Saddam : His Rise and Fall (8 page)

The newfound notoriety of the Iraqi Baathists pleased Afleq, who sought to exploit for his own ends the political instability the failed assassination attempt had caused in Baghdad. At this juncture Afleq was playing a double game. He organized the expulsion of Fouad al-Rikabi and other members of the Baath leadership in Baghdad on the grounds that they should not have involved the party in the assassination plot. Afleq then sought to place his own supporters in key positions in the Iraqi Baath Party, and to this end he arranged for Saddam to acquire his much-coveted full party membership. Although Afleq later said that he could not recollect meeting Saddam until after 1963,
¹⁰
the quietly spoken ideologue and the restless young murderer would soon form a symbiotic attachment. It was mainly due to the efforts of Afleq, who for a time controlled the Baath Party in both Syria and Iraq, that, in 1964, Saddam was elected to a key position in the leadership of the Iraqi Baath Party. Saddam repaid the compliment by ensuring, when he finally achieved power, that Baathism became Iraq's official political doctrine. In the same way that Josef Stalin would use Lenin's name as a means of legitimizing his own rule, so Saddam would invoke Afleq's name to justify his own position in Iraq. Saddam had “a living Lenin who could be wheeled out on suitable occasions to ratify his decisions and above all his status as guardian of party orthodoxy against successive groups.”
¹¹
And when Afleq, who was himself later forced into exile in Baghdad, died in 1989, Saddam paid (or rather, the state did) for a massive tomb to be built for the founder of Baathism.

After two to three months in Syria, Saddam and the other surviving members of the assassination squad moved to Cairo where they joined up with a group of about five hundred exiled young Baathists who had congregated in the
Egyptian capital. These young Baathists were sent to Egypt by the Syrian government, the junior partner in the political union between Cairo and Damascus. The purpose of sending them to Cairo was to continue their education; at the time of his involvement in the assassination plot against Qassem, Saddam had still not completed his secondary education. President Nasser, as head of the first pan-Arab union, now opposed Qassem for reneging on his commitment to bring Iraq into the confederation. Afleq and the other Baathist leaders believed that the young assassins would be safer under Nasser's watchful eye than in Damascus, where the regime was less stable. The campaign to remove Qassem, meanwhile, was to be left to more senior, and experienced, Baathists.

This was the only time in his life that Saddam lived abroad, and soon after arriving in 1960 he enrolled at the Qasr al-Nil High School. After all the exhilaration of committing his first murder in Tikrit, and attempting his first assassination in Baghdad, life in Cairo was by comparison a relatively staid affair. Nevertheless, with Gamal Nasser in his full pomp, and Cairo the undisputed capital of Arab nationalism, Saddam could not help but be moved by a city that was a hive of political activity. Apart from his studies, Saddam involved himself fully in politics, joining the Egyptian Baath Party. Within months Saddam had become a member of its Regional Command, i.e., the Egyptian branch, although the influence of the Baathists was limited by the overpowering presence of Nasser, a fact that was ultimately to lead to Syria unilaterally seceding from the pan-Arab union in 1961.

Saddam's own recollections of his years in exile are uncharacteristically modest and low-key. One of his biographers reported that he “emulated Nasser and played a good deal of chess and was not distracted by night life and read a good deal.”
¹²
This account was supported by Abdel Majid Farid, who was Nasser's secretary-general, and who was responsible for looking after the young Baathists. According to Farid, the Egyptian authorities helped him with his education and assisted with finding a suitable apartment. “He was one of the leaders of the Iraqi Baath. He used to come to see me now and then to talk about developments in Baghdad. He was quiet, disciplined, and didn't ask for extra funds like the other exiles. He didn't have much interest in alcohol or girls.”
¹³
Abdul Karim al-Shaikhly, who became close friends with Saddam in Cairo, wrote to his family in Baghdad that Saddam spent most of his time trying to catch up on his education and finish his high school education. Shaikhly, a future Iraqi foreign minister, became such close friends with Saddam in Cairo that the two young men regarded each other as twin
brothers. Shaikhly, who would be one of Saddam's first victims after he became president, spent his time in Cairo finishing his medical degree. In one letter to his family he described his new friend as “a quiet man, not a social person, someone who is trying hard to educate himself.”
¹⁴

Other contemporaries, however, do not paint such a rosy portrait. A Cairene café owner who served Saddam and his friends regularly described him as a troublemaker who never paid his bills. “He would fight for any reason,” recalled Hussein Meguid, the owner of the Andiana Café, which, together with the Triumph, were Saddam's favorite haunts. “He would fight for any reason. We wanted to bar him from coming here.”
¹⁵
But the police came back and said he was protected by Nasser, and when Saddam finally left Cairo he owed several hundred dollars. Perversely, it was not a debt that Saddam forgot. In the 1970s, when he was vice president of Iraq and had returned to Cairo on official business, Saddam made a surprise return to the café and paid his bill in full, leaving the owner a three hundred dollar tip. Saddam would not be Saddam if darker tales were not in circulation about his alleged misdeeds in Cairo. He was accused of killing an Egyptian in 1960 by throwing him out of his apartment window,
¹⁶
and also of killing a fellow Iraqi in 1963.
¹⁷
But as there are no records of the alleged offenses, and as Saddam was free to leave when he chose, they must be discounted as mere wishful thinking.

However much Saddam tried to put a brave face on his stay in Egypt, it was generally accepted that he regarded life in Cairo as the equivalent of a prison sentence. He did, however, manage to complete his high school education and in 1961 enrolled at the University of Cairo to study law. Saddam was provided with a modest allowance paid by the Arab Interest Section of Egyptian intelligence. Saddam never completed his studies, but still managed to secure a degree several years later when he turned up at the annual law examinations at Baghdad University in full military uniform. Before sitting down to take the examination, Saddam placed his gun on his desk to make himself feel “more comfortable.” As with the headmaster who wanted to expel him, the sight of the gun did the trick, and Saddam was duly awarded his degree.

Saddam's sojourn in Cairo was the occasion of two other important events in his life—his first marriage, and his mysterious dealings with the Central Intelligence Agency. It was during his time at Cairo University that Saddam became engaged to his cousin Sajida, the daughter of his uncle Khairallah. Marrying within the family was the expected norm for someone from Saddam's background, and by becoming engaged to his uncle's daughter he
was observing family tradition. Sajida was probably born in 1937 (which explains why Saddam may have tampered with his birth records to make him the same age as his wife, and not her junior), and Saddam spent most of his childhood growing up with her and her brother Adnan at Khairallah's homes in Tikrit and Baghdad. In effect Saddam and Sajida were brought up as brother and sister. According to Saddam, the marriage had actually been arranged when they were children and his grandfather betrothed Sajida to him. Saddam, aware of his tribal duties, observed Arab custom and asked his stepfather Hassan al-Ibrahim to approach his uncle and formally ask permission for him to marry Sajida. Relations appear to have improved between Hassan and Saddam, perhaps because Hassan sensed that Saddam might make a success of his life, and might therefore prove of use to the indolent stepfather. Hassan did as Saddam requested, Khairallah consented, and Saddam became officially engaged. Although the couple was not married until Saddam returned to Iraq in 1963, Saddam celebrated the engagement in traditional Arab style in Cairo in early 1962 and, to reassure Sajida of his good intentions, he sent her a wedding ring. The engagement party was organized by his good friend Abdul Karim al-Shaikhly.

The other significant development for Saddam during his residence in Cairo was the relationship he developed with the CIA. Like most of Saddam's activities in Cairo, his dealings with the Americans are shrouded in mystery, particularly as most of his direct contemporaries have been killed.
¹⁸
But there is nonetheless sufficient circumstantial evidence to indicate that Saddam made contact with the CIA's Cairo station. The early 1960s were a period when cold war tensions between Washington and Moscow were approaching a critical stage, as demonstrated by the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. The CIA saw its primary purpose as countering any attempt by the two communist superpowers, the Soviet Union and China, to extend their activities beyond their existing spheres of influence. China's move into Southeast Asia was ultimately to provoke the United States' ill-fated involvement in Vietnam's civil war. Moscow's desire to extend its influence in the Islamic world, from the Central Asian Soviet republics to the oil-rich Arab states of the Middle East, was to result in the region becoming a tinderbox, primed to ignite by the heated rivalries engendered by the cold war.

Iraq, situated at the heart of the Middle East, was regarded by Washington as a key strategic asset. For this reason the United States had encouraged the formation of the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact, the regional defense organization
set up in the mid-1950s comprising Britain, Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan. Indeed, the Americans were so concerned about the level of political instability in Baghdad following the overthrow of the monarchy that Allen Dulles, the CIA director, in 1959 declared that “Iraq was the most dangerous spot on earth.”
¹⁹
By 1961, political developments in the region prompted the Americans to be proactive in countering what they regarded as a serious Soviet attempt to take over the Middle East.

Concern had been expressed about President Nasser's now notorious arms deals with Moscow, and the Soviets were suspected of being involved in General Qassem's decision to draw on the support of the Iraqi Communist Party to keep him in power. Qassem's decision unilaterally to withdraw from the Baghdad Pact in 1959, which made the region more susceptible to Soviet infiltration, and to rely increasingly on Soviet foreign aid and military supplies, did little to allay Washington's suspicions. The West was even more alarmed when in 1961 Qassem attempted to occupy Kuwait, which the Iraqis had always regarded as part of their own territory, and to nationalize part of the foreign-owned Iraqi Petroleum Company, a move that, for the Americans, had unpleasant echoes of the nationalization program Nasser had implemented during his early years in power.

The Egyptians under President Nasser were just as determined as the Americans to influence the political development of the modern Middle East, particularly as the decision by Syria in 1961 to withdraw from the United Arab Republic had seriously dented Nasser's ambition of creating a united Arab state. Iraq, therefore, which had reneged on its promise to join the UAR when Qassem seized power, was of particular interest to the Egyptians, and Egyptian intelligence was as active as the CIA in attempting to establish a sympathetic government in Baghdad.

As someone who had already participated in one attempt to overthrow Qassem, it was hardly surprising that Saddam and his exiled Baathist colleagues should find their activities arousing the keen interest of both the Egyptian and American intelligence services. Saddam was paid a modest retainer by the Egyptian authorities and allowed to study. But relations between the exiled Iraqi Baathists and the Egyptians cooled considerably after their fellow Syrian Baathists withdrew from the UAR, a move, moreover, that was actively encouraged by Michel Afleq, the founder of the Baath and who was Saddam's personal mentor. Saddam's biographers claim that Saddam was kept under close observation in Cairo, that he was continually harassed, and that his apartments were
searched on several occasions.
²⁰
This could, of course, have been due to Saddam's alleged criminal activities, and the Egyptians would have been obliged to search him for weapons if, as was alleged, he was threatening his opponents in Cairo with physical violence, in the same way that he had done in Baghdad.

None of the official biographers, however, made any mention of Saddam's frequent visits during this time to the American embassy in Cairo. The Americans, for different reasons, were as keen as Saddam to have Qassem removed from power, and there was strong circumstantial evidence to suggest that Saddam was in close contact with the CIA toward the end of his stay in Cairo.
²¹
Said Aburish, another of Saddam's sympathetic biographers, suggested that Saddam's meetings with the CIA were condoned by Egyptian intelligence, even though Washington and Cairo were pursuing diametrically opposed policies toward Baghdad. Although the true extent of Washington's courtship of the young Saddam may never be known, it cannot be discounted that Saddam Hussein started his political career as an agent of the CIA. The nearest anyone has come to shedding light on this intriguing aspect of Saddam's career was a meeting the authors Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett had with a high-ranking former official of the U.S. State Department who confirmed to them “that Saddam Hussein and other Baathists had made contact with the American authorities in the late 1950s and early 1960s.”
²²
Certainly the issue was of sufficient sensitivity for Saddam that, later in his political career, he liquidated those Iraqi contemporaries who may have been in a position to shed light on his spying exploits.