Saddam : His Rise and Fall (49 page)

The only area in which Saddam's elaborate security arrangements lacked effectiveness was in controlling the activities of his family. By the mid-1990s Uday's activities, in particular, were a cause of much friction. He had turned the Olympic Committee into his personal fiefdom, and by controlling much
of the country's media output, he had unlimited access to one of the regime's key components, the propaganda machine. Uday's utter disregard for the state's institutions created friction with Watban, his uncle and Saddam's half brother, who controlled the Interior Ministry, and Hussein Kamel, who saw his own position as Saddam's potential successor being eroded both by Uday's acquisition of wealth and power, and to a lesser extent by Qusay's emergence as a more sober influence on the government. Matters came to a head in true Tikriti fashion in the spring of 1995 when Uday forced Watban's resignation by running a series of disparaging articles about him in his newspaper,
Babel
. A few days later Uday, in a drunken rage, attacked his uncle, shooting him in the leg and killing three of his companions while they were attending a private party in Baghdad. Watban, who feared for his life, claimed the shooting had been an accident, even though his injuries required him to have his leg amputated. Hussein Kamel and his younger brother, Saddam Kamel, believing that they were next on Uday's list, fled into exile in Jordan, taking their wives, Saddam's daughters Raghad and Rana.

The defection of Saddam's two sons-in-law in August 1995 was potentially the most damaging blow he had suffered since seizing power in 1979. For the first time two members of the Tikriti ruling circle had escaped Saddam's authority and were threatening to betray the regime's innermost secrets. Hussein Kamel, as head of Iraq's weapons procurement program, was particularly well equipped to provide Western intelligence with a treasure trove of detail about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction program. Hussein Kamel was fully debriefed by both the CIA and Britain's M16, and then by Rolf Ekeus, the head of UNSCOM. He provided a detailed account of Iraq's weapons program, including hitherto hidden chemical weapons plants and front companies helping with Iraq's weapons procurement and Saddam's VX nerve agent program. His most startling revelation was that Saddam had been within three months of testing an atomic bomb at the start of Operation Desert Storm in January 1991.

Hussein Kamel fully expected to be granted asylum in either the United States or Britain, from where he would base his campaign to overthrow Saddam. To this end he granted an exclusive interview to
Time
in which he said his defection was motivated by “the interests of the country.” He was deeply critical of Saddam's regime. The country had spent nearly fifteen years at war and had accumulated debts that it would take “generations and generations” to pay. He also tried to distance himself from the brutality of the
regime. “There are too many executions in our society, too many arrests,” he complained. “Whatever the age of the critic—whether 80 or 15—many people are executed.”
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Saddam was so enraged by the defections that for a time he was not able to eat and refused to talk to any of his close associates. Eventually, when he had calmed down, he called in Uday, whom he believed bore primary responsibility for the defections, and stripped him of all his positions. Saddam's security forces raided the headquarters of the Olympic Committee and freed all those being held in Uday's private jail. Saddam was forced to update his submissions to UNSCOM, including new data on biological weapons, such as anthrax and botulism, VX nerve gas, and new information on Iraq's attempts to acquire nuclear weapons. UNSCOM was readmitted to Iraq and Ekeus resumed the inspections, this time equipped with incontrovertible evidence of Iraq's nonconventional weapons infrastructure.

Saddam moved quickly to demonstrate that he was still the strongman of Baghdad, despite the shooting of his half brother Watban and the defection of his two sons-in-law. He announced that a referendum would be held on October 15, in which eight million Iraqis would vote on the question: “Do you agree that Saddam Hussein should be president of Iraq?” Even though he dyed his hair and suffered back problems, Saddam was still presented to the Iraqi people as a heroic, virile leader. His cousin and defense minister, Ali Hassan al-Majid, was the campaign's chief cheerleader. “Oh lofty mountain! Oh glory of God!” Majid said in an official broadcast. “By God we have always found you in the most difficult conditions as a roaring lion and courageous horseman, one of the few true men.”
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Saddam won the plebiscite with 99.96 percent of the vote. Majid performed another important service for Saddam by issuing a public denouncement of his cousins for defecting to Jordan. “This small family within Iraq denounces this cowardly act,” said the statement, which was read live on Iraqi television. “His [Saddam Kamel's] family has unanimously decided to permit with impunity the spilling of blood.”
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If Hussein Kamel had expected a hero's welcome in the West for his defection, he was sorely disappointed. Western intelligence officers were prepared to debrief him and his brother, but had no desire to perpetuate the relationship. In their view he was an arrogant, vainglorious individual who was too closely associated with Saddam's regime to be considered as a viable alternative. However much they wanted to see the back of Saddam, they did not
want him to replaced by one his clones.
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By the end of the year Hussein Kamel, Saddam Kamel, Saddam's daughters, and their retinue were confined to one of King Hussein's guesthouses in Amman, and all their overtures to be given a sanctuary in the West were met with a resounding silence.

Sensing an opportunity to avenge himself on his errant sons-in-law, Saddam established contact with them in Jordan through his security agents. He personally phoned the sons-in-law at their Amman hideout, offering them a presidential pardon if only they would return. Apart from the embarrassment their revelations on the arms program had caused, Saddam's honor as the family patriarch had been compromised by, as it appeared to Arab eyes, the abduction of his two daughters. Saddam gave Uday the opportunity to redeem himself by persuading the two families to return to Baghdad, tempting them with the offer of a presidential pardon. Disillusioned by the reception they had received, and arrogantly believing that they had taught Saddam a lesson, in February 1996 Hussein Kamel and Saddam Kamel agreed to return home with their families. For once Saddam Kamel protested against the decision of his overbearing brother, saying, “You donkey. You want us to go back to our deaths.” Hussein Kamel responded by pulling out his pistol and replying, “You will come back.”

The party set off on the journey to Baghdad on the morning of February 20. As soon as they crossed the border at Trebeil, they were met by Uday and his guards. No attempt was made to arrest the Kamel brothers, but Uday took his sisters Raghad and Rana and their children into his motorcade. On their arrival in Baghdad, the two men were summoned to the Presidential Palace. The two brothers were forced to sign papers sanctioning their immediate divorce from their wives. Saddam personally tore off their badges of rank from their uniforms—Hussein Kamel was a lieutenant general, while his brother was a lieutenant colonel. He then sent them to stay at their father's villa at Assadiyah, on the outskirts of Baghdad, to await their fate. Later that evening Saddam summoned relatives and associates of the disgraced men to the Presidential Palace. Sami Salih, who was still head of Iraq's oil-smuggling operation, was one of those present. He recalled that Saddam was “drunk, red-eyed, and wild. He was waving his gun around and screaming abuse.” Saddam said that the brothers had shamed everyone in Iraq, particularly their family. He told them, “You must remove this shame. You must get hold of them and cleanse this stain. Get rid of them.” Saddam then staggered out of the room and the “guests” were taken into the presidential compound, where
they boarded three Toyota buses. Salih and his companions genuinely believed that they were going to be executed because of their association with the disgraced men.

Instead they were driven through the suburbs of predawn Baghdad. After about half an hour they came to a halt. One of the guards entered the bus and told everyone to stay quiet, on pain of death. Salih, who had worked with Hussein Kamel for many years, recognized the location; the buses had been parked a short distance from Hussein Kamel's family villa. The house was surrounded by Iraqi Special Forces, which were heavily armed. Salih could see the distinctive markings of Uday's silver Mercedes in a side street. The silence was eventually broken when a bulletproof Mercedes pulled up in front of the villa. A soldier, using a loudspeaker, called to those inside the house, “You must surrender, you are surrounded. You are not in danger.” The occupants of the house responded by firing at the car, which sped away. The special forces, which were commanded by Ali Hassan al-Majid, the disgraced brothers' cousin, opened fire. The ensuing battle went on for about thirteen hours, and the entire proceedings were filmed by a presidential cameraman, while Uday and Qusay watched the proceedings from the safety of their bulletproof Mercedes. Although the Kamel brothers put up a brave fight, they eventually ran out of ammunition and were killed, together with their father, their sister, and her son. When the fighting was over, Majid went over to the body of Hussein Kamel, put his foot on the neck, and fired one last shot into the head. The bodies were then loaded onto a garbage truck and driven away.

Finally one of the special forces commanders walked over to the buses, where the terrified occupants had been trapped throughout the day's events. “We hope you enjoyed the show,” the commander said. “I want this to be a lesson to all of you who knew these people. Iraq is not a country for traitors. No one betrays the Iraqi people and lives.”
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The buses were driven back to Baghdad while Saddam's cameraman returned to the Presidential Palace to deliver his videotape of the day's events. The widowed Raghad and Rana vowed never to speak to their father again, and went with their children to live with Saddam's estranged wife Sajida. A final postscript was added to this unhappy saga in February 2000 when the mother of Hussein Kamel and Saddam Kamel, the only surviving member of the family, was stabbed to death and her body cut into pieces in her home in Baghdad.

 

The skill with which Saddam countered the threat to his leadership posed by the defections of his sons-in-law left him in a stronger position than he had been in for many years. By persuading the al-Majid clan to do his dirty work for him, Saddam had demonstrated his supremacy over his fellow Tikriti tribesmen. By publicly humiliating Uday, who was stripped from his official positions and forced to make amends for provoking the defections in the first place, Saddam had reasserted his authority over his quarrelsome family. In the summer of 1996 he was able to consolidate his success at home by inflicting two humilitating defeats on the continuing attempts by Western intelligence to overthrow him.

Since the collapse of the INC's offensive to capture Mosul and Kirkuk in the spring of 1995, the CIA and MI6 had continued to explore ways of staging a coup in Baghdad. The American effort to overthrow Saddam had been stepped up following the appointment of John M. Deutch as director of the CIA in March 1995. After reviewing the record of the CIA's Iraqi operation to date, Deutch's new management team concluded that it should be made tighter and more focused on the single objective of overthrowing the Iraqi leader. Deutch was also under pressure from the White House to deliver a result before the 1996 U.S. presidential election.
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The failure of the 1995 offensive in Kurdistan had strained relations between the INC and the CIA, to the extent that Ahmed Chalabi had been banned by the White House from visiting CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia. On the recommendation of British intelligence, the CIA was now dealing with a rival operation to the INC, the London-based Iraqi National Accord (INA) headed by Dr. Ayad Allawi, a former Baathist who had defected from Iraq after falling out with Saddam in the 1970s. Unlike the INC, which mainly conducted its operations outside Iraq, the INA had a network of high-placed contacts inside Iraq, mainly in the military and the senior echelons of the Baath. The INA was confident it could arrange a coup inside Iraq, which appealed to both the American and British governments.

One part of the INA's plan was for the three sons of Mohammed Abdullah al-Shahwani, a retired general with the Iraqi Special Forces and a helicopter pilot, who were based in Baghdad, to help orchestrate a military coup against Saddam. Unlike the INC's invasion plan of 1995, this scheme attracted the enthusiastic support of both the CIA and MI6. In early January 1996, a conference of high-level intelligence officials, which was attended by officers from both MI6 and the CIA, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Jordan, was held in
the Saudi capital, Riyadh, at which it was agreed to support fully the INA plan to overthrow Saddam. Scott Ritter, the UNSCOM chief inspector, claimed that backing for the INA plan was driven by MI6, which wanted a “quick, simple coup.”
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Apart from money and equipment, the INA was given a state-of-the-art satellite communications system, complete with high-technology encryption features to frustrate eavesdroppers.

Unfortunately for the INA, one of Shahwani's operatives was captured in Baghdad by Saddam's ever-vigilant security forces, together with the top-secret communications system. The Iraqis were careful to give no hint of their breakthrough, and simply monitored the INA as it finalized its plan for overthrowing Saddam. On June 26 Saddam's security forces finally pounced. One hundred and twenty Iraqi officers were arrested in the first sweep, including some of the ringleaders and Shahwani's three sons. The plotters were all from elite units such as the Special Republican Guards, the Republican Guard emergency forces, and the army. A number of officers arrested were from a highly secret special communications unit called B32, which worked directly with Saddam and was responsible for his secure communications with military units around the country. Senior officers in the Mukhabarat and other security services were picked up. Even two cooks at the Presidential Palace were arrested and confessed to a plot to poison Saddam, which had been part of the INA's fallback position if the military coup failed. In all about eight hundred suspects were detained, and the majority were tortured and executed. Flush with their success, the Iraqi intelligence chiefs could not pass up the opportunity of crowing over their victory to their CIA counterparts, who were anxiously awaiting news of the coup attempt in Jordan. On the morning of the arrests, the captured communications system transmitted a message from the Mukhabarat in Baghdad to the CIA. “We have arrested all your people,” the message said. “You might as well go home.”
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