Robert Fisk - The Great War for Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East

And so they all gathered, old al-Bakr and the young Saddam and Arafat and Hussein and Crown Prince Fahd of Saudi Arabia. Reporters were banned from the conference chamber but photographers were allowed to view these men much in the way that visitors are permitted to see the embalmed body of Lenin. Masquerading as part of Michael Cole’s BBC television crew, I walked into the chamber and shuffled along the rows of princes and presidents who sat in waxworks attitudes of concern and apprehension, past Arafat, who repeatedly and embarrassingly gave a thumbs-up to the cameras, past a frowning King Hussein and a glowering Saddam. I watched the future Iraqi leader carefully, and when his eyes briefly met mine I noted a kind of contempt in them, something supercilious. This was not, I thought, a man who had much faith in conferences.

And he was right. The Saudis made sure that they didn’t anger the United States, and after three days of deliberation the Arab mountain gave forth a mouse. Egypt would be put under an economic boycott – just like Israel – and a committee would be dispatched to Cairo to try to persuade Sadat to renounce Camp David. To sweeten the deal, they were to offer him $7 billion annually for the next ten years to support Egypt’s bankrupt economy. The unenviable task of leading this forlorn delegation to Cairo fell, rather sadly, to Selim el-Hoss, the prime minister of Lebanon whose own war-battered country was then more deeply divided than the Arab world itself. Sadat snubbed them all, refusing to meet the ministers. The money was a bribe, he accurately announced, and ‘all the millions in the world cannot buy the will of Egypt’.

The nature of the Iraqi regime was no secret, nor was its ruthlessness. The British had already become involved in a trade dispute with the government in 1978 after Iraqi agents in London murdered Abdul Razzak al-Nayef, a former Iraqi prime minister who had been condemned to death by the Baghdad authorities. A British businessman, a representative of Wimpey’s, had been languishing for a month in Baghdad’s central prison without any charges, and a British diplomat, Richard Drew, was dragged from his car in the city and beaten up, apparently by plain-clothes police.

But the search for ‘spies’ within the body politic of Iraq had been established eleven years earlier, and to understand the self-hatred which this engendered in the regime – and Saddam’s role in the purges – it is essential to go back to the record of its early days. After I first saw Saddam in Baghdad, I began to build up a file on him back home in Beirut. I went back to the Lebanese newspaper archives; Beirut was under nightly civil war bombardment but its journalists still maintained their files. And there, as so often happened in the grubby newspaper libraries of Lebanon, a chilling pattern began to emerge. At its congress in November 1968, the Baath party, according to the Baghdad newspaper Al-Jumhouriya , had made ‘the liquidation of spy networks’ a national aspiration; and the following month, the newly installed Baath party discovered a ‘conspiracy’ to overthrow its rule. It accused eighty-four people of being involved, including the former prime minister, Dr Abdul Rahman Bazzaz, and his former defence minister, Major General Abdul Aziz Uquili. The charges of spying, a Lebanese newspaper reported at the time, ‘were levelled in the course of statements made in a special Baghdad radio and television programme by two of the accused, an ex-soldier from the southern port of Basra and a lawyer from Baghdad.’ The interview was personally conducted, according to the Beirut press, ‘by Saddam Tikriti, secretary general of the Iraqi leadership of the ruling Baath party’. According to the same newspaper, ‘the interview was introduced by a recording of the part of the speech delivered by President al-Bakr in Baghdad on December 5th [1968] where he said “there shall no longer be a place on Iraqi soil for spies”.’

The slaughter began within six weeks. At dawn on 27 January 1969, fourteen Iraqis, nine of them Jews, were publicly hanged after a three-man court had convicted them of spying for Israel. They claimed that Izra Naji Zilkha, a 51-year-old Jewish merchant from Basra, was the leader of the ‘espionage ring’. Even as the men were hanging in Liberation Square in Baghdad and in Basra, a new trial began in Baghdad involving thirty-five more Iraqis, thirteen of them Jews. Only hours before the January hangings, the Baath – of which the forty-year-old ‘Saddam Tikriti’ was just now, according to the Lebanese press, ‘the real authority’ – organised a demonstration at which thousands of Iraqis were marched to the square to watch the public executions and hear a government statement which announced that the party was ‘determined to fulfil its promise to the people for the elimination of spies’. The Baghdad Observer later carried an interview with the revolutionary court president, Colonel Ali Hadi Witwet, who said that the court reached its verdicts regardless of the defendants’ religion, adding that seven Jews had been acquitted. When the next batch of ‘spies’ were executed on 20 February, all eight condemned men were Muslims. As usual, their conviction had been secret, although the night before their execution Baghdad radio broadcast what it claimed was a recording of the hearing. The condemned men had been accused of collecting information about Iraqi troop deployment. Their leader, Warrant Officer Najat Kazem Khourshid, was one of the eight, although his ‘trial’ was not broadcast. Baghdad radio later told its listeners that ‘the Iraqi people expressed their condemnation of the spies.’

By May 1969, the Baathist failure to suppress the Kurdish rebellion had led to the arrest of a hundred more Iraqis, including twenty-four who had served in the previous regime. One of these was the lord mayor of Baghdad, Midhat al-Haj Sirri, who was accused of leading a CIA intelligence network. Former ministers arrested included Ismail Khairallah, Fouad Rikabi, Rashid Musleh, Siddik Shansal and Shukri Saleh Zaki. The Baath leadership sought the ‘people’s’ opinion. Delegates to a meeting of farmers’ trade unions roared their support when President al-Bakr declared that he was determined to ‘chop off the heads of the traitors’. The lord mayor was duly brought to the Baghdad television studios to ‘confess’ his role as a CIA agent while another defendant, Dr Yussef al-Mimar – an ex-director general of the ministry of agrarian reform – broke down and implicated former senior ministers in the defection of Mounir Rufa, an Iraqi air force pilot who had flown his Mig-21 fighter-bomber to Israel three years earlier.

Al-Mimar also claimed that he was recruited into the CIA by an Iraqi businessman in Beirut in 1964, and ordered by a CIA front company masquerading as investment brokers first to open an investment business in Libya and then to secure an invitation to Baghdad for President Eisenhower’s secretary of the treasury, Robert Anderson. How much of this ‘confession’ bore any relation to the truth it is impossible to know. Four Iraqi civilians – Taleb Abdullah al-Saleh, Ali Abdullah al-Saleh, Abdul Jalil Mahawi and Abdul Razzak Dahab – had been hanged the previous month for spying for the CIA. On 15 May 1969, the Baathist regime hanged another ten men after one of them, Abdul Hadi Bachari, had appeared in a television ‘confession’. They were accused of working for both Israel and the United States and included an army sergeant and an air force lieutenant.

In June, for the first time, a convicted ‘spy’ told Iraqi television he had worked for British intelligence. Named as Zaki Abdul Wahab, a legal adviser to the Iraqi businessman in Beirut, he was accused in the Baghdad press of being ‘a British-American agent’. By July, another eighty prominent Iraqis were on trial for espionage. They were merely the prelude to thousands of hangings, almost all for ‘subversion’ and ‘spying’. Eleven years later, when Saddam Hussein was confirmed in power, Iraqi hangmen were dispatching victims to the gallows at the rate of a hundred every six weeks. In 1980, Amnesty International reported the recent executions of 257 people.