Rolf Ekéus kept an apartment in central Stockholm lined with books and softened by a well-tuned piano. At his club near the capital’s waterfront, he could lunch with other notables of Sweden’s political elite. As he led UNSCOM’s investigations in Iraq, he embodied much of the ethos of Swedish global diplomacy—earnest, balanced, multilingual, and devoted to peacebuilding. Yet he also had to manage some of the tension inherent in Sweden’s historical doctrines of neutrality. His wealthy, democratic country was firmly attached to Europe and therefore, by proximity, to the American nuclear and defense umbrella of the Cold War era. Swedes appointed to roles like the one Ekéus held sought credibility as independent fact finders and mediators, but some leaned toward Washington more than others. From his office at the U.N. tower in Manhattan, Ekéus continued to take an aggressive line toward Saddam. His decisions might not fairly be called pro-American, but by 1995, the Clinton administration was certainly satisfied. Ekéus continued to welcome the C.I.A.’s insights into what Saddam might be covering up. He also opened a secret, sensitive intelligence-sharing channel with Israel. Scott Ritter, an American Marine officer posted to the Special Commission, regularly shared U-2 photos with Israeli defense and intelligence analysts so that the Israelis, who watched Iraq closely, might offer suggestions about where Ekéus’s inspectors should be hunting.[1]
Tariq Aziz found Ekéus difficult to influence. His standard was “perfection,” as Aziz told Saddam. “This is his desire at the behest of the United States, and due to his own cowardice. As a person, he is a coward. He is not one of those international figures that say, ‘I am convinced, and this is where I stop.’ ”[2]
Aziz was on the hook to Saddam for results at the U.N.—sanctions relief, above all. He knew well that his regime was still covering up too many secrets about its past weapons work to expect a passing grade from Ekéus. By 1995, the Special Commission had documented and dismantled much of Iraq’s prohibited missile arsenal. Russia had provided serial numbers of Scud missiles the Soviet Union had exported to Iraq, and this data had accelerated accounting work by a specialized U.N. team. Iraq’s chemical-arms program had also been well documented. Yet Iraq still harbored important secrets about its missile program and past chemical-weapon use, as well as about its nuclear-bomb program. The regime had still not come clean about its centrifuge work to enrich uranium or its crash program, following the invasion of Kuwait, to use reactor fuel to hurriedly build a bomb.[3]
Yet perhaps the biggest remaining problem, Aziz knew, was Iraq’s biological-weapons program. Saddam had approved a robust research and weapons-building effort that dated to the mid-1980s. They had loaded germ agents into about 166 bombs and 25 missile warheads on the eve of the 1991 war. Hussein Kamel ordered those weapons destroyed in May of that year after they weren’t used. Yet he again prohibited recordkeeping. Ekéus had been probing this history and hunting for hidden biological stocks since 1991, yet Iraq had admitted next to nothing. The regime had trotted out stone-faced technocrats and scientists who offered one absurd cover story after another about the purposes of suspect facilities. On biological weapons, Ekéus “has solid ground against us, actually,” Amer Mohammad Rashid, one of Saddam’s weapons advisers, told him. “I regret to say that we are responsible.”
Saddam had refused to tell the truth in part because he feared that if he admitted his lies about the germ weapons, Ekéus would “use it as an excuse” to revitalize and prolong other investigations. During the first half of 1995, Aziz advised that this risk was now worth taking because France and Russia were ready to help Iraq achieve sanctions relief—but only if “the existence of a big gap in the biological file” could be addressed. Saddam remained skeptical that Ekéus would ever come around, and he had doubts that France and Russia could be trusted, but he appears to have given Aziz permission to see what might be done.[4]
That April, in Baghdad, Aziz told Ekéus a story about a friend in the city who had been accused of political murder. His friend was innocent, but he confessed nonetheless, after being tortured. Aziz suggested that Iraq might be prepared to make a similar admission about its history of biological-weapons work.
Ekéus flew to Washington and met Tony Lake, the national security adviser. He reported what he had heard. “Tariq Aziz must have gone to the Arthur Koestler school of philosophy,” Lake said, referring to the author of the novel Darkness at Noon, in which the protagonist, caught up in Stalinist show trials, confesses to crimes he did not commit.
The dance between Ekéus and Aziz continued into the summer. Iraq admitted that it had developed an offensive germ-warfare program but still falsely claimed that it had never assembled weapons. Aziz kept demanding sanctions relief. Ekéus could only say that telling the truth would help at the Security Council.
“Do they want to come clean or not?” Peter Tarnoff, Clinton’s undersecretary of state for political affairs, asked Ekéus that June. “Their behavior seems to indicate that they have something to hide.”
“Their mindset is one of paranoia,” Ekéus said. “Saddam Hussein has a very limited point of view. He deals largely with a small set of people, virtually all Iraqis.” His thinking, Ekéus continued, was “limited and maybe bizarre and screwed up.”
Tarnoff noted that if “Saddam had made a decision to come clean and the Iraqis followed through, the U.S. alone would not be able to resist.”
“We have growing confidence in most areas” of the weapons inspections, Ekéus acknowledged. The open issues about chemical arms and missiles were “not important.” Yet it was “crystal clear” that Iraq was hiding “both weapons and documents” from its work on germ warfare. It was also unclear whether they would ever tell the full story. Ominously, Aziz had coupled the disclosure of half-truths that summer with a threat: unless the U.N. ended sanctions, Iraq would cease all cooperation.[5]
This was the state of play when Hussein Kamel’s defection rocked Baghdad in August. It was immediately clear to Saddam and Tariq Aziz that if Hussein Kamel turned state’s witness for Ekéus—if he started spilling secrets—Iraq’s position at the Security Council would spiral from bad to worse. Yet only Hussein Kamel knew the full story of what he had ordered destroyed or hidden. They were flying blind.[6]
Aziz telephoned Ekéus and asked him to visit Baghdad. At twilight on August 17, Ekéus and nine colleagues filed into the cavernous conference room at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Aziz brought his own delegation.
Aziz began by saying that after Hussein Kamel’s flight to Jordan, he had learned of secrets that had been kept from the U.N. “on Hussein Kamel’s instructions.” Aziz himself had never “known the truth.” They intended to correct the record now. After they did, Aziz continued, he was sure that Ekéus and his colleagues “would conclude that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction—no weapons and no materials.”
Rihab Rashid Taha al-Azawi, a mild-mannered scientist educated in Britain, proceeded to read out a stunning confession of Iraq’s development of biological weapons. She recited dates, facilities, equipment used, and approximate production volumes. She described how Iraq had produced botulinum toxin and anthrax, agents so deadly that a drop might kill a person. She explained how germ bombs and warheads had been assembled and deployed. It had all been Hussein Kamel’s doing. Ekéus and his team scribbled notes furiously.[7]
Two nights later, the Swede returned alone to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and met Aziz. Ekéus complained that while Rihab Taha’s admissions had been remarkable, he “had not received one single document” to back up her story.
But Aziz wanted to talk about the bigger picture. He knew Ekéus would soon find a way to meet Hussein Kamel, “the American agent,” as he called him. Ekéus should be wary. Hussein Kamel would lie, and the Swede must be able to “see the difference between lies and facts.” Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction—none. Aziz was “absolutely sure.” All its work lay in the past.
If Ekéus would just do the right thing, Aziz continued, Iraq would be appreciative. He looked out the window and exhaled cigar smoke. “We could open an account in Switzerland for you—for instance, five hundred thousand dollars.”
Stunned, Ekéus managed to reply, “That’s not the way we make business in Sweden.”[8]
When Ekéus complained that Iraq had provided no records, he may have sparked an idea in Aziz’s brain trust. Days later, an Iraqi minder told Ekéus that he had important news: the regime had just discovered that Hussein Kamel had secretly stored documents about illicit weapons at his farm outside Baghdad.
Ekéus and some of his team members drove straight there. They made their way to a “traditional shotgun-shaped henhouse,” Ekéus recalled. Inside they found 170 boxes of documents, microfilm, photographs, and videotapes—the documents alone would total about 680,000 pages when inventoried. It was obvious that the materials had recently been moved to Hussein Kamel’s shed—the crates were dust-free. But the treasure was genuine. One inspector quickly found a historical memo updating authorities about Iraq’s germ weapons.[9]
Ekéus flew on that day to Amman for an appointment with Hussein Kamel. Riding into the Hashmiya Palace grounds, he saw children’s toys and bicycles scattered on the lawns. Inside, he found a large reception room alive with activity—ringing telephones, televisions tuned to the BBC and CNN, aides typing at computers.
Hussein Kamel joined him on a long sofa. For the next two hours, he spoke mainly about how his alienation from the Baathist regime had evolved.
“My departure from Iraq was not a personal matter,” he insisted. “It is the country that matters.” Iraq was now in bad shape, suffering “executions every day, people in jail, and confiscation of money.” Kamel described his conflicts with others on Saddam’s team. When he became minister of defense after the war in Kuwait, he had “criticized the wrongdoings of members of the leadership.” The backlash had been harsh, and he had resigned. He stayed home for four months. When he returned, he continued to point out incompetence, and there was “a lot of shouting.”
“Iraq just continues with policy that leads nowhere,” he complained. Saddam had prepared an “enormous shopping list” of conventional arms—tanks, fighter planes, artillery—that he planned to buy from Russia as soon as he was free from sanctions. Iraq’s foreign policy, he argued, “should focus on improving relations with the West, reject the militaristic policy of the past, focus upon economic reconstruction and growth, establish cordial relations with all neighbors,” and support the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. To achieve this, his father-in-law had to go.
At dusk, Ekéus and Hussein Kamel stepped out onto a patio. To the west, they could see the lights of Jerusalem. Speaking “almost dreamily,” Ekéus recalled, Hussein Kamel said that he “saw a future of peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors.”[10]
Hussein Kamel’s defection made Nizar Hamdoon introspective. Hamdoon had no desire to break with Saddam. Yet he saw himself as a reformer, a truth-teller in a system that he, too, increasingly recognized as broken. After several years of unenviable work defending Iraq before the U.N. Security Council, Hamdoon decided to deliver some realism to Saddam. The ambassador “had credibility” with Saddam, recalled his friend Odeh Aburdene. He dared to tell Saddam that “people are hungry” in Iraq, because of sanctions, provoking Saddam to retort: “Don’t worry. Everything is under control.” As Aburdene put it, “Nobody else could have that conversation” because Saddam “didn’t think that Nizar would conspire against him.”[11]
During the first days of September 1995, the ambassador typed on his office computer an extraordinary letter to Saddam, exceeding eight thousand words. He told Saddam “what was on his mind,” as he later explained to the scholar Daniel Pipes. He asked, as a colleague who worked with Hamdoon at the time later summarized it, “Where have we gone wrong?” When Saddam staged public referendums endorsing his rule, why did the results always have to be 99.2 percent in favor of the president’s continuing reign? “Why not say sixty-five percent?” Hamdoon asked, as this colleague recalled. “Why not make it more realistic?”[12]
Hamdoon had come to think that Iraq was a “good candidate for democracy, from the perspective of its size, history, culture, natural resources and human resources,” as he once put it. In recent years, countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America had staged elections and implemented democratic constitutions. He urged Saddam to embrace this wave of political pluralism. “He wanted Iraq to be like Spain,” Aburdene said.[13]
Hamdoon dispatched his letter by diplomatic pouch. He knew he was pushing the edges of what was tolerable. Some weeks later, he was summoned home to Baghdad, the colleague who worked with him at the time recalled. Hamdoon left instructions for the care of his wife and daughters should he fail to return.[14]
Saddam did recognize the letter as a threat—perhaps less for what it said than because it had been written down at all and, worse, typed on a computer that might be penetrated by the C.I.A. or other hostile intelligence services. If Hamdoon’s critique leaked, it could be used by Iraq’s enemies as evidence of serious dissent within the Baghdad regime. According to Pipes, Saddam directly accused Hamdoon of sending a copy of his letter to the C.I.A., perhaps as a prelude to defecting. Yet Saddam did not punish Hamdoon or execute him. He shared Hamdoon’s letter with Baath Party leaders and then wrote a seventy-five-page reply that rebutted Hamdoon’s advocacy, the ambassador later told Pipes. As with his confessional tour after Hussein Kamel’s departure, Saddam made a display of his own confidence and normalized what might otherwise have been a destabilizing episode.[15]
For all the drama, by the arrival of autumn in 1995, Saddam and Ekéus were in some respects back where they had been before Hussein Kamel’s flight to Jordan. The main issue remained Iraq’s germ weapons, and the regime’s systematic lying about them, which Aziz and his colleagues now sought to undo. Even the truth could sound ludicrous. One part of the biological-weapons program had origins in a poisons unit that sought to protect Saddam against doctored food. “You know as well as I do that every government in the world has a section of their state security organization devoted to the testing of the food of the leadership,” Aziz once remarked to an incredulous U.N. inspector.[16]
Amir al-Saadi, a friend of Jafar Dhia Jafar’s, sought to persuade Ekéus’s team that the germ weapons had been deployed as a deterrent, not as an offensive arsenal. Saadi had been educated in London and was married to a German citizen; he understood the rationales of deterrence. “Nobody would use weapons of mass destruction against us because then we would retaliate—that’s the whole idea,” he told Ekéus’s team. “It was to prevent a war from starting.”[17]
He and other sophisticated scientists might have wished to believe this, but the argument did not add up. Saddam had hidden his biological weapons, suggesting that he might be more interested in keeping his options open than in classical deterrence. In any event, it is difficult to deter enemies by developing a terrible weapon if your adversaries do not know for certain that you possess such a weapon. As Dr. Strangelove tells the Soviet ambassador in the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick’s classic satire about nuclear deterrence, “Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret!”
The circularity of Iraq’s deception had become a whirlpool, spinning Ekéus and his team around and around, forcing them to consider at an almost metaphysical level what could be known and not known in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. “I didn’t lie to you,” Aziz assured Ekéus when the Swede returned to Baghdad after his meeting with Hussein Kamel. Since it was obvious that Aziz had, in fact, been deceptive about the germ-weapons program, the Iraqi deputy prime minister added that diplomacy, “according to an English definition,” means that “the employee lies for the sake of his government. The concealment of previous information was not my responsibility.”
He offered Ekéus updated assurances that September: “We confirm that Iraq is empty of any material, warheads, or anything that contradicts” U.N. resolutions about banned weapons. Yet there was one more caveat: “And if there is anything, then it is not in the hands of the Iraqi leadership but in the hands of the American spy,” Hussein Kamel.[18]
On October 2, 1995, Ekéus flew back to Amman to meet again with Hussein Kamel. When he arrived at Hashmiya Palace, there were no longer children’ s bicycles and toys strewn on the grounds. The televisions and computers in the makeshift command center had gone dark. Hussein Kamel sat alone on a sofa nursing a glass of water. A Jordanian civil servant with imperfect English had been assigned to translate. Ekéus struggled to make himself understood. He and a colleague had come with a list of questions about Iraqi missiles, but Hussein Kamel was not interested.
“I will return to Iraq!” he declared suddenly.
“When?” Ekéus asked, stunned.
“Soon.”
Ekéus said he thought this was a bad idea, but Hussein Kamel seemed determined. He had been appointed and fired from powerful positions more than once by the president, he explained. He knew that if he returned, he would face a period of political exile, but this would not last long.
Ekéus concluded that there was little he could do but offer his best wishes and advice. “Don’t go to Baghdad yet,” he said as he departed.[19]
Hussein Kamel’s operations room had gone dark because the exiled Iraqi opposition to Saddam shunned him. His repeated calls to the main Kurdish political parties had produced little, according to the reports of the Amman office of Iraqi intelligence. Ahmad Chalabi, who tolerated few rivals, had no time for him. He explored moving to France or Germany but got no traction. Britain refused to admit him when he sought to attend an opposition conference in London, as Iraqi intelligence found.[20]
David Manners, the C.I.A. station chief, assigned a case officer in his midthirties to stay on top of Hussein Kamel. But “General Hussein” was insulted by the officer’s youth. Unhappily, Manners made periodic trips himself to Hashmiya. His message remained that the United States was not going to back the defector—certainly not unless Hussein Kamel did more to prove himself. “The way you can highlight your own importance to people back in Washington is to tell us things that only you know that will help us remove Saddam,” Manners told him.[21]
Hussein Kamel did reveal useful information, but the problem, according to Samih Battikhi, the deputy director of Jordanian intelligence, was that the C.I.A. “wanted information from him without promises to support him,” and Hussein Kamel therefore resisted full cooperation. The reality was that both Manners and Battikhi thought he was “as bad as Saddam,” if not worse. Hussein Kamel and his brother Saddam boasted openly of their cruelty. They recounted a story about an employee in Iraq who had failed at a task Hussein Kamel assigned him. Hussein Kamel supposedly made the man drink gasoline and then shot him in the stomach to try to make him explode—another rendition, whether true or merely twisted bravado, of the savage experiments described by survivors of the 1991 uprisings. Jordanian intelligence was no paragon of human rights—investigators documented widespread abuse of detainees in Jordanian prisons—but this sort of casual bragging about torture and execution seemed beyond the pale.[22]
When King Hussein restricted his ability to talk to the press, Hussein Kamel raised the possibility of moving to Syria. He was free to leave, King Hussein told his aides, but Saddam’s daughters must remain. By Iraqi intelligence accounts, Hussein Kamel passed a letter to Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, asking to visit Damascus, but Assad denied the request. The Syrians regarded Hussein Kamel’s defection “as an American plot,” the spy service wrote, designed to “overthrow the regime in Iraq” and replace it with one that would move closer to Israel. This was something the Syrians “consider[ed] a danger to their position.”[23]
Sajida, Saddam’s wife, got in touch with Hussein Kamel and told him that he would be protected if he brought her daughters and her grandchildren home. Saddam also called him, according to Ali Shukri, the aide to Jordan’s King Hussein, and he, too, offered assurances: “Do you think I could harm the father of my grandchildren?”[24]
On the night of November 4, 1995, Yitzhak Rabin addressed one hundred thousand Israelis at a peace rally in Tel Aviv’s municipal square. He joined the folk singer Miri Aloni in a rendition of “A Song for Peace.” As he departed the stage, he urged the crowd, “Let’s not just sing about peace—let’s make peace!” Backstage, Yigal Amir, a twenty-five-year-old Israeli Jew, drew a pistol and shot Rabin twice. He died less than two hours later. Yigal was a right-wing activist who opposed Rabin’s support for returning parts of the West Bank to the Palestinians. “I acted alone on God’s orders, and I have no regrets,” he told the police.
Bill Clinton, King Hussein, and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt attended Rabin’s funeral two days later. Clinton and Hussein delivered eulogies. “We belong to the camp of peace,” the king declared. The assassination had ripped a hole in the Oslo negotiations, but by their presence in Jerusalem, King Hussein and Mubarak sought to show that they would stay the course.[25]
In Baghdad, Saddam and his comrades watched the funeral on television and then gathered to denounce what it showed about Arab resolve against Israel. King Hussein “now believes deep down that the only thing that will keep his throne is Zionism, not the people of Jordan,” Saddam said. He mocked Clinton for wearing a yarmulke at the funeral when he led a nation of Christians.
“Is Clinton waiting to be paid money by the Zionist so he can balance his budget?” Saddam asked. “He needs the support of the Zionist lobby so they will agree to renew his presidency for four more years. So this is liberal democracy.” More than thirty years after his education as a pan-Arab nationalist in Cairo cafés, he hewed to the hackneyed antisemitic assumptions of Zionist conspiracy. The revolution in satellite television news that allowed Saddam to watch Rabin’s funeral live in Baghdad only reaffirmed his worldview.[26]
That month, Aziz informed Saddam that “Ekéus and his influence on the Council has become stronger than before.” Hussein Kamel’s information and the document dump Aziz had orchestrated had helped Washington’s case that Saddam was chronically unreliable. The French were forecasting that Iraq might require another year or eighteen months to win relief. The news infuriated Saddam.
Yet Iraq continued to cover up small matters about its weapons history. Aziz recounted for Saddam the case of some Iraqi scientists who had recently tossed a batch of imported missile gyroscopes into the Tigris because they feared the consequences of discovery.
“Sir,” Aziz said, “as far as cheating, we are cheating and we continue to cheat. But when cheating is not—”
“We need to know how to cheat,” Saddam interrupted. “God damn them, they come out with something against us every day.” The U.N. inspectors, he insisted, were “the biggest liars!”[27]
In February, convinced that he had a future in Baghdad, Hussein Kamel at last made a firm plan to leave Jordan. He told the journalist Robert Fisk that Saddam “was my uncle before he was my father-in-law. We are one family.” Fisk thought Hussein Kamel sounded “excited, expectant, constantly expressing his admiration for Iraq and its president, at times bursting into laughter.”
On February 17, 1996, Hussein Kamel wrote to Saddam:
I would like to extend my complete apology for what has happened despite its dangerous nature. And I hope that you accept my apology for this, and I know how compassionate you are. . . . Mr. Commander, I never intended at any given day to leave my country and stay far away from it, and it never crossed my mind to hurt Your Excellency.
Indirectly, he blamed his defection on his mortal conflict with Uday, perhaps hoping that Saddam would forgive a family feud more readily than he would accept outright treason. He referred to the shooting of Watban and Uday’s threats of more violence: “This unfortunate event has forced me to leave quickly against my will.” Hussein Kamel also said he was “frustrated” by allegations that he was “an agent for American intelligence. And this is insane. . . . We were raised hating the Americans.”
He concluded by appealing to Saddam’s sentiments as a grandfather:
Our children . . . always recall Papa Saddam and Mama Sajida, also their [uncles] Uday and Qusay and their aunty and maternal cousins. This is their daily topic. They keep reminding us. They keep dreaming their vision, their dreams of viewing Your Excellency and the kind family. . . . I repeat my sincere apology to Mr. President for what I have done, and the rest is reserved for Your Excellency.[28]
Saddam shared Hussein Kamel’s pleading with the Baath Party’s leadership. On February 19, he convened a meeting of the Revolutionary Command Council and other high-ranking leaders. After lengthy discussion, according to a Council bulletin soon issued to party members: “There is no dispute that Hussein Kamel has betrayed the trust and betrayed the Party and the nation.” Still, because of his “total failure and the failure of the deluded enemies who collaborated with him,” the party approved Hussein Kamel’s plea to return home.
He would be pardoned, but he would have to return “all state and citizens’ money he had control over both before and after his escape.” He would also be expelled from the Baath Party, the armed forces, and the government. He would only be permitted home “as an ordinary citizen.”[29]
It was as much as Hussein Kamel could reasonably hope to hear, and the decision to merely banish him from office was consistent with what he had been expecting.
Hussein Kamel seems to have been alone in his conviction that Saddam’s pardon was reliable. His wife, Raghad, pleaded with him to “calm down, let some time pass” before making such a rash decision. She predicted that her father “will divorce us the moment we arrive there.” But her husband “could not bear being away from Iraq,” she recalled.[30]
The party piled into a convoy of Mercedes-Benzes and drove to the border, trailed by Jordanian intelligence officers. They crossed into Iraq, where Uday awaited them. The Jordanians filmed the encounter and shared it with the C.I.A. According to Manners, Uday embraced his sisters before hugging Hussein Kamel and Saddam Kamel, too. Then Uday separated his sisters for the onward journey to Baghdad.
Watching from the Jordanian side, an officer told Samih Battikhi by telephone, “Khallas,” or “He’s finished.”[31]
The next day, Saddam asked to see his daughters and grandchildren. “We had a long discussion,” Raghad recalled. “My father was very hurt. For the first time, I saw him unable to talk.” Uday and Qusay were there. Qusay announced to his sisters that they would be divorcing their husbands. Raghad said nothing. She was upset but also regretful, believing that “we should have been more careful in both leaving Iraq and returning to Iraq.”[32]
Iraqi television soon announced the divorces. But rather than use judicial or Baath Party authority to further punish the Kamel brothers, Saddam asked the Majid family, led by Ali Hassan, “Chemical Ali,” to take responsibility for Hussein Kamel’s fate, on the grounds that the Majid family had been dishonored.
At a meeting of family leaders, Ali Hassan and his brethren formally petitioned the president, who was present. They declined to seek the death penalty “because these men are your sons-in-law and fathers to nine grandchildren.” However, they continued, “we as a clan do not forfeit our right to take the death penalty.” They would carry out the executions themselves, as a matter of family honor.[33]
The Kamel brothers had made their way to their sister’s house in the Saidiya neighborhood of Baghdad: “Subdivision 925, Lane 25, House 5,” as a subsequent Iraqi intelligence investigation identified it.[34]
In the early hours of February 23, an alarm was raised across Baghdad that Hussein and Saddam Kamel might be attempting an escape. Capture-or-kill orders went out, and plainclothes intelligence police soon flooded the streets. Most likely, Iraqi intelligence had intercepted calls in which Hussein Kamel or other family members had talked about trying to flee.
Meanwhile, the Majids mustered a posse of Special Security Organization officers and armed volunteers to surround the Saidiya house. According to the journalists Andrew and Patrick Cockburn, “in bizarre deference to the proprieties of tribal feuding, the assault party sent ahead a Honda filled with automatic weapons and ammunition for the Kamel family to defend themselves with.” By 9:00 a.m., there were reports of gunfire in Saidiya. When a security officer approached, he “saw a house surrounded by civilians exchanging fire [with] people inside the house.” He noticed “the presence of Ali Hassan al-Majid, and Uday and Qusay, sons of the president.” A commander of Saddam Hussein’s bodyguard informed him that the shootout was “a tribal matter involving the traitor Hussein Kamel,” and nobody should interfere.[35]
The gun battle lasted until sunset. Finally, an ambulance arrived, and the Majid clan pulled back. The attackers suffered at least several deaths, but they had finished the job. Hussein Kamel, Saddam Kamel, their sister, their sister’s children, and their father all lay dead amidst shards of glass, smashed furniture, and broken concrete. Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti reported that more than twenty Majid family members died on both sides. They had done their duty, but according to Barzan, the Majids fumed for years afterward at Uday and Saddam, blaming them for Hussein Kamel’s defection and the shootout deaths in their branch of the family.[36]
Raghad, who was now twenty-five, was “very hurt, very much, perhaps more than you can imagine” by her father’s decision to sanction her husband’s killing. “I was angry.” Yet she did not blame Saddam, because he took “the decision he deemed appropriate. And those who err will be punished. . . . Everyone in the family knew that, supposedly.”[37]
Hussein Kamel’s defection was the most significant crack in the Baghdad regime since Saddam had taken full power. Yet the president had vanquished his son-in-law with ease. He had publicly humiliated and then murdered Hussein Kamel while absolving himself of direct responsibility and making one of his henchmen take charge of the execution, dressing it up as clan justice. The episode’s dramatic demonstration of Saddam’s cunning and resilience in the face of insider threats might have cautioned the C.I.A.’s coupmakers.
It did not.