Saddam's Secrets Read online

  In 1964, in the middle of much confusion and uncertainty in Iraq, I received word that I had been selected for advanced training in night flying, instrument flying, and bad-weather flying. But I was doubly surprised when I found out that I was going to Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, to get my instructor’s rating, and to work with some of the best trainers in the world. Randolph is connected to Lackland Air Force Base, and those two installations were widely recognized at the time as having the most advanced pilot training in the world.

  Not only was I glad to be getting away from the mayhem in Iraq for a while, but it was a great honor to be allowed to go to the United States to take advanced instrument training. I’d learned a lot during my basic flight instruction in Russia, and the hours I’d already logged in the MiGs would soon prove to be very important. But the thought of going to America for my instrument rating was the best news I could have gotten.

  By the mid-1960s, relations were getting somewhat better between Iraq and America, and I was able to go to school over there with a double salary—I not only received my regular officer’s pay from the Iraqi government, but I also got a nice stipend with flight pay from the American government. So I was well paid during my time in Texas, and that made it possible for me to see and do a lot of interesting things while I was there.

  The first thing I had to do, however, was to gain the acceptance of my fellow officers. As it turned out, I was the only student pilot from the Middle East, and most of these guys had never met an Iraqi before. They were convinced I couldn’t tell one end of a jet fighter from the other. A few of them teased me, asking if I’d left my tent back home in the desert, and some of them called me “Camel Jockey” behind my back. This surprised me because I had never ridden a camel.

  But one day the chief flight instructor called me into his office and said he wanted to check me out in one of the new trainers. There were planes at the base, including the T-38 Talon and the T-39 Saberliners that were being used by the air force and navy. I’d never flown either of those planes before, but I was pretty sure I could handle it. So I told him I’d love to go up with him. The next day when I reported for duty, he had a dual-seat trainer warming up on the flight line, so we both put on our flight suits and helmets and climbed aboard.

  The instructor handled the takeoff, and once he got her up to a good altitude, he started showing me the controls and gauges, pointed out how the lights and instruments worked, and then he made sure I knew about the canopy controls and the ejection system. I was sure I had a good grasp of all that, so after about ten minutes I said, “Sir, I think I’ve got it. Can I have control?” I guess he thought I was being a bit hasty—after all, to him and the others I was still the unproven camel jockey—so he asked if I was sure I was ready, and I told him I was.

  At that point he let go of the stick and said, “She’s all yours.” That’s all I needed to hear. For the first couple of minutes, I made a series of banks and turns, getting used to the controls, and I increased and decreased speed to get a feel for the way she accelerated. Before long I was sure I had it down and I asked the instructor if I could go ahead and try a few maneuvers. He said, “Are you sure?” Again, I said, “Yes, sir, I’m sure.”

  Making an Impression

  The trainer we were flying was a very good airplane, but, honestly, I could have run circles around it in my MiG-21F. With all due respect for the plane and the pilot, however, I made a few turns and banks to get the feel of it, and then I proceeded to put that airplane through her paces. First I took her into a steep dive followed by a gentle climb and a series of hard-left turns and a roll at the end.

  Each maneuver was a little faster than the one before, and it gave us a strong gravitational pull, which was something else I needed to experience in that airplane. At that point I took her into another dive and leveled out into a slow roll and turned back to the right. It was a good ride, and the plane handled perfectly. But after about fifteen minutes, the instructor keyed his headset and told me, “Okay, Georges, take us home.”

  As we approached the airfield, I was sure the instructor would be expecting to take the controls and bring her in, so I said, “Sir, if it’s okay with you, I’d like to do the landing.” He hesitated briefly but gave me the go ahead, and I made the approach and touched down very nicely. Then I just taxied back to the same spot on the flight line that we’d left from. As soon as we stepped down from the cockpit onto the tarmac, the young officer nodded his head toward the headquarters building and said, “Follow me.”

  That’s all. No word of satisfaction or disappointment. Just, “Follow me.” For a minute I wasn’t sure if I’d passed or flunked, but once we got inside the building he led me down the hall to the commander’s office, tapped on the door, and then both of us went in and reported to the commanding officer. Looking over at me, the flight instructor said, “Sir, this man can fly. He just took me on one hell of a ride, and I can tell you, we’ve got nothing to worry about with this guy.” Then he reached over and shook my hand and said, “Georges, welcome to Texas.” It was such a great feeling to be accepted so quickly, and in that way. And that was only the beginning of seven incredible months in America.

  By the time I got back to Iraq at the end of my training, I discovered that I’d been transferred to a new squadron that was just being formed to fly the new MiG-21FL. These planes were faster, more powerful, and much more sophisticated technically than even the 21F I’d been flying.

  The Tactics of a Monster

  It was after the revolution of July 17, 1968, that Saddam began moving up in the party. He still had very little power, but it was clear that he was making his move. His job at the time was that of chief bodyguard to president Al-Bakr. But because of his efficiency and determination, he rose quickly and before long Al-Bakr named Saddam as his deputy.

  This was all the encouragement Saddam needed, and soon he demanded to be given officer’s rank in the army. A short time later he was appointed to the rank of four-star general without ever having served a single day in the military. Career officers like me were required to attend the National Staff College for three years and pass a rigorous set of examinations before they earned the rank of a field grade officer—meaning major or higher. But Saddam became a four-star general overnight, with no effort at all.

  By this time, most of us knew that Saddam was a brutal and treacherous man. He had a hair-trigger temper and wouldn’t think twice about killing you if you got in his way. This made him very useful during the revolution, but it also made him very dangerous to both his friends and his allies. Everybody was afraid of him. He killed for nothing, and he collected people who were loyal to him and kept meticulous notes on those he distrusted. He started his climb to power in the Intelligence Service, which is known as the Mukhabbarat in Iraq. This was a mostly secret division of government that was styled on the order of the KGB in Russia.

  Mukhabbarat actually means Civil Intelligence, although they didn’t call it that at the time. They gave it the more innocent sounding name of Public Affairs. And in that capacity Saddam was able to bring in all sorts of thugs and gangsters to help him carry out his plans. And he had big plans.

  In America, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is not allowed to spy on private citizens. If they suspect that foreign terrorists or spies are operating within the country, they can go to a federal judge and get specific permission to conduct covert surveillance, but there are strict limits on the intelligence services in the United States. In my country, however, that was not the case until recently. Especially under Saddam, the government could spy on anyone, anytime, and anywhere. And believe me, they did it with a passion.

  Part of the problem since the liberation of Iraq in 2003, in fact, has been that many Iraqis who grew up under the old regime want to revert to those tactics. They want the government to be able to spy on private citizens. I have a role in the new defense ministry now, and one of the things I have to keep telling people is that those old
cloak-and-dagger procedures are no longer legal. They’re against the law. We’re not permitted to spy on our own people any longer, and if there’s to be law enforcement in the country, then the police will have to handle it.

  But no such restrictions were there to hamper Saddam Hussein, and he wouldn’t hesitate to spy on anyone, or to order the execution of his political enemies. On one occasion, Saddam called me in to his office with Gen. Adnan Khairalla, who was minister of defense. He said, “Look, Georges, if my sons Uday and Qusay step one millimeter over the line and don’t behave exactly as I want them to, I won’t hesitate to chop off their heads.” That was his first sentence to me, and that tells you the type of obedience he demanded.

  He recognized no restrictions on his authority, and he would take drastic measures with anybody, any time, whether they were Sunni or Shia, Tikriti or non-Tikriti, Arab or non-Arab, man or woman, adult or child. Saddam would never hesitate to punish anyone who stepped over the line or who refused to obey him. When he threatened Al-Bakr and forced him to step down, there was a strong negative reaction by some high-ranking members of the Baath Party. They said, “Why should Saddam Hussein be in power? Why shouldn’t we vote for a new leader instead of just letting Saddam take over with a gun?”

  When Saddam heard about those comments, he brought all the members of the party to a large auditorium in downtown Baghdad. When he arrived, everyone was in their seats, but Saddam lit a big cigar and casually began calling each of those dissenters by name, sending them outside where they were executed by their own party members. And some of them were killed in the most dreadful ways you can imagine. Actually, they were killed in ways you could probably never imagine because his tactics were so evil. I’ve never heard of anything like this anywhere else in the world in my lifetime, except in my own country.

  Years later, a film re-creation was made of those events, and even knowing how and why it happened can’t lessen the feeling of revulsion I get whenever I’ve seen it. Some of the men he killed that day were members of the central committee of the Baath Party. I knew many of them, and they were all very capable, intelligent, and distinguished people. But he had them killed systematically, one by one. When they stepped outside, the Mukhabbarat were already waiting for them. Saddam didn’t actually know if the names he called out had said anything bad about him. But, as he said to me, if he thought that at some time they had stepped even one millimeter over the line, he wouldn’t think twice about chopping off their heads.

  Internal Corruption

  In this way Saddam screened out anyone who could make trouble for him in the future. He was a genius at doing evil, and he gathered around him a large group of men who had gone to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and East Germany to learn the most efficient methods for eliminating one’s political enemies. I met some of those men. They were little better than savages who had gone to Russia to learn how to interrogate prisoners and get every last bit of information out of them before killing them. They were trained how to use some of the most diabolical forms of torture ever devised. And they wouldn’t think twice about using them.

  Even if there were no other reason to drive Saddam from power and change the regime in Iraq, that would be reason enough. His brutal repression of dissent, his murders and torture of political opponents, his barbaric treatment of the good and innocent people of Iraq, and his manipulation of people, turning one against the other for his own political advantage—these were clearly the work habits of a monster. And, thanks to America and her allies in the coalition, we are finally rid of that monster today. It’s true he had weapons of mass destruction, and he used them. But there was something even worse than WMDs—the mind of Saddam himself.

  With so much evil inside his head and so much wealth in his hands, God only knows what he would have done if the Americans had not come in and stopped him.

  The decision to remove Saddam was the right thing to do. It was done at the right time and, I believe, in the right way. If you only hear what the news media say about the situation in Iraq, you would probably get the impression that nothing is going right and that the decision to use military force was a bad one. But this is not true. Many things are going very well now, but I’ve never heard anyone on the evening news saying that the new government is doing well. No one is telling you that we’ve built 12,500 new schools, that we have electricity and telephones again, and that roads and other infrastructure are being rebuilt better than before. No one is telling you that teachers, who were earning less than $3.00 a month under Saddam, are now being paid $350 or more a month, which is a respectable living wage in Iraq.

  Several years ago, teachers in Iraq were very well paid. They could afford to travel in the summer and take trips abroad. They could afford to give little gifts to their students. When my wife was a teacher, I used to go with her to the shops in Baghdad to buy presents for the children who were earning high marks in her classes. But when the inflation was so bad, teachers had to ask their students for food—they would ask those from well-off families to bring them an egg, a potato, a tomato, or whatever they could spare from home. Teachers are the most numerous profession in Iraq, with nearly a million men and women at all levels, and this large group of people was forced to beg for food.

  Under Saddam, the entire system was corrupt, and the military was the most corrupt of all. For example, if a soldier wanted to go on leave, he would have to bribe his commander to let him go. Seven days leave might cost him two-hundred dollars. Or if a soldier wanted to transfer to another base, to be closer to his family, his commander could demand that he pay him five-hundred dollars or more. The whole system was corrupt, and everybody knew it. In time our people became artists at using bribes and corruption to get whatever they wanted.

  There have always been certain people who would demand bribes and kickbacks, but in Iraq this became the rule. If you went to the police, you had to give them a bribe to get help. If you went to the post office to mail a package, you had to give the teller a bribe. Even if you only wanted to pay your electric bill, you had to pay a bribe. If you couldn’t afford it, you’d have to go stand in line for two or three hours, or perhaps longer, to transact even the simplest business.

  We’re not beyond that entirely, even now, but it’s getting better. The problem is that Iraq now has a very young government. And in some ways you can say that we’re a young nation. The government is young and our military is young, but also the average age in Iraq is very young—around fifteen to sixteen years of age. Even the parents of our young people have never known any other way of life.

  Fear, anger, suspicion, and corruption is all they’ve ever known. And the idea that you must distrust everyone and cheat in order to get ahead is embedded in their consciousness. So the question now is, how do you change the habits of people who have known no other way of life? I believe it can be done, and it’s happening, little by little. But it’s a slow process. The miracle is that it’s happening at all.

  Working for Change

  I recall one day shortly before the war, in 2002, when I was in my office in Baghdad, and we were visited by two young women. One of them was from Sweden and the other from Holland, and they had come to Iraq as reporters for the Christian organization they worked for in Europe. They came to my church, and since I served as president of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Iraq, I had agreed to meet with them. They were asking about Christians in our country, and they especially wanted to know about prisoners of war coming back from Iran.

  They had spent several days looking around the country, and this was the last day before they returned to Europe, so they still had several questions for which they needed answers. One of the young women said, “General, I will tell you one thing. We visited hospitals and families all over this country. We visited soldiers, former prisoners of war, and many others, and we think that the whole population of Iraq should be in the hospital, because everybody here is sick.”

  Those words really struck a nerve, but I said, “Y
ou know, I agree with you. And even the man who is speaking to you now is sick. We will need a miracle to change the lives of these people, or at least a prophet who can speak to them and change their hearts.” That’s not to say that good things aren’t happening in Iraq today, because they are. But nothing can change the hearts of the people overnight. Neither Prime Minister Al Jaafari nor Dr. Ayad Alawi nor President Jalal Talabani could change them immediately. None of us has a magic wand. It will take time and good influences from abroad, I believe, to help us accomplish so much. Our needs are simply too great for change to come in a day. But, God willing, change will come.

  One day after liberation in 2003, an American official came to me and said he wanted to find out about the condition of the police in Iraq. At that time our records indicated that we had approximately 150,000 police on the payroll in the country. But he wanted to see how many were actually showing up for work on any given day. So we did an exhaustive study and found out that there were, at most, thirty-seven to forty-thousand policemen ready for duty. The rest were based on falsified employment records. Someone—or more likely a group of someones—was stealing all that money. As I said, the Iraqi people had become experts in finding ways to cheat the system. They had no loyalty and felt no guilt, and that’s perhaps the worst part of all.

  For many months there have been stories about the terrorist attacks on police stations in Iraq, and in most cases scores of policemen are killed or wounded, and many more just run away. You have to ask yourself, how can this happen? A half dozen terrorists come to a police station and shoot ten or twenty police officers. They blow the place up and set it on fire, and immediately all the policemen run away and hide. So then the same terrorists go on to the next police station and do the same thing, again and again, maybe five or ten more times. What’s going on? How can five or six terrorists be so powerful that they can shut down the entire police force of Baghdad or Karbala or Ramadi?