Saddam's Secrets Page 8

  After I rested for a few minutes and savored the congratulations of all the people crowding around me, I was feeling so confident that I told the crew chief I was ready to go up again. But he said, “Sir, there’s no need to go up in that one. The other 21 is fueled and ready, so you can take that one up and see how she flies.” I said, “Good idea.” So I took a few minutes to drink a small glass of strong Arab tea, or stikan as we call it, and then I went back for my second flight of the day.

  Defying the Odds

  The next day, on Sunday, I made two more flights and on Monday two more. By the time I made the first five flights, I had control of the plane. By the sixth, I started playing around. A short time later, they assigned more pilots to our squadron and the Russian instructors were finally allowed back into the country. When they found out that I had flown the MiG-21, the instructors were shocked.

  They said, “How did you do that? No one can fly the MiG-21 without training!” And they asked the base commander why he let a green lieutenant with so little flying time take the controls of a supersonic jet fighter. And when they found out I’d been taking off without using the afterburner, they were doubly shocked. “What! That’s impossible!” they said. “No one should fly a MiG-21 without using the afterburner.”

  Despite all their bluster, the instructors recognized that I was a good pilot, and I think they came to respect me a lot. We became good friends and they taught me about all the things I hadn’t learned from the technicians. In particular, they taught me what to do in case of an emergency. In those first six flights, I hadn’t even considered what to do if something went wrong, and maybe that’s a good thing. I might have been tempted to try something. The shame, of course, is that the commanders only wanted the privilege of boasting that one of our pilots had flown the MiG-21, never thinking that the plane could crash and the pilot would be lost. To them, I might as well have been driving a car—it was as if I had been driving a Buick and they just wanted me to switch to a Pontiac.

  That’s how unrealistic their thinking was. But, thank God, he helped me fly the plane and bring it back in one piece. And because of that very strange request so early in my career, everybody in Iraq knew my name and I became known as the father of the MiG-21. I’m sure much of my later success was inspired by that event, and I was able to continue flying throughout my career, from lieutenant all the way to major general.

  The Revolution of 1968

  The leaders of the Baath Party were unscrupulous men. Al-Bakr and Saddam knew they couldn’t carry off another revolution by themselves, so they just took their time, watching for opportunities to come against Aref and his supporters. Eventually they were able to persuade the chief of military intelligence, Abdurazzaq al-Nayif, the commander of the Republican Guard, Col. Rahman Ibrahim al-Daud, and the commander of the palace guards and armored units, Col. Sadun Ghaidan, to join their cause.

  These three men would prove to be very important to the coup since they were the only ones who could make sure the army did nothing to resist. Saddam was present at those meetings, and it was decided that Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr would be president and Abdurazzaq al-Nayif would be prime minister. Ibrahim al-Daud was selected to serve as minister of defense.

  The revolution took place in the pre-dawn hours of July 17, 1968, when I was the senior duty pilot at Rashid Air Force Base. I was assistant commander of Squadron 11, which was a unit of MiG-21s assigned to protect Baghdad. I was a twenty-eight-year-old captain at the time, but I was the most experienced pilot and I’d been flying the MiG-21s since early 1963. The squadron commander had only recently transitioned from the British Hawker-Hunters and wasn’t nearly as experienced as I was.

  It started out to be a quiet morning, but around 3:00 a.m. six tanks and armored personnel carriers (APCs) pulled up at the front gates of the base. They didn’t threaten to use their weapons, but they ordered the guards to stand aside and drove straight to the base headquarters where I was working. They had been instructed to block the runways so none of our aircraft could take off. They knew that if they put tanks and APCs on the runways, nobody could fly. And they told us that if anyone tried to fly without permission they would shoot them and destroy the airplane.

  I was sitting with a fellow officer, Captain Hamza, a pilot with a squadron of MiG-17s, when the phone rang. Hamza answered it, and it was President Abdel-Rahman Aref on the line. As soon as the president identified himself, Hamza said, “Sir, I need to let you speak to my senior officer, Captain Georges.” And he quickly handed the receiver to me.

  I greeted him: “Yes, sir. This is Captain Georges.” And the president said, “Tell me, Georges, what’s happening at your base?” I said, “Sir, six tanks and APCs entered the base a short time ago and they told us that if anyone tries to fly they’ll shoot the pilot and destroy the plane.” Aref said, “No, no, son. Why should you risk being shot and letting the aircraft be destroyed? Don’t go to the aircraft.”

  Then he said, “Didn’t the air force commander call you?” And I said, “No, sir. No one has called tonight.” So he said, “Okay, I’ll contact the air force commander and he’ll be calling you right away.” So I thanked him and hung up the phone.

  Ten minutes later the phone rang again, and this time it was Major General Jassam Mohammed al-Shahir, the air force commander. He said, “Hello, Georges, how are you?” There were only two squadrons of MiG-21s in the Iraqi Air Force at that time, and they were our best fighters. So General Jassam knew me very well because I was a MiG pilot. He said, “Georges, what’s going on down there?” So I repeated what I’d just told the president, and he said, “Are the soldiers there now?” I said, “Yes, sir, two of the officers are here in the room with me now.” So he said, “Tell them the air force commander is in his office now. If they want to speak to me, tell them to come here. I’m ready to talk to them.”

  The two officers, Warrant Officer Kamel Yassin and Major Daud al-Tikriti, had been watching me as I spoke to the commander. So I signaled with one hand to see if they wanted to speak to the commander. But they signaled back, No, not now! So I said to Gen. Jassam, “Yes, sir, I will tell them what you said.” And Gen. Jassam said, “Okay, Georges, thank you. Now I’m going to have the base commander call you.”

  Heroes of the Revolution

  The base commander was a very famous officer named General Hassan Arem. He was an older officer and a very colorful man, full of great stories, who could keep me laughing for hours. He called about ten minutes later and asked what was going on at the base, so again I repeated the whole story and he said, “Okay, Georges. I’m coming now.” But he never came.

  Later that morning before the sun was up, the phone rang once again and I picked it up. It was Abdurazzaq al-Nayif, who was soon to become the new prime minister. He said, “Hello, who’s speaking?” I said, “This is Captain Sada.” He knew me very well so he greeted me warmly, and then he told me he needed one thing to be done immediately. He said, “Georges, I need a formation of MiG-21s to fly for the revolution.” I said, “What do you mean, sir? What do you want them to do?”

  “You know,” he said, “make a nice formation and fly over the city of Baghdad so everyone can see that the air force and the army are with us.” I said, “Yes, sir. I understand. But, sir,” I added cautiously, “these pilots are new guys and they’ve never flown the MiG-21 in formation before. Will it be okay if I do it by myself?”

  He said, “Oh, no, Georges. We want a nice formation to fly over the city.” At that point I knew he was serious, so I said, “Okay, sir. Somehow we’ll manage to do it.”

  I had two guys, Lt. Shihab Ahmad and Lt. Mohammed Abdulaziz, who had flown with me before, but they were inexperienced in flying the 21s in formation. It takes practice and experience to know how to hold position in a fly-over. Also, the pilot needs to know how to key in on his leader and keep his eyes open any time he’s flying at low altitude over a big city. There was no telling on that day who might want to take a shot at us. So I was a bit nervo
us about the whole thing.

  Furthermore, I didn’t know who might be in charge when we returned to the base for landing. I knew that Abdurazzaq al-Nayif had been the chief of intelligence, so he spoke for the government. The two officers who had come to the headquarters during the night, and who were still there, were both members of the Baath Party. So I wondered, Are all these guys in it together? Do they all want us to fly in formation over the city? Or will they kill us the first chance they get?

  I considered the options and finally decided it was best to obey a military order and fly the formation. But I also decided we wouldn’t use aircraft that were armed. Most of the time the MiG-21s were armed with missiles and rockets, but I thought it would be much better for a demonstration flight not to have dangerous weapons on board. No one would know whether they were armed or not, of course, but with inexperienced pilots, this would be safer.

  I gave both pilots, who were young lieutenants, careful instructions on the maneuvers we were going to fly and I told them that they were to follow my explicit commands. When we took off, we got into formation to fly over the city and I switched my radio over to Radio Baghdad on the civilian band to hear what was being said. As we came in over the river, from west to east, the announcer was telling everyone to look up and watch the heroes of the air force flying for the revolution. They wanted everybody to know that the military supported the coup.

  But as soon as I heard that announcement, I heard another click on the military frequency, meaning that someone else was flying nearby. It wasn’t one of my young pilots, so I said, “Hello, who’s there? Who’s in the air?” I didn’t know if it was going to be friend or foe, so I repeated the challenge again, a little louder: “Who’s flying? Please identify yourself!”

  Finally, on the second try someone responded, “Who is that?” I replied, “Who are you?” And he said, “Who are you?” This was going nowhere. This guy was afraid to identify himself. I was in a MiG-21, the fastest plane in the sky so I didn’t need to worry, whoever it was. So I decided to identify myself. I said, “This is Captain Georges Sada, flying out of . . .” and before I could even finish the sentence he came back on and said, “Hello, Georges, how are you? This is Lieutenant Colonel Hamid Shaiban.”

  Hamid was a good friend. He was the base commander at Habbaniya and very much my senior officer. But I said, “Hello, sir. Thank you very much, but I had not been told there was another formation in the air. Will you go and land please?” He must have known this was a serious matter, because he didn’t argue with me. He was a Tikriti, and he had been told to fly by Al-Bakr. That made two formations, one from the Baath Party and one from the air force, but Colonel Hamid was only too happy to land.

  We finished our flight and circled the city one last time. Just for fun I made a low-level pass over my house in Al Mansour, just to let my wife and family know it was me, and then we returned to base. Altogether, we were up for about an hour. But before landing, I took a good look around the airfield, because in a situation like that you never know when someone might jump out and start shooting at you. The best jet fighter in the world is helpless on the ground—anyone with an AK-47 can ruin your day. But I didn’t see any problems, so we landed and as soon as we shut off the engines people came running out to greet us. They wanted to thank us for the fly-over, and they were cheering like we were the heroes of the revolution.

  Later we learned that the revolution took place without a single shot fired. There was no resistance. Today they call the 1968 coup the White Revolution because of that. The army and the air force supported the coup, and the only thing that changed was that we had a new president and a new air force commander. And our base commander, General Arem, was replaced as well. That’s why he never got back to me.

  The next time I saw General Arem was more than ten years later, after I had become a general myself. When he saw me he came over and gave me a warm greeting, but I looked him in the eye and said, “Sir, in 1968 you said you were coming to the headquarters to see me, and I’m still waiting for you!” He said, “Okay, stop it, Georges! You know what happened.” Indeed, I did.

  Treachery and Deceit

  The Revolution of 1968 only happened because three high-ranking officers and a common thug were persuaded to go along with Al-Bakr and Al-Nayif to carry out the coup. One commanded the palace guard, the second was with the republican army, the third was the chief intelligence officer, and Saddam Hussein came like a gangster. So why did these men agree to cooperate? Because the leaders of the Baath Party knew they couldn’t do it without the intelligence service and the Republican Brigades. For any of these groups to try to take over the government without the others would have been suicide. None of them knew it at the time, but for men of such stature to join forces with a villain like Saddam was sheer madness.

  They knew the kind of man he was, but they were hungry for power and didn’t stop to consider what could happen in the future. Abdel-Salam Aref had been president, but his helicopter was shot down and burned. After that, his brother, Abdel-Rahman Aref was able to succeed him. But it was clear from the first that he was not the right man for the job. He was a gentleman and a good man, but he was also a weak man and totally unprepared for the demands of such a job in a place like Iraq.

  So Saddam made a deal with the Republican Guard, and that’s the real background of the coup of 1968. The problem was that these groups were all very different, with different plans and ideas, and it was going to be impossible for them to work together. Saddam saw this weakness as his chance to make a move, so he stepped up and took command. On the thirtieth of July, just thirteen days after the first coup, he overthrew his own allies, making Al-Bakr the president and himself the deputy.

  There was an attempt to stage a counter coup at the time. If it had succeeded, the history of Iraq would be very different. But, sadly, it didn’t happen. Gen. Ibrahim al-Ansari, who was not a member of the party, was the chief of staff. He was a good man and he could see that Saddam and his allies were going to be a disaster for Iraq, so he went secretly to Hardan al-Tikriti, who had recently been the air force commander but was named minister of defense in the new government, and he said, “Now’s the time to catch these guys and get rid of them.” He said, “I only need three battalions from my brigade and I will catch Saddam, Al-Bakr, and all the others. We will make a much better system, but now is the time to act.”

  Hardan, who was a Tikriti and a Baathi, was a friend of Al-Ansari, and I believe he agreed with the idea. But he was suspicious and he feared that Saddam and Al-Bakr were just using Al-Ansari to test his loyalty and to trap him in a plot. He thought, I’m afraid that if I say yes to this plan, it will turn out to be a trick and Bakr and Saddam will come after me. So what he decided to do was to prove his loyalty by going to Saddam and saying, “Ibrahim al-Ansari came to me secretly, and he asked me to help him stage a counter coup against you, but I didn’t want to do that.” This came as a complete surprise to Saddam. He had not been plotting with Al-Ansari, but because of his own fear and suspicion, Hardan al-Tikriti made the biggest mistake of his life. And, ultimately, it would cost him his own.

  At that point, Ansari’s plot was uncovered and Saddam fired him as chief of staff. But they didn’t like Hardan al-Tikriti any better. Whenever there was a cabinet meeting, Hardan and Saddam would often get into big arguments. Even though he was a party man, Hardan was not like them—he was not as venal or corrupt as they were—so first they retired him from the army and brought up Gen. Shanshal, who was weak and pliable, to be chief of staff of the army.

  Next they sent Hardan into exile in London, then they made him ambassador to Sweden and were well rid of him for a while. But Hardan didn’t like being out of the picture, so he went to Kuwait where he tried to stir up a coup against Al-Bakr and Saddam. When Saddam found out that he was there, he called the Iraqi ambassador to Kuwait and told him to find Hardan and shoot him, and that’s exactly what happened.

  The Nuclear Threat

&nbs
p; No sooner had the 1968 coup ended than Saddam began thinking about how he could get rid of the next group and increase his own power. Abdurazzaq al-Nayif, Sadun Ghaidan, and Ibrahim al-Daud were still there, but on July 30, 1968, Saddam went to the office of Prime Minister Al-Nayif with a gun and told him he was taking over. He said, “Either I will kill you now or you’re finished. Choose the place you want to travel to.”

  Al-Nayif looked at Saddam with sadness and surprise in his eyes, and he said, “Saddam, why are you doing this?” But Saddam only said, “Don’t talk much. It’s over.” Saddam’s people were already calling Al Muthana Airport where they kept a large Russian-made plane called the Ukraina, which was an Antonov-12, and they told them to prepare to take the prime minister wherever he wanted to go. He chose London.

  On that day, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr became the president, prime minister, and minister of defense, and Saddam Hussein was his deputy. Just imagine how quickly it all happened: on the seventeenth of July, 1968, they carried out a successful coup. Less than two weeks later, on the thirtieth of July, Saddam walked into the office of Prime Minister Abdurazzaq al-Nayif, pointed a gun at his head, and told him he was finished. Saddam’s henchmen drove Al-Nayif to the airport and put him on the plane to London, where, not long afterward, he was assassinated in the streets by his own military attaché—at the order of Saddam.

  Saddam knew exactly what he was doing. He wasn’t satisfied to be merely the deputy to Al-Bakr; however, he still needed time to put his plans together. So he took his time and let Al-Bakr remain in charge for a while. Al-Bakr served as general secretary of the Baath Party and Saddam was his deputy, but Saddam was actually in charge of everything. After a while he told the president that he needed to have military rank in order to manage the affairs of government, so they made him a four-star general and even gave him the red ribbon of a Staff College graduate, which was a shock to many who had earned that ribbon legitimately.