddam's readiness to commit violence is provided by Saadoun Shakir, the army deserter who drove his escape car in 1966 and was appointed to the RCC after its formation. He recalls that Saddam had decided to remove Nayif “on the first day of the revolution.” During the initial planning Saddam asked Shakir “to have ten committed party members ready to assassinate Abdul Razzak Nayif if he asked them to.” Apart from gate-crashing the Baathists' takeover of the country, Nayif's main offense was that he “had links with foreign forces and that he would have sabotaged the revolution.”
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After his own flirtation with the CIA in Cairo, Saddam was not taking any chances that a fellow collaborator might be in a position to reveal unwelcome details of his own involvement with “foreign forces.”

Even if Saddam's methods lacked sophistication, they clearly had a place in Bakr's new regime, which is why Saddam, who was still young and inexperienced compared with other senior members of the Baath, such as General Hardan al-Tikriti, found himself deputy chairman of the RCC. This appointment must have seemed especially pleasing to Saddam given that he had so abjectly failed in his youthful ambition to enroll at Baghdad Military Academy and pursue a career in the armed forces, the established channel for
young men from the provinces seeking social mobility. He had been forced to watch on numerous occasions as rivals such as Tikriti made use of their military standing to further their political objectives. Bakr, however, who was more than capable of controlling the military side of things, needed someone who could take care of civilian affairs, in particular making sure that the military's recent stranglehold on Iraqi politics was broken. With his secretive security force and paramilitary storm troops, Saddam was perfectly suited for the task. And if Bakr had any doubts about Saddam, they were quickly allayed by Khairallah Tulfah, his friend and companion from Tikrit, who rarely missed an opportunity to reemphasize his nephew's many qualities. “Saddam is your son,” Khairallah, the newly appointed mayor of Baghdad, would constantly advise Bakr. “Depend on him. You need the family to protect you, not an army or a party. Armies and parties change direction in this country.”
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Saddam's dramatic transformation from jailbird to revolutionary leader in the space of just two years is a remarkable achievement by any standard. With Bakr's patriarchal backing, and with his own security apparatus at his disposal, there was only one likely trajectory for the young Tikriti's future career, and that was up. It is a testament both to the depths of Saddam's ambition and his ruthless sense of purpose that he managed to overcome the considerable disadvantages of his birth and background to reach the heights of Iraq's revolutionary establishment at such a young age. None of the other key players who emerged during the coups of 1968 were fatherless, indigent peasants without any formal training. Ever since he moved to Baghdad with his uncle Khairallah in the mid-1950s, the only qualifications that Saddam had acquired were in the dubious arts of gangsterism and political survival. His personal ideology, such as it was, consisted of an innate patriotism that bordered on the xenophobic, a condition much encouraged by Khairallah, and a profound understanding that political success in Iraq was determined simply by the acquisition, and retention, of absolute power, by whatever means.

Before his imprisonment in 1964 Saddam had acquired a standing of sorts in the Baath Party, having secured his appointment to its Regional Command in 1964 as a result of the enthusiasm he had displayed for persecuting Iraqi communists. The collapse of the Baath Party through internal bickering had played into Saddam's hands in late 1963 and early 1964, and circumstances conspired to move in his favor both during his imprisonment and after. In
political terms the most important development was the deterioration in relations between the Syrian and Iraqi parties, which was precipitated in February 1966 when the Marxist wing of the Syrian Baath seized power in Damascus in a military coup. Michel Afleq and other, more traditional, Syrian Baathists were arrested and the party's National Command, which technically oversaw control of Baathists throughout the Arab world—including Iraq—was dissolved. Not only did the success of the Marxists in Damascus raise fears of a communist revival in Baghdad, but the new Syrian government made it abundantly clear that it intended to assume control of all Baathist policy, a move that meant all Iraqi Baathists would be placed under Syrian control.

The notion of taking orders from Syrian communists was deeply unappealing to Iraqi nationalists such as Bakr and Saddam, and soon after his jail escape Saddam organized what was called an Extraordinary Regional Congress, which was convened in Baghdad in September 1966. The congress has come to be regarded as a watershed in Baath history, the moment when the Iraqi Baathists irrevocably parted company with their Syrian counterparts, a rift that determined the strained relations that were to develop between the rival ruling Baath factions in Baghdad and Damascus. The congress decided to abandon the system of a unified command, based in Damascus, with regional commands established in various member countries. It was replaced by two rival National Commands in Iraq and Syria, which both claimed to be the heirs of the original party, and which claimed leadership over Baathists throughout the Arab world. Having effected this initial schism, the Iraqi Baathists followed it up in February 1968 by insisting on the supremacy of their own National Command, with Bakr appointed as secretary-general and Saddam working as his deputy.

Apart from playing a key role in facilitating the establishment of an independent Baath Party in Iraq, Saddam, again with Bakr's support, spent the two years leading up to the July 1968 coup assisting with the party's reconstruction after the disasters of 1963, and purging the party of any surviving leftists. He completed the formation and organization of Jihaz Haneen, the party's neo-Nazi militia. The organization itself was the brainchild of Abdul Karim al-Shaikhly, although Shaikhly himself was more of an ideologue, an intellectual figure who, having argued for the creation of a paramilitary wing, was quite content to leave the day-to-day administration to Saddam. The paramilitary organization, under Saddam's guidance, came to be composed of individual cells of committed and trusted party workers, with each cell working in isola
tion from the others. Many of those recruited by Saddam to run the Jihaz Haneen cells had worked with him in the torture chambers at the Palace of the End in 1963. An indication of how the Baath was taking shape under Saddam can be drawn from the fact that all three of Saddam's half brothers—Barzan, Sabawi, and Watban—all passed through his training camps, learning skills such as firing machine guns and abducting opponents. Another head of a Jihaz Haneen cell was Saadoun Shakir, Saddam's friend who had driven the getaway car for his jailbreak. The Baath under Bakr and Saddam was very much a family concern, and Saddam's main goal was to make sure that the next time the Baathists made a bid for power, they not only succeeded but remained there.

During the period when Saddam was busily building the power base that would eventually lead to him becoming one of the most powerful figures in the new Baath government, he still remained a socially awkward individual who was often overcome by shyness when required to mix with his Baathist contemporaries. Although he was tall and well-built, he retained a strong peasant accent and his coarse, colloquial Arabic made him feel conspicuous among his more genteel contemporaries in Baghdad. Fellow Baathists who knew him at this time recall that on the few occasions that Saddam made a public appearance, he did not talk much and that when he did, most of his conversation was confined to a denunciation of the evils of communism. His wife Sajida, who soon became pregnant with Qusay, Saddam's second son, after his release from prison, usually accompanied him to these functions. But on the whole Sajida was a neglected wife who was left at home to look after her young son while her husband devoted his every waking moment to furthering his career. For much of the time Sajida and the infant Uday stayed at Khairallah's house. During the period immediately following his escape from prison Saddam hid in the houses of friends, such as Abdul Karim al-Shaikhly, or Baath Party activists. Even when it was safe for him to come out of hiding, he still stayed at different houses to protect himself from revenge attacks. It was a policy he continued long after he had become president. During the Gulf War in 1991, for example, it was said that he stayed at a different location every night of the conflict. As a full-time employee of the Baath, Saddam received a modest income of fifteen dinars per month (about thirty dollars), which was paid for out of the five dinars a month subscription that all Baath Party members were required to donate. He was given an old Volkswagen Beetle, which had been looted from the communists in 1963, in which to conduct his official Baath business. This was later upgraded to an old Mercedes, which had been acquired by similar means.