Saddam : His Rise and Fall (48 page)

The Iraqi Olympic Committee's downtown headquarters had sufficient capacity to hold up to 520 detainees. The cells were located in the basement, and included sensory deprivation cells, which were sealed, painted red with red lightbulbs, and contained a tiny slot for the passage of food. Prisoners would be held for up to three months in these conditions. For many years Uday's prison complex at the Olympic Committee was kept secret from his father. Many of those held in Uday's cells had broken no law. They were mainly businessmen or the children of wealthy families who Uday thought were ripe for exploitation. Some of those held were simply ransomed by Uday—in 1995 the going rate was said to be $100,000. Others were imprisoned to force them to participate in a fraudulent scheme that Uday had devised. In one case an Iraqi businessman had arranged to import a shipment of steel for a construction project, and had deposited his payment with a bank in Baghdad to transfer to his foreign supplier. Uday arranged for the paperwork to disappear and had the man arrested. He then arranged to have the deposit transferred to his own account and the businessmen was brought in for interrogation at the Olympic Committee. He was given a stark choice: either make another payment for the steel, or die.
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While the regime flourished, the people suffered. By 1995 there was still no clean drinking water, the electricity system could only provide three to four hours of power a day. The per capita caloric intake was half what it was before the war. Crime was so widespread that in 1993 alone 36,000 cars were stolen. UNICEF claimed that in 1993 between 80,000 and 100,000 children died because of the sanctions. But the regime would do nothing to help. It suited Saddam to have the population weak and fearful. Limited medical aid was provided, but only to favored party members. Abbas Janabi claimed that during the period he spent working for Uday the regime could afford to buy anything it wanted, but preferred to spend the money on arms and expensive
cars for the ruling elite. Saddam's only response to the growing desperation of ordinary Iraqis to feed themselves and their families in 1994 was to order that thieves should have their right hands cut off; frequent offenders were to have their left leg cut off from the knee and armed robbery would carry the death penalty. At the same time three high-ranking army officers were executed on Saddam's orders for questioning Uday's military capabilities.

The most essential aspect of the sanctions-busting operation was that it enabled Saddam to continue to defy the demands of the UNSCOM weapons inspectors. The pattern up to 1995 replicated that established when they first started work. Saddam's security forces would do everything in their power to impede the work of the inspectors, would make false claims about the true extent of the Iraqi weapons programs and devise new schemes for concealing the more sensitive material. Sami Salih, who spent five years based at the Presidential Palace running the sanctions-busting operations, said that Saddam never had any intention of complying with the requirements of the UN inspection teams. “There were missiles hidden all over Iraq. I saw them stored under swimming pools and on farms.”
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Despite all the provocations, the inspectors under the cool leadership of Rolf Ekeus continued with their painstaking task. They would present the Iraqis with incontrovertible evidence and force them to hand over the offending material. Ekeus struggled on with the mission despite Saddam's constant brinkmanship, one day threatening to reinvade Kuwait, the next threatening a new atrocity against the Kurds. Occasionally American and British warplanes would react to the provocation by bombing antiaircraft missile batteries in Iraq.

Although Saddam had the ability to cause the Allies immense irritation, the various schemes to remove him met with little success. This may have had something to do with the fact that from the autumn of 1993 onward the Clinton administration was deeply involved in efforts to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, which was enjoying one of its most constructive phases in years after the signing of the Oslo Accords. While Saddam was a nuisance, he was regarded in Washington as a containable nuisance, and any concerted effort to remove him might upset the delicate balance of the Arab-Israeli negotiations, particularly as many Palestinians were sympathetic to Iraq and would use any attack on Saddam as an opportunity to accuse the United States of anti-Arab bias.

Clinton was certainly less obsessed with the Saddam issue than Bush had been. Since April 1991, when President Bush signed his “finding” authoriz
ing Saddam's overthrow, American policy had been based on a twin-track approach: to contain Saddam through a combination of sanctions and the no-fly zones while Western intelligence agencies worked within Iraq to bring him down. Initially the Clinton administration left the Bush approach essentially unchanged, and Clinton renewed Bush's “finding” authorizing Saddam's overthrow. Even so, Clinton was eager to avoid face-to-face confrontations with Saddam, and his advisers wanted to keep Saddam off the front pages. The phrase used by Anthony Lake, Clinton's national security adviser, to officials working on Iraq was: “Don't give us sweaty palms”—i.e., do not provoke any crises.
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The CIA and Britain's MI6 were nevertheless still fully committed in their attempts to organize a coup. By late 1994 most of the intelligence activity was based in the Kurdish safe haven in northern Iraq. In September 1994 the CIA established its base at a heavily fortified villa at Salahdin while the Iraqi National Congress (INC) created a ministate for itself, complete with its own television station and newspaper. The INC had devised a plan to attack Mosul and Kirkuk, the two major cities in northern Iraq, which, if successful, would seriously weaken Saddam. The INC was greatly assisted in its planning by General Wafic al-Samurrai, Saddam's former head of military intelligence, who had defected in December 1994 after learning from his colleagues at the Presidential Palace that Saddam planned to kill him.

The INC and Samurrai were confident of success, although Washington was concerned that, if it supported the revolt, it could find itself embroiled in a messy war in Iraq, something successive U.S. administrations had been desperate to avoid since the end of Operation Desert Storm. On the eve of the INC's planned attack, Lake sent a message to the CIA team based at Salahdin ordering them to tell the INC that “the United States would not support this operation militarily or in any other way.”
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The INC, whose plans were already well advanced, went ahead with the attack and, even without American support, achieved a degree of success, capturing several hundred Iraqi prisoners. But without U.S. support, the INC, which was backed by Jalal Talibani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) Party, was unable to consolidate its gains, and the offensive petered out, leaving the Iraqi exiles deeply disillusioned about the sincerity of Washington's commitment to overthrowing Saddam.

The constant threat of plots, coups, and invasions, however, did little to ease Saddam's peace of mind. He was reported to be suffering from heart
trouble and the resulting dizzy spells caused by a lack of blood reaching the brain. In the summer of 1995 yet another plot was uncovered, this one organized by Mohammed Madhloum, an air force commander who tried to launch an uprising against Saddam. The attempt failed and Madhloum and his accomplices were captured. Each of them was tortured by having all of their fingers cut off, one by one. Then they were shot.
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By this stage in his long career Saddam had developed a siege mentality. He had always taken his security to ludicrous extremes, but by the mid-1990s the aging tyrant had become almost dysfunctional in his obsession with it. Saddam spent most of his time at the Presidential Palace, which by the 1990s had become a massive, sprawling complex of about one thousand acres; on one side the Tigris provided a natural boundary, while the rest was protected by an electrified perimeter fence, with guard towers every fifty yards. The main road access was across a bridge, which had been rebuilt after being bombed in the war. Ordinary Iraqis were not allowed anywhere near the compound, and risked a jail sentence if they approached it without permission. Once past the main checkpoints, visitors were sent to one of several gates that were specially designated for different groups: the military, politicians, businessmen, or personal friends and acquaintances of Saddam's family. The gates and the fortress itself were guarded by a confusing number of different security forces, who were there as much to keep a watchful eye on one another as to protect Saddam and his entourage. The most basic security functions were performed by trusted members of the Republican Guard; more sophisticated measures, such as electronic surveillance, by the Special Republican Guard. Overall control of the complex was in the hands of the Republican Palace Guard, while the safety of Saddam and his family was entrusted to the Organization of Special Security (OSS) headed by Qusay.

The OSS guards were the elite corps. Most of them were recruited from Saddam's tribe in Tikrit, and they were afforded better privileges than most of the cabinet ministers to guarantee their loyalty. They were distinguished from the other guards by their olive green uniforms, a white lanyard, and special-issue guns. They lived with their families inside the presidential compound in comfortable villas. They had their own sports and health club, hospital, and schools for their children. They dined at their own restaurant complex, where their meals were served by waiters. Every six months they received a new car, usually a Mercedes. Most of them earned twice the wage of an Iraqi cabinet minister and, when off duty, they were generally allowed to do as they
pleased, so long as they obeyed the command of their master, Saddam Hussein. As one former official at the Presidential Palace commented: “They fear only God, and their God is Saddam Hussein. They were so powerful that even ministers called them ‘sir' when they entered the Presidential Palace. No one took any liberties with them.”
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By now Saddam had established one of the most extensive security structures in modern history. Although he rarely appeared in public, by the mid-1990s he had some eight “doubles” who could impersonate him at public functions; sometimes they appeared at different events at the same time, causing difficulties for the state-owned media, which had to prepare daily reports on Saddam's itinerary. Visitors were still subjected to the routine where they were driven around Baghdad for hours in cars with blackened windows when invited to attend one of Saddam's guesthouses. Being such an expert himself in poisoning his opponents, Saddam not surprisingly took great care to ensure that he did not become a victim. Before meeting any member of his government, Saddam would insist that they first wash their hands, a precaution against the possibility that they might have poison on their fingers that could rub off in a handshake. In the interests of security no indignity was spared Saddam's guests. All of them had their photographs and fingerprints taken, and the OSS had the right to strip-search cabinet members prior to any meeting with Saddam. Even Tariq Aziz, one of Saddam's most trusted lieutenants, was not immune from such degradation. On rare occasions guests were subjected to an intrusive medical examination to check that they had not concealed any poison or explosives in intimate areas of their bodies. Even these elaborate precautions could not prevent the occasional security lapse. In 1996 Saddam narrowly escaped an assassination attempt when a young waitress at the Presidential Palace, who was supposed to serve him poisoned food, was overcome with fear and confessed. Saddam immediately had her taken outside the dining hall and shot. All her accomplices were tortured and executed.
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When off duty the guards terrorized the local population, and rumors circulated of their womanizing and dissolute behavior. One guard commander was seen one evening at a nightclub trying to attract the attention of an old girlfriend. When she rejected his advances, he pulled out a gun and shot her five times in the chest. They were also said to procure women for Saddam, who, despite his second marriage to Samira Shahbandar, still had a predilection for young, blonde women. For example Saddam might be attracted to a
woman he had seen on television. He would order his bodyguards to bring her to him. When he had finished with her, the bodyguards would be told to pay her handsomely. But if for some reason the woman had not pleased him, she would be taken out and shot.
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Despite all the security, Saddam relied on a number of psychics to warn him of any impending misfortune. No doubt he had inherited his superstitious nature from his mother, who had used her collection of seashells to sell prophesies to the peasants of Al-Ouja. Saddam made particular use of an elderly blind woman psychic, to whom he paid particular attention in times of crisis. She once predicted that he would be the victim of an assassination attempt—not in itself a controversial prediction given the frequency with which he was attacked—and thereafter Saddam trusted her judgment.

Those who visited the palace regularly, such as Sami Salih, said there was always an air of tension about the place as no one—not even most of the OSS guards—knew whether or not Saddam was present. Most of the time he worked in a small building in a sealed corner of the presidential complex, and very few officials ever ventured into his inner sanctum. Visiting dignitaries were always received in the old Presidential Palace, and only Saddam's most trusted confidants were allowed into his private office. Access to Saddam was strictly controlled by Abdul Hamoud, his private secretary, who occupied a separate building in front of his private quarters. Whichever office Saddam used to receive his visitors was equipped with cameras and recorders. The meetings took the form of a royal audience, and guests were supposed to talk only after he had spoken, and then to keep their answers concise. Although Saddam had his sleeping quarters within the palace compound, he rarely slept there. In Baghdad alone there were at least five other palaces that accommodated his retinue, and he would move from one to the other regularly to escape detection. On those occasions when Saddam left the Presidential Palace, a number of decoy motorcades—never fewer than five—would sweep over the main bridge and into Baghdad. Saddam would not be in any of them, but would most likely have left by another exit, or through one of the secret underground tunnels that were connected to the presidential bunker.