On the evening of Tuesday, October 18, 1988, Kamel Hana Gegeo threw a party on “Mother of Pigs,” an island in the Tigris River that jutted from an oxbow a few hundred yards from the Republican Palace. Once covered by date palms, the island had caught the eye of Frank Lloyd Wright, who, during the 1950s, considered using it as the fulcrum of his “Plan for Greater Baghdad,” a passion project that was ultimately tabled by Iraq’s king and ignored by the strongmen who followed. Guesthouses, some with swimming pools, now flanked the island’s tree-shaded lawns. The houses could be rented out for weddings and parties. Some were reserved for connected officials of Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Gegeo was an intimate of Saddam Hussein—his chief servant or valet, a full-faced man ready with a smile or a struck match for Saddam’s cigar. He also helped manage the president’s personal staff and schedule. He was a Christian and a rare non-Tikriti who enjoyed Saddam’s trust. In the jealous opinion of some of the president’s close relatives, he reaped outsize financial rewards for his loyalty. In any event, he was privileged enough to book a place on Mother of Pigs, and that night he threw a party for about fifty people, replete with raucous music, dancing, and free-flowing hard liquor.
There are two available eyewitness accounts of what ensued—they align on the main points but diverge on some details. The most reliable account appears to be that of Zafer Muhammad Jaber, who was a contemporary and close aide to Uday Hussein, the president’s eldest son. Uday was then twenty-four. He was up late at his official home in the government quarter, within earshot of the party, according to Zafer. The two were drinking vodka and watching TV when the sound of shooting disturbed them. Uday dispatched a bodyguard to see what was happening. The man returned to report that Gegeo’s party was “out of control.” The guests were drinking heavily, and some were firing off assault rifles, he reported.
“Go over there and tell them to stop,” Uday ordered.[1]
The bodyguard did so, but the shooting went on. Uday decided to handle it himself. He, Zafer, and two bodyguards rode across a bridge to the island. Uday wore a black dishdasha, an ankle-length robe, and carried a bamboo walking stick with an ivory handle carved into the head of a snake baring its fangs. It was one among a collection of about 150 walking sticks of “varying quality and design” possessed by Uday, according to Ala Bashir, one of Saddam’s physicians. “The art of restraint was unknown to him,” he noted of the president’s son.
On the island, they found Gegeo so drunk he could barely stand. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” Uday told him, according to the account attributed to Zafer. Gegeo spoke back to him, and Uday called the valet “a dog.” He struck Gegeo on the head with his stick and watched the man crumple to the ground.
Uday and his companions left, believing that Gegeo had fallen because he was drunk and that he was not seriously hurt. As it turned out, Uday’s blow caused internal bleeding in the valet’s brain. He died before dawn. The killing was a prologue to a drama in Saddam’s family worthy of the most over-the-top Middle Eastern telenovelas, a crisis that would produce perhaps the most serious assassination threat Saddam Hussein had yet confronted—this time, from his eldest son.[2]
Uday Hussein was just four years old when his father became vice president of Iraq. As a boy, he barely knew the striving, modestly comfortable years of his parents’ early marriage. He came of age amidst rising ostentation and privilege, colored by his father’s harsh rule. Notwithstanding the Baath Party’s democratic-revolutionary rhetoric, given the record of succession in the Arab world, as Saddam’s eldest son, Uday was his heir apparent. Other of Saddam’s close and highly privileged relatives abused power, but as Uday reached high school, he took this to baroque extremes. He lived out a prolonged arrested adolescence that lasted well into midlife. He was “like a child,” one of his government interpreters remembered. “His ideas were not clear. . . . He was not really mature.” Tariq Aziz dismissed the adult Uday as “just a kid” whose conduct admittedly “went beyond what is acceptable.”[3]
By the late 1980s, Uday had grown physically into a tall man—taller than his father—with large brown eyes and perpetual black stubble. His default look was menacing insouciance. He was reportedly less than a success in school, but he received high marks from terrified teachers and earned multiple degrees from Iraqi universities, including, eventually, a doctorate. He did acquire excellent English. He had wanted to pursue his education in the United States, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he recalled: “I did my SATs, everything. I did very well. Passed with high marks.” The Iran-Iraq War prevented him from pursuing his dream of “nuclear studies.” [4]
He settled for racketeering and rapidly enriched himself by smuggling scarce and coveted goods, such as cigarettes and alcohol. In 1987, having reached the same age at which some of Saddam’s half brothers had taken on significant responsibilities, Uday was appointed by his father to run the National Olympic Committee of Iraq; it was an indication that Saddam grasped his son’s limitations.
He was a feared man about town, a wildly self-indulgent collector of “watches, jewels and rings, money, women and luxury cars,” as Bashir put it. He kept dozens of imported Mercedes-Benzes, Ferraris, BMWs, Rolls-Royces, and the like in a garage near the Republican Palace. He prowled the capital at night in his ostentatious rides, turning up with an armed entourage at nightclubs and five-star hotels, where he and his mates held court at tables shrouded in the fog of cigar smoke. Some young women volunteered for his privileged company, but Uday was indifferent to consent and could threaten the safety of any girl or woman who strayed into his sight.[5]
You have killed him,” Saddam told Uday icily the morning after Gegeo’s death, according to Ala Bashir. “Give yourself up to the police and accept your punishment.”
Devastated, Uday swallowed a bottle of Valium and soon collapsed. His bodyguards transported him to Ibn Sina Hospital, a two-story, white-walled facility flanked by palm trees. The hospital had been opened in 1964 and soon gained a reputation as the best in Baghdad; in 1974, Saddam took it over and turned it into a private twenty-bed facility for his family and senior Baath Party officials and their families. Ala Bashir, a plastic surgeon, was on staff. By 1988, he recalled, the hospital “had a large staff of highly qualified doctors and nurses on call at any time for the President, his family and the regime’s top echelon.”[6]
Doctors pumped Uday’s stomach, revived him, and kept him overnight for observation. Saddam telephoned his half brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, who joined family members at the hospital the next day. Hussein Kamel was there. Barzan sized up the family dynamics: Hussein Kamel, as a contender for succession to power, “was pleased” by Uday’s disgrace because it would now “take a long time to restore the relationship between the father and son.”[7]
As soon as he was able, Uday checked out of the hospital. He dismissed his bodyguards, grabbed a Kalashnikov rifle, and shot at his own security men when they tried to approach him. The bodyguards informed Saddam that “his son’s mental state was still slightly precarious,” as Bashir put it.[8]
That evening, the president called Barzan and asked him to come immediately to Radwaniyah. Barzan found the president dressed in “sports attire” at one of the compound’s palaces. We have only Barzan’s record of what followed, but it is consistent with the general run of events described in private later by Saddam, as well as with accounts from Ala Bashir and other sources.
Saddam told Barzan that Uday had driven out to Radwaniyah to confront his father. He had tried to shame Saddam over a long-term affair the president was having with Samira Shahbandar, who was from a prestigious family and had been married to an executive at Iraqi Airways. She was spending more and more time with Saddam—she was his undeclared second wife, in the eyes of some. The couple reportedly had a young child—a son named Ali.[9]
“Go back to your wife!” Uday had demanded, referring to his mother, Sajida, as Saddam explained to Barzan. The president added, “Fortunately, I did not have a handgun on me. Otherwise, I would have killed him.”
He was still steaming a short time later when his second son, Qusay, burst into the palace, screaming, “He is here! . . . Uday!”
“Tell him to come in so that we can put an end to this nonsense,” Barzan advised, as he recalled it.
“No, he has a rifle in his hands and wants to kill Dad,” Qusay warned.
Barzan went outside, where his brother Watban joined him. They found Uday gripping an assault rifle. They stepped toward him to take it away, but Uday shuffled back and fired off a burst around their feet. Eventually, Uday began to cry and dropped his gun. They escorted him to meet his father, but when they reentered the palace, Qusay drew a pistol on his older brother, “in an attempt to shoot his brother,” as Barzan judged it.
To Barzan, as ever, family relations were a zero-sum struggle for Saddam’s favor. He reprimanded Qusay, calling him “a hypocrite and an opportunist who was trying to take advantage of the situation” by murdering Uday at a moment when this might be justified so as to eliminate a rival and move up the line of succession. Whatever his thinking, Qusay stood down.
They gathered before Saddam in the living room. Uday apologized and kissed his father. “The atmosphere was very miserable, the women were crying,” and Saddam remained distraught and quiet for about ten minutes, Barzan recalled.
“After what has happened, I do not consider Uday my son,” the president finally said. He told Uday “that he was a killer and must prepare to go to the police station and give himself up.”[10]
Uday retreated to his rooms in the palace. Later that evening, Hussein Kamel arrived, handcuffed Uday, and removed him to a guesthouse on the Radwaniyah compound, where he was placed under a kind of house arrest. It emerged, according to Barzan, that shortly after Saddam had renounced his son before the family, Uday had secretly telephoned the American embassy to ask for asylum. Hussein Kamel or his men had been monitoring Uday’s line and moved in to detain him.
Rumors spread. The killing “is becoming known to people—maybe not all people, but to some Iraqis,” Saddam told his advisers about two weeks later. He could repress the truth, but it would be “much better,” he said, to put out the facts himself and control the narrative. He settled on a public resolution: he disclosed the killing and called for an official investigation while also saying that Uday had acted unintentionally and had felt so much remorse that he had tried to take his own life.[11]
Saddam released Uday from his Radwaniyah quarters after a few weeks, but Uday promptly beat up a telephone operator who had irritated him. Days after that, he pistol-whipped a security guard and fractured the man’s skull.
Saddam again summoned Barzan. The president lamented that if Uday remained in Baghdad and continued to behave this way, he was going to “force me to kill him.” Saddam had an idea: he could appoint Barzan as an ambassador in an overseas embassy, and Barzan could take Uday with him, to settle him down.
Barzan readily agreed; he had been yearning for years to leave Iraq. He told Saddam that England would be his first choice, Switzerland his second.
“Honestly, I do not trust Uday, and England is full of enemies,” Saddam said, as Barzan recalled. They settled on Geneva. Saddam’s office ordered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to make the arrangements immediately.[12]
On December 18, Barzan flew to Switzerland with Uday in a government Boeing 737. Uday brought along two heavy suitcases full of cash; more than fifty suits; and at least a dozen fur coats and hats. As they settled into Geneva that winter, Uday insisted on wearing his fur ensembles when he went out. When Barzan tried to explain that Genevans were staring at him because of his outlandish outfits, Uday replied, “Yes, of course—they could not buy such clothes.”
Predictably, he caused trouble. He pulled a gun on a nightclub patron. He racked up traffic tickets and was cited for illegally importing a vehicle. At first, the Swiss authorities “uncharacteristically” did not press for his prosecution or expulsion, because of “the status of Iraq at that time,” as Barzan put it. One day in January, however, at the Iraqi embassy, Uday shot an Iraqi guard in the chest. Barzan bundled the screaming employee into a car and rushed him to the hospital, hoping that neighbors or guards at the German embassy across the street hadn’t heard the gunfire and wouldn’t call the police.
The guard survived. Barzan fed the Swiss police a story that the man had accidentally shot himself while cleaning his gun. It was obvious that Uday had to leave the country before he ended up in a Swiss prison. On January 19, just a month after his arrival, Uday left to visit Paris. He passed through Bonn and Istanbul before returning to Baghdad later that winter. Saddam never imprisoned his son, and Uday gradually reestablished himself in Baghdad. Saddam allowed Barzan to remain in Geneva with his wife and children. His half brother was not exactly restored to favor; their relations remained strained. But he could again meet the president and write to him about sensitive family and political matters.[13]
The year following the end of his war with Iran might have been an opportunity for Saddam Hussein to reset and rebuild. The eastern and southern borders of Iraq were at last calm. Ports and trade reopened. Iraq’s budget was pinched by war debts and falling oil prices, but Saddam had emerged as by far the strongest military leader in the Gulf region—a heavily armed giant among the flaccid royal families nearby. The United States, Britain, and France were greatly relieved that the Iran-Iraq War was over, and that oil shipping through the Persian Gulf was no longer under daily threat. Those countries continued to see Saddam’s Iraq as a bulwark against revolutionary Iran and as a potential market for lucrative exports. It would have been a natural time for Saddam to return to the sort of leadership he had exercised during the 1970s—to travel back to Europe, perhaps, and negotiate deals for advanced technology; to shrink and restructure his military; and to refocus Iraq’s emphasis on industry and science. For its part, during its tilt toward Baghdad, the United States had approved the export of more than $1 billion in military equipment to Saddam’s regime after 1985, and trade between the two nations had grown sevenfold, from $500 million to $3.5 billion annually. The White House hoped to continue this business-friendly partnership.[14]
Yet Saddam seemed to have emerged from the war in an angry, paranoid, inward-looking state of mind. In matters where he might have earlier perceived complexity or irony, he now seemed to see only the dark side. His nearly mortal struggle with his eldest son had surely unsettled him. In foreign affairs, he referred regularly to the Iran-Contra revelations of 1986 and their seeming proof of an ongoing conspiracy against him by the United States, Israel, and Iran. The C.I.A. reported to American policymakers on plots against Saddam uncovered by the regime in November 1988 and again in January 1989; the latter case led to “the purging of dozens, possibly hundreds, of officers from the army and air force,” according to Richard Pollack, then a C.I.A. analyst studying Iraq. Assassination threats had long been background noise in Saddam’s experience of power. Now they seemed to be a preoccupation.[15]
At some point during the spring of 1989, Saddam received an intelligence report that Israel planned to assassinate him by launching an armada of about thirty fighter jets to bomb a family home in Tikrit when the president was visiting. The planes would race low over the desert floor to evade radar, as they had during the Osirak strike of 1981. To prepare, the president ordered his air force to stage an exercise simulating such an attack so that he could learn how to defeat it. On July 2, Saddam traveled to Tikrit to observe the maneuvers. Nine Soviet-made Sukhoi Su-25 fighter jets swooped in low from the west, as if flying from Israel. On approach, one plane’s engine failed, and the pilot ejected. His jet crashed near enough to Saddam’s observation post that the president concluded the pilot was trying to kill him.[16]
When not dodging assassins, real or imagined, Saddam devoted himself during 1989 to self-glorification before the Iraqi people. He promoted his place in the pantheon of great leaders to have emerged from Mesopotamia dating back to ancient Babylon. If modern Egypt’s claims to leadership of the Arab world owed something to the longevity of its civilization, Saddam was not about to be outdone. His government reburied Babylonian kings in new tombs and knocked down Babylonian ruins to build fresh walls using yellow bricks that contained an inscription reporting that the reconstruction had taken place “in the era of the leader President Saddam Hussein.”[17]
He also commissioned monuments to Iraq’s “victory” in its war with Iran. In August, Saddam dedicated the Swords of Qādisiyyah, named for a seventh-century battle in which an Arab Muslim army had defeated Persian enemies. Fashioned out of steel and bronze and held by arms modeled from plaster casts of Saddam’s own, two bending crossed swords towered forty feet above a plaza in central Baghdad. The Iraqi artist Khalid al-Rahal designed the monument in collaboration with Saddam; following Rahal’s death in 1986, Mohammed Ghani Hikmat, one of Iraq’s best-known sculptors, completed the project. At the dedication, Saddam donned a white jacket and a white helmet sporting an ostrich feather as he rode beneath the swords on a white horse, an appropriation of a Shia tradition commemorating Imam Hussain, the revered grandson of Prophet Muhammad.[18]
The mishmashed cult of personality Saddam cultivated was a far cry from the collectivist pretensions of the early Baath Party years. His costume wardrobe for propaganda messaging had grown dizzyingly diverse—Kurdish peasant one day, Sunni Arab sheikh the next. He regularly donned his green fatigues and pistol belt to reprise his revolutionary heritage. The catastrophic war with Iran was in fact a triumph, his propaganda machine trumpeted.
On September 4, 1989, Barzan wrote to Saddam from Geneva. He did nothing to assuage his half brother’s sense that he was besieged and insufficiently celebrated. In protesting Iraq’s gas attacks and human-rights abuses, America was waging “psychological warfare” against Iraq, Barzan asserted. Washington’s themes were “Human Rights issues, Kurdish rights, sectarian divide, and other allegations that are designed solely for one aim, which is to defame Iraq and dilute the efficacy of our victory” over Iran.
He accused Washington of trying to “invade us from the inside out” by fomenting rebellion within Iraq. Saddam should be wary of an American-authored assassination attempt, he concluded. If an assassin is willing to kill himself in the act, “there isn’t any security procedure that could be taken to prevent him from achieving his objective.” He worried about Iraqi prisoners of war held in Iran who might have been indoctrinated with revolutionary zeal and venomous hatred of Saddam.[19]
Barzan offered a prescription for long-term regime survival: a nuclear-weapons deterrent. “We have to hurry,” he wrote. “We are in a constant race with Iran and Israel.” A nuclear deterrent would “enable us to defend our sovereignty and independence . . . before being attacked or becom[ing] subjected to a conspiracy.”[20]
Barzan’s writings were in sync with Saddam’s thinking. The gap between what Saddam Hussein believed about the United States in the autumn of 1989 and what Washington’s foreign-policy elite assumed about him had grown wider than at any time since the Reagan administration had first come to his rescue seven years before. In Washington, it would take time for this reality to begin sinking in.
On November 8, 1988, George H. W. Bush had been elected president of the United States. He was arguably the best-prepared foreign-policy president since Dwight Eisenhower. A former C.I.A. director and U.N. ambassador, he had spent eight years as vice president watching Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy up close. As he moved into the Oval Office, Bush assembled a team of foreign-policy pragmatists led by National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, a retired U.S. Air Force general. Bush and Scowcroft were both inclined to continue the Reagan administration’s support of Iraq. Saddam’s influential Arab allies, King Hussein of Jordan and President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, continued to argue for American engagement with Baghdad. The prospect that Saddam might start arresting terrorists or quietly back the Israeli-Palestinian peace process tantalized the American foreign-policy establishment. Whatever the likelihood of such breakthroughs, the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies reported that Iraq was war-weary and debt-burdened and posed no near-term threat.
In September 1989, Bush attended a National Security Council meeting in which Richard Kerr, a bespectacled analyst who served as acting director of the C.I.A., gave a briefing about Iraq to inform a White House policy draft on Saddam’s regime for distribution across the national security bureaucracy.
Is it possible that Saddam Hussein could really change? Bush asked.
“The leopard does not change his spots,” Kerr said. And yet the consensus at the meeting, as Scowcroft summarized it, was that there was nothing to lose by trying to strengthen ties with Baghdad. Bush agreed. The president sought to “encourage acceptably moderate behavior on the part of Saddam Hussein” while aiding American businesses by winning them access to “what was assumed would be a substantial Iraqi reconstruction effort” after the war with Iran.[21]
On October 2, Bush signed National Security Directive 26, which essentially extended the Reagan-era tilt toward Saddam. “Normal relations between the United States and Iraq would serve our longer-term interests and promote stability in both the Gulf and the Middle East,” it said. “The United States Government should propose economic and political incentives for Iraq to moderate its behavior and to increase our influence.” The main incentive Bush had in mind was the extension of U.S. credits to allow Iraq to import American wheat, a policy that had support from farm-state politicians, such as Senator Bob Dole, the influential Republican from Kansas. Bush’s willingness to advance trade with Iraq also had backing from corporate America. The U.S.-Iraq Business Forum boasted blue-chip members such as AT&T, Bechtel, Bell Helicopter Textron, and oil giant Exxon. Saddam had warmly received American corporate executives in Baghdad. (“I look forward to having a Westinghouse refrigerator,” Tariq Aziz quipped.) The Forum’s corporate members sometimes carried Iraq’s case to Congress. The White House assured the Forum that its goals were “consistent with U.S. policy,” recalled Richard Fairbanks, a Forum board member and registered lobbyist for Iraq. “The administration wanted closer diplomatic and commercial ties to Iraq.”
In Baghdad, the ascendant Hussein Kamel was, in return, bullish on America. The weapons programs he oversaw drew on more than $4 billion in unauthorized loans from the Atlanta, Georgia, branch of an Italian bank, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro. The bank’s Atlanta manager had leveraged the program of credit guarantees to Iraq and had provided large off-the-books loans to Kamel’s military industrialization ministry—a scandal that broke just before Bush signed National Security Directive 26 and that would plague his administration for the next three years.
Congress members outraged by Saddam’s recent mass killings of Kurds and his use of chemical arms continued to press for economic sanctions against Iraq. The White House lobbied to defeat these proposals, all part of what Bush and Scowcroft later described as “a good-faith effort toward better relations.”[22]
Amidst this official optimism, on October 6, Tariq Aziz traveled to Washington to meet Secretary of State James Baker, a shrewd Texas lawyer and political fixer. Aziz shocked Baker by reporting that Saddam had concluded that the United States was secretly working against him. He even feared he could be marked out for assassination.[23]
Baker tried to disabuse Aziz of this thinking. The State Department soon cabled the Baghdad embassy to instruct diplomats there to assure their Iraqi counterparts that Washington was not conspiring against Saddam. Yet those diplomats had no way to influence Saddam or his inner circle. The C.I.A. had no sources among Saddam’s confidants. The D.I.A. no longer had the ties to Iraqi military intelligence that it had enjoyed in the days of Druid Leader. The plan to coax Saddam toward moderation suffered from a void of access and understanding. This was about to become clear to all the world.