Saddam : His Rise and Fall (10 page)

In early November the military wing of the Baath conducted a coup of the party's leadership against Sadi and his associates. Sadi was put on a plane and sent into exile in Spain. The National Guard came out onto the streets in protest and attacked the government's main Rashid military base on the outskirts of Baghdad. At this point Bakr, who had been attempting to reconcile the ideological differences between the rival wings of the party, called a meeting of the Baath National Command, the party's governing body, an umbrella organization, which controlled the different national groups, such as the Syrian Baath and the Iraqi Baath. (The individual Baath Party Regional Commands represented the interests of Baathists in their respective countries; thus the Iraqi Regional Command and the Syrian Regional Command were both subordinate to the National Command, which was based in Damascus.) Throughout this period Saddam, more through family loyalty than ideological conviction, supported Bakr, his fellow Tikriti, and soon found himself acting as the prime minister's de facto personal bodyguard. Saddam was to be found constantly in public at Bakr's side, armed with a loaded revolver.

The arrival of Michel Afleq and several other prominent Syrian Baathists to attend the special conference convened in Baghdad by Bakr to resolve the ideological conflict within the Baath did not, however, improve the mood of the “Iraq first” contingent, especially when Afleq, who regarded himself as the figurehead of pan-Arab Baathism, suggested that he should take control of Iraq's political affairs. With the National Guard continuing to pose a threat to public order, President Arif finally lost patience with the Baath and decided to act. On November 18 he mobilized those army units on whose loyalty he could rely. Several disillusioned military members of the Baath, including General Tahir Yahya, the chief of staff, and Brigadier Hardan al-Tikriti, the commander of the air force, lent their support when Arif gave the order to attack the National Guard in Baghdad. Within hours Arif's forces were successful and the president was in full control of the city.

President Arif's decisive intervention ended the Iraqi Baath Party's first, brief, flirtation with power. The twelve Baath members of the government were expelled, and replaced by military officers upon whom Arif felt he could rely. Bakr, Saddam's mentor, was sacked as prime minister and Iraq submitted itself to government by military dictatorship. The National Guard was dissolved and
replaced by the Republican Guard, an elite unit in the armed forces that was commanded by a member of Arif's own tribe. Well armed and stationed strategically near Baghdad, the main function of the Republican Guard was to protect the regime against future coup attempts.

The disastrous reversal in the fortunes of the Baath Party in late 1963 was not, however, a complete disaster for Saddam Hussein. The peremptory dismissal of not one, but two, sets of party leaders meant that the Bakr faction, which Saddam supported, became the dominant force. During the next couple of years Bakr made his way through the ranks of the Baath Party to become secretary-general of the Regional Command—i.e., the section of the party responsible for Iraq. As Bakr's position strengthened in the Baath, so did Saddam's. The full membership of the party that he had acquired in Cairo was finally recognized in Baghdad and he was promoted to the Iraqi Baath Party's Regional Command in the summer of 1964—according to some commentators, with the backing of Michel Afleq—and used this position to consolidate his control of the party's internal security. The crisis of late 1963, in which the military wing of the party had colluded with the government to form a military dictatorship, taught the civilian wing of the Baath Party an important lesson, namely that in future they would need to be better organized if they were not to succumb to the superior firepower of the armed forces.

Salim Shakir, a former general in the Iraqi army who was active in the Baath Party during this period, recalled that Saddam carefully exploited Bakr's diffident nature to increase his own power base. “Until 1963 Saddam Hussein was nothing more than a gangster. If you wanted someone killed, you called for Saddam. But after Bakr started to move up the party ranks, Saddam was very smart and attached himself to him. Bakr was a good politician, but he was useless in public. He was a backroom operator. He needed someone to carry out his orders, and so he asked Saddam. As a fellow Tikriti he believed Saddam was loyal to him, and so he gave Saddam a lot of responsibility. Saddam was therefore able to use Bakr to strengthen his position in the party.”
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Saddam now concentrated his energies on improving his social position. He married Sajida, to whom he had been betrothed during his exile in Cairo. Although it was an arranged marriage, the bride and bridegroom appear to have enjoyed a genuine affection for each other. A photograph taken shortly after their nuptials in 1963 depicts an attractive young couple, with Saddam clean-shaven (the trademark mustache had still to make its appearance) and smartly dressed in a dark suit and tie, and a rather serious-looking, dark-haired
Sajida wearing a modest dress with a plain floral print. Later Sajida dyed her hair blond after her husband developed a penchant for blond women, but in these early days of innocence they appeared much like any other young couple preparing to tackle the challenges of married life. Even after a couple of murders, a failed assassination attempt and four years' exile in Cairo, Saddam himself looked far from menacing; he comes across as self-conscious and shy, a fresh-faced young man who seems ill-at-ease in front of the camera lens. Saddam's social ineptitude was confirmed by one of his Baathist contemporaries who remembered him as being “very shy and introverted.” At social gatherings “he did not say much. When he did speak, though, all he did was express ferociously anticommunist views.” Nor did Sajida herself make much of an impression on Baghdad society. “She looked like her father wearing a wig and, as no one liked her father, people gave her a wide berth.”
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From the point of view of Saddam's future career, however, his choice of Sajida for his bride was a good one. Khairallah Tulfah, her father and his uncle, was a close associate of Bakr, even if Khairallah detested the Baath Party's socialist sympathies. During the party's first flirtation with power in 1963, Bakr rewarded Saddam's uncle for his support in helping the Baathists to seize power by making him director general at the Ministry of Education. Saddam's alliance with Bakr was further strengthened when one of Bakr's sons married a sister of Sajida, and one of Bakr's daughters married a brother of Sajida.
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Even at this early stage in the Baath Party's development, the clannish Tikritis were using the traditional bonds of marriage and kinship to secure their power base in Baghdad.

Saddam devoted all his energies to building up the Baath Party's internal security structure, a body that would become one of the main platforms for his own ascent to power. Like many Baathists, particularly those in the civilian wing of the party, Saddam had been appalled at how lack of party discipline had resulted in its expulsion from office in late 1963. With Bakr's encouragement, Saddam resolved to establish an organizational structure that could deal both with external enemies and internal dissidents. During his Cairo years, Saddam was greatly influenced by Josef Stalin, and studied his life and work. While it is difficult to believe that a mediocre student like Saddam, who spent most of his time running gangs and intimidating opponents, was capable of undertaking a serious study of the Soviet despot, it does seem that some of the more ruthless aspects of Stalin's philosophy found favor with the Baathist's apprentice. After the humiliation of November 1963, Saddam was often to be
heard uttering Stalinist maxims such as “If there is a person then there is a problem; if there is no person then there is no problem.”

Saddam was one of a group of committed Baathists responsible for establishing, sometime during 1964, the party's secretive security apparatus, which was called Jihaz Haneen, or the “instrument of yearning.” Following the coup of November 1963, which had resulted in most of the remaining Baathist leaders—including Bakr—eventually being jailed, Saddam took a calculated risk by remaining in Baghdad, a decision that was contrary to the wishes of the party's high command in Damascus, which wanted him to flee once more to Syria. Saddam correctly reasoned that he would be regarded as a coward if he left Baghdad, and as a traitor if he sought refuge with a group of foreign Baathists in Syria. Together with some of the few Baathists who had not been jailed by Arif, Saddam set up an underground security force that owed more to the Nazi Brownshirts than the Red Guards in its outlook. The principal aim of Jihaz Haneen was to act as a counterweight to the large number of military officers in the Baath who in 1963 had sided with Arif to expel the civilian wing of the party. With people like Nadhim Kazzar holding senior positions, however, the organization was soon to become one of the most feared security apparatuses in the entire Middle East.

Saddam's freedom in 1964 was to prove short-lived. With most of the Baath leadership either in exile or in jail, Saddam was left to his own devices, and it was not long before he was involved in yet more plots to overthrow the government. As with the 1959 plot to assassinate Qassem, Saddam was joined by his “twin brother,” Abdul Karim al-Shaikhly. Several possible scenarios were explored for assassinating President Arif in September 1964. There was a plan to shoot down his plane when it took off from the Baghdad airport, and there was another, much favored by Saddam, in which he and a group of Baathists would storm the Presidential Palace, break into a conference room where Arif and the rest of the government were meeting, and machine-gun them all to death. This plot, which gave Saddam the honor of firing the machine gun, had to be abandoned after a palace official who was to have allowed the plotters access to the palace, was transferred to another post. Finally the plotters had to resort to a crude plan to attack the Presidential Palace with homemade bombs made with TNT that they had purchased on the open market. But this plot, like the others, was foiled by the security forces. In mid-October Saddam's hideout in the suburbs of Baghdad was surrounded by the security forces. After a brief exchange of fire, Saddam
was forced to surrender after he ran out of ammunition. According to one of his official biographers, Saddam was cool and composed when Arif's security forces burst into the room. “My dear fellow, what's this about?” he inquired. “Machine guns? Is there no government?”
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Salim Shakir, who was involved in one of the plots to overthrow Arif and later became one of Iraq's most distinguished generals, met Saddam for the first time at a house in Baghdad that was being used to plan the coup attempt. “It was a rather convoluted plan, and Saddam was trying to get me to mobilize army units to support a coup attempt. Looking back it all seemed rather farcical, but I must confess that Saddam was very impressive. He came into the room to address the meeting and said quite simply: ‘We are going to take over the regime.' I must confess I thought there was something about Saddam that made him stand out among most other Baathists of his generation. My first impression was that I was dealing with a natural leader, a man with a clear idea of what he wanted to do.”
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As with many other episodes from Saddam's early life, a degree of mythology has been allowed to develop about his “heroic” attempts to rid Iraq of the Arif government, and the stoicism he displayed during his two years of imprisonment. His official biographers relate how he was kept in solitary confinement for long periods, and how he was singled out for special treatment by the authorities because of his refusal to cooperate with them, the clear implication being that he was tortured. On one occasion, he claims, he was made to sit on a chair for seven days, not in itself a great hardship, and he also claims the government made several overtures to him in the hope of persuading him to join the Arif government. Just as Stalin was said to have spent his time in prison reading, generally trying to improve himself, and becoming one of the chief debaters in the prison commune, so Saddam “spent his time in prison trying to raise the morale of those comrades whose spirit had been broken by torture. He read a number of books and encouraged the others to read too; he also initiated discussions about the Party and its future.”
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This inspiring account of Saddam's imprisonment, however, does not square with the recollections of those surviving Baathists who were jailed with him. Ayad Allawi, a young medical student and Baath Party activist who was imprisoned at the same time as Saddam, recalls that, far from being given a hard time, Saddam received preferential treatment from the prison authorities. “Most of us were held in a special camp where the regime was very tough,” says Allawi. “Many of us were tortured, some quite badly.” Saddam's
“twin” Abdul Karim al-Shaikhly, for example, was given particularly harsh treatment. At one point his interrogators drove a nail into his back to make him confess. At another he was dragged around the prison compound, tied to the back of a jeep, and suffered appalling injuries. Saddam, however, was detained separately from the other prisoners. He was held at an old police training college, according to Allawi, where the conditions, compared with those experienced by the other Baath detainees, were similar to “being in a holiday camp. Even though the security forces had about thirty incriminating statements from witnesses denouncing Saddam—including one that he had smuggled guns from Syria to Iraq—they turned a blind eye.”
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The preferential treatment Saddam received during his detention between 1964 and 1966 aroused suspicions in the Baath Party that he had made a secret deal with the Arif government; some former Baath Party members have claimed that Saddam was actively working with the government to inform on his own party.
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During the summer of 1963, when Saddam was involved in the persecution and torture of communists and leftists, he worked in conjunction with the state authorities. There is also the possibility that he was working in conjunction with the CIA contacts he made in Cairo. Certainly that was the suspicion shared by many of the other Baathists who were jailed by the Arif regime, but did not enjoy Saddam's preferential treatment. Even though Saddam was actively involved in trying to overthrow the Arif regime, it seemed that he still had friends in the government, and even abroad, who were able to ensure that he was not badly treated in prison. And however much Saddam liked to think of himself as a Stalin-like figure, who looked after and helped to indoctrinate his fellow prisoners, in reality he was not well liked by his fellow inmates. Many of the other prisoners were well educated and came from better families and from a higher social class; many of them were also army officers. They tended to treat with disdain the thuggish young man from Tikrit, who was of low social standing, conversed in a strong peasant dialect, and had very modest educational qualifications. The only qualification to which he could lay claim was the secondary school certificate he obtained in Cairo, but no evidence of this was ever actually produced. Saddam developed a grudge against many of his fellow inmates for the patronizing tone they adopted toward him, and took his revenge against them once he had assumed a position of power in the Baathist government.