Saddam's Secrets Read online

  I went around to all the officers on the general staff and apologized for my mistake. I said, “Gentlemen, I’m sorry. I looked at all the evidence and analyzed the intelligence data that was given to me by Gen. Sabir, and I was certain we would be hit. It looks like I was wrong, and I’m sorry if I upset you.” I made a particular point of going to see Gen. Muzahim, the air force commander, and I said, “Sir, I’m sorry. I was wrong and you were right. But I hope you know that I truly believed we were going to be hit. All the factors I examined told me we were going to be hit.”

  I told him, “The foreign press, intelligence data, everything pointed to the same conclusion. But, frankly, I must say I’m glad I was wrong about that. At least the country is safe.” And then I added, “But please, tell the young officers to stop making fun of me. It’s not wise for these men to make fun of a general, especially since I was doing my best and offering you the best information I could give you about the threat of an invasion.” General Muzahim shook my hand and gave me a pat on the shoulder, and he agreed to tell the young men to leave me alone.

  Mixed Messages

  I was 100 percent certain there would be an attack, and that was the message I was trying to convey. Unfortunately, most of my colleagues had decided that Saddam had worked a deal with the Americans under the table. They said that American forces had come to the Gulf to make a show of force, to show the world they didn’t like what we did in Kuwait. But, in fact, there was an agreement between Saddam and the American ambassador. Everybody knew that Saddam would be free to do whatever he liked, and the Americans would never intervene.

  Those who recall the meeting between Saddam and Ambassador April Glaspie will remember what happened. It was televised to the entire world by satellite. And in Iraq, everybody knew what Glaspie had said. She told Saddam, “We have no opinion on your Arab versus Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1990s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America.” It couldn’t have been clearer. An American ambassador had told an Iraqi dictator that he could do whatever he liked, and what he liked at that moment was transforming Kuwait into the nineteenth province of Iraq.

  The day the film of that meeting appeared on Iraqi television, copies were made and sent to every commander in the field. And when they saw it, they understood the message, and they were enthusiastic to get busy and carry out the president’s orders. There were some commanders who thought that Glaspie had been sent by President Bush to trick us. In other words, the Americans had already decided they were going to attack Iraq, so they were telling Saddam to go ahead and do whatever he was going to do so they could turn the coalition forces loose on us. Honestly, I didn’t know what to think of that, but I saw what Ambassador Glaspie had said, and I was certain she wasn’t warning Saddam that he had to stop immediately and get out of Kuwait.

  On the day I reported for duty, after being reinstated as an adviser to the general staff, I was prepared to do whatever I could to serve my country in a time of great difficulty and stress. But I didn’t need to be in the military to know what was about to happen. I understood that if we didn’t leave Kuwait right away, we were going to be hit by the Americans. I was sure of it, and I was telling everybody who would listen those first few days that the only way to avoid war with the West was to stop where we were, get out of Kuwait, and bring our forces home.

  I was worried what would happen to my country and my people if Saddam didn’t listen to reason, but he wasn’t worried in the least. Saddam wasn’t concerned about the consequences to Iraq if this adventure failed. He had said that if anything ever happened to him, or if he were no longer president, then why should he care what happened to Iraq? I had heard him say it many times: “If anybody ever comes to take this country from me, I will not give it to them the way it is now. I’ll give it to them completely destroyed!” He had even said it on national television, and every Iraqi knew it.

  There was no point in trying to reason with such a man. And it seemed no one in Iraq was willing to try.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE CONSEQUENCES OF WAR

  The years between the Iran-Iraq War and the first Gulf War were two of the sweetest I can ever remember. The fighting had ended in the north and the invasion of Kuwait had not yet begun. We were so glad to be done with fighting, but then in 1990 things started escalating all over again. Saddam was saying that Kuwait was stealing our oil, drilling slanted wells into our underground reservoirs. No one in Iraq cared about that; surely there was enough for everyone. But then Saddam started saying, “Of course, Kuwait actually belongs to us. It’s not a separate country but the nineteenth province of Iraq.”

  That may have been true a hundred years earlier, before the British partitioned the land. Centuries before that, all the Arab lands in the Middle East belonged to the Assyrians, but you can’t throw out history and diplomacy just because you covet your neighbor’s territory. History changes things, and there’s no going back. But Saddam was only looking for an excuse to start another war, and Kuwait, which was one of the richest countries in the world, had become the object of his affections.

  Part of Saddam’s argument was that Kuwait had been dumping oil on the world market in such large quantities that it was forcing down the price of Iraqi oil. At that time Iraq was shipping 3.5 million barrels a day, but the price had dropped so much that Saddam estimated he had lost at least $10 billion. He said it was the Kuwaiti’s fault and they would have to pay Iraq the difference.

  The debate escalated to the point that each of the countries involved determined that they would have to send representatives to meet in Saudi Arabia for a conference to air their differences and come to a fair settlement. Saddam decided to send his deputy, Izzat al-Douri. Prince Abdullah would be the representative of the Saudi monarch, King Fahd, and Sheikh Saad would represent his own country, Kuwait. The story of the encounter in Riyadh is striking, to say the least, and the account which follows is what happened as it was related later to me.

  The meeting was set for July 31 and August 1 of 1990. But before Izzat al-Douri left for Riyadh, Saddam spoke to him privately and told him, “Look, Izzat, whatever you do, I don’t want you to accept their offer. No matter what happens, make sure that you find a way to refuse any settlement Sheik Saad offers you.”

  So Izzat al-Douri went to Riyadh with that message firmly planted in his mind, and as soon as the conversation began the first words out of his mouth were, “Sheik Saad, I demand that you pay my government $10 billion in cash.” It was a strange way to begin a discussion, but that’s how it began. There was much discussion and debate, and Al-Douri was asked to explain his demand. But eventually Sheik Saad told him, “Okay, Mr. Al-Douri. I agree to your demand, but we will not pay you $10 billion. We will pay only $9 billion.”

  The Deal Breaker

  That was certainly a lot of money, even for Kuwait. But the reason Sheik Saad refused to pay the full amount had nothing to do with the size of the demand. It had to do with saving face—or the Arab tradition of sukrah, which means that the bargainer was not defeated in the negotiation because he was able to strike a better deal.

  However, Al-Douri refused his offer, because this was exactly what he wanted to happen. He shoved his chair back noisily from the table and said, “Okay, Sheik Saad. If you will not pay the full $10 billion, then I suppose we have your answer. I hope you know that this conversation is now finished and I’m leaving.”

  Prince Abdullah, who was the Saudi crown prince at that time, succeeded his half-brother as king in 2005, and he had been watching everything very closely. When he realized that Izzat al-Douri was going to leave without resolving the matter, he said, “Stop, stop! Please, gentlemen, sit down. If you will give me a moment, I want to speak to His Majesty, the king,” and he made a telephone call to the palace to tell King Fahd what was happening.

  He said, “Majesty, the two parties are agreed that Kuwait should
pay Iraq $10 billion. But Sheik Saad will not pay so much. He will pay only $9 billion. What shall we do?” Without a moment’s hesitation, the king said, “Tell the Iraqi that I will pay the $1 billion, and tell him I will call Saddam Hussein myself this very minute. And I will tell him that an airplane will be on its way to Baghdad within the hour with $1 billion in cash.”

  There was the money that Al-Douri had demanded, nine billion from Kuwait and one billion from Saudi Arabia. Everyone knew this was nothing but extortion by Saddam Hussein, but they didn’t want to give the tyrant any more excuses to cause trouble. Sheik Saad was content, and to seal their agreement he suggested that they all join hands and drink a toast—a glass of juice or tea or whatever was available—to celebrate their success.

  But as they were walking the thirty feet from the meeting room to the table where glasses and beverages had been arranged, Sheik Saad said, “Well, Mr. Al-Douri, I think we are both satisfied now, and it’s finished. But I hope you won’t come back to me six months from now and complain about the borders between our two countries as you’ve done so many times in the past. We are agreed now, and everything is settled between us.”

  He should have known better than to bring up this old dispute, but no doubt those words were just what Al-Douri had been hoping for. He was terrified that he would have to go back to Baghdad and tell Saddam he had accepted the sheik’s offer—especially since Saddam had sent his cousin, the notorious “Chemical Ali,” as a member of the delegation, to observe and report on everything that happened. Izzat al-Douri may have gotten the $10 billion, but Saddam was going to eat him alive. First, Saddam would humiliate him; he would say, “Look, you ice seller! Didn’t I tell you to find a way not to agree with those people? And you’ve disobeyed my orders! Do you know what I do to people who disobey my orders?” But now that conversation would never happen, because Sheik Saad had given Izzat al-Douri the perfect pretext.

  So he said, “Oh, no, Sheik Saad. Please don’t speak to me about borders! That’s another matter altogether. That has nothing to do with this! And you know very well that we must settle the border problem before there will ever be peace between us.”

  Sheik Saad stopped dead in his tracks. He couldn’t believe that Al-Douri was doing this after he and King Fahd had agreed to pay Iraq such a handsome settlement. So he said, “Mr. Al-Douri, what are you saying? We’ve just given you $10 billion to settle this matter, and you still want to argue about borders?”

  Al-Douri shook his head and yelled back at him, “Okay, Sheik Saad, forget about it! I see what you are doing now.” He made himself appear to be very angry, but on the inside he was laughing, knowing that he would now be able to go back and tell Saddam that he had accomplished everything just as he’d been instructed to do. So Izzat al-Douri quickly gathered the members of his delegation and said, “Gentlemen, this meeting is over now, and I’m leaving.” And that was it.

  The meeting finished late in the evening and Izzat al-Douri arrived back in Baghdad sometime after one o’clock on the morning of August 2, 1990. As soon as he stepped down from the plane, the first thing he did was call Saddam at the palace and tell him, “Sir, everything is fine. We didn’t agree.”

  Saddam was delighted, and he said, “Izzat, as always, you are the faithful one. This is very good news, indeed!” Then Saddam put down one telephone and picked up another that was connected to the operations center at the Iraqi base south of Basra, where his field commander, Gen. Hussein al-Majid, was waiting. When Gen. Hussein picked up the phone, Saddam told him, “Hussein, let the boys get in.” That’s all he said, and with those reprehensible words, the invasion of Kuwait began.

  A Pretext for War

  Hussein Kamel Hassan al-Majid was Saddam’s son-in-law, married to his oldest daughter Raghad. Saddam had made him minister of defense, minister of industry, and a half dozen others, including the minister of oil. When he hung up from speaking to the president, Hussein al-Majid reached for the telephone and called the commander of his helicopter squadron. He barked into the phone, “General, how many helicopters did I tell you to have ready?” The commander answered, “One hundred helicopters, sir.” Hussein said, “Are they ready?” And the answer came back, “Yes, sir. They’re ready.” Then Hussein told him, “Let them fly.”

  The commander did have his helicopters and pilots ready, mechanically at least. But he hadn’t anticipated that they would have to fly at night. So in response to Hussein al-Majid’s order to let them fly, he said, “But, sir, not all our pilots are trained for night flying.”

  Hussein’s anger flashed suddenly, and he yelled back, “What do you mean they’re not trained to fly at night? What’s the difference between night and day? I can drive my Mercedes in the nighttime as well as I can in the daytime. So why can’t you fly a helicopter at night?” This is how ignorant this untrained military commander was of operational logistics. He had never held rank higher than a corporal in the army. But because he was Saddam’s son-in-law, he was suddenly a general in charge of an invasion, and he didn’t know the difference between driving a car and flying a helicopter at night.

  Unfortunately, that wasn’t all he didn’t know. He also didn’t know the way to Kuwait. He hadn’t seen the maps and didn’t know which way the pilots were supposed to go. The Iraqi pilots had not been briefed on obstacles they would encounter or when to fly low level and when to go higher and gain altitude. Because they had no idea what was ahead of them, and because they had little or no experience with night flying, we lost forty-seven helicopters and four attack fighters that night.

  Why did we lose them? Because pilots without proper training, briefing, or equipment crossed the border at low level and flew straight into the high tension wires that ran parallel to the Kuwaiti border. Each helicopter was carrying between sixteen and twenty-four commandos, and all of them were lost.

  Another group of helicopters was lost while attempting to locate and destroy the Kuwaiti radio and television station. In each helicopter they had a local guide to show them the way to the station, but these Arabs who knew the way on the ground in daylight had absolutely no idea what they were looking at from a helicopter at night. So they kept circling, looking right, left, up, and down, flying from one place to the next, trying to find the station. Then, as dawn approached, Kuwaiti machine gunners were able to pick them off one by one.

  At least 50 percent of the Iraqi aircraft sent into Kuwait were lost in the first hours of the assault because of the stupidity of our commanders. And the situation on the ground was just as bad. Whenever a modern army prepares for battle, there are supposed to be operational orders—called “ops orders” in military shorthand—that provide details on the route and methods of attack, the types of weapons and equipment to be used, the number of men to be deployed in each area, and clear descriptions of the objectives. And most good plans will also have a Plan B, or an alternate objective, in case the offensive runs into unexpected obstacles or resistance.

  But our ops orders went like this: “Hussein, let the boys get in.” That was it. First, Iraqi jets came and attacked the two airfields so that the Kuwaiti jets couldn’t take off. This was followed by a ground assault led by the Republican Guard. There were four columns of tanks, trucks, and armored personnel carriers (APCs) all jammed up together—thousands of military vehicles— going into Kuwait. The main road was so full of cars, trucks, and tanks that it soon became a huge traffic jam.

  But not all the Kuwaiti pilots were stopped by the bombing. One of them, Staff Colonel Mohammed Mubarak Sultan Mubarak, managed to get one fully armed A-4 Skyhawk off the airfield and onto a service road. By some miracle, he was able to take off and avoid the automatic weapons fire coming at him. Once he was airborne, he immediately attacked all four columns of Iraqi vehicles with anti-tank rockets and machine guns, and before it was over he had destroyed thirty-eight tanks with their carriers, dozens of cars, trucks, and APCs, and killed hundreds of soldiers.

  After that, the Kuwaiti flew to Dhara
n and remained there until the beginning of the air war, on January 17, 1991. Not long after that he was shot down and taken prisoner, and that’s when I met him. When Saddam found out about his actions, he insisted that Col. Mubarak was a war criminal and demanded that he be killed, but I couldn’t help but admire the courage and skill of this brave and resourceful pilot. Even though I was an officer in the Iraqi Air Force, I was impressed by the tenacity of any pilot who refused to be stopped by a damaged runway. After the war, he was released and he returned to his country. From there he went on to serve on the staff of the American commander, Gen. John Abizaid, in Qatar.

  Punish, Pillage, and Destroy

  When the Iraqi forces entered Kuwait, they didn’t just go in, take over the palace, and declare a military victory. Because of the hatred that had been stirred up by Saddam, the soldiers went in as thieves, looters, robbers, and rapists, and they did their best to destroy the whole country. They stole everything they could get their hands on from government buildings, shops, stores, and especially private homes. They took currency, gold, jewels, furniture, clothing, automobiles, personal items, and everything that wasn’t nailed down.

  Furthermore, Saddam had issued an order to the ministers of all departments of the government saying that each of them was to go and confiscate everything they could carry from the Kuwaiti ministry in their area—including everything that was nailed down. In other words, the Iraqi minister of education was to take everything from the Kuwaiti ministry of education— furniture, files, computers, books, financial records, everything. Doctors and dentists did the same, taking operating tables, dentist chairs, hospital beds, and even the bed pans. And they took boxes of Korans from the Islamic Ministry to give to the citizens of Baghdad.