Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Mossad had made one previous attempt itself, in November 1992. Its agents in Iraq had discovered that Saddam was planning to visit one of his several mistresses, who lived near Tikrit. The agents had learned that Saddam intended to arrive around dusk at the woman’s home. Next day, he would visit a military base close by before flying back to Baghdad. In the estimated fifteen minutes between leaving the woman’s villa and reaching the air base, Saddam could be vulnerable to attack.

Under the personal control of General Amiram Levine, at the time the deputy director of Mossad, the plan to kill Saddam was approved by Israel’s then prime minister, Benyamin Netanyahu. Code named Skah Atad, the assassination team trained for weeks in the Negev Desert.

Details of the operation offer an insight into the thoroughness of the planning. The Mossad kidon team would be supported by forty hand-picked members of Israel’s Special Forces Unit 262—burned into Israel’s memory as the one that in 1976 rescued the hostages from Entebbe airport in Uganda, where they were being held by terrorists who had hijacked their passenger plane.

Using two Hercules C-130 aircraft, the assassins would fly into Iraq below radar range. On the ground they would divide. The kidon would move to within two hundred meters of the route Saddam would travel from his mistress’s villa to the air base. The main group would wait about six miles away, equipped with a special Mossad-developed radar-controlled missile, code named Midras, Hebrew for “footstep.”

The kidon team was to target Saddam and open fire on his car. At the same time one of the assassins was to signal the missile team to fire from the precise coordinates the kidon would provide—and destroy the vehicle.

But Ariel Sharon, then foreign minister, and Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai had ordered the operation canceled because the risks of failure were too high.

Now, almost a decade later, supported by Washington, there was no such hesitation in trying to kill Saddam.

Each morning as the creeping gray ended and another day began—the moment Saddam Hussein’s mother had taught him was the “first dawn”—a truck drove to one of his palaces, in which the country’s self-appointed president for life would have spent another secure night.

The truck contained live lobsters, fresh shrimps, and sides of fresh lamb and beef, all fat had been trimmed from the meat. There was a variety of yogurts and cheeses, and a special favorite of Saddam Hussein’s, olives picked from Syria’s Golan Heights. He likes to spit out the pips, “the way I will one day spit out the Israelis from their land,” he once said to his former chief of intelligence, General Wafic Samarai.

Later, when he fell out of favor, the spymaster had fled for his life, walking for forty hours to escape through the north of Iraq into Turkey. Samarai was lucky. Most of those who crossed Saddam Hussein were killed by methods that surpassed the torture chambers of ancient times. Samarai’s input to the plan to kill Saddam was fed into the Mossad computers.

While the sixty-five-year-old Saddam still slept, perhaps in the arms of another young girl selected by his Republican Guards to satisfy his voracious sexual needs, the truck was unloaded.

In each palace were stationed scientists from the country’s nuclear arms program. They worked in a restricted area in the basement of a palace. Access to it was only through swipe cards, whose codes changed every day. In the basement was a suite housing a powerful hospital-style X-ray machine. The scientists X-rayed each item of food. They were looking for any sign of whether it had been poisoned or exposed to previous radiation.

When nothing suspicious was detected, the food passed on to further checks. Chefs took a small portion: a morsel of lobster or fish, a sliver of meat, a nibble of cheese, a small spoonful of yogurt. Food that needed cooking was prepared. Then all the items were tastefully arranged for the waiting tasters. They were selected from some of the untold legions of prisoners in Iraq’s jails.

Watched by members of Al Himaya, Saddam’s personal bodyguards, each prisoner swallowed and displayed his open mouth to the bodyguards. The tasters were then observed for an hour to ensure they had not been poisoned. Next they were taken to a lab to have blood drawn. This was tested to make sure there was no trace of radiation in what they had digested. The prisoners were then taken to a courtyard in the palace and shot—usually with a single bullet to the back of the head.

The gunshots were a signal for Saddam Hussein that his breakfast, and the other meals he would eat during the day, were safe to consume.

This chilling ritual was one of many that governed his life.

Whichever woman shared his bed overnight was dismissed. Her fate, like those of so many others forced to sleep with him, was a matter of conjecture. Alone, Saddam made his way to his private swimming pool. For him a number of laps was an important exercise to strengthen his spinal cord. Some years before he had undergone surgery for a slipped disk. He swam naked, watched only by his bodyguards. From them there were no secrets about his physical infirmities. He had a limp, in public he would walk only a few steps before pausing. For a man so muscular in uniform, he had a belt of fatty tissue around his lower abdomen.

Swim over, there was another essential ritual to the start of his day. His barber, who traveled everywhere with him, arrived to trim Saddam’s mustache and touch up the black dye in his hair. The chemicals used in the process came from Paris, each bottle had been tested to ensure it contained no lethal agent. His hair uniformly tinted to hide any trace of gray, his nails were then buffed and manicured with a colorless polish.

Then his personal dresser took over. Saddam’s uniform was custom-made, cut to emphasize the musculature of his body. His biceps and strong thighs were the result of those early teenage years when he went camel racing. His jacket was tailored to disguise the spreading waistline he had failed to halt despite periods of strict dieting.

These vanities were in a man who was irritated by the way his wife of forty years, Sajida, allowed her hennaed hair to be less than perfect and whose body was matronly.

His physical needs attended to, Saddam Hussein was ready for another day. No one could deny his capacity for work. A twelve- to fourteen-hour day of meetings was not unusual. At the end of each session he would take a small nap in a room adjoining the office. Thirty minutes later he could be back at the top of a conference table ready to plunge himself into a new round of discussions.

Each meeting began the same way. Saddam studied an executive summary of the reports that had been prepared. Sometimes he would ask to see the full report for closer examination. No one around the table knew which report would be chosen for scrutiny. If the summary did not match the full report, he would closely question the writers of both. He then displayed a harsh, inquisitorial manner. He was a natural bully.

Every few hours—wherever he was—his closest aides knew they must arrange for him to be near water a fountain, an indoor waterfall, a flowing stream. Water is a symbol of wealth and power in the desert land of Iraq. In Saddam’s personal milieu—his social relations, the customs and culture in which he was raised—water is a prerequisite. In all his personal offices—no one knows how many there were scattered around Baghdad and beyond—there was always the sound of cascading water on a background disc.

It was Saddam’s obsession with personal violence that was the most terrifying side to his multifaceted personality. He had become obsessed with the dynamics of creating pain, spending countless hours reviewing the videos of those he had tortured and then executed. The methods of killing ranged from a victim being buried alive, to a specialty Saddam learned from the Taliban: a long nail was driven through a victim’s ear into his brain. His torture chambers were reputed to contain effigies made of wood and iron in which a victim was confined. The hollow effigies contained spikes positioned so as to penetrate the victim’s body. Strangulation and being buried alive in the desert were fates reserved for those for whom he had decided hanging was too quick.