In the early afternoon of July 27, 1982, a private jet belonging to the Kingdom of Jordan touched down in Baghdad. It carried a single American passenger: Thomas “Tom” Twetten, a C.I.A. operations officer. He had spent most of his career under diplomatic cover, for which he was a natural. He had grown up in small-town Iowa and held a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University. His interests included antique books, such as travelogues by nineteenth-century voyagers. By the time he reached his forties, his hair and full eyebrows had whitened, but his face was unlined; he looked like a bank officer with abstemious habits. Twetten had served tours posing as a diplomat in Benghazi, Accra, and New Delhi before becoming the C.I.A.’s chief of station in Amman, Jordan. This position brought him into close contact with the country’s ruler, King Hussein, a neighbor and ally of Saddam Hussein, as well as a friend of the Reagan administration and the C.I.A. The Jordanian monarch was a charming adventurer and political survivor—a pilot, motorcyclist, and amateur radio enthusiast who seemed to regard running secret backchannels in the Middle East as a fun perk of being king. Twetten’s trip to Baghdad was just such an operation, and King Hussein had readily lent the C.I.A. his jet.
Twetten’s mission, conceived at the White House, was to persuade Saddam’s regime to accept C.I.A. assistance in Iraq’s war against Iran. If Saddam was willing, the agency would secretly provide highly classified imagery from U.S. spy satellites that showed recent Iranian battle positions on crucial war fronts, to advantage Iraqi forces. The National Security Council had given Twetten clear instructions: stay in Iraq as long as it takes to set up a channel to share this intelligence, and “do not ask for anything in return; this was an American gift.”[1]
The generosity reflected panic inside the Reagan administration. America hewed publicly to a policy of neutrality in the Iran-Iraq War. But this no longer seemed viable. “Iraq has essentially lost the war with Iran,” the C.I.A. concluded in a Special National Intelligence Estimate circulated six weeks before Twetten arrived in Baghdad. Satellite imagery showed about a hundred thousand Iranian troops mustered near the Iraqi border for an attack on Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city—a blitzkrieg that Iraq could not fully see coming, agency analysts believed. If it succeeded, Iranian forces might capture Basra and drive on Baghdad to achieve Ayatollah Khomeini’s goal of replacing Saddam’s regime with a “fundamentalist Islamic one,” as a classified paper from the National Intelligence Council warned. President Reagan signed a Top Secret National Security Decision Directive authorizing the United States to do “whatever was necessary and legal,” as one of the drafters put it, to prevent Khomeini from toppling Saddam. A radical Tehran-backed Shiite government in Baghdad would expand the Iranian revolution, threatening America’s oil-pumping allies in the conservative Sunni royal families of Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.[2]
Saddam had never expected to fight a long war against Iran, never mind a losing one. Initially, Iraqi forces seized almost ten thousand square miles of Iranian territory, but rather than driving on toward Tehran, Saddam’s invading soldiers hunkered down in positions that were difficult to defend. Their commander in chief was a liability: Saddam traveled frequently to the front lines to provide detailed orders about matters such as how to dig trenches. As the Iranians counterattacked, thousands of battlefield deaths decimated Iraq’s infantry; by the summer of 1982, the size of Iraq’s army had shrunk from 210,000 to 150,000. Iran’s military atrophied, too, from casualties and purges of senior officers carried out during Khomeini’s revolution. But the ayatollahs could draw on a larger population, and they supplemented their professional forces with tens of thousands of Pasdaran conscripts and volunteers, many of them teenagers who heedlessly charged Iraqi lines—sometimes to clear land mines—in a religiously inspired form of suicide-by-combat. These martyrdom seekers who charged forward when other soldiers would not—“insects,” as one Iraqi general dismissed them—influenced Saddam’s embrace of chemical and biological weapons. On his orders, Iraqi forces would increasingly turn to gas attacks, draping the battlefield with clouds of sickly and debilitating poison. Saddam soon stopped speaking about Khomeini’s defeat. He would settle for a peace that “keeps our sovereignty and our dignity intact,” he told advisers privately. But Khomeini vowed to fight on until Saddam was deposed and tried as a war criminal.[3]
Reagan’s aides met repeatedly in the White House Situation Room during the spring of 1982 to debate what support for Baghdad might actually work. Weapons supplies did not seem to be the answer. In comparison to Iran, Iraq did not suffer from a lack of quality tanks or planes. Its bigger problem was poor generalship caused by Saddam’s sacking of professional commanders in favor of Baathist political hacks—a problem Washington could not fix. In the end, the National Security Council settled on secret action by the C.I.A. “Baghdad’s most basic need is for accurate and timely intelligence” on Iran’s troop layout and war plans, as a National Security Council options paper put it. The decision would tilt U.S. policy toward Iraq and against Iran, which the administration was not willing to acknowledge openly. There was a risk that the Reagan administration would get caught slipping satellite maps to Iraq, which would further anger Iran, but sharing intelligence with Baghdad “could have an immediate impact on the war and it maintains at least some degree of deniability.”[4]
An Iraqi colonel in an army uniform received Twetten at Baghdad’s airport. The colonel worked for the General Military Intelligence Directorate, a spy service that was part of the Ministry of Defense. He escorted Twetten to the Mansour, a new eleven-story hotel on the Tigris boasting swimming pools and casinos. The hotel was designed like a ship, with its prow pointed toward the river. The Iraqis checked Twetten in as “Mr. Hussein.” He explained that he had C.I.A. colleagues standing by in Amman, about a ninety-minute flight away. These officers had intelligence maps of the current war front, and if Iraq agreed to accept the agency’s assistance, he would order the C.I.A. men to fly to Baghdad immediately.
After consultations, the colonel said they were willing. King Hussein’s jet flew back to Baghdad that evening. On board were an operations officer and the C.I.A.’s top analyst following the Iran-Iraq War.[5]
That night, the Americans unfurled their maps in a secure room, and their hosts pored over them. By morning, however, it emerged that Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam’s half brother at the Mukhabarat, objected to cooperating with the C.I.A. He wanted to abort the meetings and send the Americans home.
The Mukhabarat and military intelligence struggled over authority. The main job of military intelligence was to collect information to support warfighting and national defense. Barzan’s secret police and overseas spies collected foreign and “strategic” intelligence, such as information about Saddam’s political opposition. During the war with Iran—a conventional conflict in which the enemy also fomented revolution inside Iraq—the two spy agencies were bound to knock heads.
Barzan demanded to meet Twetten. The army colonel brought Twetten to the Mukhabarat’s headquarters. Barzan’s large, gaudy office was decorated with green wallpaper and portraits of Saddam. (Saddam made a habit of checking where his portraits were hung when he visited people’s homes. He once told Barzan that you “can know how loyal people are” by eavesdropping on their children’s unfiltered chatter and by “whether or not they have my pictures up in their houses.”) The Iraqi spy chief sat behind an ornate desk. He “looked like hell,” Twetten thought.
Still in his midtwenties, lightly traveled, Barzan’s sense of world affairs was informed by the grievances that filled every Baath Party newspaper: that America was the power behind Zionism; that Zionism was a blight upon the Arab world; that Israel was likely the secret driving force behind Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution and his war against Iraq; and that the C.I.A. was an enabler of all these conspiracies. Barzan uncorked what Twetten later described as a “loud, seething forty-five-minute lecture about why I wasn’t welcome” in Baghdad. As for the C.I.A.’s Top Secret battle maps, he was emphatic, as Twetten recalled: “We don’t need it. We don’t want it—and you can leave.”
Twetten pleaded his case. “We’re talking about Iraqi lives, and we’re talking about the president of the United States wanting to help you.” Barzan was unyielding.[6]
After this dressing-down, Twetten spoke to the military intelligence officers who had received him: “It’s really not a good idea to tell the president of the United States that the information he has authorized me to give you is unwelcome,” he said. There was more battlefield intelligence to share if the Iraqis could bring themselves to accept it.
His appeal worked, or seemed to. His hosts received permission, presumably from Saddam himself, to spend more time with the C.I.A. delegation in order to further examine what the maps showed. Twetten judged that his hosts found the information “very significant.”[7]
The Iraqis soon moved the C.I.A. team from the Mansour to a guesthouse near military intelligence headquarters, a gated campus on a thumb-shaped peninsula jutting into the Tigris. Wafiq al-Samarrai, a military intelligence officer then in his midthirties, joined the meetings.
The White House was ready to build a longer-term intelligence-sharing relationship with Iraq, through the C.I.A., to aid Iraq in the war, Twetten explained as he prepared to leave. “You’ve got to talk your political side into doing this,” he said.[8]
Politics in Iraq turned on the outlook of just one man, of course. Barzan’s secret police provided a formidable defense against Khomeini’s incitements of popular revolution within Iraq, yet Saddam looked vulnerable. In July 1982, the same month when Twetten turned up, the president traveled to Dujail, a Shiite-populated town about thirty-five miles north of Baghdad, to speak about recruitment for the war. A would-be assassin fired twelve rounds at him from an AK-47 assault rifle. It was a glancing threat, but Saddam had at least 1,400 Dujail villagers rounded up. Baathist tribunals ordered the execution of more than one hundred of them.
Across the Arab world, newspapers carried speculation that Saddam might—or should—relinquish power to a Baath Party successor, to make a settlement with Khomeini easier. A story went around that Saddam’s minister for health, Riyadh Ibrahim Hussein, had suggested during a cabinet meeting that Saddam temporarily step down. Supposedly, Saddam had calmly asked Riyadh to step outside for consultations, then shot him dead within earshot of his comrades. The story became a widely circulated anecdote of Saddam’s management style. The truth was more prosaic, if also an example of arbitrary Baath justice. Riyadh was dismissed from his ministry in June 1982 and arrested two months later, accused of being a “traitor” and importing a medicine that killed people. He was tortured and then executed by firing squad that autumn, according to his daughter.[9]
In this season of insecurity, the C.I.A.’s “gift” of satellite-derived maps of Iran’s troops triggered Saddam’s deep-seated suspicions about the United States. He feared, among other things, that the U.S. and the Soviet Union wanted Iraq and Iran to debilitate themselves in a long, costly war. He was justified in this anxiety: the year before, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger had remarked that the “ultimate American interest” in the conflict would be met if “both sides lose.” During the summer of Twetten’s visit, Saddam commented publicly, “If the two superpowers wanted to stop the war, they could have.”[10]
Saddam did not trust that the C.I.A.’s satellite intelligence was reliable. What if the imagery was being doctored to promote a military stalemate? He feared, too, that the U.S. was already helping Iran in the war—playing both sides. “I mean, America has two faces, one face that it displays in front of us” but another that “does not want the Iranians to be defeated,” he once explained to his advisers.
Prior to Khomeini’s revolution, the shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, had been among Washington’s closest allies in the Middle East. Iran’s military still flew American warplanes and fired American guns left from the shah’s arsenal. Washington had firmly broken off relations with Iran after the 1979 revolution, and the Reagan administration maintained an official arms embargo against both Iran and Iraq. Yet somehow Iran continued to obtain American-made spare parts. How? There was a commercial black market, but Saddam suspected that Israel might be covertly sending American parts to Khomeini. Iraqi intelligence picked up traces of this apparent Israeli trade and reported the evidence to Saddam. (The reporting was accurate, as the world would learn years later; Israeli leaders had secretly agreed to provide Iran with supplies in exchange for liberating Iranian Jews so that they could migrate to Israel.) Saddam assumed, reasonably, that any covert Israeli arms deals with Iran must be known to the C.I.A.
He also believed—it is not clear why—that Iran was receiving satellite photos of Iraqi battlefield positions from somewhere. He was clearly worried that the C.I.A. might be feeding satellite intelligence to both Iraq and Iran. “You tell me how Iran gets satellite pictures?” Saddam asked visitors in the summer of 1982. He wasn’t prepared to accuse the United States openly, but the matter nagged him. He could also see that American AWACS radar aircraft and intelligence planes based in Saudi Arabia flew close to the Iran-Iraq war zone to monitor the fighting. “We are afraid that the collected information will go to the Iranians in one way or another,” he told his aides.[11]
Saddam cast himself as the Fidel Castro of the Middle East, the one Arab leader bold enough to stand up to Washington’s oil-driven neocolonialism in the Persian Gulf. “We talk about the American occupation,” he told his comrades. “The Americans came, the Americans went. . . . They wanted to embarrass the Iraqi position.” Yet he recognized that having hostile relations with a superpower was “unnatural” and that better ties with Washington might strengthen his rule, if he managed things carefully. That July, Saddam told Time magazine, “I have nothing personal against the U.S.”[12]
Saddam soon accepted regular deliveries of maps and satellite pictures from the C.I.A. The intelligence proved its worth on the battlefield, or so the C.I.A. deduced from Iraq’s willingness to normalize a highly secret intelligence relationship. The agency now had to build a formal “liaison” relationship with Iraqi intelligence in order to analyze and ship over satellite imagery from week to week. The C.I.A. had a playbook for such partnerships. They were typically built on reciprocal exchanges of visits by spy leaders and as many alcohol-soaked get-to-know-you dinners as the partnering foreign service would tolerate. There was an inherent edginess in this relationship-building, since the C.I.A. officers involved were often tasked with identifying foreign spies they might pitch to become agents for the United States—and sometimes, depending on the country, vice versa.
There was but a single C.I.A. officer posted in Baghdad at the time Saddam agreed to work with the agency. Gene “Kim” McGill was a well-regarded Arabist, and during his tour in the Iraqi capital, he was “undeclared,” meaning he was posted in the guise of a U.S. diplomat, and the C.I.A. did not inform Iraq that he was really one of theirs. After Twetten’s breakthrough, the agency needed a “declared” officer in Baghdad—that is, one who would maintain diplomatic cover but whose true employer would be disclosed to the Mukhabarat to facilitate cooperation. After McGill rotated out, the C.I.A. posted a declared officer named Bruce Johnson—whom the Iraqis came to call “Abu Eric,” or Father of Eric (his son)—to run the satellite intelligence exchanges. The C.I.A. passed its maps to the Mukhabarat, which passed them to military intelligence. The Mukhabarat’s access to the material seemed to resolve the earlier conflict caused by Barzan.[13]
The C.I.A.’s Baghdad station was situated on the second floor of one of America’s more decrepit outposts in the Middle East: the “United States Interests Section of the Embassy of Belgium.” In 1967, an Iraqi government preceding the Baath Party’s had broken diplomatic relations with Washington over the Six-Day War, a brief conflict between Israel and its Arab enemies. Thereafter, Belgium represented the U.S. For several years, the State Department posted no diplomats to Iraq. In 1972, the Nixon administration sent out some Americans to serve in Baghdad under the Belgian flag, but the Belgians didn’t have enough office space. The U.S. ended up occupying a former embassy of Romania.
This was a three-story beige concrete building in the Masbah district of Baghdad. A Belgian tricolor flew over the chancery door, and portraits of a young, bespectacled King Baudouin adorned the walls. American diplomats were provided stationery in French and Flemish, as well as business cards advertising their affiliation with Belgium. The Masbah compound was “a huge dump,” as Deborah Jones, who worked there, put it. Some rooms had red velvet wallpaper. The staff numbered about a dozen by the early 1980s. They were crammed together amidst a mélange of unsightly furniture. There was but a single phone line that required a switchboard operator to direct calls to extensions. To run the intelligence program with the Mukhabarat, the C.I.A. installed a secure communications system that could transmit satellite imagery. (C.I.A. officers also couriered materials to Baghdad.) In the small classified area, someone mounted a sign: “Remember, this is a former Romanian embassy.” In other words, it was likely riddled with listening devices. State Department diplomats (the real ones) recalled that some classified messages required the use of onetime code pads of midcentury vintage; the messages could then be dispatched by weekly courier to Kuwait. There were no U.S. Marine guards, yet the main building was less than ten feet from the street, an unnerving situation given the voluminous incoming intelligence that described “how the Iranians had plans to blow us to kingdom come,” as one diplomat recalled.[14]
Foreign diplomats in Baghdad were reluctant to speak Saddam’s name out loud, given the ubiquitous presence of informers, so they developed various tongue-in-cheek codes to discuss the president. One technique was to refer to Saddam silently by placing an index finger above one’s lip, indicating a mustache. Traveling out of Baghdad entailed an epic project of obtaining permission forms and photocopied checkpoint passes. For those diplomats tasked with reporting to their capitals about Iraqi affairs, often the best they could do was monitor Saddam’s propaganda on state television; read the official press; walk around markets to track prices or scan for small insights about ordinary life; talk to other diplomats about their readings of Baath Party intrigues; and exchange messages with mid-level counterparts at the Iraqi Ministry of Foreign Affairs.[15]
William Eagleton, a career foreign service officer in his fifties, was the senior diplomat at the U.S. interests section. Eagleton became enamored of Kurdistan, traveled there regularly, and eventually wrote a book about Kurdish rugs—perhaps not the most urgent matter in U.S.-Iraqi relations—and another about Kurdish political history. The analysis he transmitted to Washington promoted a then-common theme among Arabists in the Reagan administration: Saddam was obviously a brutal ruler, but he had some merit as a “paternalistic national leader” whose modernization drives during the 1970s had led him to a “progressively more pragmatic foreign policy.”
Such reporting lifted the hopes of those Reagan administration strategists who believed that Iraq under Saddam—with its vast oil wealth—could be not only saved from defeat by Ayatollah Khomeini but also coaxed closer to America’s “moderate” Arab allies, led by Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. The Reagan team hoped Saddam might cease threatening Israel and end aid to Palestinian terrorists.
There was, however, the problem of Saddam’s “dark side,” as Eagleton put it in a cable to Washington on March 23, 1983. “The two sides of life in Iraq reflect the two basic aspects of President Saddam Hussein’s own personality,” he wrote. The Iraqi president’s “extensive social/economic welfare system” reflected his plan to “forge ‘a new Iraqi man (and woman)’ capable of leading Iraq into its rightful place on the Arab and world stage.” But “there is another side to Saddam,” Eagleton went on, one visible in the Mukhabarat’s secret police. With a workforce of about forty thousand, “the Mukhabarat operates as a separate and distinct entity,” Eagleton reported. Its powers encompassed “summary arrests, including disappearance; torture, mistreatment and degrading treatment of prisoners; arbitrary arrests and detention without trial. . . . These and other Gestapo-like tactics . . . are well-known to all who live in Iraq.”[16]
Early in 1983, Saddam asked Said K. Aburish, an American-educated Palestinian journalist and Arab nationalist, to travel to Washington. He was to buy two hundred American-made M-16 rifles for Iraq’s elite presidential guard. It was a test of Saddam’s nascent secret alliance with the Reagan administration. Such a small batch of M-16s was of no great military significance, but Saddam’s motivation, Aburish concluded, was to have his crack bodyguard “be photographed parading with them.” The Iranians would then see the rifles and “surmise that he and the Americans were close enough for the U.S.A. to equip his personal guard.” But the U.S. turned down his request. When Aburish visited the Iraq desk at the State Department, an official read him a statement about America’s neutrality in the Iran-Iraq War, and its refusal to sell arms to either side.[17]
This was one in a chronic series of misunderstandings between Reagan’s strategists and Saddam’s inner circle over what the Iraqis thought of as “courtesy” gun purchases when their officials visited the U.S. When the Iraqi president and his top aides considered the attractions of America, they thought of gun stores. The Iraqis maintained their own small interests section in Washington, and the State Department discovered that Iraqi diplomats were buying up guns at D.C.-area marts and shipping them home in diplomatic pouches. When David Mack took a posting at State headquarters, a superior told him, “Well, you won’t have much to do with Iraq, but all they want to do is buy guns! Guns!” Mack came to understand the Iraqis’ dismay about refusals such as the one endured by Aburish: they could not fathom “this strange country” where you could buy guns as easily as chewing gum but must not ship them abroad.[18]
As part of its relationship-building, the C.I.A. invited a Mukhabarat delegation to secretly visit its Langley headquarters. The trip became a fiasco because members of Saddam’s family who had hitched a ride to America skipped formal meetings to go shopping for pistols with silencers. Twetten, who had by now taken a senior position in the C.I.A.’s Near East Division, received a call from an F.B.I. agent assigned to monitor the Iraqi visitors. One member of the delegation, the agent reported, had claimed that Twetten was his sponsor and that “you will approve it,” meaning the purchase of handguns and silencers.
Ah, the joys of intelligence work, Twetten thought. No, he would not approve it. But now he had to explain to a senior Mukhabarat officer leading the Iraqi delegation that the C.I.A. couldn’t allow his companions to carry home these guns. The purchases violated the Reagan administration’s arms embargo, and it hardly needed mentioning that, in Iraqi hands, the silencers might be used in assassinations.
The Mukhabarat officer dismissed Twetten’s scruples. He made his point with an anecdote: “A couple of years ago, we had a Russian intelligence officer in Baghdad who ran over and killed somebody on the street. We took care of him. He didn’t have to go home—we just covered it up, paid a little money to the family, and that was that. That’s what intelligence services do for each other. Now, why can’t I have some pistols?”[19]
Early in May 1983, Eagleton rode to Mukhabarat headquarters. Barzan received him. The C.I.A.’s intelligence operation had been running for nearly a year. Saddam’s fears of American trickery seemed to be easing. The number of sensitive subjects that could be discussed between U.S. and Iraqi officials had expanded. For Iraq, the main priorities were obtaining more high-quality arms and ensuring that the U.S. was truly committed to choking off Iran’s supplies. For the U.S., a major goal was ending Iraq’s support for terrorists.
Eagleton used his meeting to challenge Barzan about Iraq’s relationship with the Abu Nidal Organization, a violent Palestinian group that would eventually carry out attacks in twenty countries, claiming hundreds of lives. Sabri al-Banna, a.k.a. Abu Nidal, had broken from Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (P.L.O.) in 1974; he had an office in Baghdad. Eagleton told Barzan that “a major barrier to better U.S.-Iraqi relations was the presence of Abu Nidal in Iraq and operations he has conducted, particularly during the last year.”
This seemed to be a reference to an assassination attempt in which Barzan was directly implicated. In June 1982, in London, an Abu Nidal operative shot and gravely wounded Shlomo Argov, Israel’s ambassador to Great Britain, as Argov left the Dorchester hotel. Nawaf al-Rosan, among the attacking party, turned out to be an Iraqi intelligence colonel. (Israel inaccurately blamed the P.L.O. for the attack and cited it as a justification to invade Lebanon.)
Barzan insisted that “it was a mistake” to view Abu Nidal as “a tool of the Iraqi government” and that Iraq “could not completely control” the Palestinian. Still, he conceded that he could “exert some influence on him through dialogue.” For example, Barzan continued, with apparent pride, Abu Nidal had been planning attacks “against Jews in Europe and we convinced him there was no benefit in this.”
Eagleton suggested that Iraq should expel Abu Nidal.
“This would be dangerous,” Barzan countered, and the U.S. “would regret it if it happened,” because Washington would lose Iraq’s moderating influence.
Since they were trading complaints, Barzan had one to share: He noted that an Iraqi visiting America had recently “bought presentation pistols,” meaning guns intended as gifts back home. These pistols had then been “confiscated at the airport.” Was this really necessary?
Yet they ended their discussions cordially, with “mutual expressions of interest in maintaining high-level dialogue,” as Eagleton reported to Washington.[20]
A week later, in Paris, Secretary of State George Shultz welcomed Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s deputy prime minister, to his hotel suite for a forty-five-minute discussion. Aziz conveyed the “personal” desire of Saddam “for better relations with the U.S.” The secretary wrote that the U.S. and Iraq had reached “a new stage in the development of better understanding of our very important common interests.”[21]
The Reagan administration had marked its course: by mid-1983, it had shifted from a panicked effort to stave off an Iranian takeover of Iraq to an acceptance of Saddam as a prospective partner in America’s strategy for the Middle East. It was a decision that would have deep and unforeseen consequences for the U.S., Iraq, and Iran. Washington had now lashed itself to a dictator whose economic ambitions and ruthless “dark side” were easy enough to grasp. Yet Saddam was much more than his development plans or his secret police.
Saddam would prove to be a leader of immense energy, self-confidence, restless suspicion, and unpredictability. He was a dogmatic revolutionary who had imbibed the sweeping idealism of 1960s pan-Arabism. He could lose himself in long monologues about postcolonial revolutionary politics in countries from Algeria to Cuba to Ethiopia to Yemen. He was capable of both cunning insights about his adversaries and dumbfounding blindness about global affairs—sometimes in the same conversation. He harbored ambitions as a writer and a patron of the arts. And he was the continually beleaguered patriarch of an extended family that was becoming Iraq’s next royal family, whose members chronically abused their privileges. From one day to the next, the president was not always easy for even his nearest relatives or Baath Party comrades to understand. In distant Washington, it was less the man than the chess piece that attracted interest—in the Cold War’s struggle, and in the face of the Iranian Revolution, Saddam looked like a weighty piece that might be shifted to advantage. He appeared to be manageable.