Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

From time to time, the interrogators asked questions they knew Saddam could not answer. What was going on in Washington and London in the run-up to the Iraqi war? Where was he on a certain date? When he could not answer, he would be accused of covering up.

“After a while, a question will be slipped in that he can answer. If the interrogators have done their groundwork properly, he will be glad to answer it. Then the questions will move to other questions they want him to answer,” said Koubi.

“Another means to break him would be to offer simple inducements. If Saddam answered a series of questions, he would be promised uninterrupted sleep. And possibly a change in his carefully monitored diet. But always the promises would not be quite kept. And followed by more promises that if he continued to cooperate, they would be fulfilled,” explained Koubi.

In January 2004, he was visited by an International Red Cross team of doctors. They pronounced he was being fairly treated.

The deadly mind games would continue until the interrogators and specialists were satisfied that no more could be wrung out of Saddam Hussein. Then he would be left to his fate. More, he would know by then, he could not expect.

Meanwhile, Mossad had joined other intelligence services in the hunt for Saddam’s missing fortune. By January 2004, Meir Dagan’s team of financially trained agents, some of whom had worked in the City of London and Wall Street before joining the service, had established that the Queen of England’s banker, Coutts of London, was one of eighteen British banks Saddam Hussein had used to hide his $40 billion fortune over the 1980s.

The bulk of that money was stolen by him from the central bank of Iraq, transferred to banks in the Middle East, and then deposited under false names in the London banks. Later, the money was transferred to banks in Switzerland, Germany, Japan, and Bulgaria.

“Any transfer coming from a London bank was assumed to be legitimate,” said Christopher Story, a former financial adviser to British prime minister Margaret Thatcher at the time Saddam was salting away his fortune. Story, the quintessential English gentleman in his pin-striped Savile Row suits and customized shoes, is a recognized authority on the financial duplicity of the Iraqi leader, and his once close relationship with the major banks of the world. A clippedvoiced Englishman, Story edits a respected financial banking journal, the International Currency Review . Its subscribers include the World Bank, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, and the Bank of England.

Story has amassed documentation showing that Robert Maxwell, the disgraced tycoon who once owned the London Daily Mirror newspaper group, arranged for billions of dollars to be laundered through Bulgarian banks to the Bank of New York. It was then owned by Edmund Safra, known as “financier to the mafia.” He died in a mysterious fire in his Monaco penthouse in 1999. Maxwell was killed by Mossad agents when he threatened to reveal Israel’s intelligence secrets.

“If Saddam gives up all the names of those who helped him, it would cause panic greater than any Wall Street crash. Many still hold high office today. It is impossible that they did not know what was going on with Saddam. He was moving out huge sums of money right up until the eve of war,” said Story.

Until now untold, the story of how Saddam Hussein began to amass one of the world’s largest private fortunes began when a private jet took off from London to Baghdad in 1982. During the five-hour flight from London, its solitary passenger, financier Tiny Rowland, spooned beluga caviar into his mouth and sipped vintage Krug champagne. That was his regular diet on a business trip in his Learjet. The delicacies had been sent from Baghdad by Saddam Hussein.

This was no ordinary journey on that summer’s day in 1982, even for the sixty-eight-year-old financier with a fearsome reputation as a predator in the City of London, on Wall Street, and on the stock markets of Europe. Sitting in his hand-tooled tan leather armchair on board his customized jet, feet resting on a $150-a-square-foot carpet, Roland W. Rowland—the name on his gold-embossed business cards—had indeed come a long way from where he had been born in 1917 in a British prison camp in India.

He was the son of a German trader called Fritz Fuhrop. His mother was the daughter of a pillar of the English Raj who had followed her husband into internment. Following their release after the end of World War I, Rowland’s Indian nanny had called him “Tiny.” Even though he would grow to be six feet tall, the nickname stuck. Now it was the only link with his past—those days when he had dug latrines for the British army in World War II and later was a porter at Paddington railway station in London.

Those humble beginnings had fed his determination to join the ranks of the rich and powerful. He sold secondhand cars and refrigerators in postwar London. By the time he was thirty, he was a millionaire. He began to trade in gold in South Africa. His fortune grew. He was hired to “sort out” an ailing company called the London and Rhodesia Mining and Land Corporation—Lonhro. Rowland made it the single most powerful trading company in all Africa. His deals in copper, tin, and other metals made him the darling of Lonhro stockholders.

They did not suspect how Rowland had paid off Lord Duncan Sandys, Winston Churchill’s son-in-law. Using a secret account in the Cayman Islands, Rowland had given the peer $500,000 for helping to buy the largest gold mine in Ghana. When Duncan Sandys became mired in sexual scandal, the prudish Rowland cut him dead—refusing to send “even a bunch of flowers” to his funeral in 1987. No one, however rich and well connected, was allowed to implicate Tiny Rowland. He treasured his image as the quintessential Englishman. Only in the confines of a small circle of right-wing friends did he reveal his anti-Semitism and contempt for the way Britain was being run.

Already a multimillionaire, Tiny Rowland allowed his hatred for socialism to surface during the British crisis with Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) over its determination to challenge the Wilson government over self-rule. Sanctions had been introduced against what Prime Minister Harold Wilson called “this pariah state.” It later emerged that Rowland broke them. But by then Mrs. Thatcher was in Downing Street and the matter was not pursued.

Tiny looked for new fields to conquer. He bought the Observer, a London Sunday newspaper, and tried to use it to support his business interests in Africa. Next he enlisted the notorious Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi to broker a deal with Colonel Gadhafi to buy the Metropole hotel chain for $150 million.

Rowland’s ability to use anybody to further his own interests had earlier led Britain’s then prime minister Ted Heath to castigate him as the “unacceptable face of capitalism.” Tiny Rowland shrugged that off in the same imperious way he dismissed other financiers who came to him with deals. He preferred to work alone, to share his profits with no one—except his Siamese cats. Every day he fed them the same fine caviar that he ate on his Learjet as it headed for Iraq on that June day in 1982. They had curled up at his feet as he worked at his desk preparing his greatest coup yet—hiding Saddam’s fortune.

When Saddam came to power, his pro-West sympathies were welcomed in London and Washington. Their governments, along with those of France and Germany, saw the need to reinforce Iraq’s infrastructure against the looming threat posed by Iran. Baghdad became a vast bazaar. Massive bribes to secure contracts were common. They were siphoned into Saddam’s accounts. More money flowed there for his cut on deals to build superhighways, hospitals, and schools. If anybody suspected, nobody cared.