Saddam : His Rise and Fall (36 page)

Relations with Egypt, which had deteriorated after the Camp David peace agreement, were repaired after the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981. Hosni Mubarak, the new Egyptian president, who was trying to contain his own Islamic firebrands, agreed to provide Iraq with spare parts for its Soviet weapons systems, as well as tanks and other equipment. The French, who had enjoyed a lucrative arms trade with Baghdad since the mid-1970s, negotiated a loan deal for the Iraqis to have five Super Étendard warplanes, equipped with heat-seeking missiles and guidance systems and which were to be used mainly for attacks on Gulf shipping.

From 1983 onward Iraq received considerable backing from the Gulf states that were keen to contain the menace posed by the Iranian revolution. Iraq's oil revenues had collapsed as a result of its inability to ship oil through the Gulf after Syria had closed its pipeline outlet to the Mediterranean. Iranian oil revenues, on the other hand, which were buoyed by the fact that
Iran's southern ports were relatively unscathed during the early stages of the war, had nearly trebled between 1981 and 1983.
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With the war effort costing the Iraqis an estimated $1 billion a month, the donations made by the Gulf states were crucial to keeping the Iraqi economy afloat, even after Saddam had cut back his spending on consumer goods in 1982. If the Iranians succeeded in making a breakthrough of the Iraqi lines, the defenseless Gulf states were well aware that they were on the ayatollahs' agenda. Consequently Iraq received donations worth $25 billion toward its war effort, most of which was spent on rearming the armed forces.

The Western powers, with the notable exception of France, publicly professed a policy of studious neutrality in the war while privately backing the Iraqis. There was a general consensus that an Iranian victory would have disastrous consequences for the stability and security of the Gulf. Perhaps the most surprising diplomatic development during this period was the rapprochement between Baghdad and Washington. The U.S. State Department was starting to view the dramatic developments on the battlefield with alarm. The initial hope of the Carter administration that an Iraqi invasion might deter the Iranians from trying to export their revolution throughout the Middle East had come to nothing. Indeed, unless Saddam received help, there was a genuine expectation in Washington that Iran might win the war. As a first step toward resolving fifteen years of mutual hostility between Washington and Baghdad, the State Department in 1982 took Iraq off its list of countries suspected of supporting international terrorism. Countries on the list were subjected to “foreign policy controls,” and by removing Iraq from the list the United States had more freedom of movement if it wanted to funnel aid to Baghdad. Later that year the shift in policy resulted in the Reagan administration authorizing the sale of sixty Hughes helicopters, a type of aircraft specifically designed for battlefield observation. Soon after the new helicopters arrived in Iraq in 1983 they were easily adapted to fire TOW antitank missiles, and were deployed in an offensive capacity against Iranian positions.

Washington's delicate diplomatic dance with Baghdad continued in the summer of 1983 with a visit to Washington by Ismat Kittani, the Iraqi undersecretary for foreign affairs. This was reciprocated the following December with a visit to Baghdad by Donald Rumsfeld, who was then a special Middle East envoy for President Ronald Reagan. Given Rumsfeld's position as one of the leading cheerleaders in favor of military action against Saddam in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United
States, it is somewhat ironic that Rumsfeld played such a key role in helping to bring Iraq out of its diplomatic isolation in the 1980s. According to David Mack, a former U.S. diplomat who accompanied Rumsfeld on his Baghdad mission, the American desire to reopen formal channels with Iraq reflected the different U.S. geopolitical priorities that existed for the Middle East at that time. “We were looking to bring pressure to bear on Syria, and it seemed a good idea to patch up our differences with Baghdad.” The Syrian regime, which enjoyed close ties with Moscow, was then backing the radical Lebanese Shiite Muslim groups such as Hizbollah, which destroyed the American embassy and U.S. marine compound in Beirut earlier in 1983. “Relations had been improving with Baghdad from the late 1970s onward, but it was a difficult and slow process. It was very difficult for us to read the signals coming out of Baghdad. But with the war going so badly for Saddam, and the Syrians causing us a lot of grief in Beirut, we thought it made sense to deal with Saddam. We wanted to build a Cairo-Amman-Baghdad axis that would drive President Asad crazy.”
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The bombing of the American embassy and the U.S. marine compound in Beirut was in fact the key turning point in Washington's decision to build bridges with Baghdad. The embassy bombing, in April 1983, had taken place during a meeting of the CIA's station chiefs in the Middle East. In one stroke most of the CIA's best Middle East experts had been wiped out. Within weeks satellite intercepts of telephone conversations confirmed American suspicions—the terrorists responsible for the bombing had been guided by Teheran. The United States was now unofficially at war with Iran. The United States moved quickly, and the following month Secretary of State George Shultz met secretly with Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi foreign minister, during a trip to Paris. Shultz and Aziz both saw the logic of pooling resources in the fight against the ayatollahs, but the United States was still wary of normalizing relations so long as Saddam continued to harbor Abu Nidal, who only the previous year had masterminded the attempted assassination of Shlomo Argov, the Israeli ambassador to London (see Chapter Eight). In order for Washington to agree to normalize relations with Baghdad, Shultz insisted that Saddam must first get rid of Abu Nidal. The Iraqi leader duly obliged, but in the most bizarre way imaginable. Soon after the Shultz-Aziz meeting the government-owned Iraqi media solemnly announced that Abu Nidal had died of a heart attack. The report was confirmed by “sources” close to the Palestinian terrorist. A month later, just as the report was starting to acquire
credence in the international intelligence community, Libya's Colonel Gadhafi announced that Abu Nidal was alive and living in Tripoli, thereby undermining Saddam's rather ingenious attempt to wash his hands of the Abu Nidal issue.

The U.S. rapprochement with Saddam gathered momentum in December 1983 when Rumsfeld flew to Baghdad. During the visit Rumsfeld met with Saddam and delivered a personal letter from President Reagan. The visit must have been a success for, after Rumsfeld returned to Washington, the United States began to exert pressure on its allies not to supply arms to Iran. In November 1984 warmer U.S.-Iraqi relations resulted in the full restoration of diplomatic relations and American companies were encouraged to participate in the construction of Iraq's new pipelines through Jordan and Saudi Arabia to provide Baghdad with new outlets for its oil sales. Saddam responded by sending Tariq Aziz, his foreign minister, to Washington, where he delivered a message from Saddam to President Reagan and other leading members of the administration. The United States may have quietly maintained a CIA office in Baghdad from as early as 1979;
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certainly the CIA was active in Baghdad from 1984 onward. At this time, however, the United States was still holding back from directly arming the Iraqis and maintaining a policy of neutrality, with the exception of sixty Hughes helicopters that were sold in 1982 “for use in agriculture.” David Mack insisted that Washington did not sell any arms to Iraq. “We never provided any military equipment to Iraq,” he said. “The only U.S. equipment we ever sent to Baghdad was two pearl-handled revolvers which Saddam asked for especially to give someone as a present. But that was it. Nothing else.”

The most important contribution the United States made to the Iraqi war effort was undoubtedly the high-grade intelligence of Iranian troop dispositions provided by the CIA spy satellites. Soon after the restoration of full diplomatic relations, the Americans sent a CIA liaison team to Baghdad to deliver satellite photos and other intelligence gleaned from U.S. AWACS surveillance aircraft based in neighboring Saudi Arabia. The intelligence liaison between Langley, Virginia, the CIA headquarters, and Baghdad was soon established on such a regular footing that Saddam designated three senior officers from the Estikhbarat, Iraq's military intelligence, to liaise directly with the Americans. The American assistance soon paid dividends. When in June 1984 Saudi Arabian fighters shot down an Iranian F-4 attempting to attack a target in Saudi territorial waters, Washington acknowledged that this
skirmish had been directed from a “Saudi” AWACS plane manned by American personnel.

General Wafic al-Samurrai, who was one of the Iraqi officers liaising with the United States, recalled that the information was enormously helpful to the Iraqi war effort. When preparing for an attack, his officers would routinely request specific intelligence from the Americans. “I used to say, for example, ‘Give us information on the Basra sector.'” Even though the Americans provided the information, Saddam remained deeply suspicious about the relationship, so much so that he put Samurrai under intensive surveillance by his Amn al-Khass security forces. Saddam personally advised his generals on how to go about seeking information from their CIA allies. When Saddam wanted information about the Basra sector, for example, he would tell Samurrai, “Ask them to give us information from the north of Iraq to the south, because if we tell them it's Basra, they will tell the Iranians.” Samurrai would sometimes have his memos on his U.S. contacts, which Saddam was constantly demanding from him, returned with cautionary notes scribbled in the margins in Saddam's distinctive scrawl. “Be careful, Americans are conspirators.”

Saddam's suspicions about the duplicity of the American intelligence infrastructure was borne out with the exposure of the infamous Iran-Contra scandal in 1986. One of the reasons why the revelation, in late 1986, that the United States had been secretly shipping antitank missiles to Iran since 1985 caused such embarrassment in Washington was that U.S. policy was directed toward supporting Iraq in the war with Iran. The Irangate scandal, as it became known, which was hatched by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council, was designed to buy the release of American hostages being held in Lebanon, but was abandoned when details of the deal were made public. Some of the TOW antitank weapons supplied by the United States actually found their way to the Iranian front, where they helped the Iranians achieve a strategic breakthrough on the Basra battlefield.

In the early 1980s Britain was still attempting to maintain a neutral posture. Sir John Moberly, who was Britain's ambassador to Iraq between 1982 and 1985, said that, unlike the United States, Britain did not believe that Iraq was in danger of being overrun by Iran. “The American view was that there was a real danger of Iraq being defeated by the Iranians and so they had to do everything they could to bolster the Iraqis. We, however, were slightly more skeptical about things.” Because of Britain's intransigence over supplying Iraq
with arms, Moberly only saw Saddam on rare occasions, but when he did he was impressed with what he saw. “He was a man who clearly had a strong personality who was very much in control of events. Everyone in Iraq knew where they stood. And they were well aware that if they stepped out of line that would be the end for them. Most Iraqis accepted that Iraq needed a strong leader to maintain law and order and hold the country together. Saddam fulfilled all these criteria.” Moberly was, however, in constant contact with Tariq Aziz, Saddam's foreign minister, who was forever berating the British envoy about the Thatcher government's position. “Aziz was always complaining that he got a better reception from the Americans than he got from the British and that, as the former colonial power, we should have a better understanding of the Iraqi people. Aziz would say: ‘You people should understand us, but instead we find in practice that we get a far better hearing from the U.S. than we do from the U.K.”
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Indeed, for most of the war the British position on the Gulf was encapsulated by the now infamous guidelines on arms sales provided to the House of Commons by Geoffrey Howe, the foreign secretary, in 1985, when he stated that Britain refused to supply “lethal defense equipment” to either side as part of Britain's policy “of doing everything possible to see this tragic conflict brought to the earliest possible end.” By late 1984 there was growing evidence that the Iraqis were using chemical weapons as a means of countering Iran's human-wave attacks, and a number of human rights organizations were starting to investigate the claims. The UN reports were particularly resonant in London, where confirmation of Iraq's use of chemical weapons, combined with Iraq's appalling human rights record, persuaded the Thatcher government to impose tough restrictions on British trade with Iraq. There were a number of deals to supply Baghdad with nonlethal equipment, such as radar electronics, which were approved by the British government. It was only toward the end of the war that the Thatcher government quietly adopted a more liberal interpretation of what constituted “nonlethal” equipment, and the decision to allow the Midlands company Matrix-Churchill to export to Baghdad equipment designed for making sophisticated armaments would result in the “Iraqgate” scandal.

 

With money and arms coming into Baghdad, the war moved into a new phase from 1984 onward. In an attempt to force the Iranians to the negotiating table Saddam sought to undermine the morale of the civilian population
by destroying the Iranian economy. In February 1984 he began using the newly imported Soviet missiles to target Iranian cities, much as the German V2 “doodlebug” rockets had been fired at Britain during the closing stages of World War II. This provoked what became known as the first Battle of the Cities, for the Iranians soon responded in kind. The second Battle of the Cities took place in March and April 1985 and, from Saddam's point of view, began to pay dividends as the constant targeting of Teheran by Iraqi missiles provoked widespread demonstrations against the Iranian government.