Saddam : His Rise and Fall (25 page)

Another infamous Palestinian terrorist who was harbored by Saddam during this period was Dr. Wadi Haddad, one of the founding members of the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the PLO group responsible for turning the Palestinian cause into a vehicle for international terrorism in the early 1970s. Together with Dr. George Habash, the group's other founding member, the PLFP was responsible for the multiple hijacking of three aircraft at Dawson's Field in Jordan and the massacre of twenty-six people at Lod airport in Israel. The group's activities were so outrageous that they even merited condemnation by both the Soviet Union and China, and they were held responsible for King Hussein of Jordan's decision to expel the PLO from his country during Black September. The PLFP moved to Damascus, but when Habash turned against the policy of carrying out international terrorist attacks, Haddad moved to Baghdad in 1972, where he formed the splinter Special Operations Group. It was from there that he organized the infamous kidnapping of OPEC oil ministers during their meeting in Vienna in December 1975 and the hijacking of an Israeli airliner to Entebbe, Uganda. One of Haddad's closest associates during this period was the legendary Venezuelan terrorist known as “Carlos the Jackal.” In addition to staging their own terrorist operations, Haddad's organization linked up with a wide variety of European terrorist groups, including Germany's Baader-Meinhof gang and the Japanese “Red Army.” By 1977, when Saddam was effectively running Iraq, Haddad was described as “the spider in the net of the intertwined terrorist groups throughout the world.” When Haddad died, of natural causes, in 1978, he was buried in Baghdad with full military honors. According to an Iraqi defector, a former member of the Iraqi security service with special responsibility for training foreign terror groups who escaped from Baghdad in late 2000, at least fifty members of the PFLP continued to reside in Iraq until the 1990s, and made frequent use of the Mukhabarat's terrorist training facilities.
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Iraq's dealings with terrorist groups such as those run by Abu Nidal and Wadi Haddad were handled by Saddam's personal office, and it was as a direct result of Saddam's support for these internationally condemned terrorist groups in the 1970s that the U.S. State Department added Iraq's name to the list of countries accused of sponsoring terrorism. David Mack, who was political officer at the U.S. embassy's interests section in Baghdad in the late 1970s, says the Iraqis made no attempt to conceal their involvement with the different terrorist groups. “We all knew precisely where Abu Nidal's house was located, although, of course, we weren't allowed to go there,” he said. “Saddam liked to keep these groups there for show.”
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The closest Saddam ever came to admitting in public his support for the Palestinian terrorist groups was during an interview with
Newsweek
in July 1978. Asked why Baghdad had become a haven for both Palestinian and European terror groups, Saddam responded: “Regarding the Palestinians, it's no secret: Iraq is open to them and they are free to train and plan [terrorist attacks] here.”
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By the summer of 1978 hardly a week passed when one of the terror groups linked to Baghdad was not committing some atrocity or another, whether in Paris, London, or Islamabad. A former CIA officer who specialized in Iraq during the 1970s said there was never any doubt in the minds of American officials that Saddam was personally involved in ordering the terrorist attacks. “From the mid-1970s Saddam controlled everything in Baghdad. And if Saddam was providing these groups with a safe haven, he would expect something in return. For Saddam, there is no such thing as free room and board.” Indeed, by the late 1970s Saddam's reputation for being a generous backer had drawn a wide array of dissident groups to base themselves in Iraq: the hard-line Kurdish PKK movement, members of Syria's Muslim Brotherhood, and even Ayatollah Khomeini, who posed the biggest threat to the shah of Iran, all enjoyed Saddam's support. “Saddam liked to use these groups because it gave him great flexibility,” according to the former CIA desk officer. “He could turn them on and off at will. So long as they did his bidding he was happy to support them.”
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Abu Nidal's group was one that frequently fell out with Saddam, particularly over Saddam's insistence that the Palestinian terrorist continue his attacks against Syria. Abu Nidal, who regarded himself as a significant player on the Palestinian political scene, sometimes refused to obey Saddam's instructions. As a result he would temporarily close his offices in Baghdad and relocate to places like Tripoli, Libya, where he found the interference of Colonel Gadhafi in his activities less intrusive. Eventually Saddam and Abu Nidal would reach a reconciliation and the Palestinian would move back to Baghdad.

Not all Saddam's terrorist activities during this period were confined to freelancers on the payroll of the Iraqi intelligence services. Dr. Ayad Allawi, a former senior member of the Baath who had fled to London in protest of Saddam's brutalization of the country, awoke one night at his Epsom home with his wife to find one of Saddam's assassins armed with an ax standing over their bed. “We were both subjected to an horrendous attack by this masked man,” recalled Dr. Allawi, who became a leading Iraqi campaigner for Saddam's overthrow. “He hit us several times and left us for dead. Fortunately
after he left I managed to drag myself to the phone and call for help.”
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Abdul Razzak Nayif, the former Iraqi prime minister who had helped the Baathists seize power in 1968, was not so fortunate. In July 1978 he was murdered as he left the InterContinental Hotel in London. The assassins fired two bullets into his head at point-blank range. The police later arrested two Iraqis who were charged with his murder. It later transpired that they were members of the Estikhbarat, the Iraqi equivalent of Britain's Special Air Service (SAS), military intelligence agents responsible for conducting overseas operations. The assassination sparked a diplomatic row between London and Baghdad, particularly as the British government was in the process of hosting the latest round of peace talks between Israel and Egypt. Britain expelled eight Iraqi intelligence officers and barred three others from entering the country, citing its “increasing concern at the threat posed by terrorist activities in London, particularly against Arab targets. The presence in London of a number of known Iraqi intelligence officers has led us to the conclusion that it would be best that they should leave.”
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The Iraqis did not take the expulsions lying down. A similar number of British diplomats were expelled from Baghdad. The Iraqis arrested British businessmen who were working in Iraq on contracts. The businessmen were charged and convicted on trumped-up spying charges, and given lengthy prison sentences. Saddam also issued a directive instructing ministries and state organizations not to do any business with Britain, and a total trade embargo on British goods was immediately enforced.

When diplomatic channels were eventually reestablished between London and Baghdad, and British diplomats made representations asking for the release of the jailed businessmen, the Iraqis made it clear that there would be no deal unless Britain first agreed to release the two Iraqi intelligence officers jailed for Nayif's murder. “We received several Iraqi delegations in London and they could not understand why we would not free the killers,” recalled a British diplomat who handled the negotiations at the time. “They thought it was simply a matter of a trade-off. But there was no way the British government could interfere with the due process of law.”
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More than twenty years later the two assassins were still serving their life sentences in British jails.

Saddam's first flirtation with the world of international terrorism gradually came to an end in late 1978. The signing of the Camp David Accords in September 1978 between President Anwar Sadat of Egypt and the Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, was a watershed moment in the history of
Middle East diplomacy. While much of the world applauded the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, Saddam saw it as an opportunity to reposition Iraq as the figurehead of Arab opposition against Israel, a position that had once been held by Nasser. The previous year Saddam had gone on the record in a rare interview with an American newsmagazine in stating his opposition to the peace deal being mooted by the Carter administration. By far the most significant message to emerge from the interview was Saddam's personal antipathy toward the existence of the state of Israel. While stressing that he personally had nothing against the Jewish people, he nevertheless declared himself to be a committed anti-Zionist. “We will never recognize the right of Israel to live as a separate Zionist state,” he declared.
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A year later Saddam saw in Sadat's “betrayal” an opportunity to assert his own position in Arab politics, and to that end he organized a summit in Baghdad in late 1978 to discuss how best to respond to Egypt. This required Saddam to improve relations with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, and to make overtures to President Asad of Syria to set aside the Baathist schism that had poisoned relations between the two countries for much of the 1970s. It was also in Saddam's interests to repair his relations with Yasser Arafat, who was still regarded as the undisputed leader of the Palestinian cause. Arafat, of course, felt badly betrayed by the outcome at Camp David, having been led to believe that the Palestinian issue would be resolved during the peace talks, only to discover that Sadat had in effect opted for a unilateral peace deal with the Israelis. While the Baghdad summit was in progress, Saddam called Arafat into his office to outline his new policy. According to Palestinian officials who were present at the meeting, Saddam promised to drop his support for Abu Nidal, who was still busily assassinating Arafat's key officials, if Arafat promised to support Iraq's anti-Sadat initiative. “I can tell you at once that we will sanction no further operations against you mounted from Baghdad,” Saddam assured Arafat. “We will no longer take responsibility for his [Abu Nidal] actions—and we have told him so.”
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Saddam's decision to scale down his involvement with terror groups provided him with an opportunity to reassess Iraq's international standing. The diplomatic spat with Britain in the summer of 1978 had meant that Baghdad now found itself facing diplomatic isolation from two of the West's key powers as it had already severed relations with the United States following the 1967 Six Day War. From the mid-1970s onward, however, there had been signs of a sea change taking place in Baghdad's diplomatic orientation. Saddam, who had
been responsible for negotiating the Soviet pact in 1972, had been increasingly skeptical about the necessity of maintaining good relations with Moscow, particularly after the Soviets let him down so badly during his offensive against the Kurds in 1974–1975. An early indication of Baghdad's softening position toward the United States had been provided in April 1975 when Saddam granted an interview to the distinguished
New York Times
correspondent C. L. Sulzberger. Although the official Iraqi position remained staunchly anti-American because of Washington's support for Israel, Saddam was keen to send out a softer message because he wanted to incorporate the best Western technology, particularly that from the United States, in his master plan for modernizing Iraq. Even without formal diplomatic ties, trade with the United States had grown almost tenfold between 1971 and 1975. So far as Saddam was concerned, he saw no contradiction between Iraq maintaining its position as a fierce critic of American policy and being one of the largest consumers of American goods in the Middle East. “American policy as it is now conducted is our enemy,” he informed Sulzberger. “But the Arabs, of whom we are a part, are not against the American state or the American people; only against American policy. We feel uncomfortable about U.S. meddling in our internal affairs, in the regional policy of the Middle East. If there is a change in this, we shall respond immediately.”
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Saddam returned to this theme again during his
Newsweek
interview in 1978. When asked about the prospect of a restoration of diplomatic ties between Baghdad and Washington, Saddam repeated his insistence that the United States must scale down its commitment to Israel. “There are other major issues, such as your complete support for the Zionist entity [Israel] and your deliberate strategy of dividing the Arab world, that stand in the way of normal relations.”
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As the American diplomat on the ground whose task it was to make sense of Baghdad's flirtation with Washington, David Mack found it hard to know just how seriously to take Saddam. “On one level they were supporting all these terrorist groups who were running around bombing Europe, and they never missed an opportunity to berate us for our policy on Israel. But on another level they were very keen to do business with the U.S. Our basic problem, though, with the regime at that time was Baghdad's support for all those terror groups. Until they sorted that out we were not going to play ball, and we made that perfectly clear.”
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Indeed, relations between Washington and Baghdad would not be properly restored until the summer of 1984, when the ruinous toll of the Iran-Iraq War would force Saddam to drop his opposition to Washington's pro-Israeli stance.

By the late 1970s Saddam's position as “the strongman of Baghdad” had gained general acceptance in the outside world and any Western diplomat or journalist seeking a meeting with the Baath leadership was steered toward Saddam, and not Bakr. Certainly by this time Saddam had taken complete control of foreign policy, as he was to make abundantly clear in his increasingly fraught dealings with Moscow. Saddam was determined to wean Iraq off its dependency on Soviet support, and in the May 1978 he fired another shot across Moscow's bows by executing twenty-one communist military officers who had been languishing in jail in Baghdad since 1975. The Baath had already declared that no political activity was allowed within the military other than Baath political activity. Even though the communists had been arrested before the Baath ruling was announced, in their cases Saddam decided to enact the ruling retroactively, and the officers were executed. To start with, a half dozen of the officers were shot. The Soviet ambassador was outraged and personally visited Saddam to protest. As a consequence of his visit ten more of the officers were shot. The Soviets then ordered the heads of the East bloc missions to plead for mercy. They too were ignored and the remaining five prisoners were marched before a firing squad. Not content with this humiliation for the Soviets, Saddam banned Soviet transport planes from using Iraq airspace to ferry military supplies to Ethiopia, which Moscow was backing in its war against Eritrean rebels. For good measure, Saddam supported the Eritrean campaign, and let rebel groups train in Baghdad. Finally Saddam demanded that the Russians relocate their embassy, which was situated next door to the Presidential Palace. Saddam suspected the KGB, no doubt correctly, of monitoring his conversations inside the palace and at the adjoining Baath Party headquarters. When the Soviets refused to move, Saddam reacted by cutting off the water and electricity supplies to the Soviet compound. A few days later the Russians announced that they would, after all, be moving into new premises.