The Story (2 page)

“Remember those packets we got each morning, with the glossy pictures
and a tentative grid?” Ryan reminisced. “Go to this place. You'll find a McDonald's there. Look in the fridge. You'll find French fries, cheeseburger, and Cokes. Then we would get there, and not only was there no fridge and no fries, there hadn't even been a thought of putting a McDonald's there.”

One day in mid-April 2003, Ryan had raced to the city of Bayji, 130 miles north of Baghdad, to inspect a dozen fifty-five-gallon drums in an open field that soldiers had unearthed. The Iraqis buried everything of even remotely potential value, which increased suspicions about them among US intelligence agencies. Ryan, who led Mobile Exploitation Team (MET) Bravo, was told that one of the drums had tested positive for cyclosarin, a deadly nerve agent. “It turned out to be gasoline,” he recalled. On another trip, his soldiers had dug up a crate containing a sofa.

In late May 2003 Ryan's friend, Chief Warrant Officer Richard “Monty” Gonzales, the head of search team MET Alpha, was sent to Basra in southern Iraq to investigate what senior weapons experts had described as nuclear equipment. What they found were industrial-scale vegetable steamers. The contents of the crates had all been clearly marked—in Russian.
²

By the time their deployment and my embed ended in June 2003, the soldiers who had tried to remain optimistic about their mission were bitter. After promising leads had fizzled and Iraqi weapons scientists who had cooperated with the XTF were turned over to the Iraq Survey Group (the XTF's larger successor), Ryan Cutchin, Monty Gonzales, and Dave Temby, a veteran Defense Department bioweapons expert, called the suspect site list “toilet paper.” They had reached another disheartening conclusion: while weapons hunters were likely to continue uncovering remnants of chemical and biological munitions, suspect chemicals, and WMD precursors, they were unlikely to find stockpiles of modern unconventional weapons that administration officials claimed had posed the “grave threat” to America. We were gobsmacked.

What we did not know then was that Saddam Hussein had been playing a double game: while he wanted the UN to believe that he had given up his WMD so that sanctions would be lifted, he also wanted Iran, Israel,
and his other external and internal enemies to believe that he had kept those weapons. Moreover, as America's top weapons analysts would later conclude, even Saddam wasn't absolutely sure what was left in his stockpiles. At a Revolutionary Command Council meeting in October 2002, he had asked his senior staff whether “they might know something he did not about residual WMD stocks,” Charles Duelfer, America's top Iraq weapons inspector, would write in 2013.
³
But a decade earlier, as we were crisscrossing Iraq in search of the elusive WMD stockpiles and the scientists who had produced them, all we knew for certain was that the intelligence the XTF had been given about Iraq's unconventional weapons was wrong. With this came the devastating realization that, as a result, some of my own earlier WMD stories were wrong, too.

I had not been wrong about Saddam, though. He was a mass murderer, a true psychopath. Sure, there were lots of bad people in the world, and some of them even led countries. It would have been folly for the United States to try to oust them all. But after years of reporting in the Middle East, I considered Saddam special.

When I had first visited Iraq, in 1976, Saddam, not yet president, was already consolidating power. An American assistant secretary of state had described him at the time as a “rather remarkable person,” “very ruthless,” and a “pragmatic, intelligent power.”
⁴
During my first visit to Baghdad, my suitcase was stolen. The incident would not have been noteworthy if I hadn't been the only journalist covering two US senators on a visit chaperoned by US security officials and a large contingent of Iraqi uniformed and secret police. Although I was reporting for the
Progressive
, an obscure leftist midwestern monthly, the delegation had a high profile.

I had seen my bag loaded onto a well-guarded van as we left for the airport. Still, someone, perhaps one of the many Iraqi “minders,” had been brazen or desperate enough to walk off with it. The incident was telling. If Saddam was trying to build a “new socialist Arab man”—secular, disciplined, marching confidently into an oil-rich future—this petty theft was not an encouraging start.

The political climate deteriorated dramatically three years later in 1979, when Saddam assumed the Iraqi presidency in a characteristic bloodbath. He celebrated his inauguration in a giant hall in Baghdad by denouncing party members and even close friends whom he considered insufficiently loyal. As Saddam intoned their names one by one, the men were surrounded by goons and dragged out of the room. He had then called upon senior ministers, party leaders, and loyalists to form instant firing squads to kill their colleagues. After he had finished reading the list of the condemned, officials of the ruling Ba'ath Party who had not heard their names called wept openly with relief and began hysterically chanting in Arabic “Long Live Saddam!” “With our blood, with our souls,” they shouted, “we will sacrifice for you, O Saddam!” (It more or less rhymes in Arabic.)

Years later, I would hear an audiotape of the astonishing assembly, the details of which Laurie Mylroie, a scholar at Harvard University's Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and I would be among the first to describe in a book we wrote and published in 1990 just before the US-led liberation of Kuwait.
⁵

I had joined the
Times
in 1977 and became its Cairo bureau chief in 1983, responsible for covering most of the Arab Middle East. I traveled to Iraq more than a dozen times to cover the Iran-Iraq war and had grown to dread those visits. The war that Saddam had launched against neighboring Islamic Iran less than a year after becoming president was not turning out as he—or the CIA—had predicted. Though weak and internally divided, Iran's revolutionary government, which in 1979 had ousted the Shah and created the world's first militant Shiite Islamic state, was fighting back ferociously. Outgunned but not outmanned, given a population some three times that of Iraq, theocratic Iran seemed at times on the verge of defeating the secular state that Arabs regarded not only as the cradle of their civilization but also the “beating heart” of Arab nationalism.

During my visits in the mid-1980s, it was still unclear which side would win. Officially, the United States was neutral. But President Ronald Reagan had secretly decided that “secular” Iraq could not be permitted to lose to anti-American theocrats who, in 1979, had attacked the US Embassy in Tehran and held American diplomats hostage for more than a
year. So even after the United States received evidence that Saddam was using poison gas and other chemical weapons against Iranian forces and, later, his own citizens, Reagan extended credits to Iraq. America would also give intelligence guidance to Iraq's military to enhance the accuracy of its bombing raids and missile strikes. Once Saddam concluded that the United States would let him “get away with murder,” as one scholar put it, his use of chemical weapons increased.
⁶

Throughout the eight-year war, however, Washington had quietly provided, or tried to provide, covert assistance to both Iraq and Iran, reflecting what was euphemistically known as a “realist” foreign policy.

On my seventh trip to Baghdad in March 1985, I saw firsthand what our cynical policy meant for the Iranians and the Iraqis. After landing in Baghdad late at night and checking into the Sheraton, I was just dozing off when a missile struck. Its high-pitched whoosh was followed by an ear-splitting boom. The blast shattered the sliding glass terrace door of my seventh-floor room overlooking the Tigris River.

I bolted upright in bed, moving my hands slowly across the sheets. There was no glass on the bed, but shards covered much of the floor near the window. Barefoot, I inched my way across the room toward the light switch. Nothing. The blast had knocked out the power.

I had come to Baghdad to investigate whether Iran had begun firing Libyan-supplied Scud-B missiles at Iraq in retaliation for Iraq's relentless rocket attacks in the “war of the cities,” the latest escalation of the Iran-Iraq war, then in its fifth year. The missiles I was trying to find almost found me.

Flashlight in hand, my duffel bag strapped over one shoulder, and my purse dangling from the other, I inched my way down the unlit emergency stairwell to the hotel's gaudy marble lobby. Its lights were still glowing brightly—a surreal scene, given the darkness and chaos above.

An Iraqi concierge, who only an hour earlier had been overly solicitous while checking me in, suddenly barked at me, “
Where are you going?
”

I was leaving the hotel, I told him as calmly as possible. My room had just been destroyed by a missile.

“You are not going anywhere,” he commanded.

Seeing him reach for the bulge under his ill-fitting hotel uniform
jacket, I froze as he retreated behind the front desk. Handing me a sheet of paper listing over $1,000 in charges for the night and the week I had planned to spend there, he insisted that I pay my bill, in cash. Rattled but furious, I flung two $100 bills on the desk and left. As I bolted out of the hotel, I was pretty sure he wouldn't shoot me.

While I walked to the home of a European diplomat, I thought about the Iraqi leader. In a region of brutal tyrants, Saddam stood out.
The Godfather
was his favorite film—a nugget that Laurie and I unearthed in researching our book. His role model was Joseph Stalin. “I like the way he governed his country,” Saddam had told a well-known Kurdish politician.
⁷

Like Stalin, Saddam had institutionalized terror as an instrument of state policy. With more than 150,000 employees of his competing intelligence agencies watching citizens in a country of fourteen million people (the population would surge to thirty million by 2010), his reliance on arbitrary punishment and the promotion of the most obsequious had destroyed Iraq's civil society and all centers of opposition. Individuals were subordinate to the whims of a state that—as noted by Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi writer and exile whom I had befriended—was synonymous with Saddam.

No one could escape his vile gaze. Thirty-foot-high portraits and smaller renditions of him—as soldier, peasant, teacher, and tribal elder—were everywhere. With his black hair and trademark mustache, his portrait graced the entrances of hotels, schools, public buildings, city squares, private offices, and even the dials of the gold wristwatches favored by the political elite. As Makiya wrote, the government had devoted an entire agency, the Very Special Projects Implementation Authority, to creating and maintaining such depictions of him.
⁸

Iraqi women died for him, literally and figuratively, and men emulated his style of dress, his swagger, even the cut of his mustache. All mustaches in Iraq seemed to resemble his; I longed to see a goatee or a handlebar mustache. In the land where Sumerians had invented writing, discourse had been degraded to a single ubiquitous image.

All roads led to Saddam, the “leader-president,” “leader-struggler,” “standard-bearer,” “leader of all the Arabs,” “knight of the Arab nation,” “hero of national liberation,” “father-leader,” and my personal favorite title,
the “daring and aggressive knight” (
al-faris al-mighwar
).”
⁹
A scholar said that Saddam's name was mentioned between thirty to fifty times an hour in a typical radio broadcast; his TV appearances often lasted several hours a day. Makiya argued that Saddam's name and image were so ubiquitous that he had become the personification of what Iraqis perceived to be the “Iraqi” character.
¹⁰

In Saddam's Iraq, real and imagined critics had a disconcerting way of ending up dead, in jail, or simply disappearing. Saddam had used the war as a pretext for persecuting the two groups he feared most: the Iraqi Shiites, a majority, and the Kurds, the luckless minority in northern Iraq who spoke their own language, had their own distinct culture, and constituted 20 percent of the population.

During my assignment in Cairo in the mid-1980s and my visits to the region, I had managed to interview almost every Arab leader—but not Saddam. I kept a stack of fifty rejected faxed requests for meetings with him in a file in Cairo. Saddam rarely gave interviews to journalists, especially foreigners.

On another trip to Baghdad in 1985, I had yet another encounter with a bomb. I was having lunch at the home of a British defense official with David Blundy, a British reporter for the London
Sunday Times
—a brilliant, dashing friend with whom I often collaborated. (A sniper killed David four years later, while he was covering the war in El Salvador.) As the diplomat, David, and I talked about the war, an Iranian missile struck. By the sound of the explosion and proximity of the white smoke, our host guessed that the missile had landed nearby. Since this could be a rare opportunity to see precisely which missile the Iranians were firing, we hopped in the diplomat's jeep and raced to the bomb site.

Arriving before the Iraqi police, we ran toward the smoking crater. Scud-B missiles were more than thirty-three feet long and capable of carrying 2,200 pounds of explosives, the defense expert told us. This missile was less than half that size, and the damage around it suggested that it had contained less than 500 pounds of explosives.

I snapped pictures of the crater and the surrounding damage, removed the film from my camera, put it in my purse, and inserted instead a half-used
roll of film containing photos of a boring government-sponsored trip to the Iraqi front that I had taken the previous day.

The defense attaché was measuring the crater when we saw an unmarked black car with tinted windows—standard issue for the Mukhabarat, secret police—in the far distance. If we all began running, David warned, the Iraqis would surely catch us. It could be fatal for foreigners to be anywhere near such sites. David and I agreed that while we should stay, it would be riskier for a diplomat to be found there. The Iraqis might accuse him of being a spy and us his accomplices. I shoved the film roll I had just taken into his hand, hoping that he would get it out of Iraq in a diplomatic pouch. “We'll be all right,” Blundy assured the Brit as he made a dash for his jeep.