Saddam : His Rise and Fall (16 page)

The gloss was somewhat taken off the deal the following year, however, when a carefully planned attempt was made on Barzani's life, which bore all the hallmarks of Saddam's security forces. Relations between Saddam and Barzani quickly became strained because Saddam proved reluctant to stick to the terms of the March Manifesto, and probably never had any intention of doing so when the deal was originally struck. The Iraqi army was not withdrawn from the region, as had been agreed, on “security grounds,” and Saddam created numerous obstacles to prevent Barzani from implementing his side of the agreement, such as appointing Kurdish politicians to government positions in Baghdad. The final straw for Barzani was the attempt on his life, which took place while he was entertaining eight religious leaders sent by Saddam to discuss implementation of the manifesto. As Barzani was talking two explosions rocked the room, killing two of the clerics. Barzani's bodyguards immediately opened fire, killing five of the remaining clerics. Barzani himself escaped, and it later transpired that the clerics had been duped into carrying out the assassination attempt by Saddam's associate, Nadhim Kazzar.
Kazzar provided the clerics with tape recorders and asked them to record their conversation with Barzani. The moment they activated the machines the bombs went off. Barzani was particularly incensed because not only had he agreed to see the clerics following a meeting with Saddam, but because Saddam had implicated Barzani's estranged son Ubaidallah in the plot, promising him that he would succeed his father if the attack were successful. Confronted with such incontrovertible evidence of Saddam's involvement, Barzani declared, “Iraq is a police state run by Saddam Hussein who is a power-obsessed maniac.”
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Barzani's comment struck a chord with many Iraqis who came to know only too well how Saddam's security forces extended their pernicious influence into every area of Iraqi society. Immediately after the 1968 revolution all government offices were purged of any non-Baathist staff members who refused to accept the new order. The military was a harder nut to crack, but Saddam found a way around the resistance of the officer corps by reverting to the Soviet system, introduced by Lenin during the First World War, of appointing political commissars to report back on their activities. The commissars reported directly to Saddam, thereby bypassing the formal chain of command. Officers of questionable loyalty were replaced by Baathists or their sympathizers. Many of those dismissed from the armed forces, which included a number of division commanders, were arrested and tortured. Saddam similarly increased his control over the lives of ordinary Iraqis. Baathist militiamen patrolled the streets, and surprise raids on private homes in the middle of the night drove home the message that no one was beyond their control. Iraq was being transformed into a totalitarian regime, “a place where men vanished, and their friends were too frightened to inquire what had happened to them; people arrested on trivial charges “committed suicide” in prison; former officials were mysteriously assassinated; politicians disappeared.”
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While Saddam was busy establishing this labyrinthine network of spies, commissars, torturers, and murderers, he nevertheless found time to keep himself acquainted with the gruesome practices being applied to his luckless victims at the Palace of the End. A Shiite dissident who managed to survive the torture chambers at the Palace of the End provided a chilling description of how Saddam personally killed another Shiite detainee by the name of Dukhail. “He came into the room, picked up Dukhail and dropped him into a bath of acid. And then he watched while the body dissolved.”
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While cor
roboration of such stories is hard to come by, they nevertheless bear an uncanny resemblance to some of the legends that have arisen relating to Saddam's activities at the Palace of the End in 1963. Whether true or false, from Saddam's point of view the most important consideration was that stories such as this were in the public domain in Iraq, and were widely believed. So long as the population was persuaded to live with the fear that any Iraqi might at any moment suffer a similar fate, the position of the Baath Party would remain secure.

Apart from terrorizing the various factions confronting the Baathists, Saddam concentrated his energies on eliminating anyone who might be considered a potential rival, together with anyone who knew him well enough to have information that might be considered harmful to his future career prospects. As discussed earlier, the motive for the murder of Nasser al-Hani, the former foreign minister, in November 1968, was widely attributed to the fact that he may have been able to shed unwelcome light on Saddam's dealings with the CIA. The official explanation for Hani's death was that he had been killed by criminals. A similar explanation was provided four months later following the murder of Colonel Abed al-Karim Mustafa Nasrat, a former special forces commander who had spearheaded the attack on the Ministry of Defense during the 1963 coup that overthrew General Qassem. His offense was that he had remained sympathetic to the Syrian Baath, another of Saddam's pet hates. To allay public suspicions, Saddam's security officers produced a public “confession” from a petty criminal who admitted to stabbing Nasrat to death in his home during a robbery. Saddam was also implicated in the death of Fouad al-Rikabi, the former secretary-general of the Iraqi Baath, who had been personally responsible for giving Saddam his first Baath assignment, the failed assassination attempt on General Qassem in 1958. Rikabi had been forced out of the party shortly afterward by the Baathist ideologue Michel Afleq and had become a Nasserite. After the 1968 revolution the Baathists jailed him for one and a half years on a trumped-up charge. A few days before he was due to be released, “the authorities brought in a hooligan with a knife. Rikabi was stabbed in the chest and then dragged to the hospital. They left him unattended until he died.”
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There was a chilling degree of professionalism about the way in which Saddam systematically set about dispensing with his rivals. Samir al-Khalil, whose book
Republic of Fear
provides a fascinating examination of the repressive state security structures that were created by the early Baathists, sets
out a detailed list of more than thirty high-ranking officers, senior Baathists, and politicians of ministerial rank or higher who were purged after the July Revolution of 1968, most of them on Saddam's orders.
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The show trial remained Saddam's preferred method of humiliation, so long as he could be sure of securing a conviction, which was usually possible through the good offices of either the Palace of the End torturers or the willingness of the court officials to accommodate their Baathist masters. Thus Rashid Muslih, a former minister of the interior, publicly admitted at his televised trial that he had spied for the CIA, and was duly executed. Abed al-Rahman al-Bazzaz, who had served as prime minister under the second President Arif and had been generally well-disposed to the Baath, was put on trial in the summer of 1969, together with Abed al-Aziz al-Uqayli, a former minister of defense. Both these men denied the Baathists the pleasure of hearing public confessions, but received lengthy prison sentences nevertheless.

Saddam's sadistic streak was demonstrated by his treatment of Tahir Yahya, who had been Iraq's prime minister when the Baathists took power in 1968. Yahya had served Iraq as a military officer his entire adult life, and had at one time even been a prominent member of the Baath Party and one of Saddam's superiors. After seizing power Saddam had Yahya, a well-educated man whose sophistication he resented, confined to prison. On his orders Yahya was assigned to push a wheelbarrow from cell to cell, collecting the prisoners' slop buckets. He would call out, “Rubbish! Rubbish!” The former prime minister's humiliation was a source of great delight for Saddam until the day Yahya finally died in prison. He would tell the story to his friends, chuckling to himself over the words “Rubbish! Rubbish!”
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While the show trials proved to be a useful tool for persuading Iraqis that their country was riven with plots and conspiracies, Saddam needed all his cunning to dispense with more formidable rivals, such as General Hardan al-Tikriti, the gruff former air force commander who had persuaded President Arif to surrender during the bloodless coup of 1968, and Salih Mahdi Ammash, a veteran Baathist apparatchik and close ally of President Bakr. After the revolution Tikriti, a ruthless, arrogant man who posed a genuine threat to Saddam, gloried in the titles of chief of staff, deputy minister of defense, and deputy prime minister, while Ammash had become minister of the interior and deputy prime minister.

Tikriti, who ran the military as his personal fiefdom, believed that he was immune to Saddam's intrigues because, as the architect and hero of the 1968
revolution, he had become a close confidant of Bakr's, who trusted him implicitly. In this he underestimated Saddam's inherent suspicion of the military establishment, which he constantly feared would attempt to usurp the civilian Baathist government. Saddam reasoned that if he could remove Tikriti, he would negate the threat posed by the military.

Despite his high standing in the government and the army, the only chink in Tikriti's armor was that, while he supported the Baath, he was not regarded as a committed ideologue, as were Bakr and Saddam. Tikriti was nevertheless an astute operator and recognized the threat posed by Saddam, and lobbied hard behind the scenes to persuade Bakr to get rid of him. At one point in 1969 Saddam so enraged Tikriti during a row at the Republican Palace that the former general was actually able to persuade Bakr to send Saddam into exile. Saddam was put on a plane and sent to Beirut, where he remained for a week until Tikriti's temper cooled. It was a humiliation Saddam would not forget.

Ammash, on the other hand, was a dedicated Baathist, a short, stocky former army officer who, unlike Saddam, had dutifully risen through the ranks of the Baath. A cultivated man who liked poetry and had written three history books, he was put in charge after the revolution of the administrative side of the government, chairing meetings on various aspects of government policy, such as planning and reconstruction. Apart from being a close associate of Abdul Karim al-Shaikhly, the new foreign minister, Ammash was an accomplished plotter and it was for this reason that Saddam came to regard him as a threat that had to be eliminated.

Although Saddam had great influence over the highly secretive security apparatus, he was still regarded as a lowly functionary by senior figures in the Baath government such as Tikriti, Ammash, and Shaikhly, who, while generally supportive of the purges being carried out against the government's enemies, were unaware of the formidable power base Saddam was quietly acquiring for himself. At this point in his career Saddam did not enjoy any of the trappings of power. His office was still a small room located next to Bakr's in the Presidential Palace; he had no secretary or receptionist. To the other ministers he was regarded more as Bakr's errand boy than a figure of authority in his own right. He was often to be seen at the various government ministries, hanging around the reception area, waiting for the minister to find a spare moment in which to see him.

Saddam was neverthless successful in gradually undermining the reputations of his superiors. In this he was aided on two counts: he could draw on
the resources of the security forces; and he had the ear of Bakr. One indication of the all-pervasive nature of Saddam's security apparatus, even during these early days of the Baath regime, has been provided by a former Baathist official who was the recipient of a chilling demonstration of the Baath Party's institutionalized paranoia. As a senior member of Bakr's government, the official received an invitation to attend a cocktail party at the British embassy that was being hosted by the commercial attaché. The invitation had been vetted by the Iraqi Foreign Ministry, and the official duly attended the function at which he attempted to reassure Britain's diplomatic representatives that the Baath was committed to modernizing the Iraqi economy. A few days after the function the official received another invitation for drinks, this time with Saadoun Shakir, who had been appointed head of the Amn al-Amm, or State Internal Security, one of Saddam's key security agencies. The two men met for dinner at one of the main hunting clubs in Baghdad. After thirty minutes or so of general conversation Shakir, who was one of Saddam's most trusted lieutenants, suddenly produced a pile of photographs, and asked the official to examine them. The photographs, which had been taken by a photographer working for the Iraqi News Agency, showed the official conversing with British diplomats at the embassy party he had attended several days previously. “Do you recognize these?” asked Shakir. The official replied in the affirmative. “Then you should take more care,” Shakir continued. “We would prefer it if you did not go to any more functions of this nature. They will only arouse our suspicions.” The official got the message, and resolved never to attend another reception at a foreign embassy.
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Under Saddam's guidance, the Baathists established an all-pervasive network to monitor the activities of all government officials. In the same way that commissars had been appointed to oversee the activities of the armed forces, so civilian commissars were appointed to government offices to report on the activities of ministers and civil servants. The civilian commissars were generally university graduates who were trusted members of the Baath. They reported back both on the performance of ministers and their professional and social contacts. Apart from the commissars, whose positions were clearly identified, the activities of government officials were closely monitored by a secondary layer of informers who worked as secretaries or messengers. All telephone and postal communication was intercepted and analyzed, so that all government officials had to become accustomed to working in a Kafkaesque environment where there was no alternative other than to follow Baath Party
doctrine. “From the moment they came to power the Baathists were obsessed with buying bugging devices of every shape and form,” recalled one former senior official. “They were buying all the latest, high-technology equipment from countries such as Germany. They were convinced that everyone was trying to plot against them if they got the chance. We quickly learned that we were being watched every time we went somewhere and that we were being bugged every time we picked up the telephone.”
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