On April 14, 1993, George H. W. Bush flew to Kuwait on a chartered jet, to be celebrated for rescuing the emirate from Saddam Hussein. Sword dancers and drummers welcomed him. Kuwaitis waved American flags along the road into the capital. Accompanying the former president were his wife, Barbara; his sons Jeb and Neil; three daughters-in-law; former treasury secretary Nicholas Brady; former White House chief of staff John Sununu; and former secretary of state James Baker. The entourage lodged at the royal Bayan Palace. Jaber al-Ahmad al-Sabah, Kuwait’s restored emir, hosted an opulent banquet and put on a “Festival of Gratitude.” A beaming Bush proclaimed, “Mere words cannot express how proud I feel to be here.” He addressed the Kuwaiti Parliament, accepted an honorary doctorate, and flew out without incident after two days.[1]
Two weeks later, Kuwait’s security services announced the arrest of seventeen people for plotting to assassinate Bush during his visit. The accused included eleven Iraqi citizens, led by two whiskey smugglers in their thirties who were said to be agents of Iraqi intelligence. The conspirators allegedly intended to blow up Bush by remotely detonating a Toyota Land Cruiser packed with about 185 pounds of explosives. Kuwaiti authorities told the U.S. ambassador that on the day Bush arrived, they had discovered the vehicle bomb in a warehouse outside Kuwait City. Yet they hadn’t informed Bush, the U.S. Secret Service, or anyone else in the U.S. government.[2]
In the long conflict between two Bush presidents and Saddam Hussein, the assassination plot of April 1993 would acquire a special resonance. “You know, he tried to kill my father,” Jeb Bush said of Saddam Hussein some thirteen years later. “I was on that trip, too,” Jeb continued. “All of us could’ve been killed.” George W. Bush reportedly made similar comments in private and admitted publicly that he was “just as frustrated as many Americans are that Saddam Hussein still lives.”[3]
But was this attempt on Bush’s life authentic, or was it a concoction of Kuwait’s security services to further discredit Saddam Hussein? It is inherently difficult to prove the absence of a secret conspiracy. It is perhaps notable that archives from the Saddam Hussein regime apparently contain no evidence of the plot. Kevin Woods, a military historian who had full access to the files, searched for even an oblique reference and found nothing. Charles Duelfer, who led the C.I.A.’s extensive investigation into Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs and regime after 2003, also turned up a blank.[4]
Saddam was certainly reckless enough to order Bush’s killing, and there is circumstantial evidence that points to his guilt. There is good evidence that the Land Cruiser vehicle bomb revealed by the Kuwaitis was built by Iraqi intelligence. But whether Saddam Hussein specifically ordered that bomb to be used to kill Bush is another matter.
In late April, the C.I.A. dispatched bomb specialists to Kuwait. They compared the Land Cruiser bomb to two intact vehicle bombs known to have been deployed by Iraqi intelligence in Turkey and the United Arab Emirates during the 1991 war. One bomb-rigged vehicle was discovered parked inside the Iraqi embassy in Abu Dhabi. The C.I.A. experts reported that the blasting caps and the circuit board from the Land Cruiser bomb in Kuwait closely resembled those found in Turkey and the U.A.E. An F.B.I. technician also found that the three vehicle bombs had “signature characteristics” of a single maker.[5]
Yet the fact that Iraqi intelligence built the Kuwait bomb did not prove that it had been deployed to kill Bush. Just as Iraqi operatives had abandoned an undetonated vehicle bomb in the Abu Dhabi embassy, they might also have left one behind in Kuwait when they fled. Perhaps the Kuwaitis discovered the Land Cruiser after the emirate’s liberation and kept it around to be used as a prop to discredit Saddam. Such cleverness was not typically associated with Kuwaiti security services, but the emirate’s restored regime certainly would have had no qualms about running such a dirty-tricks operation against Baghdad.
In May, F.B.I. agents interviewed the accused suspects. The prisoners had almost certainly been beaten and threatened while incarcerated, so the reliability of their statements is questionable. Two of them, Wali al-Ghazali and Raad al-Assadi, the whiskey smugglers, told the F.B.I. that Iraqi intelligence had recruited them to kill Bush. This recruitment had supposedly taken place at a café, a hotel, and other locations in Basra only several days before Bush arrived. The smugglers’ handlers had presented them with the Land Cruiser as well as cash and weapons. The pair were ordered to drive the bomb into Kuwait, along with their usual consignment of liquor. They were told that Bush would give a speech at Kuwait University, but they were left on their own to figure out where that was, when Bush might appear, and how to detonate the bomb so that it would kill him.
Ghazali was given a suicide vest to infiltrate the crowd around Bush if the vehicle bomb plan failed, he said, but he tossed this vest while driving to Kuwait—if the job could not be done by remote control, he was not interested, apparently. On April 13, the day before Bush landed, the conspirators drove the Land Cruiser to a warehouse in Jahra, a suburb of Kuwait City, and parked it inside, they told the F.B.I. When they returned the next day, they saw police swarming around their hiding place. How the police had been tipped off was unclear. The men said they ran away. They stole a car to return to Iraq, but the vehicle broke down, and they were arrested as they trudged along a road toward the border.[6]
The Day of the Jackal this was not, true or invented. In Washington, Sandy Berger, the deputy national security adviser, “led the doubts” as the evidence reached the White House, recalled Bruce Riedel, the C.I.A. analyst then at the National Security Council. Berger “thought this was all a setup.”[7]
Riedel disagreed. For him, the forensics tying the Land Cruiser to a regime-sponsored bombmaker made the case. President Clinton eventually decided that the plot was real, a conclusion backed by analysts at the C.I.A. and the Justice Department, who saw no reason to disbelieve the combination of technical evidence and prisoner testimony. Clinton was “furious” and told Colin Powell that Saddam had “just tried to kill an American president. I think we ought to knock the living hell out of them.”
“Mr. President, the question is, ‘Do you want to get in another war, or do you want to punish them?’ ” Powell said. “This was a ham-handed effort with little chance of success. You need a response, but not another war.”
Clinton deliberated. There was “agony” inside the administration for “more than a month” about what should be done, Riedel recalled. Finally, on June 26, Clinton ordered a retaliatory strike. Two U.S. warships fired twenty-three Tomahawk cruise missiles at Iraq’s intelligence headquarters in downtown Baghdad.
At the last minute, to reduce the risk of loss of life, Clinton ordered that the attack take place at night, Baghdad time, when few people were likely to be at work. Yet a stray missile nonetheless smashed the home of Layla al-Attar, a former director of the Iraqi National Art Museum and one of Iraq’s most admired painters. Attar and her husband died. Clinton told the public that he had acted in retaliation for “an elaborate plan devised by the Iraqi government and directed against a former president.”[8]
A few days later, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, who was visiting Baghdad, drove out to Radwaniyah, Saddam’s estate. Over lunch, they talked about the U.S. strike. Barzan tried to explain why Clinton felt obliged to hit Iraq even though Bush was no longer President. “When a president in America leaves at the end of his term, he keeps a special status and respect,” Barzan said.
Barzan told a long story about how some Sudanese people he’d met defended the honor of their country’s retired presidents, too. Saddam interrupted to exclaim, “Look, I swear, I will eliminate them one after the other!” He seemed to be referring to his enemies in general, but perhaps he meant the Bushes. Yet he said nothing to indicate that he had ordered the April hit, or that he had not, in Barzan’s account. Whatever the truth, he was plainly satisfied that much of the world believed he was responsible.[9]
By the summer of 1993, three consecutive years of harsh sanctions had left Iraq’s population facing severe food and health-care shortages. The U.N. had proposed an “oil for food” compromise to provide relief. The idea was that Iraq could sell at least several billion dollars’ worth of oil annually but would have to submit to U.N. supervision to ensure the proceeds were used for humanitarian purposes. Saddam had refused, but he was tempted. “To be honest, even a dollar would help,” he told the Revolutionary Command Council that July. Yet he feared that “everything has a price” and that his position as a supplicant of the U.N. was already becoming “a dark tunnel, which I don’t see an end to. . . . I have a deep fear of this tunnel.” He needed a way to fight the U.N. “Once they are in, they never leave unless they suffer losses. How would we harm them?”[10]
His pessimism was understandable; U.N. weapons inspectors had all but camped out in Iraq, acting much as they pleased. They had the authority of occupiers, even if they were unarmed technocrats. They ordered the demolition of entire Iraqi factories tied to chemical-weapon production or the undeclared nuclear program. They collected the country’s remaining stocks of highly enriched uranium and shipped it to Russia to eliminate the risk that Iraq might misuse it for a bomb. The C.I.A.’s U-2 spy planes continued to fly back and forth across Iraq, taking photographs to aid inspection teams on the ground. During 1993, UNSCOM alone would conduct eight missions to Iraq lasting a total of almost two hundred days. Saddam was partly paying the price for his own foolish destruction of illicit weapons and records during the summer of 1991, which had complicated UNSCOM’s verification work. Aspects of Saddam’s weapons programs “could remain unclear for a long time,” Rolf Ekéus would report to the Security Council.[11]
Saddam had to decide whether cooperating with the U.N. would be worthwhile, even if this undermined his image as a Castro-like holdout against the American-led world order. Attempting to come clean might signal weakness to Iran and Israel. He also faced “the cheater’s dilemma,” as the Norwegian political scientist Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer would later call it. To end sanctions, Saddam needed to satisfy UNSCOM about every last bomb and beaker of his past programs. But each time he authorized fresh disclosures, he invited more questions and seemed to prolong the U.N.’s investigations. His default approach remained deception and defiance—refusing landing rights to UNSCOM, harassing inspectors, and withholding the full story of his biological and nuclear programs, in particular. Three times during 1992 and again in early 1993, a united Security Council had responded to Saddam’s intransigence by declaring Iraq to be in breach of its obligations—a veiled way to threaten the renewal of war.[12]
During the second half of 1993, Saddam softened. He allowed the U.N. to set up monitoring cameras at suspect Iraqi facilities, and he turned over information about foreign companies that had supplied Iraq’s illicit programs. Tariq Aziz summoned Ekéus to his office and asked the Swede to carry messages of reconciliation to Washington.
In November, Ekéus met Peter Tarnoff, the number-three appointee at the State Department. He explained that Aziz wanted to know “what Iraq could do to get more favorable treatment” from the Clinton administration. Would it help if Iraq were “to make a significant contribution to the Middle East peace process?” How about help in the “struggle” against Islamic fundamentalism?
But Tarnoff only offered a familiar line: the U.S. “wanted only Iraq’s full compliance with the U.N.’s resolutions, and it was not prepared to have a dialogue on any other issue.” UNSCOM’s pressure, Tarnoff continued, “remained the lynchpin of U.S. policy.” The inspections were an end in themselves, not a passage to a revival of the cooperation of the Reagan years. The more effective the inspections, “the better the chance of keeping the Iraqis in place,” Tarnoff explained. France and Russia were restless about Washington’s firm line, Tarnoff admitted. They wanted to do business in Baghdad, and they worried about Iraq’s disintegration. But the Clinton administration was not budging and had warned Paris and Moscow against any move to break consensus at the U.N.
At the White House, Ekéus heard the same thing. The U.S. “was in no hurry to see this whole matter completed,” Berger told him. “Once sanctions were lifted, there would be no leverage over Saddam Hussein.”[13]
Clinton heard from his spy agencies that his punishing approach need not last forever. If inspectors kept up the pressure, Saddam might yet fall from power, according to a National Intelligence Estimate circulated by the C.I.A. that December. “There is a better-than-even chance that Saddam will be ousted during the next three years,” the document predicted.[14]
At home, Saddam consolidated his rule around his immediate family. He tried to rehabilitate Uday, his eldest son. In the spring of 1994, Saddam considered appointing him as minister of defense, a huge leap in authority. Uday had given up his hedonistic ways and “is serious, prays, and fasts,” Saddam assured family members. He asked aides to canvass army generals. Three high-ranking generals each “noted Uday’s total lack of military experience as a potential drawback and suggested that he might be more useful elsewhere,” as Ekéus summarized their responses, which he learned about on visits to Iraq. Security officers soon turned up at these generals’ homes, told them to bid their families goodbye, and took them away, never to be seen again. Yet Saddam did not go forward with his son’s appointment. He might treat honest advice—even advice he had solicited—as a capital crime, yet he remained pragmatic. Marshal Uday was a politically implausible idea.[15]
In the early autumn of 1993, Saddam provoked another crisis with the Clinton administration by rotating tens of thousands of Republican Guard forces toward Kuwait, threatening another invasion. “This crisis might create new horizons where the political environment will be more conducive,” he explained to his advisers. Clinton ordered ships and fighter planes to the region. On October 15, the U.N. adopted a fresh resolution demanding that Iraq withdraw its forces. Saddam backed down; he had been testing and bluffing.[16]
At the White House, Martin Indyk received Ekéus, who declared that the U.S. “would not continue to play this cat-and-mouse game.” Iraq “should receive absolutely no reward for its recent behavior,” and specifically “no movement of sanctions.”[17]
The repetitive crises made the C.I.A.’s three-year-old covert action more appealing than ever. Frank Anderson, nearing retirement, had dropped some of his skepticism; he now thought a coup was “unlikely but possible.” Cables poured in from the rotating C.I.A. teams in Iraqi Kurdistan about contacts that Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress, working with the Kurdish paramilitaries, had reportedly made with potential coupmakers inside the Iraqi military.
The C.I.A. had “no insight” into Saddam’s decision-making, and Iraq outside Kurdistan “was truly a denied area by that time,” Anderson recalled, using the intelligence term for an impenetrable black box. Still, Chalabi’s ambition and promises were infectious. With White House approval, Anderson ordered the establishment of a permanent C.I.A. base in Iraqi Kurdistan.[18]
For chief of base, Anderson selected Robert Baer, a charismatic troublemaker and nineteen-year agency veteran. Anderson admired Baer for his “enormous courage, physical courage”—qualities that were, he accepted, “not tempered by a lot of judgment.” A passionate downhill ski racer as a teenager, Baer had enrolled at Georgetown, where he made himself known by riding a Harley motorcycle up the library steps and through the main reading room. Recruited to the Directorate of Operations, he learned Arabic, Farsi, and French and put in hard tours in Beirut during a period of war, hijackings, and kidnappings. Baer himself admitted that it was his way to push things beyond the edge. As C.I.A. veteran Milton Bearden told Anderson, “I used to wake up at five in the morning and start with the question, ‘What did I forget to tell Baer not to do today!’ ”[19]
Baer believed that a coup against Saddam seemed unlikely and certainly would not be bloodless. The fantasy of silver-bullet covert action “helped the big thinkers” in Washington “get to sleep at night, and since we had no human sources inside or even near Saddam’s circle—none—there was nothing to bring them back down to earth,” Baer recalled. The covert-action program against Saddam had acquired a C.I.A. cryptonym: DB ACHILLES. (The “DB” was cable coding for matters pertaining to Iraq.) Saddam himself had cited the Achilles myth while rallying Arab neighbors in 1990 to his coming war against America. For both the Iraqi dictator and the C.I.A., the example of the Homeric hero with a vulnerable heel offered a call to action, despite long odds. Saddam regarded America as too hubristic and too afraid of taking casualties to defeat a united Arab nation, which he hoped to forge through his own leadership, against all evidence. The C.I.A.’s operatives and leaders embraced hope over experience as they searched for a coup plan that might work. Both sides therefore trapped themselves by imagining a fatal flaw in their opponent that did not actually exist.[20]
Early in 1995, Baer and Steve Richter, now the C.I.A.’s chief of Middle East operations, briefed Indyk at the White House. Indyk recalled that he “specifically warned” both the C.I.A. men that “no commitments could be made on behalf of the U.S. government to putative coup plotters unless the White House explicitly approved them.” If Indyk did issue such instructions, they apparently did not register.
Baer and a fresh team of Northern Iraq Liaison Element colleagues deployed to the C.I.A.’s base in Salahuddin, to the north of Erbil. Ahmad Chalabi had procured a ramshackle house for the operatives; it lacked running water, electricity, and heat. Chalabi was meanwhile peddling a well-worn white paper, “End Game,” describing a strategy to get rid of Saddam by fostering an uprising among Kurdish and Shia rebels, who would be aided by defecting military units. It essentially proposed a rerun of the failed 1991 popular uprisings stoked by the Bush administration, but with more generals on the inside to help. Baer dismissed the blueprint as a fantasy. No one at the C.I.A. or the White House believed that Chalabi was in a position to stage an uprising against Saddam, “not even the dreamers,” Baer recalled.[21]
Yet there was a new development. An Iraqi general who had been in a high position had recently defected. He wanted to move on Saddam, Chalabi told Baer. And he wanted to meet the C.I.A.
Wafiq al-Samarrai was well known to American intelligence. He had been the number two in the General Military Intelligence Directorate during the era of secret cooperation between Saddam and the Reagan administration. He had met in Baghdad with C.I.A. officers carrying satellite-derived intelligence. Later, he had worked with D.I.A. officers during Druid Leader. He had briefly been promoted into the top job at General Military Intelligence but his career had been sidetracked. In early December 1994, at forty-seven, Samarrai drove to Kirkuk and walked thirty hours into Kurdistan, where he connected with Ahmad Chalabi and Jalal Talabani, the leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. They set the general up in a mountainside villa near Dohuk. There Samarrai began to receive a succession of intrigued American and U.N. visitors, Robert Baer among them.
“I’ve been dispatched to the north by a group of military officers who intend to get rid of Saddam,” the general told Baer on January 22, 1995. “We need to know whether your country will stand in our way or not.” Samarrai also asked for immediate U.S. recognition if the coup were successful.[22]
In the coming days, Samarrai provided specifics. A combat brigade and two divisions commanded by generals with whom he was communicating would strike at Saddam. They expected that such an attack would cause Saddam to take shelter in his home area around Tikrit. There, another military unit in the conspiracy—a tank company attached to a local school for tank operators—would trap Saddam. Neither Baer nor anyone else at the C.I.A. had a way to talk to the Iraqi commanders supposedly involved in the plot. Their plan seemed complex and based on assumptions about how Saddam would behave that were inherently uncertain. Still, Samarrai was the closest thing to a restive senior officer with ties to Saddam that the C.I.A. had encountered up close in years.
Baer cabled the general’s statements to Langley. Headquarters replied: “This is not a plan.”[23]
Baer did not interpret this sarcasm as an order to stand down. He continued to talk with Samarrai. He collected the names of the conspirators; according to him, their bona fides checked out. And Baer encouraged the general: “Washington wants Saddam out.” Baer later acknowledged that he was stretching his authority by making such remarks. He was operating “out where the bright fires burn.”[24]
Samarrai also made himself available as an inside source to other agencies. In February, Charles Duelfer flew into Dohuk by helicopter with a U.N. team.
“I’m a soldier and a politician, and I have aspirations for the future,” the general told him. Over hours, Samarrai answered questions about Iraq’s biological weapons and missile programs, two of the big mysteries that still bedeviled Duelfer and Ekéus. But Samarrai didn’t know much about the details. He did offer insights into Saddam’s outlook. He said that the president regarded the possession of weapons of mass destruction as essential to his own security.
“We are the number-two country in this region, after Israel, in the biological and atomic fields,” he said. “Saddam thinks he’s going to be toppled if he doesn’t have weapons.”[25]
The comment partly explained Saddam’s willingness to allow the world to believe that he had weapons when, in fact, he did not. Yet this was a “liar’s truth” that the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies found very difficult to accept.
Ahmad Chalabi had no qualms about lying. He cloaked his personal ambition in a righteous cause that had many passionate backers. He conceded no errors. When things did go wrong, he cast blame in whatever seemed the most convenient direction. He had a sense of theatrical possibility. He understood that a long con requires belief in something grand, entrancing, and just out of reach—in this case, Saddam’s overthrow.
As part of Chalabi’s “End Game,” his I.N.C. had recruited and trained in Kurdistan a small, lightly armed militia. In Chalabi’s thinking, this ragtag force would join veteran guerrillas from the two large Kurdish parties in an attack on Saddam’s forces, which in turn would ignite armed rebellion in Iraq’s southern governorates. Samarrai’s defection had allowed Chalabi to weld this plan onto the general’s somewhat more plausible-sounding coup d’état.
“For a guy with virtually no internal support in Iraq, Chalabi knew how to get things done and especially how to nudge people where he wanted them to go,” Baer recalled. The uprising-cum-coup still looked like a long shot to Baer—among other things, fighters for the two main Kurdish parties, who often skirmished with one another, had escalated their armed rivalry into near civil war.[26]
Yet Baer pushed the plan forward. He filed many cables to C.I.A. headquarters and heard nothing in reply, he recalled. He later said he interpreted this indifference as permission, and he encouraged Chalabi and Samarrai to set a date for an attack. They decided to launch on the night of March 4, 1995.
By now, so many people had been let in on Chalabi-Samarrai-Kurdish plans that leaks flowed in all directions. On March 2, at 7:00 a.m. Washington time, Bruce Riedel, who had returned to the C.I.A. from the White House but still worked on Iraq, telephoned Martin Indyk. He reported that intercepts showed that Saddam was mobilizing elite Republican Guards to attack Kurdistan in order to preempt a coup attempt he expected to be launched from there.
Indyk called Richter, who outlined the plot involving Samarrai; according to Indyk, this was the first time he or anyone else at the White House had heard of such a coup plan or of Samarrai’s involvement. The Pentagon reported that Iranian security forces and the Badr Brigade, the Tehran-based Shiite opposition group, were moving into Kurdistan to join the fighting once the coup attempt was launched. “It seemed that everybody—even Saddam—was in on this coup except Clinton, in whose name it was being launched,” Indyk reflected.
Indyk and two aides—Ellen Laipson and George Tenet, then the senior White House staffer for intelligence matters—charged into the office of National Security Adviser Tony Lake. He had never heard of Samarrai or the coup plot, either. Laipson showed him a grainy photograph of the tough-looking, overweight Iraqi defector—“direct from central casting”—and they laughed out loud before it occurred to them, as Indyk put it, that “a lot of people were about to get themselves killed for no good purpose.”
Lake called Admiral William Studeman, recently appointed as acting director of the C.I.A., following the resignation of James Woolsey. Lake laid into the admiral: “The first time the White House finds out about it is today, not from a report from the C.I.A. but from an intercept!”
Lake turned to his staff: “We need to turn this thing off, now!”
He decided to write personally to Baer so that there would be no confusion. Lake’s cable arrived on March 3, Iraq time, at Baer’s C.I.A. base in Salahuddin: “The action you have planned for this weekend has been totally compromised. We believe there is a high risk of failure. Any decision to proceed will be on your own.” The message ordered Baer to inform the would-be coupmakers that America would not back them.[27]
A conspiracy months in the making fizzled in days. On March 6, Samarrai told Baer that he was leaving for Damascus to put his children in school there. Saddam had arrested his co-conspirators, he reported. Kurdish guerrillas launched their attack and won a battle against Saddam’s forces, but they later had to fall back. No uprising came from the South. And the C.I.A. ordered Baer to leave.
It turned out that days before the March 4 launch date, Chalabi had met with Iranian intelligence officers in Iraqi Kurdistan. He fabricated a story that the White House had dispatched an assassin, “Robert Pope,” to get rid of Saddam, and he urged the Iranians to join the action. The Iranians cabled Tehran with this report, and eavesdroppers at America’s National Security Agency intercepted it. Lake and C.I.A. officers initially believed that Pope was Baer and that he might have actively plotted Saddam’s killing in violation of U.S. law. It took months of investigation to exonerate Baer of this falsehood. There was no Robert Pope.[28]
The episode was such a complete fiasco that it might have disabused Bill Clinton of any hope that C.I.A. covert action could ever solve his Saddam Hussein problem. But Saddam soon proved to be much more vulnerable than he had seemed that March. The twist was that the Iraqi president had no immediate cause to fear his generals. His Brutus was his son-in-law.