Nineteen
Spy vs. Spy
On February 18, 1996, five days before Hussein Kamel’s death, Ayad Allawi, the leader of the Iraqi National Accord, held a press conference in Amman, where he vowed to end Saddam Hussein’s rule. By then, Saddam and his security services could be in no doubt about what they had to defend against. As Allawi would say later that year, “We think that any uprising should have as its very center the armed forces.”
The chapter of C.I.A. covert action that followed Hussein Kamel’s demise was modestly resourced. In January 1996, the Clinton administration allocated a budget of about $6 million, largely funneled through the National Accord. Even if, as seems likely, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait chipped in additional funds, this was a tiny sum relative to the scale of the challenge—about the size of the operating budget of a small American town. Also, the program was not very secret. Successful conspiracies to carry out coups d’état don’t typically have an address for their targets to zero in on, but the National Accord set up shop openly in Amman, where it broadcast on a C.I.A.-funded station and published newspapers.[1]
Clinton clearly had mixed feelings about any direct C.I.A. attempt to use Iraqi partners to capture or kill the Iraqi president, yet after Kamel’s defection, he decided to lean forward with the C.I.A. Rather than a direct assault on Saddam, however, Clinton seems to have authorized plans to back the I.N.A. to “exploit” a coup attempt by someone in the Iraqi military. This “prepare, wait, and exploit” concept stopped well short of real-time C.I.A. involvement in paramilitary operations or the provision of U.S. air support.
“If the administration had said something like, ‘Get rid of him and do it in six months,’ then okay,” David Manners, the Amman station chief, said later. But the Amman station and the Iraq Operations Group at headquarters did not have such instructions, according to Manners and John Maguire, the case officer posted to Amman until 1994 and later deputy head of Iraq operations. “The job was to collect telephone numbers for key Iraqis in the event there was a coup against Saddam” so that the C.I.A. could “contact them and say, ‘Hey, we’ll support you,’ ” a third former senior C.I.A. operations officer recalled. This effort had a newly visible leader in Ayad Allawi. His National Accord allies would be largely responsible for their own counterintelligence—the detection of Saddam’s efforts to penetrate their ranks. And they were vulnerable. The Jordanian intelligence field officers assigned to provide safe houses and security to the National Accord had longstanding ties to Saddam’s regime.[2]
The reporting sources inside Iraq recruited by Charlie Seidel, the last Baghdad station chief before the U.S. embassy’s closure in late 1990, had by now largely gone off the air—without resupply, some of the agents had run out of the encryption materials used to send secret messages. But the agency did have a new means to support potential coupmakers. During 1996, at the request of Rolf Ekéus, C.I.A. and British intelligence moved personnel and equipment into Baghdad, under cover of Special Commission operations, to eavesdrop on Iraqi security forces protecting Saddam Hussein.[3]
This operation was part of a Special Commission program to discover hidden WMD by agitating the bodyguards close to Saddam. Weapons inspectors would make surprise visits to sensitive buildings, such as presidential offices. As the Special Security Organization, or the S.S.O., scrambled to hide materials or block the inspectors, the eavesdroppers would intercept their encrypted radio communications and try to discern where illicit weapons might be hidden. The idea was that insights from S.S.O. chatter might reveal how Saddam’s “concealment mechanism,” as the inspectors called it, actually worked.
The work of clandestine eavesdroppers was coordinated with C.I.A.-managed U-2 spy plane overflights to capture photographic evidence of Iraqi guards scrambling to hide things during surprise inspections. “More sophisticated equipment” deployed in Baghdad allowed the U.N. “to collect more rapidly and be able to immediately adjust our inspections in response to observed Iraqi actions,” recalled Charles Duelfer, the deputy to Ekéus who ran the U.N.’s liaison with the C.I.A. The White House approved the operation, but John Deutch warned Duelfer that “it was my ass if it blew up” and the eavesdroppers got caught—in which case Saddam might imprison them as spies or hold them as hostages.[4]
The operation did eventually blow up, but not in the way Deutch feared.
If there was a reason for optimism among the Americans that spring, it lay in the person of Ayad Allawi. He struck his American allies as the sort of opposition leader who might deliver on his promises. He was a tall, balding, thick-set man with a dignified bearing; he was also prone to displays of temper. He “understood the Mukhabarat culture of intimidation,” as a cousin put it, yet he was at home in Western institutions.[5]
“I came from a family that had enjoyed power and had been part of power,” Allawi said years later. Like Chalabi and Jafar Dhia Jafar, he was the scion of an elite family from Iraq’s Shia majority that had served the royal governments of the Hashemite era. He, too, had attended Baghdad College, the Jesuit high school. After the royal family’s overthrow in 1958, his family remained in Baghdad, and as a teenager, Allawi was attracted to Baathism. At the time, politically active and secular-leaning students like himself had to choose between “two conflicting forces”: the communists and the Baathists. (The Dawa Party was another path available for devout Shia activists.) Allawi joined the Baath Party, and when the party was repressed during the early 1960s, he was arrested alongside Saddam, whom he got to know. “I was financially well off through my family,” Allawi recalled, yet “I enjoyed a very good relationship with most of the Baathists.”[6]
He studied medicine and completed his initial degree in Iraq in 1970. He said he turned against the Baathists after they meddled in that year’s Black September conflict between Jordan and the Palestine Liberation Organization, a mess that disillusioned him about the Baath Party’s devotion to the Arab cause. He moved to London for postgraduate studies and to work at the National Health Service. Later, Allawi would be accused of spying on Iraqis for the Baath Party in Britain, a charge he would adamantly deny. On the contrary, he said, he organized “secret cells” to overthrow Saddam. By the late 1970s, clearly, his opposition to Saddam had attracted the regime’s attention.[7]
One night in February 1978, after a long day in London, Allawi returned to his home in Epsom, Surrey, in the suburbs. He chatted with his wife briefly and went to bed. At about three in the morning, he came half-awake and saw “a shadow . . . a flickering reflection” by his bed. He thought he was probably dreaming. Then he was on the floor, blood pouring from his head. A tall man wielding an axe loomed over him, swinging blow after blow. His wife jumped on the intruder, who turned his axe on her and almost severed her hand. Finally, the assailant left the couple for dead. Allawi crawled to a telephone and called for help. Miraculously, he and his wife survived.
During the assault, Allawi recalled warning his attacker: “If I survive, I will gouge your eyes out—and Saddam’s.” Whether or not this is a reliable memory, it certainly reflected Allawi’s attitude toward the Baathist regime after he recovered. During the 1980s, however, when the Thatcher government joined the Reagan administration in partnership with Saddam, his circumstances changed. “We were forbidden from working in politics here in London,” Allawi said. He moved abroad. At some point, Allawi worked clandestinely with MI6, presumably collecting intelligence about Saddam’s Iraq, according to Warren Marik, a C.I.A. operations officer in the agency’s Near East Division.[8]
After the invasion of Kuwait, Allawi emerged as a semi-public opposition figure. He launched the Iraqi National Accord, or the I.N.A., at a conference in Erbil, in 1992. He traveled to Washington and met influential figures in Congress, such as the Republican senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain. In London, Julian Walker, a legendary Arabist at the Foreign Office, assured Allawi that Britain, like America, had by now officially given up on Saddam. “You can do whatever you like against Saddam Hussein,” Walker said, excepting “military action or assassinations” organized from London. The I.N.A. opened offices in Riyadh and Dubai. After King Hussein broke with Saddam in 1995, Allawi set up in Amman, “a dream for us” because of the steady flow of Iraqi travelers, including regime figures.[9]
Allawi developed a concept that he called “defect and defend.” The I.N.A. would secretly recruit Iraqi military officers who would revolt against Saddam but then hold their positions at military bases or other secure areas. Saddam would almost certainly order a counterattack, but when he did, the military dissidents’ outside allies—the Americans, British, Egyptians, Jordanians—would intervene to shut down Iraqi airspace and help the rebels seize power in Baghdad.
Allawi’s ace card was the willingness of outside governments to intervene militarily, in contrast to the White House’s refusal to do so when Chalabi and Robert Baer improvised a similar action in the spring of 1995. “We had a very strong commitment from all these countries that once this starts, we will support you,” Allawi recalled of the lay of the land by that year’s end—or so he had been led to believe. The I.N.A.’s allies in the Iraqi military would “trigger an event,” and then Saddam would “overreact, and then you can force a fissure in the system,” as the C.I.A.’s John Maguire described it.[10]
Allawi thought the revolting Iraqi units “would have to hold out for one month, to flip the government” in Baghdad. But during 1996, the C.I.A. and MI6 told him that he would have to tighten that timeline—Washington and London were not going to fight a month-long air war to remove Saddam. The records remain classified, but it seems unlikely that Clinton made a specific promise of air support, à la the Bay of Pigs, but the president seems to have indicated that if an initial revolt looked promising, this time he would consider ordering a military intervention, as long as it would be quick and decisive.
Allawi had reason to be confident. The National Accord leader had become “the preferred choice of the C.I.A.–State Department career people,” recalled David Mack, the longtime Middle East hand. In Amman, Rick Francona “thought Allawi was the savior. . . . I really thought he had the leadership, the organization, the education, and the understanding of the West.” As a senior C.I.A. analyst then at Langley headquarters summed it up: “We were in love with him because he was our guy.” Yet the agency’s Iraq watchers also circulated reports that Allawi “has no constituency” among the Iraqi population and was “petulant” and “tended toward grudges . . . too similar to Saddam,” the analyst recalled.[11]
One of Allawi’s clandestine radio studios created a broadcast directed specifically at the Iraqi Army. The intention was to build a “very compartmented approach to the officers who are working with us—no one should know their names,” Allawi recalled. All communication should use only “pseudonyms and code names.” Yet Allawi and his allies were challenging Saddam at spy games he had been playing for decades, to the point of obsession.[12]
On April 21, 1996, Dzhokhar Dudayev, the leader of the breakaway Chechen Republic of Ichkeria and an enemy of Moscow, stood by a jeep inside his republic, talking on a satellite telephone. A Russian missile incinerated him. It had targeted him because of his phone signal. This was a mistake Saddam Hussein would never make. Aware of the vulnerability, he had used a telephone only “twice” after 1990, by his own account. Dudayev’s assassination that spring set off another season of “acute spying disease,” as an aide to Saddam called the president’s obsession with counterintelligence.[13]
By 1996, Saddam rarely worked at the Republican Palace. He spent much of his time at Radwaniyah, with its many buildings and tunnels. He had also built many smaller palaces. These were mocked in the West as symbols of Saddam’s indulgence in garish luxury. In fact, nobody in the regime actually lived in many of these places, and Saddam rarely slept at them—they functioned as places to hold short-notice meetings. “He got to the point where no one in the government or the party could meet with him without much hassle and weeks of waiting,” Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti recalled. Ministers only saw him in secure cabinet meetings. Newly arrived ambassadors never presented their credentials to him. Every foreigner in Iraq was considered a potential spy. “It is hard to get in touch with the president, especially in the last few years for security reasons,” Tariq Aziz observed after Hussein Kamel’s defection.[14]
Saddam rarely let go of his pistol, a Browning 9-millimeter. He brought an armed bodyguard to his regular one-on-one meetings with the leaders of his own security agencies, even though many of these leaders were his relatives. Following Hussein Kamel’s defection, Saddam prohibited all high-ranking officials and their wives from traveling abroad, even after they retired, with only rare exceptions. Low-level palace laborers who retired could not leave the country for a year, and then only after a security review.[15]
A unit known as the Group of 40, drawn from Saddam’s family, constituted his innermost bodyguard. They were the only individuals permitted to approach him while armed. The Special Security Organization provided the next ring of protection. This was a large and well-paid force drawn from more diverse social networks, a police state’s version of the U.S. Secret Service. The Special Republican Guard protected the S.S.O.
Saddam’s regime continually investigated potential traitors and spies. The security agencies published doctrines, trained cadets, conducted lessons-learned studies, and collected and analyzed information about potential threats from all over the world. Their assessments dealt in facts, not the usual distortions that attended Saddam’s cult of personality. The main agencies all spied on one another, which certainly led to false accusations and wild-goose chases. Yet overall, the Baath Party’s work on counterintelligence was the part of governing Iraq that it did best.
In 1993, the Special Security Organization produced a Top Secret training study that asked: “How does the enemy think? What are their ways and means?” It outlined Iraq’s policies to thwart the C.I.A., Mossad, and other hostile services. The study’s essential point was that Iraq’s adversaries would inevitably “think about penetrating into the Presidential Special Security units,” including the S.S.O. A later study produced at a training academy for intelligence officers described how enemy spies prioritized “collecting information about the President and his family, and locating and working on penetrating the President’s outer perimeter.” It accurately summarized C.I.A. and MI6 support for opposition figures; the role of neighbors such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia; C.I.A.-funded propaganda radio and Voice of America broadcasts; and the attempted recruitment of Iraqis who traveled.[16]
No detail was too small. The Special Security Organization used its poisons lab to test ingredients that would be used in Saddam’s birthday cakes. Routine surveillance included “installing secret listening devices in the homes of employees, telephone tapping at work and home, personal monitoring of after-work activities, and continual gathering of information about those in the inner circles and their families,” as the scholar Joseph Sassoon’s detailed study of security service files describes. By design, many of the more than 1,300 employees of Saddam’s palaces were Christians, on the theory that this tiny Iraqi minority lacked the ability to threaten Saddam. S.S.O. officers themselves faced intense scrutiny. Saddam built a prison expressly for members of his bodyguard suspected of unreliability. Senior officers carried out interrogations of their own colleagues, sometimes harshly. S.S.O. officers, like Iraqi Army generals, had to apply for permission to marry. The questionnaire they filled out asked what brand of cigarette the individual smoked and how he spent his leisure time: “Do you attend nightclubs? Do you have enemies?”[17]
A study noted that enemy spies employed as couriers “the Arab and Iraqi drivers who are working on the road” between Baghdad and Amman or Baghdad and Damascus. These drivers had been recruited at times as “contact tools with their agents inside the country.” This was another accurate insight. It would soon upend the C.I.A.’s latest coup plan, with tragic consequences.[18]
In addition to Allawi, the C.I.A. had another favored partner in Amman, a decorated former Iraqi Special Operations Forces commander named Mohammed Abdullah Shawani, “the General” to his followers or “General Mo” to some of the agency officers who worked with him. Shawani belonged to a notable family in Mosul from Iraq’s Turkmen ethnic minority. He rose in the Baathist military after 1968. A stocky, muscled athlete in his youth, Shawani had undergone elite military training in the United States at Fort Benning and Fort Bragg. He became a pilot, provided helicopter instruction to King Hussein of Jordan, and won fame during the Iran-Iraq War by leading an airborne assault on a fortified Iranian position to free up trapped Iraqi forces.
A celebrated pilot-commander with American and Jordanian connections and the proven ability to conduct an air assault was never likely to enjoy a long career in service of Saddam Hussein. To the president, Shawani must have looked like a coup leader in waiting. His patron was the long-serving minister of defense, Adnan Khairallah, Saddam’s brother-in-law and a powerful figure in the regime during the 1970s and 1980s. In May 1989, Khairallah died in a helicopter crash that many Iraqis assumed was an assassination ordered by Saddam. Whatever the case, by 1991, Shawani believed that he had himself become a target and was under surveillance, he later told Allawi. He made his way to Jordan, where King Hussein granted him asylum and introduced him to the C.I.A.
During the early 1990s, Shawani worked with case officers at the Amman station and ran an intelligence network inside Iraq. Three of his sons—two of them retired army officers—remained in Iraq and helped him surreptitiously. “You couldn’t help but like him,” said Francona. “He was a tough guy . . . but rigid.” Manners, the station chief, marveled at Shawani’s courage and piloting skills. George Tenet, then the C.I.A.’s deputy director, described him as “a born leader with a significant following” who “quickly became key to developing a strong network inside Iraq for the Agency.”[19]
Shawani ran his own intelligence-collection operations, but by 1996 he was “working independently” with the Iraqi National Accord, according to Allawi. Yet the overlapping C.I.A.-backed networks were not tightly organized. “There were too many cutouts,” or intermediaries passing messages, Francona recalled. It is an inherently risky practice because “the longer you make your chain [of contacts], the more susceptible it is to being interdicted somewhere.” The C.I.A. provided tradecraft training—codes, message security, and the like—but never commanded its allies directly. As Francona put it, “You can tell them not to do things, but assets are assets, and they’ll do what they want to do.”[20]
Shawani’s network became an important part of the 1996 operations. He seems to have been advancing a plan to launch a helicopter raid against Saddam or a similar operation based on Allawi’s “defect and defend” model. Such plans were certainly bandied about in Amman. Yet it isn’t clear how plausible any specific effort became during 1996. Some C.I.A. officers who worked with Shawani said that his operation still had more to do with collecting intelligence to identify Saddam’s vulnerabilities.
In any event, it was far from clear to some C.I.A. officers who worked with Shawani whether the Clinton White House ever intended to take on the breathtaking political and military risks that would be involved in backing an attack on Baghdad in the way Allawi had designed. According to John Maguire, the C.I.A. repeatedly sent the Clinton White House draft memoranda of notification—specific covert-ops proposals—about a defect-and-defend-type operation to rattle and perhaps topple Saddam. But the agency received no response. “You’d craft it, send it in—‘We’re ready, we’ve got everything in place,’ ” but then the White House would not answer, he recalled. “Crickets.” As Maguire saw it, Clinton “set up a system that protected him politically from claims that he wasn’t serious about deposing Saddam, but he set up a fail-safe system to prevent anything from actually happening.”[21]
Ellen Laipson, the senior intelligence analyst then working at the White House, could sense the C.I.A.’s frustration. “I’m not sure Clinton or Tony Lake expected Saddam to fall or particularly cared,” Laipson said. The reality was that for Clinton, in 1996, merely containing Saddam “was quite satisfactory” because it meant that the president, who had many other priorities, including his reelection campaign, “didn’t have to deal with the aftermath of Saddam falling.” Containment was an entirely defensible—even wise—foreign policy for the United States in the mid-1990s, but it begged the question of why, then, Clinton gave an impression to the C.I.A. and King Hussein, among others, that he was actively seeking Saddam’s violent overthrow.[22]
Meanwhile, into the first half of 1996, the U.N. teams hunting for WMD in Iraq now included C.I.A. and British special forces officers who continued to conduct an eavesdropping program aimed at Saddam’s bodyguards. Scott Ritter, a former U.S. Marine intelligence officer, ran the most sensitive Special Commission inspections, but even he was not privy to the technical details of this work. One of Ritter’s inspections began in Baghdad on June 10. He later concluded that the C.I.A.-U.K. eavesdroppers were actually there to enable a coup attempt by Shawani or another group of dissident Iraqi officers.
The evidence Ritter discovered was circumstantial but striking. He quoted British intelligence officers he worked with as confirming that the C.I.A. had installed a “black box” inside the Special Commission’s office in Baghdad to sweep up encrypted communications by Saddam’s security forces and automatically “burst” the data to U-2 spy planes when they passed overhead. In other words, American and British intelligence had hijacked the U.N. inspections—and particularly the one in June—to pursue “the real U.S. objective for Iraq—regime change.” Ritter’s account is credible, but he concedes that there was no “indisputable proof” that the C.I.A. was using its eavesdropping to run a coup operation against Saddam.
Still, it would be inexplicable—and very bad tradecraft—if the C.I.A.’s eavesdropping on Saddam’s bodyguards was not coordinated with the coup plans the agency was developing simultaneously with the I.N.A. Worried that the U.N. was being badly used by the C.I.A., Ritter later presented his analysis to Duelfer, the U.N. liaison to Langley, and Duelfer waved him off. “All I would say is that you probably would do very well not to ever mention it again,” Duelfer said.[23]
Once more, it all ended in tears. Early in 1996, Iraqi intelligence obtained a contraband satellite communications device used by Shawani’s network. According to Allawi, Saddam’s men seized the device from an Iraqi national who worked inside the Egyptian embassy in Baghdad and also as a courier for Shawani’s people. Allawi later blamed Shawani for loose tradecraft, but in early 1996, the Iraqi breakthrough was unknown. Iraqi nationals working in foreign embassies were under intense surveillance and effectively had no choice but to report on what they did to Saddam’s secret police—the alternative to cooperation was torture. Once the Iraqis captured the device, they bided their time. They listened, watched, and mapped out Shawani’s network, including the activities of the general’s sons.[24]
In late June, The Washington Post quoted Allawi declaring that “the end is near” as he described his plans for a “controlled, coordinated military uprising”—a public statement that did not appear to be recommended covert-action tradecraft, either. The Iraqis pounced within days of that story’s release. They arrested Shawani’s sons and many dozens of other suspects, “far in excess of the number that we actually had working for us,” according to Francona. The detainees were, of course, severely tortured, and some inevitably made false confessions, causing more people not actually involved to be rounded up and marked for execution.[25]
As the crackdown unfolded, an Iraqi intelligence officer contacted Shawani and told him that he could save his sons if he agreed to return to Iraq to exchange himself for his boys. Shawani asked for time to think about it. If the offer were genuine, he would accept it, he told American colleagues, but they told him what he surely also knew: the offer was a mirage, and if Shawani accepted it, he would only add his own demise to that of his doomed sons. He stayed put in Jordan.
The next month, one of Saddam’s enforcers telephoned the Shawanis at their home in Amman. Francona and Shawani’s wife happened to be there when the phone rang. They were watching the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta on television. The Iraqi caller put the Shawani boys on the phone so that they could say goodbye to their parents before they were executed. The general was stoic. His wife, however, “was really just devastated,” Francona remembered. “Took it out on me. My fault.”
The death of the Shawani sons and the collapse of the wider coup enterprise was a devastating fiasco that would haunt and anger C.I.A. officers involved for years to come. The Americans to blame were mainly the decision-makers at the top, however. “The whole thing was compromised from day one,” recalled Bruce Riedel, the C.I.A. analyst. “And this was Deutch’s baby.” The C.I.A. director knew that the incipient coup operation “was what the White House wanted to hear, and he overpromised.”
“Let me say something to you about operations,” Deutch later told the journalist Peter Jennings when challenged about that summer’s deaths and failures. “In the Central Intelligence Agency, like everywhere else in the world, they always have risk. They aren’t always successful. These were responsible risks carried out by dedicated individuals, coordinated with an overall government policy.” But had the sacrifices been made in pursuit of a realistic plan? “I would say we had very careful and very modest expectations about how easily any coup effort could be successful,” Deutch said.[26]
King Hussein eventually dismissed the ministers who had urged working with the C.I.A., but he did not wallow in regret. He still ruled a precarious realm in the shadow of Saddam. “That was exciting,” he remarked privately, referring to his year of living dangerously with Hussein Kamel and the C.I.A. “What are we going to do now?”[27]
Saddam Hussein spent considerably more hours of his working week thinking about intelligence operations than Bill Clinton did. He did not consider the C.I.A. to be his most formidable adversary. “The best technically able intelligence outfits in the world are the British, the ex-Soviet, and the Israeli,” he advised colleagues late in 1996, following his latest triumph. “The Israelis, they use Jews from all around the world for intelligence matters,” he continued. “The Soviets use all the communist movements and what you would call the international peace movements, all the names you can think of, for the sake of their intelligence services. But technologically, the British intelligence service is more advanced than any of them.”
In late August 1996, Saddam cut a deal with Masoud Barzani, the leader of the opposition Kurdistan Democratic Party in Northern Iraq, to eviscerate Barzani’s principal Kurdish rival, Jalal Talabani. The two Kurdish leaders were struggling over control of customs revenues at the Turkish border. Barzani’s double cross reflected the role of profiteering in the region’s tangled conflicts. With Barzani’s cooperation, Saddam sent thirty thousand troops to retake Erbil. His forces also swept up the nearby headquarters of Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, still operating despite its previous failures.
Chalabi was in London. Saddam’s conquerors executed dozens of his operatives. A small contingent of C.I.A. officers posted in the region fled. The Clinton administration evacuated about six hundred survivors from Chalabi’s network, as well as more than six thousand Kurdish affiliates of U.S. agencies or U.S.-funded charities. They were airlifted to Guam, from where many were eventually resettled in the U.S. Among the evacuees were Wahid Kochani, the survivor of a mass execution during the Anfal, and his family, aided by Human Rights Watch. Because of Saddam’s military incursion, Operation Provide Comfort, the program to aid Kurds in northern Iraq, collapsed, although the U.S.-led no-fly zone, renamed Operation Northern Watch, would continue.[28]
In response to this setback, Clinton ordered an expansion of the no-fly zone over southern Iraq, many miles away from the scenes of Saddam’s latest aggression. Tony Lake explained the White House’s thinking: “Had Saddam been allowed to use force with impunity,” by way of his assault on Kurdistan, “he would have been emboldened to act again. . . . Rather than play Saddam’s game by responding in the North, we acted in the South. . . . Saddam’s strategic straitjacket has been tightened.”[29]
The reality was less impressive. “We didn’t know where Saddam was most of the time, we couldn’t identify any Iraqi generals who wanted to overthrow him, and the Kurds and the others were pathetically incapable of doing anything,” Riedel recalled.
“This system is here to stay,” Saddam crowed to his comrades. He had achieved “a big and great national gain” that “not only made people clap” but would make it easier for neighboring Arab states and “international friends” to “change their position” and help Iraq find sanctions relief.[30]
On the evening of December 12, 1996, Uday Hussein, now thirty-two, cruised Baghdad’s wealthy Mansour neighborhood in a Porsche Carrera. He and his posse were apparently casing an ice cream shop in the area that attracted young female customers. As his car slowed, two gunmen on the street raised Kalashnikov assault rifles and sprayed his Porsche with bullets, striking Uday in the left side and in his legs.
He was near death when a friend carried him into the presidential hospital. By the time the physician Ala Bashir arrived, surgeons had stabilized him. Saddam arrived at the operating theater later. On a table, Uday lay covered in bloody bandages, unconscious under an anesthetic. His father gripped his hand. “My son, men must allow for such setbacks as these,” he said, as Bashir recalled. “But we are right and they are wrong.” Three enemies of Saddam—the Dulaimi tribe in western Iraq, which sometimes cooperated with the C.I.A.; the Dawa Party; and a previously unknown Baghdad opposition group of young urban reformers called “the Awakening”—all claimed responsibility for the assassination attempt.[31]
At the end of 1996, following the evacuation of the I.N.C. from Kurdistan, the C.I.A. cut all ties with Ahmad Chalabi, on the grounds that he was fatally unreliable. He had collaborated with Iran, deceived the agency, and led his followers and supporters into catastrophe. “There was a breakdown in trust,” George Tenet reflected. “We never wanted to have anything to do with him anymore.” Following Bill Clinton’s reelection in November, John Deutch resigned—or was pushed out—the following month. In the summer of 1997, Dave Manners also resigned from the C.I.A., disgusted by the Clinton administration’s unwillingness to live up to its promises to Iraqi agents and allies in the field.[32]
Allawi and Shawani continued to operate with C.I.A. support, but they, too, were disillusioned. “We found out that there is no seriousness in the position of the United States,” Allawi recalled. “A depressed attitude” settled over the Americans. Tenet succeeded Deutch as C.I.A. director. Chastened by the events of 1995 and 1996, he preached realism about the agency’s prospects against Saddam.[33]
Uday’s bullet wounds turned out to be serious, and his suffering perhaps offered some measure of rough justice to his myriad victims. It required six months of treatment before he could leave the hospital. A German surgeon operated, but even then, Uday “was barely able to walk,” Bashir recalled. His speech could be difficult to understand. He seemed even more irascible and aggressive. Blood loss after he was shot might have damaged his brain, but Bashir felt it was difficult to judge, since “he was already insane.”
Saddam had long ago accepted assassination plots as the price of power. “You and your brother have to be aware of the possibility of incidents like this,” he told Qusay that spring, referring to the hit on Uday. “Be prepared for the worst.”[34]