Something appeared to be wrong with Hussein Kamel, something apart from the violent hubris to which his colleagues had grown accustomed. He suffered seizures. He would black out for a few minutes and then remember nothing of the episode. An Iraqi doctor examined him and detected a brain tumor. The case was operable, but the delicacy of the procedure and the status of the patient called for international expertise. In February 1994, a French specialist operated on Saddam’s son-in-law at a military hospital in Jordan. The procedure appeared to be successful, but as he recovered, Hussein Kamel fell into a fresh round of conflict with Uday and Qusay. He had always been frenetic, but by mid-1995, he struck some colleagues as downright unhinged. They thought his illness might explain his behavior, but it also appeared that the competition among Saddam’s princes might be getting to him. Jafar Dhia Jafar met him that summer and concluded that he was “experiencing a psychological crisis” caused by his rivalry with Saddam’s sons.[1]
At the time of Hussein Kamel’s operation in Jordan, the contours of King Hussein’s relations with Iraq were shifting again. The Oslo peace process had led the king to forge a settlement with Israel the previous year. In June 1995, Marwan Kassem, the king’s chief of royal court, secretly traveled to see Saddam Hussein. They met in Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit. The Jordanian envoy dropped a bombshell: King Hussein wished to visit Baghdad jointly with Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s prime minister, to enlarge the Oslo negotiations.
Kassem argued that Iraq would never rid itself of sanctions without Israel’s approval, and he “advised us to change our policy towards Israel in order for the siege to be lifted,” as Saddam recalled it. The idea that Saddam would receive Rabin as a guest of Iraq was almost beyond imagination, but these were ambitious times in Middle East peacemaking.
Saddam remembered rejecting the proposal outright; he told Kassem that “he and King Hussein better not mention it again.” Saddam also disclosed the proposal to Hussein Kamel, telling him that “defeatists” like Jordan “need people to be defeated with them in order to see that they are not alone in that defeat. For Iraq, this is impossible.”
Saddam still trusted his son-in-law and allowed him to travel abroad. In mid-July, Hussein Kamel flew to Moscow. “He told me that he was invited by the Russians and by the Belarusians,” Saddam told colleagues later. Hussein Kamel met Kirsan Nikolayevich Ilyumzhinov, a chess enthusiast and the president of the Russian Republic of Kalmykia, an oil-and-gas-endowed enclave by the Caspian Sea. As was typical in the Boris Yeltsin era of Russian government, Ilyumzhinov had prospered as a businessman while he consolidated political power in his region. Hussein Kamel talked with him for hours at a dacha near Moscow. A Russian foreign ministry official and a Kuwaiti businessman joined them. Hussein Kamel’s agenda on this journey remains unclear, but it seems most likely that he was engaged in sanctions-evading business of some kind, or was seeking to build ties in the chaotic post-Soviet landscape that might benefit Iraq.[2]
On his way home, he passed through Amman, the crucial gateway for Iraq’s illicit trade. Hussein Kamel kept an apartment there, behind the Iraqi Commercial Office. He stayed several days and may have met King Hussein. But Hussein Kamel may have seen the proposal to reset relations with Israel as an opportunity. He had already sent messages to the Clinton administration indicating that he did not necessarily share his father-in-law’s unshakable hostility toward Israel. He certainly imagined himself as a next-generation Iraqi leader who could rally America behind him.[3]
By the end of July, Hussein Kamel and his brother, Saddam Kamel, were preparing to leave Iraq with their children and wives—Raghad and Rana, respectively, daughters of Saddam Hussein. On July 27, Hussein Kamel met with an Iraqi brigadier who worked with the U.N. on weapons issues. He grilled the brigadier about what the outside world did and did not know of Iraq’s prohibited weapons. They discussed Iraq’s aborted atomic-bomb program. Hussein Kamel declared that by 1991, if it weren’t for the war over Kuwait, Iraq would have been able to build a bomb within eight to twelve months. The war had deprived Iraq of “a strategic balance with Israel,” he said.
That same evening, he summoned Mahdi Obeidi, the physicist who had worked with him, and asked questions about the bomb program’s history, as if preparing himself to brief others. These meetings suggested that Hussein Kamel “had already decided” by late July to defect, Saddam later concluded. In final preparation, Hussein Kamel collected at least $9 million in cash, according to later investigations by Saddam’s regime.
During his travels in and out of Jordan, Hussein Kamel had indicated to King Hussein’s aides that he might break with Saddam. It is difficult to assess how actively the king encouraged him. The Jordanian monarch was working secretly that summer to flip Iraq into the Middle East peace camp, and it is conceivable that, in this context, he recruited Hussein Kamel to defect. Yet it is clear that the exact timing of Hussein Kamel’s decision was a surprise in Amman. And there can be no doubt that Hussein Kamel’s longstanding rivalry with Uday played a significant part in the events about to unfold. Uday had recently threatened to kill him, Hussein Kamel later told King Hussein’s aides.[4]
Hussein Kamel was in a treacherous position. If he betrayed Saddam, he would not only risk his own life but also greatly complicate his wife’s position. After marrying Hussein Kamel as a teenager, Raghad had stayed in school and completed a university degree. She had grown into a formidable woman in her own right. “I grew up among giants,” Raghad recalled. “Real men. I felt safe amongst them.” This was about to change.[5]
Monday, August 7, 1995, was the eve of a national holiday in Saddam’s Iraq to commemorate the end of the Iran-Iraq War seven years earlier. Among the celebrants was Watban al-Tikriti, one of Saddam’s half brothers. He attended a party on a small farm in south Baghdad. It was a familiar scene—music, female singers, armed men on the prowl, and free-flowing liquor. What could go wrong?
This time, more than usual: Watban was also feuding with Uday, who had publicly questioned his uncle’s competence as interior minister—and not without reason. Saddam had then fired Watban back in May. “What was I to do?” the president explained later. “He would drive around Baghdad at night, drunk, and shoot out traffic lights.” A Watban-Uday fissure had now been added to the family fault lines.[6]
That August night, Uday hosted his own fete at a former yacht club on the Tigris. It was a suffocating evening; temperatures hung above one hundred degrees long after sunset. Sometime after midnight, after becoming enraged by reports of goings-on at the party Watban was attending, Uday decided to crash his uncle’s celebration. The cause of Uday’s anger has variously been described as an argument about a woman, a fistfight that escalated, or Watban’s indiscreet mocking of Uday. In any event, Uday was drunk, fired up, and armed with a pump-action shotgun.[7]
Uday opened fire when he arrived. He killed several guests and badly wounded Watban in the leg. “Blood spurted everywhere, and Watban was unconscious when Uday stuffed his uncle into the car” and drove him to the exclusive family hospital in Baghdad, according to Ala Bashir, the family physician. Watban survived, but it would require more French surgeons to try to repair his leg, which eventually had to be amputated.
Saddam rushed to the hospital, checked on Watban, and went hunting for Uday, who had wisely gone into hiding. “My father will have to calm down,” Uday reportedly told his bodyguard. (This took a while. Some days after the incident, Saddam barged into a garage at the Republican Palace complex where Uday had stored scores of Mercedes-Benzes, BMWs, Porsches, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and other cars. The president ordered security guards to douse the vehicles with gasoline and strike a match. Years later, hunting for Saddam’s illicit weapons, American investigators came across this garage, still filled with charred vehicles.)[8]
Meanwhile, that same fateful night, beneath a waxing desert moon, the Hussein and Saddam Kamel families barreled in Mercedes sedans down the highway toward Jordan to make their dramatic escape. It isn’t entirely clear why Uday’s shooting spree led Hussein and Saddam Kamel to flee that night. Saddam Kamel may have gotten into a fistfight with Uday. Raghad Hussein is one of the few surviving witnesses on the inside. She has not gone into details, but she has made clear that they all fled for their lives. “I knew that if we stayed, there would be a bloodbath,” she explained. The victims would be close members of her family, she continued. “So in order to prevent this conflict, I supported the decision to leave.”[9]
Eid al-Mawlid al-Nabawi, the celebration of the birth of the Prophet Muhammad, as recorded in the Islamic calendar, fell that year on August 9, the day after Hussein Kamel and his family arrived in Jordan. That morning, Marwan Kassem, King Hussein’s chief of royal court, was shaving at his Amman residence when his daughter told him that Hussein Kamel was on the phone.
“I’m Lieutenant General Hussein,” Hussein Kamel said when he picked up. “I have a message from the president.”
Kassem invited him over. They sat down in the living room. Hussein Kamel seemed ill at ease. He mentioned that he was staying at the Amra Hotel, a comfortable if undistinguished place on the capital’s Sixth Circle. He said that he was under “orders from Saddam” to only deliver his message to King Hussein personally.
Later that day, the king invited Hussein Kamel to see him. Only then did Saddam’s son-in-law announce that he was seeking political asylum in Jordan. He explained that he was not safe in Baghdad because of Uday. He also sought the king’s support in a campaign to succeed Saddam Hussein as Iraq’s ruler.[10]
The king transferred Hussein Kamel’s family to Hashmiya Palace, a hilltop estate with a view of Jerusalem that had been built during the 1970s. King Hussein had intended to live at Hashmiya with Queen Alia, his Egyptian-born third wife, but in 1977, Alia died in a helicopter crash. Afterward, the palace became a residence for visiting dignitaries, and its staff had hosted Prince Philip of Britain and Jacques Chirac. Now the families of Hussein and Saddam Kamel moved in.
As word spread about Hussein Kamel’s defection and ambitions to overthrow Saddam, Amman became a “bee town,” as one senior Jordanian official put it, with “all intelligence services, all media—Western, Russian, local, Arab,” pouring into the Jordanian capital. The betrayal shook up assumptions about Iraq’s future. Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi intelligence chief, flew to Amman to discuss teaming up with Hussein Kamel against Saddam.[11]
The defection had forced King Hussein to abandon the deliberate ambiguity of his relations with Saddam and choose sides. By doing so, he put at risk his fragile kingdom’s economic stability, gambling that Washington and London would back him up. Sanctions-busting trade between Jordan and Iraq—tolerated by the United States on the grounds that King Hussein was too important an ally to punish—provided Jordan a crucial source of energy at discounted prices. Saddam could not afford to lose his trade with Jordan, either. But nobody could predict how he would react to the king’s decision to shelter Hussein Kamel.
The king’s patrons in London and Washington weren’t sure what to make of Hussein Kamel’s desire to topple his father-in-law, but they welcomed such a dramatic sign that the Baghdad regime might crack up. British prime minister John Major wrote to offer his “very warm support” for Jordan’s “brave decision,” which had delivered a “serious blow to the Iraqi regime.” The king replied that he had acted because Hussein Kamel and his family “sought our help, as a result of total desperation and pressing need to alert the world to the urgent requirement for change in their country.”[12]
King Hussein harbored hopes that if he helped engineer a change of regime in Baghdad, he might somehow restore his own extended family’s historical royal rule in Iraq. The king’s dreams of a Hashemite return in Baghdad were at least as fanciful as his hopes for Saddam’s embrace of the Oslo peace process, but the ambitions of monarchs sometimes die hard. “King Hussein is free to dream about anything he wants,” Tariq Aziz advised Saddam privately. “King Hussein is controlled by the U.S.; they tell him to do things. . . . There is a deal between King Hussein, Hussein Kamel, and the United States to make a change” in Iraq.[13]
All those hoping that Hussein Kamel’s defection might produce Saddam’s overthrow still faced the quandary that had bedeviled the C.I.A. for four years now: How would they actually pull this off? And how could they predict confidently that what followed would be any better?
David Manners was the newly arrived C.I.A. station chief in Amman that summer. He was a U.S. Naval Academy graduate in his late thirties who had moved back and forth between the Soviet–East European and Near East Divisions of the Directorate of Operations. He and his family had barely unpacked in Amman when he received a call from Ali Shukri, the director of King Hussein’s private office and an influential palace fixer. Shukri said the king wanted to see him.
“I fear that Saddam Hussein may take action against me,” the Jordanian monarch told Manners when they were seated in a reception room. He asked to talk to President Clinton, to “get assurances of protection.”
Manners delivered a secure phone to the palace and called back to headquarters to see how the C.I.A. might meet the king’s request. John Deutch, a chemist and former M.I.T. provost, had recently arrived from the Pentagon to become C.I.A. director. Deutch’s good relations with Clinton offered the agency renewed access to the Oval Office. Yet Deutch had little experience with intelligence operations. He had served most recently as deputy defense secretary and had grown accustomed to the reflexive deference shown to superiors at the Pentagon. The C.I.A.’s comparative disdain for hierarchy and its culture of creative insubordination (or indiscipline and lack of accountability, depending on the beholder) seemed to stun Deutch, in the judgment of some of his new colleagues.
Deutch called King Hussein to reassure him while they waited for a slot in Clinton’s schedule: “Anything you need, we will provide.”[14]
Clinton called later and repeated the assurance that Washington would protect Jordan against Saddam if he retaliated over Hussein Kamel’s defection. Clinton followed up with a formal letter restating this commitment. The tight, often secret collaboration between the king and successive American presidents had opened a new chapter.
On Saturday, August 12, Hussein Kamel addressed a press conference in a garden at one of King Hussein’s palaces in Amman. He wore a gray suit and spoke calmly from a podium surrounded by yellow roses. He spoke like an aspiring politician: “It was the suffering of our people that prompted us to leave the regime and work for the welfare of our people,” he said. He did not denounce his father-in-law by name and pledged not to spill Iraqi state secrets unless this was in the interest of the Iraqi people. But he did not hide his ambition: “We are working to topple the regime.”[15]
Saddam wanted his daughters and grandchildren back. Soon after the defection, the Iraqi president dispatched Uday, Ali Hassan al-Majid (“Chemical Ali”), and an intelligence officer to Amman. King Hussein felt he had no choice but to receive the delegation, which would also include Iraq’s ambassador in Jordan. The Jordanian Royal Guard, responsible for the king’s safety, recommended that they disarm the Iraqi visitors, who typically packed pistols. But the king did not want to insult his guests or seem to be afraid of them. Ali Shukri, the senior palace aide, warned the Iraqi ambassador: “If your people so much as twitch, you are all going to be killed.”[16]
Before the meeting, the king summoned Dave Manners. Shukri met him and reported that the king had spoken personally to Saddam’s daughters, and that the women had said they wished to stay in Jordan. The king would explain that the daughters could remain under the king’s protection for as long as they wished. Manners recalled being ushered into a room adjoining the office where the Iraqis would arrive. He was to sit there during the meeting, out of sight. Before it started, the king came in, pulled out a .45-caliber pistol, chambered a round, and, smiling, handed the gun to Manners. “Who knows what happens?” he said wryly.[17]
When the visitors turned up, three Royal Guard officers with automatic rifles stood by the king. Majid did the talking for the Iraqis. The king heard them out but let them know that Raghad, Rana, and their children would not be leaving his protection unless the women later decided to go home. The discussion was over in less than fifteen minutes. It seemed doubtful, however, that Saddam would let the matter rest.
King Hussein had asked that a high-ranking emissary from the Clinton administration visit with Hussein Kamel to assure him that he had done the right thing by breaking with his father-in-law, and to explore plans to overthrow Saddam.
Manners joined a call with George Tenet, now at the C.I.A. as Deutch’s deputy, to discuss who the Clinton administration would send to Amman. Deutch had suggested dispatching J. H. Binford Peay III, the four-star general in charge of Central Command (CENTCOM). But Manners thought that was a terrible idea, he recalled. Hussein Kamel “is a thug in an Armani suit,” he said. “You do not send a four-star general or flag-rank officer out to meet this criminal. This is a C.I.A. thing . . . this is dirty stuff.”
They settled on David Cohen, a career analyst with a graduate degree in political science who had recently succeeded Ted Price as the head of the C.I.A’s global spying operations. Officers at Jordan’s Mukhabarat, its General Intelligence Directorate, arranged a dinner at Hashmiya Palace. Hussein Kamel wore a business suit. He was abstemious—he did not smoke and drank only water with lemon. His brother Saddam and a hulking cousin who had come to Jordan with them wore Hawaiian shirts with pistols protruding from their pants. After a meal, they sat down to discuss “how to go forward in terms of cooperation,” as Manners put it.[18]
Neither Cohen nor Manners spoke Arabic, so the discussion suffered from the starts and stops of interpretation. Hussein Kamel delivered a rambling monologue about his ambition to rescue Iraq. Some of his remarks were straightforward, yet his ideas about how to seize power were “sprinkled with elements of madness,” Manners recalled. At one point, evidently inspired by Saddam Hussein’s methods of patronage, he suggested that the United States buy five thousand Mercedes sedans and bring them to the Iraqi-Jordanian border to put on display in a giant parking lot. Then they should announce to Iraqi military officers that if they defected and crossed the border, they would be rewarded with a car. Even more astonishingly, he asked for direct command of the 82nd Airborne Division, according to Manners. “We’ll take back Baghdad in a week,” he said, speaking of what he could do with those American forces at his disposal.
“I’m not in a position to do that,” Cohen said about handing over the 82nd Airborne. He exchanged sideways glances with his colleagues, and the Americans left abruptly. The C.I.A. soon formed a task force to work with Jordanian intelligence on debriefing Hussein Kamel about his potential and about the inner workings of the regime and its weapons programs. But it was already evident that Hussein Kamel was unlikely to be the savior the agency had been seeking.[19]
Hussein Kamel’s defection had deprived him of the access and authority that would have made him a danger to Saddam had he remained in Baghdad and tried to seize power there. His years as Saddam’s visible and powerful henchman and his complicity in many of the regime’s catastrophic campaigns, such as the brutal occupation of Kuwait and the murderous repression of the 1991 uprisings, undermined his ability to attract allies. A British intelligence officer summed up the situation in a session with King Hussein: “Your majesty, you have a recently cut rose,” he said. “It has its own perfume, which will wither away in no time.”[20]
The C.I.A. and MI6 had cultivated opposition to Saddam since the Gulf War, separately and together. King Hussein maintained close ties with both spy services. Manners admired his British colleagues but kept his distance on operational matters. There had long been an air of sibling rivalry between the two services, and in this case, it played out in competition for King Hussein’s attention. The Americans were action-oriented and impatient; the British were “more reserved, more into details,” and they knew the region better because of their imperial experience, recalled Samih Battikhi, then deputy head of the Jordanian Mukhabarat.
After the debacle with Ahmad Chalabi in Kurdistan, the C.I.A. appeared ready to join MI6 in firmly backing another opposition leader long cultivated by Britain: Ayad Allawi, a physician, businessman, and former Baathist based in London who had founded the Iraqi National Accord, a rival opposition group to Chalabi’s. Allawi had built a network of former and serving Iraqi military officers, some of whom had carried out “C.I.A.-inspired” bombings in and around Baghdad in the year prior to Hussein Kamel’s defection, according to Martin Indyk. Unlike Chalabi, Allawi did not have ties to Tehran or lie habitually, and he worked comfortably in the shadows. Yet Allawi made clear that summer that he was not about to share power with Hussein Kamel.
Allawi met with King Hussein and criticized the newcomer: “He doesn’t have a plan,” Allawi said. He dismissed Hussein Kamel, not inaccurately, as someone with “a very narcissistic streak and a very nasty streak of corruption and hurting people.”[21]
For Manners and the C.I.A., the situation was delicate. Hussein Kamel’s declarations had made headlines and constituted the most visible fissure in Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship since George H. W. Bush had inaugurated covert action four years earlier. King Hussein had openly embraced regime change in Baghdad. The C.I.A. sought to encourage the king’s pivot while persuading the monarch that Hussein Kamel was not by himself the answer. “The king needed to learn that the guy’s a defector—his utility is in the act he committed,” Manners reflected later. “We’re not going to get behind him.” But King Hussein was understandably skeptical about the C.I.A.’s ability to foment a change of regime by its own methods. And Saddam Hussein had only just begun to fight back.[22]
About two weeks after Hussein Kamel arrived in Amman, Jafar Dhia Jafar received a summons to a meeting in Baghdad. He was taken in a car with thick blackout curtains to a building inside the Republican Palace complex. After being checked for weapons, he entered a small lecture hall filled with colleagues from Iraq’s former nuclear program and scientists and administrators from other industrial projects. Saddam entered and took a chair onstage.
“I have gathered you to apologize to you twice: once for appointing Hussein Kamel as your supervisor and once again for his being my son-in-law and being affiliated with my family,” Saddam said calmly. During an hour of extemporaneous remarks, he repeated this apology three times. He described Hussein Kamel as “conceited” and “paranoid” and explained that the operation to remove the tumor in his brain had “negatively affected his behavior.”[23]
The event was part of an extraordinary secret apology tour Saddam undertook late that summer to minimize the damage of his son-in-law’s betrayal and reassert his authority. The president distributed a letter of apology and explanation to ministers and other leaders. He presided over a “lessons learned” session with his Council of Ministers. To an audience at the Military Industrialization Corporation and at a convening of the Revolutionary Command Council, he repeatedly offered the same two-part apology: first, for having saddled the nation with this vile traitor, and second, for having invited Hussein Kamel into his own family. Deftly, Saddam cast the crisis as a shared experience of the Baath Party leadership, a collective trauma.
To the Revolutionary Command Council, Saddam spoke of himself in the third person. He acknowledged Hussein Kamel’s abusive actions while in power, but he cleverly absolved his comrades of their own complicity in his son-in-law’s misdeeds. “You tolerated the person who insulted you very much and insulted the country,” he said, “because it seemed that he has the trust of Saddam Hussein, and because you value Saddam Hussein in your hearts. . . . Therefore, I thank you a lot.”
He explained that Hussein Kamel’s “treason” was the result of two factors. The first was ambition. As recently as March, his son-in-law had been pressing for a promotion to deputy prime minister, which Saddam had refused to give, knowing that Hussein Kamel’s appetite for power was insatiable. “I told him, ‘You are sick.’ ” Hussein Kamel would not be satisfied until he had Saddam’s own position. “I told him, ‘I am warning you, this is dangerous—dangerous for you, and it is dangerous to have such an imagination.’ ”
He assured his comrades that he did not believe in family rule. “Saddam Hussein . . . believes in the republican system, and he is not concerned to make the Baath Arab Socialist Party a tool or stairs to his relatives so they [can] sneak into authority one after another.”
The possibility that his son-in-law had gone off the rails because of a brain tumor seemed to comfort Saddam. It exonerated him of all responsibility. A doctor had advised Saddam that because of the operation, Hussein Kamel’s “brain electricity has changed.”[24]
Saddam recounted that he said to himself, “If he is insane and committed suicide, or had he remained insane, it would have been more honorable for me, honorable for him” and for his place in history, “rather than be labeled as a traitor.” Saddam maintained that he did not feel threatened. Jordan was “a small and weak country,” he told one audience. “King Hussein was raised by the British,” he continued. “He was not raised in a rural home in Iraq,” as Saddam had been, so he “cannot endure hardships.”[25]
King Hussein’s own enthusiasm for his guest waned as summer passed. Hussein Kamel “didn’t have the charisma,” recalled Ali Shukri. “He wasn’t properly educated; he didn’t speak English or any other language” besides Arabic. Ayad Allawi was not the only opposition leader to shun him. The Shia parties “especially didn’t want to have anything to do with” Hussein Kamel because they accurately regarded him as complicit in Saddam’s murderous crushing of the 1991 rebellion.[26]
Yet the king was also irritated by the C.I.A. The agency had undermined his secret initiative to bring Iraq into the peace process with Israel, he felt, because the Clinton administration did not trust Saddam enough to explore his political rehabilitation. (So dismayed was King Hussein by the Clinton administration’s unwillingness to support Yitzhak Rabin’s outreach to Saddam that when a right-wing Israeli gunman assassinated Rabin later that year, the king wondered aloud if Americans were behind the killing.)[27]
Dave Manners worked to persuade the king to back Allawi and the Iraqi National Accord. Yet the Jordanian monarch’s top advisers were divided—some favored going all in with Washington, while others preferred maintaining Jordan’s business and political ties to Saddam’s regime. In September, King Hussein flew to Washington and rode to the C.I.A.’s wooded campus to hear a pitch about the agency’s latest plan to develop an insider coup against Saddam, this time through Allawi.[28]
One of King Hussein’s skeptical advisers had warned him “to expect a half-baked presentation” at the C.I.A. The spy agency briefers would cloak their lack of knowledge about the internal situation in Iraq “through the use of elaborate graphs, charts, and presentational aids.” Even in these early days of PowerPoint’s hegemony over Washington, an overload of colorfully designed but cluttered and questionably relevant information was a common feature of intelligence briefings.
Manners by now sympathized with the skeptics around the king. He was coming to believe that the Clinton administration was not serious about a plan to remove Saddam Hussein from power. The DB ACHILLES covert-action program was very modestly funded, and the White House was clearly ambivalent about taking more risks. A half-assed covert action was worse than none at all, Manners thought.
Saddam was becoming the “new Fidel Castro,” entrenched in power and feeding off America’s ineffectual enmity, Manners told Deutch and King Hussein in the Langley meeting. King Hussein said he had used the same analogy—if the effort to remove Saddam went as poorly as the effort to remove Fidel, Jordan would pay a steep price.
The king left the session at Langley still undecided about whether to back the C.I.A. Later, on the same visit, however, he met Bill Clinton in the Oval Office. The president pulled him aside, put an arm around his shoulder, and asked him to join the effort to unseat Saddam. The king agreed. The C.I.A.—this time with apparent support at the highest levels—would try again.[29]