Interviews and correspondence with Jafar; that his colleagues thought of him as aristocratic is from interviews with former scientists in the Iraqi program.
Tuwaitha’s layout is from interviews with former scientists and David Albright, Corey Gay, and Khidhir Hamza, “Development of the Al-Tuwaitha Site: What If the Public or the IAEA Had Overhead Imagery?,” Institute for Science and International Security, April 26, 1999, https://www.isis-online.org/publications/iraq/tuwaitha.html.
Jafar’s visit with Khaliq is described in chapter two of Jafar Dhia Jafar and Numan al-Niaimi, Al-Iʻtirāf al-akhīr: Haqīqat al-barnāmaj al-nawawī al-ʻIrāqī (Beirut: Markaz Dirasat al-Wahdah al-Arabiyah, 2005), hereafter cited as Last Confession. Sarah Moawad produced an English translation of this Arabic-language memoir for the author. The memoir’s account of Jafar’s ordeal from 1979 to 1981 is supported by the recollections and published works of multiple other scientists in the nuclear program, as well as by references in an unpublished manuscript by Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti. However, Jafar is the only source of the specific content of some conversations. Hussain Al-Shahristani’s activism, family background, sympathy for the Iranian Revolution, and other biographical aspects are from interviews with Shahristani. He has also written two memoirs: Al-Hurūb ilá al-ḥurrīyah: Awrāq min ayyām al-miḥnah ʻāshahā al-Duktūr Ḥusayn Shahrastānī fī sujūn niẓām Ṣaddām (hereafter cited by its short English title, Escape to Freedom) and, more recently, an English-language memoir, Free of Fear (Bloomington, Ind.: AuthorHouse, 2021).
Interview with Shahristani; Khomeini’s quotations (“that pig,” “revolution like ours”) from Nigel Ashton and Bryan Gibson, eds., The Iran-Iraq War: New International Perspectives (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2013), 36.
Shahristani’s arrest is described in Jafar and Niaimi, Last Confession, chapter two, and in Shahristani’s Arabic-language memoir. Jafar and Shahristani are in agreement about what transpired. The quotations here are from Shahristani.
Shahristani’s interrogation is from interviews with Shahristani. All quotations are from his two memoirs.
Jafar and Niaimi, Last Confession, chapter two; Jafar’s letters to Saddam are from interviews with Jafar.
Interviews with Jafar.
Jafar and Niaimi, Last Confession, chapter two.
Biographical details and “like a shadow” from Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, “The Sweet Years and the Bitter Years” (hereafter “Sweet and Bitter Years”), an unpublished memoir translated by the Conflict Records Research Center, National Defense University, Washington, D.C. (Note: all references to the Conflict Records Research Center are hereafter cited as CRRC followed by the relevant record number). Divided into parts, Barzan’s memoir is tagged as SH-MISC-D-001-919 (Part I), SH-MISC-D-000-948 (Part II), or SH-MISC-D-001-204 (Part III). The manuscript partly consists of daily diary entries, often quotidian, made by Barzan during his years as an Iraqi diplomat in Geneva. In some passages, however, he provides autobiographical accounts of his life with Saddam, his meetings, and his family conflicts. The matter of the murders that he and Saddam were involved in as boys comes up late in the manuscript when Barzan describes a “tense and edgy” conversation he had with Saddam in 2001. At one point during a convoluted discussion about the fatal shooting Saddam committed and other killings, Barzan recounts that he said to Saddam: “I killed four people.” He provides a detailed, if difficult to unpack, account of the grievances that led to the killings.
“a nitwit”: interview with Imad Khadduri; “an asshole”: Charles Duelfer, Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq (New York: PublicAffairs Books, 2009), 402.
“Sweet and Bitter Years,” CRRC SH-MISC-D-001-919.
“Iraqi sitting in a café”: Ala Bashir and Lars Sigurd Sunnanå, The Insider: Trapped in Saddam’s Brutal Regime (London: Abacus, 2005), 87.
Jafar and Niaimi, Last Confession, chapter two.
Shahristani, Free of Fear, 67–68; interview with Shahristani.
Night dreams at Abu Ghraib from Shahristani, 73–74; Shahristani’s meeting with Barzan from an interview with Shahristani.
“I want to build an atomic bomb” from Jafar and Niaimi, Last Confession, chapter one; Jafar’s education and move to CERN from an interview with Jafar.
“I shouldn’t—I cannot—refuse”: interview with Jafar.
Iraqi properties in Paris from an interview with a former Iraqi diplomat; medical travel from an interview with Ala Bashir; shopping list from David Styan, France and Iraq: Oil, Arms and French Policy Making in the Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 124; oil-revenue figures from Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi, Saddam Hussein: A Political Biography (New York: The Free Press, 1991), 90.
“intelligent . . . rather nice”: from Jacques Chirac, My Life in Politics, trans. Catherine Spencer (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012), 55; itinerary from Le Monde, September 5, 1975; menu and thousand-franc tips are from an interview with Jean-André Charial, chef at L’Oustau de Baumanierè, by Amel Brahmi.
Interview by Amel Brahmi with Jacques Mailhan, who participated in the event.
CRRC PDWN-D-000-341.
Yahya al-Mashad’s murder is from Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations (New York: Random House, 2018), 350–53.
Saddam’s “mummy” and “rotten man” from Jerry M. Long, Saddam’s War of Words: Politics, Religion, and the Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 68.
“Arabs of corruption”: CRRC SH-SHTP-D-000-559; “We will force”: CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-835.
Interview with Jafar; Jafar and Niaimi, Last Confession, chapter two.
May automobile gift from Mahdi Obeidi and Kurt Pitzer, The Bomb in My Garden: The Secrets of Saddam’s Nuclear Mastermind (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2004), 50; number of Iraqi technicians at Saclay from an interview with Fadhil al-Janabi, scientist then at the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission; “The alternative is our destruction”: “Osiraq/Tammuz-1,” Federation of American Scientists, https://fas.org/nuke/guide/iraq/facility/osiraq.htm.
CRRC SH-SHTP-A-001-039 and CRRC SH-SHTP-A-001-480. Both transcripts are from around June 1981, following the attack, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD1124180.pdf.
“Oppenheimer of Iraq”: interview with Janabi; Shahristani and Barzan is from an interview with Shahristani.
Jafar and Niaimi, Last Confession, chapter two.
“a feeling of having”: interview with Janabi; “vengeance was way up”: interview with Khadduri; “a strong conviction”: from p. 9 of the Currently Accurate, Full, and Complete Declaration of the Past Iraqi Nuclear Program, submitted by Iraq to the U.N. on December 3, 2002. This unpublished document, hereafter cited as the CAFCD, was obtained by the author.
Interview with Jafar.
Office description from an interview with Mazin Jazrawi by Amel Brahmi; all quotations from Jafar and Niaimi, Last Confession, chapter two. Other scientists in the Iraqi nuclear program at this time said in interviews that they soon became aware of Jafar’s assignment by Saddam to lead a secret program to develop highly enriched uranium. The scientists are divided on whether Saddam directly ordered a nuclear bomb program in late 1981 or whether the assignment was more ambiguous—that is, to covertly develop fissionable material, which would create a bomb option, while reserving judgment on whether to try to weaponize. Given how far Iraq was in 1981 from being able to construct a finished bomb, this may have been a distinction without much of a practical difference at the time. In any event, the separate accounts of Jafar and Shahristani quoting Barzan in 1980 as stating that Saddam wanted to build a nuclear weapon make clear what Saddam intended, even if he was at times cautious about how to go forward.
Twetten’s tours are from Michael Wines, “After 30 Years in Shadows, a Spymaster Emerges,” New York Times, November 20, 1990; Twetten profile and mission are from interviews with Twetten; National Security Council quotation (emphasis in original) are from James G. Blight et al., Becoming Enemies: U.S.-Iran Relations and the Iran-Iraq War, 1979–1988 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 115. Becoming Enemies provides an invaluable oral history by participants in U.S. policymaking during the Iran-Iraq War. Twetten’s visit in late July may not have been the first made by an American intelligence officer to Baghdad during 1982, but it is the best documented. In February 1982, the United States removed Iraq from the list of countries sanctioned for being state sponsors of terrorism—a factually dubious decision. Wafiq al-Samarrai and a second Iraqi intelligence source describe an initial unsuccessful visit to Baghdad that February or March by men whom they believed to be C.I.A. officers seeking to share satellite-derived battlefield intelligence about Iran. However, Twetten said in an interview that he had no knowledge of such an earlier trip and that if it had been conducted by the C.I.A., he likely would have known. He speculated that perhaps the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, or the D.I.A., might have reached Baghdad earlier than he did, if such a visit took place. U.S. intelligence may also have been provided via Jordan initially.
“Iraq has essentially lost”: Bryan R. Gibson, Covert Relationship: American Foreign Policy, Intelligence, and the Iran Iraq War, 1980–1988 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2010), 77; “fundamentalist Islamic one”: Henry S. Rowen to Geoffrey Kemp, “The Iranian Threat to American Interests in the Persian Gulf,” National Intelligence Council study, July 20, 1982, RAC Box 2, Geoffrey Kemp Files, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library (hereafter RRPL); “whatever was necessary and legal”: quoting Howard Teicher in Gibson, Covert Relationship, 78.
Saddam’s micromanaging is described in Williamson Murray and Kevin M. Woods, The Iran-Iraq War: A Military and Strategic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); the shrinking of the Iraqi Army from Murray and Woods, Iran-Iraq War, 185; “insects”: Ofra Bengio, Saddam’s Word: Political Discourse in Iraq (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 153; Saddam spoke of the “implementation” of a chemical weapons program in March 1981, CRRC SH-MISC-D-001-334; “keeps our sovereignty”: CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-710.
“Discussion Paper for SIG on Policy Options for Dealing with Iran-Iraq War,” on policy options for dealing with the Iran-Iraq War, RAC Box 2, Geoffrey Kemp Files, RRPL.
Interviews with Twetten. His arrival was smoothed by both King Hussein and Ronald Reagan. In Nigel Ashton, King Hussein of Jordan: A Political Life (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010), 218–19, Ashton describes the king’s correspondence to persuade Reagan to aid Saddam that spring. On July 17, ten days before Twetten arrived, President Reagan wrote to Saddam Hussein on the occasion of the celebration of the Baath Party’s revolution in 1968: “Despite the present difficult circumstances, on this day you and your countrymen can be proud of the strides you have made in the area of economic development.” See also RAC Box 2, Geoffrey Kemp Files, RRPL.
Interviews with Twetten and Twetten’s comments in Blight et al., Becoming Enemies, 113–14. Barzan on Saddam’s loyalty checks from “Sweet and Bitter Years,” CRRC SH-MISC-D-001-204.
Interviews with Twetten.
Joost R. Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 42–43; quotation from an interview with Twetten.
The executions in Dujail eventually became part of a war crimes case filed against Saddam Hussein following his capture by American forces. Daughter’s account: Al-Sharq al-Aswat, May 22, 2004.
Kissinger’s remark appears in Mansour Farhang, “Teheran’s Game Plan,” editorial, New York Times, February 5, 1991; “If the two superpowers wanted”: Saddam’s interview with Time magazine reporters Murray J. Gart and Dean Brelis, July 6, 1982, in Saïd K. Aburish, Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), 217.
“America has two faces”: CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-561; “You tell me how”: Aburish, Politics of Revenge, 216; “We are afraid”: CRRC SH-SHTP-D-000-846.
“We talk about the American”: CRRC SH-SHTP-D-000-559; “unnatural”: Aburish, Politics of Revenge, 216; “I have nothing personal”: Aburish, 216.
Interviews with several former U.S. officials familiar with the C.I.A. station in Baghdad during the 1980s.
Amel Brahmi and I reconstructed this history, which proved to be complex and obscure. We interviewed former U.S. officials who served in the interests section or during the early years of the revived embassy, after 1984: David Mack, James Bullock, William Haugh, Deborah Jones, and Theodore Kattouf, among others. Ryan Crocker, who served there between 1978 and 1980, recalled the sign in the classified area. All quotations, interviews by the author and Brahmi.
Interviews with former U.S. diplomats.
State Department cable, Baghdad to Washington, March 23, 1983, RAC Box 4, NSC Near East and South Asia Affairs Directorate Collection, RRPL.
Aburish, Politics of Revenge, 224–25.
Interview with Mack.
Interview with Twetten. This visit to the C.I.A. occurred after mid-1983, but it is not clear when. It seems likely that the delegation included Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law, who briefly took charge of the Mukhabarat after Barzan’s resignation in late 1983. Qusay, Saddam’s second-born son, may have also joined the trip, and he and Kamel may have been the ones who tried to purchase silencers. An Iraqi source familiar with the C.I.A. liaison dated the visit to 1985 and said Kamel and Qusay were in the traveling party. He added that “the visit was a total failure” because “the two men were not qualified in the field.” Twetten, speaking almost forty years after the event, said he was “ninety percent” certain that Hussein Kamel was in the delegation. His recollection about the gun incident is clear and in line with other similar incidents.
State Department cable, Baghdad to Washington, May 4, 1983, RAC Box 4, NSC Near East and South Asia Affairs Directorate Collection, RRPL. The name of the Iraqi official Eagleton met with is redacted, except on one page, where the subject line reads “Meeting with Barzan al-Tikriti.” For these errors in the unnecessary censorship of decades-old meetings with deceased figures in history, we can only be grateful.
State Department cable, Paris to Washington, May 11, 1983, Document 18 in Joyce Battle, ed., Shaking Hands with Saddam Hussein: The U.S. Tilts toward Iraq, 1980–1984, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 82 (hereafter NSA EBB 82), February 25, 2003, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/iraq18.pdf.
Saddam’s mother’s date of death: “Sweet and Bitter Years,” CRRC SH-MISC-D-001-919. Other sources date her death to August 1982, but the date provided by Barzan appears credible. His manuscript also describes Subha’s deathbed edicts, issued to Barzan’s sister, who attended to her mother in her last days. Photographs of Subha appear in Amir Iskander, Saddam Hussein: The Fighter, the Thinker and the Man (Paris: Hachette Réalités, 1980).
For many years, Saddam’s opponents circulated stories that his biological father abandoned his family and that his mother was a prostitute. Some biographers reported these rumors, but others documented the more prosaic fact of his biological father’s early death while acknowledging some gaps in the record. In his autobiographical novel, Saddam describes the sequence of events surrounding his birth; the account here is from a matching one given by Saddam in detention to a C.I.A. interviewer, John Nixon. See John Nixon, Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein (New York: Blue Rider Press, 2016), 122.
All quotations from Men and a City, as translated by Hawraa Al-Hassan, in “Propaganda Literature in Ba‘thist Cultural Production (1979–2003): The Novels of Saddam Hussein as a Case Study” (hereafter “Propaganda Literature”). This is her invaluable 2014 doctoral thesis at King’s College, University of Cambridge. Hassan is also the author of Women, Writing and the Iraqi Ba‘thist State: Contending Discourses of Resistance and Collaboration, 1968–2003 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020).
Saddam’s tribal tattoo from Nixon, Debriefing the President, 17–18.
“bold and brave”: Raghad Hussein interview with Al Arabiya, February 17, 2021; all other quotations from “Sweet and Bitter Years,” CRRC SH-MISC-D-001-919. Although the luncheon scene and quotations here are from Barzan’s self-serving unpublished memoir, the story of the split between Barzan and Saddam in late 1983, and the fact that this falling out coincided with a dispute over Raghad’s engagement, is described by other sources, including recent memoirs by Raghad’s eldest daughter, Hareer, and those of family retainers, such as Ala Bashir, one of Saddam’s personal physicians. See also, for example, Con Coughlin, Saddam: King of Terror (New York: Ecco, 2002), 199–200.
Arm-for-an-arm—the retributee was Luai Khairallah, Sajida’s brother—from Bashir and Sunnanå, The Insider, 157; “trivial person”: Tariq Aziz’s detention interview with the journalist Ali al-Dabagh, conducted in 2010, broadcast on Al Arabiya in 2013. The English translation was released by the CRRC on July 23, 2013, https://conflictrecords.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/crrc-releases-translation-of-interview-with-tariq-aziz; shot-out traffic light incident is from Saddam while he was detained, mentioned in, among other accounts, Duelfer, Hide and Seek, 105; the kidnapping of two traffic cops from Bashir and Sunnanå, The Insider, 152.
Aaron M. Faust, The Ba‘thification of Iraq: Saddam Hussein’s Totalitarianism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), 77.
Rising at 5:00 a.m. from an interview with Saman Abdul Majid, a French- and English-language translator in the presidential secretariat; valet from Duelfer, Hide and Seek, 388; four cigars a day from Nixon, Debriefing the President, 93; “Whoever wants to smoke”: CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-635; satellite TV and poker game details from Saman Abdul Majid, Les années Saddam: Révélations exclusives (Paris: Fayard, 2003), 121.
“On a personal level”: interview with Fadhil al-Janabi; “He looked you straight”: Murray and Woods, Iran-Iraq War, 24.
Saddam’s reading from an interview with Majid; his interest in biographies is from Majid, Les années Saddam, and Nixon, Debriefing the President; his reading of Hemingway is noted in, among other sources, Duelfer, Hide and Seek, 405.
Publication date of Mualla’s The Long Days from Hassan, “Propaganda Literature”; for an entertaining account of the filming of Clash of Loyalties, see James Montague, “When Saddam Met Oliver Reed,” Esquire Middle East, July 15, 2014, https://www.esquireme.com/culture/saddam-met-oliver-reed; Terence Young from Aburish, Politics of Revenge, 48; “eagle” from Hassan, “Propaganda Literature.”
“more than one obstacle,” description of schools and the Khairallah house, exam grade, and struggles with attendance from CRRC SH-PDWN-D-000-944.
“unable to restrain himself” and “immediately opened fire” from Iskander, Saddam Hussein, 53. The iconographic episodes in Saddam’s political biography recounted here appear in fragments in CRRC records, but they are fully treated in book-length English biographies and journalistic assessments by Aburish, Coughlin, the Cockburns, and Karsh and Rautsi. Iskander’s book is informed by distinctive access to Saddam’s circle in the late 1970s and contains valuable family photographs.
“on such a cold night”: Iskander, 67.
Saddam’s residence in Cairo, the Egyptian branch of the Baath Party, and gatherings at the Qasr al-Nil from CRRC SH-MISC-D-000-860; Saddam’s affiliation with the Iraqi Student Association and the Association of Iraqis in Cairo from CRRC SH-BATH-D-000-775; “Cairo for us”: Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005), 55; “this kind of liberal”: CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-723.
For an authoritative account of what is known about American involvement in the February 1963 Baathist coup, see Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt, “Embracing Regime Change in Iraq: American Foreign Policy and the 1963 Coup d’état in Baghdad,” Diplomatic History 39, no. 1 (January 2015): 98–125; “some played dominos”: Murray and Woods, Iran-Iraq War, 136.
Iskander, Saddam Hussein, 137. Aburish and Barzan, who was in the room with his own gun drawn, confirm the essential details of Iskander’s account.
Aburish, Politics of Revenge, 186.
See chapters three and five in Fakhri Qadduri, Hakadha ʻaraftu al-Bakr wa-Saddam: rihlah 35 ʻam fi Hizb al-Baʻth (This is how I knew al-Bakr and Saddam, a 35-year journey in the Ba’ath party) (London: Dar al-Hikmah, 2006). Translation for the author by Amel Brahmi.
Karsh and Rautsi, Saddam Hussein, 114.
Hamdani’s memoirs, in Murray and Woods, Iran-Iraq War, 287.
“Friend of the President” cards and medal benefits from Faust, Ba‘thification of Iraq, 174–75; artists’ salaries from Majid, Les années Saddam, 142.
Majid, 146.
Rolex and Piaget watches from Majid, 150. For a characteristic portfolio of photos from Saddam’s public rounds, see CRRC SH-MISC-D-001-963.
“The Zionists are greedy”: Kevin M. Woods et al., A Survey of Saddam’s Audio Files 1978–2001: Toward an Understanding of Authoritarian Regimes, Paper P-4548 (Alexandria, Va.: Institute for Defense Analyses, 2010), 80–82, as cited in Hal Brands and David Palkki, “Why Did Saddam Want the Bomb? The Israel Factor and the Iraqi Nuclear Program,” Foreign Policy Research Institute E-Notes, August 2011; the Iraqi Jewish archive discovered in the Mukhabarat’s basement from Sandi Fox, “Who Owns the Jewish Treasures That Were Hidden in Saddam Hussein’s Basement?,” PBS NewsHour, April 29, 2014, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/stolen-treasures-iraqi-jewish-community.
“One moment he would be”: Murray and Woods, Iran-Iraq War, 24; Ali Hassan al-Majid’s remarks from his F.B.I. detention interview on January 31, 2004.
Aziz interview with Dabagh.
“Sweet and Bitter Years,” CRRC SH-MISC-D-001-919.
“Sweet and Bitter Years,” CRRC SH-MISC-D-001-919.
“Iraq: Foreign Intelligence and Security Services,” partially declassified C.I.A. memo, August 1985, Document 5 in Jeffrey Richelson, ed., Saddam’s Iron Grip: Intelligence Reports on Saddam Hussein’s Reign, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book 167, October 18, 2005, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB167/05.pdf.
“Sweet and Bitter Years,” CRRC SH-MISC-D-001-919.
Saddam International: http://berthetpochy.blogspot.com/p/architecture-interieure.html; Le Monde, August 19, 1983; “initiate a dialogue”: State Department cable, Baghdad to Amman, December 14, 1983, Document 29, NSA EBB 82; golden spurs from Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair, 49.
“despicable act”: Reagan remarks on October 23, 1983, RRPL video, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/remarks-reporters-death-american-and-french-military-personnel-beirut-lebanon; Shultz and Rumsfeld conversation from Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir (New York: Sentinel, 2011), 11.
“harbored illusions”: Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 4.
Tariq Aziz and Rumsfeld from Rumsfeld, 5; “among the four most powerful”: memo from Shultz to Reagan, November 20, 1984, Box CFOA 414, Edwin Meese Files, RRPL.
Aziz’s interview with Ali al-Dabagh.
Portrait of Aziz from interviews with Iraqi colleagues and multiple U.S. and European diplomats and officials who negotiated with him, particularly Charles Duelfer and Rolf Ekéus; Baghdad home with car ramp described in Tim Trevan, Saddam’s Secrets: The Hunt for Iraq’s Hidden Weapons (London: HarperCollins UK, 1999), 16.
State Department cable, London to Washington, December 21, 1983, Document 32, NSA EBB 82, except “unnatural,” which is from a readout cable of Rumsfeld’s meeting with Saddam Hussein the next day, also part of Document 32, NSA EBB 82.
State Department cable, London to Washington, December 21, 1983, Document 31, NSA EBB 82.
Videotape from Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 9.
For a timeline of Iraq’s chemical-weapons program from its origins to the 1980s, see Iraq Survey Group, Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the Director of Central Intelligence on Iraq’s WMD, rev. ed. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2005), 3:1–9. This voluminous report is hereafter cited as the Duelfer Report.
CRRC SH-MISC-D-001-334.
Iraq Survey Group, Duelfer Report, 3:6.
CRRC SH-AFGC-D-000-094, as quoted in Murray and Woods, Iran-Iraq War, 221; July 1983 mustard attack described in Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair, 29.
Rashid from Hiltermann, 37; tabun gas use described in Hiltermann, 32–36; “crude sulfur-mustard” and casualty estimate from Murray and Woods, Iran-Iraq War, 229.
Ricciardone from Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair, 39; for full March 4 statement, see “Press Statement: Iraq’s Use of Chemical Weapons,” James Placke to James M. Ealum et al., March 4, 1984, Document 43, NSA EBB 82; Bernard Gwertzman, “U.S. Says Iraqis Used Poison Gas against Iranians in Latest Battles,” New York Times, March 6, 1984, https://www.nytimes.com/1984/03/06/world/us-says-iraqis-used-poison-gas-against-iranians-in-latest-battles.html.
State Department cable, Washington to Khartoum, March 24, 1984, Document 48, NSA EBB 82.
State Department cable, Washington to Amman, March 18, 1984, Document 6 in Malcolm Byrne, comp., Saddam Hussein: More Secret History, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 107 (hereafter NSA EBB 107), December 18, 2003, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB107/.
“worsened”: State Department cable, Washington to Khartoum, March 24, 1984, Document 48, NSA EBB 82; Rumsfeld’s instructions from Document 7, NSA EBB 107, as quoted in Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair, 52.
“You got beaten” and habits and attire: Janet Wallach, “The Artful Ambassador,” Washington Post, December 8, 1985, and author’s interview with Samir Vincent; “like a Baath Party thug”: David L. Mack, oral history interview by Charles Stuart Kennedy, October 24, 1995, Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (hereafter cited as FAOHC, ADST).
Hamdoon’s education from State Department cable, Baghdad to Washington, undated late 1984, RAC Box 4, RRPL, as well as author’s interviews with Samir Vincent, who also attended the Jesuit school, and Odeh Aburdene; Hamdoon on Cagney & Lacey and “control the cities . . . control the gangs” from Wallach, “The Artful Ambassador”; gifting of Cuban cigars and champagne from Sarah Moawad interview with Peter Bourne.
Moawad interview with Judith Kipper and author’s interview with Aburdene.
Moawad interview with Mary King.
All quotations from interviews with King and Aburdene.
Mack’s oral history interview, FAOHC, ADST; Daniel Pipes, “ ‘Thank You for Everything. But Do Not Stay’: An Exchange with the Late Nizar Hamdoon,” Middle East Quarterly 10, no. 4 (Fall 2003): 33–44.
Pipes, “ ‘Thank You for Everything,’ ” 33–44; Hamdoon’s remarks from his appearance at the Baltimore Council on Foreign Affairs, April 2, 1986, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym_1Z174NbQ.
“Iran-Iraq War,” C.I.A. memorandum, August 28, 1984, in Matthew M. Aid, ed., U.S. Intelligence on the Middle East, 1945–2009, BrillOnline Primary Sources, accessed through the Library of Congress.
Memorandum from Robert McFarlane, November 26, 1984, Folder: Iraq 1984 (11/21/1984–12/24/1984), RAC Box 4, Edwin Meese Files, RRPL.
Memorandum of Conversation, Oval Office, November 26, 1984, RAC Box 4, NSC Near East and South Asia Affairs Directorate Collection, RRPL.
Ronald Reagan, The Reagan Diaries, ed. Douglas Brinkley (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 281.
Dhafir Selbi, Zuhair Al-Chalabi, and Imad Khadduri, Unrevealed Milestones in the Iraqi National Nuclear Program, 1981–1991, ed. Imad Khadduri (Scotts Valley, Calif.: CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2011), 41–42.
Saddam’s use of Wanderlodges from interviews with Mazin Jazrawi by Amel Brahmi, as well as from Mazin Jazrawi, ‘Ashr Sanawat fi qusur Saddam Hussein (London: Dar al-Hikmah, 2005), hereafter cited in English as Ten Years in Saddam’s Palaces, translated for the author by Amel Brahmi; see also Patrick J. Sloyan, “Air Force Hunted Motor Home in War’s ‘Get Saddam’ Mission,” Washington Post, June 23, 1991; luxury Wanderlodges from N. R. Kleinfield, “On the Road in a $350,000 Home,” New York Times, June 21, 1987.
Radwaniyah under construction from Ten Years in Saddam’s Palaces and interviews with Jazrawi.
Jafar and Niaimi, Last Confession, chapter three.
“fruitful objectives”: Selbi, Chalabi, and Khadduri, Unrevealed Milestones, 42, and interviews with Selbi and Khadduri; see also Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer, Unclear Physics: Why Iraq and Libya Failed to Build Nuclear Weapons (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2016), 95–96; Jafar’s thinking from correspondence with Jafar; “make a golden statue”: Jafar and Niaimi, Last Confession, chapter three.
Jafar and Niaimi, Last Confession, chapter three, and correspondence with Jafar.
Interviews and correspondence with Jafar.
Interviews and correspondence with Jafar. See also Braut-Hegghammer, Unclear Physics, 80.
Interviews and correspondence with Jafar, as well as the CAFCD. The chronology in this document is supported by the memoirs of Jafar, Niaimi, Selbi, and Khadduri, as well as by the findings of I.A.E.A. inspectors. See also Jafar and Niaimi, Last Confession, chapter four.
Interviews with Shahristani; “The hardest part of solitary” and “Dad, open the lid”: Shahristani, Free of Fear, 86–89.
CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-896 and SH-SHTP-A-001-023.
Interviews with Saati and Janabi.
C.I.A. Directorate of Intelligence, “The Iraqi Nuclear Program: Progress Despite Setbacks,” June 1983, Document 19, NSA EBB 82.
C.I.A. Directorate of Intelligence, “Iraq’s Nuclear Program: Acquiring a Nuclear Fuel Cycle,” partially redacted, February 1985, in Matthew M. Aid, ed., U.S. Intelligence on the Middle East, 1945–2009, BrillOnline Primary Sources, accessed through the Library of Congress.
“It’s time to start” and five-year forecast from an interview with Jafar.
Jafar and Niaimi, Last Confession, chapter three.
CRRC SH-SHTP-D-000-573, as excerpted in Murray and Woods, Iran-Iraq War, 19.
“Sweet and Bitter Years,” CRRC SH-MISC-D-000-948.
Interviews with Jafar and Selbi; “could control him”: Iraq Survey Group, Duelfer Report, 1:45.
Obeidi and Pitzer, Bomb in My Garden, 57.
Obeidi and Pitzer, 59–62.
See “Attorney General Ed Meese Tells Reporters That Between $10–$30 Million Had Been Diverted to the Contras,” Meese press conference at the White House, November 25, 1986, AP Archive video, published September 24, 2012, http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/7615e940a0ba4d8baa5cfa976506e949; Bernard Weinraub, “Iran Payment Found Diverted to Contras; Reagan Security Adviser and Aide Are Out,” New York Times, November 26, 1986, https://www.nytimes.com/1986/11/26/world/iran-payment-found-diverted-to-contras-reagan-security-adviser-and-aide-are-out.html.
For an authoritative account of Iran-Contra, see Malcolm Byrne, Iran-Contra: Reagan’s Scandal and the Unchecked Abuse of Presidential Power (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 2014). The details here are from one of the investigative bodies convened to examine the matter, the President’s Special Review Board, more commonly known as the Tower Commission. It is available as a book: John Tower, Edmund Muskie, and Brent Scowcroft, The Tower Commission Report: The Full Text of the President’s Special Review Board (New York: Bantam Books, 1987). The Iranian Jewish population’s emigration is from Houman Sarshar, Esther’s Children: A Portrait of Iranian Jews (Melrose Park, Pa.: Jewish Publication Society, 2002), ix, 258.
“This is not going”: interview with Thomas Twetten; “units, troops, tanks” and “Everyone here at headquarters”: C.I.A. cable, McMahon to Casey, Eyes Only, “Present Status in Saga Regarding the Movement of TOW Missiles,” January 25, 1986, NSA, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16591-document-03-cia-cable-deputy-director-john.
Interview with Twetten.
Murray and Woods, Iran-Iraq War, 262.
In Ashton, King Hussein of Jordan, 224, Ashton describes a November 1986 letter from King Hussein to Ronald Reagan in which the king suggested that C.I.A. advice to Baghdad about Iranian intentions at Faw had been inaccurate, raising questions in Saddam’s mind about whether the mistaken analysis had been intentional.
Interview with Twetten. Cave and other C.I.A. leaders made similar statements. See Malcolm Byrne, “Mixed Messages: U.S. Intelligence Support to Both Sides during the Iran-Iraq War” (paper prepared for The Iran-Iraq War: The View from Baghdad, a conference held at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and National Defense University, Washington, D.C., October 25–27, 2011); “extensive and encyclopedic”: author’s correspondence with Lang.
Gibson, Covert Relationship, 173.
“irresponsible press bilge”: Ronald Reagan’s diary entry for November 12, 1986, White House Diaries, Ronald Reagan Foundation, https://www.reaganfoundation.org/ronald-reagan/white-house-diaries/diary-entry-11121986/; Reagan’s address: “Address to the Nation on the Iran Arms and Contra Aid Controversy,” November 13, 1986, RRPL, transcript and video, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/address-nation-iran-arms-and-contra-aid-controversy-november-13-1986; “information that must remain classified”: Unsigned, Top Secret (declassified), November 13, 1986, Folder: Iran Policy–Sensitive, RAC Box 2, Howard J. Teicher Files, RRPL.
CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-555.
“I am not surprised” and “this level of bad”: CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-555; “Zionism is taking”: CRRC SH SHTP-A-000-561; “the real American conspiracy”: CRRC SH-SHTP-D-000-609. The English translation reflects a change recommended by Ibrahim Al-Marashi as part of his review of CRRC materials for the author.
Ashton, King Hussein of Jordan, 224.
State Department cable, Baghdad to Washington, November 16, 1986, RAC Box 2, Howard J. Teicher Files, RRPL.
“somebody took my only son”: interview with a former colleague; “about the U.S. being”: Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair, 77; “People were out to get”: interview with Odeh Aburdene.
See full text of official Iraqi translation, Document 6 in Malcolm Byrne, ed., U.S.-Iran: Lessons from an Earlier War, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 394 (hereafter NSA EBB 394), December 18, 2003, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB394/docs/86-11-18%20Saddam%20to%20Reagan.pdf.
“Sweet and Bitter Years,” CRRC SH-MISC-D-001-919; details about Saddam’s writings from Bengio, Saddam’s Word, 78; cake-cutting detail from “Saddam Home Videos Show Private Life,” CNN, April 24, 2003, http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/04/24/sprj.irq.videos/index.html.
Gibson, Covert Relationship, 199.
Blight et al., Becoming Enemies, 144. Murphy recounts this exchange during an oral history discussion: “I thought the metaphor showed a keen understanding of the way big powers act,” he said. “Tariq Aziz, by the way, nearly fell off his chair laughing at the joke.”
United States Central Command, Formal Investigation into the Circumstances Surrounding the Attack on the USS Stark (FFG-31) on 17 May 1987 (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, 1987), https://www.jag.navy.mil/library/investigations/USS%20STARK%20BASIC.pdf.
For Reagan’s remarks, see “Statement on the Attack against the U.S.S. Stark,” May 18, 1987, RRPL, transcript, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/statement-attack-against-uss-stark; excerpts of Saddam’s letter from Blight et al., Becoming Enemies, 327–28.
Saddam’s condolence letter, RAC Box 3, NSC Near East and South Asia Affairs Directorate Collection, RRPL.
Murphy to Shultz, “U.S.S. Stark: Results of the Joint Investigation Group’s Sessions in Baghdad,” June 1, 1987, RAC Box 14, NSC Near East and South Asia Directorate Collection, RRPL.
Iraq’s refusal to allow interview with pilot from interviews and correspondence with Rick Francona and Pat Lang; Saddam’s purchase of Dassault Falcons from Ashton and Gibson, Iran-Iraq War, 219–20; Falcon in attack on Stark from Murray and Woods, Iran-Iraq War, 307.
Correspondence with Lang.
Correspondence with Lang.
Francona bio and late-1987 D.I.A. report are from an interview with Francona; Haywood Rankin’s quoted recollections from his oral history interview by Charles Stuart Kennedy, July 24, 1998, FAOHC, ADST.
Correspondence with Lang and interview with Francona.
Correspondence with Lang and interview with Francona. Dialogue from Francona.
Details about target packages from correspondence with Lang; “direct, immediate tactical value”: interview with Francona.
Correspondence with Lang.
Correspondence with Lang and interview with Francona. According to Katherine Hennessey, Shakespeare on the Arabian Peninsula (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 14–15, the legend of Sheikh Zubair originated with the nineteenth-century author Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, as a joke.
Interview with Francona; “chemically dependent”: interview with Kenneth Pollack, a C.I.A. analyst during this period; Iraqi Army growth figures from Murray and Woods, Iran-Iraq War, 291.
Iraq Survey Group, Duelfer Report, 3:5–10.
Interview with Francona.
Correspondence with Lang; Bruce Riedel quotations from Blight et al., Becoming Enemies, 180.
Ali Hassan al-Majid’s biography and quotation are from his F.B.I. detention interview, February 4, 2004.
“would not prevail” and “Complete destruction hanging over”: Bruce W. Jentleson, With Friends Like These: Reagan, Bush, and Saddam, 1982–1990 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994), 72.
CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-788.
Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair, xx–xxi, 105.
Iraqi contemporaneous assessments from Murray and Woods, Iran-Iraq War, 315–16; David Hirst from Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair, 6.
David B. Ottaway, “U.S. Decries Iraqi Use of Chemical Weapons,” Washington Post, March 24, 1988.
“insisted”: Lang’s interview with Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair, 203. After a thorough review of the evidence around whether Iran ever used chemical arms during its war with Iraq, Hiltermann concludes that this is “not impossible, but unlikely.”
Correspondence with Lang and interview with Francona. Dialogue from Francona.
Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair, 95.
Majid’s F.B.I. detention interview, March 20, 2004. The English translation of the directive was read into the interview record by the questioner. Joost R. Hiltermann, Bureaucracy of Repression: The Iraqi Government in Its Own Words (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1994), appendix, document 15, https://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/1994/iraq/APPENDIX.htm.
The April 10, 1987, chemical attack on a neighboring village, named Tazashar, is detailed in “Known Chemical Attacks in Iraqi Kurdistan, 1987–1988,” an appendix to a Middle East Watch report, Genocide in Iraq: The Anfal Campaign against the Kurds (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1993), https://www.hrw.org/reports/1993/iraqanfal/APPENDIXC.htm.
Author’s interviews with Wahid Kochani, with gratitude to Joost Hiltermann for making the introduction. The narrative in this chapter is largely based on interviews with Kochani. He first provided an account of his experience to Hiltermann for the Middle East Watch / Human Rights Watch July 1993 report (supra note 11). Kochani was given a pseudonym in that document, as he still lived in Iraq at the time. Later he was resettled in the United States. He also provided testimony at a post-2003 trial of Saddam Hussein and gave an extensive interview, in 2013, to the Kurdish researcher Arif Qurbany, translated from Kurdish to English by Abdulkarim Uzeri. His narrative has been consistent across all of these accounts and is corroborated by the investigations of Middle East Watch and others, which identified transit camps that Kochani passed through and collected corroborating testimony from other survivors. There are, inevitably, variations in the language Kochani uses to narrate particular episodes. For Kochani’s quotations in this chapter, I have used only my interviews, translated from Kurdish by his son Hemin. Amel Brahmi also conducted supplementary interviews. I relied on Qurbany for some of the Anwar Tayyar narrative.
Interviews with Kochani.
Murray and Woods, Iran-Iraq War, 333.
Interviews with Kochani.
Interviews with Kochani.
Kochani told me that he tried to find the Arab family that saved him but could not identify them.
In its initial investigation, Middle East Watch / Human Rights Watch identified at least fifty thousand names of individuals who disappeared during the Anfal, presumed to be executed, and Hiltermann conservatively estimated the toll at about eighty thousand. Kurdish authorities have insisted on a death toll closer to two hundred thousand. The researcher Choman Hardi, who conducted an extensive review of Anfal literature, offered an estimate of one hundred thousand. More recent scholars have credited the higher end of the range. See, for example, Lisa Blaydes, State of Repression: Iraq under Saddam Hussein (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018), 154, which cites estimates of one hundred and fifty thousand to two hundred thousand. That two thousand and six hundred villages were destroyed during the Anfal (more than one thousand had been destroyed in earlier Iraqi campaigns) is noted by Choman Hardi, Gendered Experiences of Genocide: Anfal Survivors in Kurdistan-Iraq (Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate, 2011), 13. The account of the bulldozer driver, Abdul-Hassan Muhan Murad, also comes from Hardi, 18. Women, girls, and elderly prisoners who survived detention provided accounts of their experiences as well. After thousands were packed into transit and internment camps, “the majority of the men were killed within days (as well as some of the women), and it was the women who lived through the hunger, illness, loss, and desperation in the camps,” writes Hardi, 4.
CRRC SH-GMID-D-000-859.
Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair, 138.
On the quashing of the Prevention of Genocide Act, see, for example, a draft letter, circa September 1988, from Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs J. Edward Fox to a House committee. “We could not characterize Iraqi actions as ‘genocide’ based on the evidence available at this time,” the draft letter states. Box CFOA 1321, Economic Policy Council Records 1985–1988, RRPL.
CCRC SH-SHTP-0000-788.
CCRC SH-SHTP-0000-788.
Khomeini quotation from Murray and Woods, Iran-Iraq War, 337; Saddam’s termination of cooperation with the D.I.A from an interview with Francona.
Casualties, war expenditures, and initial foreign exchange reserves from Jeffrey A. Engel, ed., Into the Desert: Reflections on the Gulf War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 28; debt statistics from Glen Rangwala, as cited in Ashton and Gibson, Iran-Iraq War, 97; “Victory in the war”: Saddam’s message to Washington via April Glaspie, July 25, 1990, as cited in Engel, Into the Desert, 28.
The basic facts about Uday’s killing of Gegeo are well documented, including through remarks Saddam later made about the incident in recorded leadership meetings. Yet exactly what happened that night is less certain. Two published eyewitness accounts are available from Zafer Muhammad Jaber and Latif Yahia. The former was interviewed for Ala Bashir’s memoir, The Insider, written with Lars Sigurd Sunnanå, a Norwegian journalist. The latter, who has maintained a website, https://www.latifyahia.net, is a former Iraqi Army officer who fled the country in 1993. He claims to have served as Uday’s body double. Reporting by the British journalist Ed Caesar (“The Double Dealer,” January 23, 2011, Sunday Times, https://edcaesar.co.uk/2011/01/23/double-dealer-sunday-times/) raised doubts about Yahia’s claims about his relationship with Uday. The Guardian also published skeptical reporting (Eoin Butler, “The Tangled Tale behind the Devil’s Double,” August 13, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/global/2011/aug/13/devils-double-tangled-tale). Yahia’s account of what led up to Gegeo’s killing, cited in Andrew Cockburn and Patrick Cockburn, Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 153–55, overlaps with Jaber’s but contains unique details. The Cockburns’ book is among the best and most reliable journalistic accounts of Saddam’s regime published before 2001, and at the time the book was written, questions about Yahia’s reliability had not yet surfaced. I’ve disregarded Yahia and relied on Jaber’s account, as given by Bashir and Sunnanå, The Insider, 81–86, as well as on an interview with Bashir. Frank Lloyd Wright’s interest in Mother of Pigs is from Michael Kubo, “Genius versus Expertise: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Architects Collaborative at the University of Baghdad,” Histories of Postwar Architecture 5, no. 8 (2021): 14–42.
Bashir and Sunnanå, The Insider, 81–86.
“His ideas were not clear”: interview with Saman Abdul Majid; Tariq Aziz’s remarks about Uday from his interview with Ali al-Dabagh.
“I did my SATs”: Cockburn and Cockburn, Out of the Ashes, 151.
“watches, jewels and rings”: Bashir and Sunnanå, The Insider, 83.
Bashir and Sunnanå, The Insider, 85–86.
“Sweet and Bitter Years,” CRRC SH-MISC-D-001-919.
Bashir and Sunnanå, The Insider, 86.
“sports attire”: “Sweet and Bitter Years,” CRRC SH-MISC-D-001-919; Saddam’s relationship with Samira Shahbandar has been widely commented upon. She was listed in April 2004 by the United Nations as part of a sanctions regime, and in the Security Council Committee’s narrative summary, posted to the United Nations Security Council website on October 29, 2014, she was described as “Saddam’s second wife and mother to his third son”: https://www.un.org/securitycouncil/sanctions/1518/materials/summaries/individual/samira-shahbandar.
“Sweet and Bitter Years,” CRRC SH-MISC-D-001-919.
CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-665.
“Sweet and Bitter Years,” CRRC SH-MISC-D-001-919.
“Sweet and Bitter Years,” CRRC SH-MISC-D-001-919.
Military and economic aid from Engel, Into the Desert, 22.
“the purging of dozens”: Kenneth M. Pollack, The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (New York: Random House, 2002), 27.
Georges Sada with Jim Nelson Black, Saddam’s Secrets: How an Iraqi General Defied and Survived Saddam Hussein (Brentwood, Tenn.: Integrity Publishers, 2006), 118–19. Sada was an Iraqi Air Force general whom Saddam commissioned to conduct an investigation into the incident. He concluded that it was an accident. The pilot escaped execution. Sada recounts that after he submitted his report, “much to my surprise,” Saddam sent him $10,000 and a gold watch.
Karsh and Rautsi, Saddam Hussein, 196.
Michael S. Schmidt, “Mohammed Ghani Hikmat, Iraqi Sculptor, Dies at 82,” September 21, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/21/arts/design/mohammed-ghani-hikmat-iraqi-sculptor-dies-at-82.html.
Barzan’s September 4 letter (Harmony ISGZ-2004-00172), as quoted in Kevin M. Woods, The Mother of All Battles: Saddam Hussein’s Strategic Plan for the Persian Gulf War (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2008), 41–42.
Woods, Mother of All Battles, 152.
Kerr-Bush exchange from Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, The Generals’ War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1995), 11; “encourage acceptably moderate behavior”: George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), loc. 6260 of 11461, Kindle.
See declassified National Security Directive 26, “U.S. Policy toward the Persian Gulf,” October 2, 1989, National Security Directives, George H. W. Bush Library, https://bush41library.tamu.edu/files/nsd/nsd26.pdf; details about U.S.-Iraq Business Forum members from Jentleson, With Friends Like These, 84; Aziz’s quip about a refrigerator from Sarah Moawad’s interview with Mary King; “consistent with U.S. policy”: Jentleson, With Friends Like These, 85; “a good-faith effort”: Bush and Scowcroft, World Transformed, loc. 6285 of 11461, Kindle.
Baker and Aziz meeting described by Michael R. Gordon, “The Last War Syndrome,” in Into the Desert, 118; that the C.I.A. had no significant sources close to Saddam from an interview with Thomas Twetten, then head of Near East operations at the C.I.A.; that the D.I.A.’s access had also dried up after the end of Druid Leader from an interview with Jim Ritchey, defense attaché in Baghdad after January 1989.
“finished as a world power” and “free hand”: Don Oberdorfer, “Missed Signals in the Middle East,” Washington Post, March 17, 1991; for Bush’s waiver of congressional restrictions, see “Memorandum on Application of Export-Import Bank Restrictions in Connection with Iraq,” January 17, 1990, American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara.
Saddam’s remarks in Amman from Shibley Telhami, “The Arab Dimension of Saddam Hussein’s Calculations,” in Into the Desert, 154–56, and Long, Saddam’s War of Words, 16.
“He had lost much weight”: Donald Trelford, Shouting in the Street: Adventures and Misadventures of a Fleet Street Survivor (London: Biteback Publishing, 2017), loc. 4762 of 7459, Kindle; “Saddam is recovering”: Augusta Anthony interview with Harold Walker.
CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-910. CRRC logged the conversation as “undated (sometime after 1989).” The discussion makes clear that it took place between Farzad Bazoft’s sentencing and execution.
Augusta Anthony interview with Robin Kealy.
“Thatcher wanted him alive”: Salah Nasrawi, “Journalist Hanged for Alleged Spying; Britain Recalls Ambassador,” Associated Press, March 15, 1990; “Our competitors would happily step”: from declassified British records as quoted by Richard Norton-Taylor and Tracy McVeigh, “ ‘It Would Be Bad for Our Interests’: Why Thatcher Ignored the Murder of an Observer Journalist,” Guardian, January 1, 2017.
Bull’s biography from William Park, “The Tragic Tale of Saddam Hussein’s ‘Supergun,’ ” BBC Future, March 17, 2016; Mossad’s assassination from Bergman, Rise and Kill First, 357–58; “We are dealing with”: CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-910.
“literally every day”: Hamdi A. Hassan, The Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait: Religion, Identity and Otherness in the Analysis of War and Conflict (London: Pluto Press, 1999), 47.
“I swear to God”: as quoted by the Iraqi News Agency and reported in “Saddam Threatens Israel with Chemical Weapons,” United Press International, April 2, 1990; ‘Everyone must know”: from the same speech, as quoted in Long, Saddam’s War of Words, 17.
Bush and Scowcroft, World Transformed, locs. 6290–91 of 11461, Kindle.
Long, Saddam’s War of Words, 17.
“unambiguous message”: Bush and Scowcroft, World Transformed, loc. 6307 of 11461, Kindle; Glaspie cable as excerpted by Gordon, “The Last War Syndrome,” 121.
Cable from Secretary of State Baker to Senator Dole, April 12, 1990, Robert and Elizabeth Dole Archive, Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics, University of Kansas (hereafter cited as Dole Archive); State Department cable, Baghdad to Amman, April 11, 1990, Dole Archive. The letter and a transcript of the discussion were released by Iraq’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs under the heading “A Message of Peace.” Tariq Aziz almost certainly supervised the English translation, but the Arabic original is also available. The Dole Archive contains a markup of Iraq’s English transcript made shortly after the trip that offers only a few amendments. One is the addition of Saddam’s answer to Dole, who had just assured him about Bush’s benign attentions: “This is sufficient for me.” Scowcroft later wrote that the senators emerged from the meeting “basically optimistic” and advised the White House to “stay the course and keep the relationship open.”
Meeting transcript, Dole Archive.
Meeting transcript, Dole Archive.
President Bush and King Hussein, “Telephone Conversation with King Hussein of Jordan,” April 23, 1990, Memcons and Telcons, George H. W. Bush Presidential Library (hereafter cited as Bush Library), https://bush41library.tamu.edu/files/memcons-telcons/1990-04-23--Hussein%20I.pdf.
“Saddam’s Message of Friendship to President Bush,” State Department cable, Baghdad to Washington, July 25, 1990, Cable 90 BAGHDAD 4237, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/110705.
Excerpt from a record archived in the Department of Defense’s Harmony database (hereafter cited as Harmony). The record, Harmony ISGQ-2003-M0006248, is a twenty-one-minute video file cited in Kevin M. Woods and James Lacey, Iraqi Perspectives Project: Primary Source Materials for Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents, Paper P-4287 (Alexandria, Va.: Institute for Defense Analyses, 2007), 4:21.
“billions” and “without sweat”: CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-626; “They are afraid”: CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-910.
Jaber al-Sabah profile from Youssef M. Ibrahim, “The Exiled Emir,” New York Times, September 26, 1990; “I know the Kuwaiti society”: CRRC SH-SHTP-A-001-232, as excerpted in Kevin M. Woods, David D. Palkki, and Mark E. Stout, eds., The Saddam Tapes: The Inner Workings of a Tyrant’s Regime, 1978–2001 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 171–72.
W. Nathaniel Howell, Strangers When We Met: A Century of American Community in Kuwait (Washington, D.C.: New Academia Publishing, 2015), 309.
Richard Murphy from Blight et al., Becoming Enemies, 222; W. Nathaniel Howell from Strangers When We Met, 316–17.
Kevin M. Woods et al., Iraqi Perspectives Project: A View of Operation Iraqi Freedom from Saddam’s Senior Leadership (Norfolk, Va.: Joint Center for Operational Analysis, U.S. Joint Forces Command, 2006), 4.
Fred Moore, comp., Iraq Speaks: Documents on the Gulf Crisis (Palo Alto: Fred Moore, 1991), 3.
Blight et al., Becoming Enemies, 222.
Directorate of Air Intelligence reconnaissance survey from CRRC SH-AADF-D-000-881; military intelligence analysis from Woods, Mother of All Battles, 60–63.
Moore, Iraq Speaks, 5–8.
Bush’s July 17 letter from Duelfer, Hide and Seek, 64; Revolution Day speech from Long, Saddam’s War of Words, 20; that C.I.A satellites detected Hammurabi Division elements from Pollack, Threatening Storm, xi; “We heard from many quarters”: Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir (New York: Threshold Editions, 2011), 183.
State Department press guidance and instructions are from excerpts published in R. Jeffrey Smith, “State Department Cable Traffic on Iraq—Kuwait Tensions, July 1990,” Washington Post, October 21, 1992. Smith’s documents include a cable from Washington to Amman on July 19, 1990, reporting on David Mack’s talking points over lunch with Mohammed al-Mashat the previous day, and a July 24, 1990, cable from Washington to Baghdad.
Interviews and correspondence with David Mack.
Interviews and correspondence with Mack, as well as the cables excerpted in Smith, “State Department Cable Traffic”; Glaspie’s handling of statements from correspondence with April Glaspie.
Woods, Mother of All Battles, 63.
John Kelly’s oral history interview by Thomas Stern, December 12, 1994, FAOHC, ADST.
Interviews and correspondence with Mack.
Kelly’s oral history interview, FAOHC, ADST.
“The sons of Kuwait”: Long, Saddam’s War of Words, 20; Kelly’s oral history interview, FAOHC, ADST.
“Saddam’s Message of Friendship to President Bush,” State Department cable, Baghdad to Washington, July 25, 1990, Cable 90 BAGHDAD 4237, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/110705. Authored by April Glaspie from her political officer’s notes soon after the meeting, this is the cable reporting on her conversation with Saddam. It acknowledges the notification to Baghdad of the U.A.E. exercise.
“Iraqi statements suggest”: Baker’s cable to Baghdad, July 24, 1990; documents Glaspie carried from correspondence with Glaspie.
Two written records of the meeting are available in English. One is the full cable authorized by Glaspie (see supra note 37). The second is a long but incomplete transcript originally provided by Tariq Aziz’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to ABC News, which translated it from Arabic to English. This version was published in “Excerpts from Iraqi Document on Meeting with U.S. Envoy,” New York Times, September 23, 1990. The Iraqi record is the fuller of the two and reads more like a transcript; the American record appears to be paraphrase and summary, with occasional quotations for specificity. The two records track the discussion’s evolution from start to finish in the same way and contain some of the same notable exchanges. According to Glaspie, however, the Iraqi transcript contains a number of significant fabrications and omissions. She recalls that the Iraqi transcript omitted her final remarks, wherein she turned aside Saddam’s request that she travel to Washington to deliver his messages personally to President Bush. The quotations in my text in this chapter come from both transcripts, but I have used the Iraqi language only where the two records are in general agreement and the differences in translation choices do not appear to be material. See infra note 45 for an example of one of the fabrications in the Iraqi transcript cited by Glaspie.
See supra note 39.
Cable 90 BAGHDAD 4237 (supra note 37) and meeting records (supra note 39). If Saddam had asked, what would Glaspie have said? If she had stuck to her professional requirement to not invent U.S. policy, she might have picked up Baker’s observation in his July 24 cable that the use of force would violate the principles of the U.N. Charter, a vague way of saying that military action might follow. This would hardly have stopped Saddam in his tracks, and he might not have even noticed the implied threat. In correspondence, Glaspie wrote that, in hindsight, she should have made “even more pointed allusion to the proximity of our fleet in Bahrain,” but that this would have required clearance from Washington.
Iraqi fabrication, “broke down and wept” remark, and Glaspie’s impression of Saddam from correspondence with Glaspie. All other quotations are from the meeting records. See supra notes 37 and 39.
Aziz interview with Ali al-Dabagh.
Francona, Ally to Adversary, 46–47.
President Bush and King Hussein, “Telephone Conversation with King Hussein of Jordan.”
Gordon and Trainor, The Generals’ War, 23.
Richard Haass, “The Gulf War: Its Place in History,” in Into the Desert, 63.
Gordon and Trainor, The Generals’ War, 26.
Bush and Scowcroft, World Transformed, locs. 6199 and 6207 of 11461, Kindle.
Cogan and Pickering from Blight et al., Becoming Enemies, 220.
Bush and Scowcroft, World Transformed, loc. 6426 of 11461, Kindle; Newton quotation from Blight et al., Becoming Enemies, 187.
Interview with Charles Duelfer, who led the Iraq Survey Group, a C.I.A.-based investigation into Saddam Hussein’s rule, and who supervised some of Saddam’s interviews while in custody. The quotation is Duelfer’s paraphrase of Saddam’s essential point.
Woods, Mother of All Battles, 80–81; Hussein Kamel’s orders from Bashir and Sunnanå, The Insider, 103.
John Levins, Days of Fear: The Inside Story of the Iraqi Invasion and Occupation of Kuwait (Dubai: Motivate Publishing, 1997), 23–27.
Brent Scowcroft’s remarks from Bush and Scowcroft, World Transformed, locs. 6463 and 6507 of 11461, Kindle; Dick Cheney’s remarks from minutes of the meeting, Bush Library, Haass, Richard N. files, presidential meeting files subseries.
President Bush, King Hussein, and President Mubarak, “Telephone Conversation with King Hussein of Jordan and President Mubarak of Egypt,” August 2, 1990, Memcons and Telcons, Bush Library, https://bush41library.tamu.edu/files/memcons-telcons/1990-08-02--Hussein%20I.pdf.
“If Iraq wins” and “not helpful”: Bush and Scowcroft, World Transformed, locs. 6549 and 6554 of 11461, Kindle; all other quotations and Bush’s concern about fearing an Israeli nuclear strike from Henry E. Catto Jr., Ambassadors at Sea: The High and Low Adventures of a Diplomat (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 3–4.
President Bush and King Fahd, “Telcon with King Fahd of Saudi Arabia,” August 2, 1990, Memcons and Telcons, Bush Library, https://bush41library.tamu.edu/files/memcons-telcons/1990-08-02--Fahd.pdf.
Cheney and Cheney, In My Time, 189–96.
Harmony ISGQ-2003-00044897, as excerpted in Woods, Mother of All Battles, 95. The transcript was corrected in Saddam’s hand in 1993.
“spilling of the blood”: Joseph Wilson, The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies That Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004), 121; “You are a superpower”: from Wilson’s contemporaneous cable, as excerpted in Bush and Scowcroft, World Transformed, loc. 6894 of 11461, Kindle; “the carrot of cheap oil”: Wilson, Politics of Truth, 121; “The Sabah family is history”: Wilson, 121.
Saddam’s discussions with Majid and Sabawi in Harmony ISGQ-2003-M0005325 and M0003629, as quoted in Woods, Mother of All Battles, 96, 99. For a detailed account of Majid’s quixotic attempts to manage looting for official purposes rather than for the enrichment of individuals, see Ibrahim Al-Marashi, “The Nineteenth Province: The Invasion of Kuwait and the 1991 Gulf War from the Iraqi Perspective” (Ph.D. thesis, St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford, 2004). Marashi examined tens of thousands of occupation records captured by Kurdish rebels during the 1991 uprising and transferred to the United States. Gold bars from Peter James Spielmann, “Iraq and Kuwait Agree on Return of Stolen Gold,” Associated Press, June 14, 1991; $52 billion from “Iraq Makes Final Reparation Payment to Kuwait for 1990 Invasion,” UN News, February 9, 2022.
Marashi, “Nineteenth Province.”
Interview and correspondence with Jafar; status and amounts of Iraq’s French and Soviet reactor fuel at the time from David Albright, “Iraq’s Programs to Make Highly Enriched Uranium and Plutonium for Nuclear Weapons Prior to the Gulf War,” Institute for Science and International Security, 1997, revised October 2002.
Interview and correspondence with Jafar.
Correspondence with A. Q. Khan from CRRC SH-MICN-D-000-741. Khan did sell centrifuge designs and equipment to Iran and Libya, and it seems likely that his outreach to Iraq was not entrapment but a genuine effort to make a sale. Jafar and Obeidi from Obeidi and Pitzer, Bomb in My Garden, 131–32.
Obeidi and Pitzer, 135.
Moore, Iraq Speaks, 11, 15.
Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush (New York: Random House, 2015), 440.
Bush and Scowcroft, World Transformed, locs. 7470–72 of 11461, Kindle.
Bush’s order to the C.I.A., August 1990, noted in Rick Atkinson, Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), 273; Siedel’s role is from author’s interviews with Dave Manners and Joseph Wilson. For accounts of the evacuation from the U.S. embassy in Kuwait City, see Levins, Days of Fear, 184–87, and Howell, Strangers When We Met, 335–37.
Marashi, “Nineteenth Province.”
Harmony ISGQ-2003-M0003629 and 10151576, as quoted in Woods, Mother of All Battles, 108.
“preserve his authority”: John Hannah, “The Primakov Mission to Baghdad and Washington: What Happened?,” PolicyWatch 24, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, October 24, 1990; quotations from Primakov’s meeting in the Oval Office from Bush and Scowcroft, World Transformed, locs. 7700–7707 of 11461, Kindle.
Atkinson, Crusade, 120.
Reuters, “Potential War Casualties Put at 100,000,” Los Angeles Times, September 5, 1990.
Bush and Scowcroft, World Transformed, locs. 8801–10 of 11461, Kindle.
Harmony ISGQ-2003-M0001716, as excerpted in Woods, Mother of All Battles, 153.
Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri’s comments from Harmony ISGQ-2003-M0004608, as excerpted in Woods, 188; “This war was launched”: CRRC SH-SHTP-D-000-557, December 15, 1990.
Kevin M. Woods et al., “The Revolutionary Command Council Discusses Civil Defense Measures and Iraqi Morale in the Face of Potential Nuclear Strikes on Iraqi Cities (29 December 1990),” in A Survey of Saddam’s Audio Files 1978–2001: Toward an Understanding of Authoritarian Regimes, Paper P-4548 (Alexandria, Va.: Institute for Defense Analyses, 2010), 288, 289, 291.
CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-670.
Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III (New York: Doubleday, 2020), 418.
Baker and Glasser, Man Who Ran Washington, 418–20.
Iraq Survey Group, Duelfer Report, 1:97–100. The report provides a translated transcript of a recording of the meeting.
Chemical-arms preparations described in Woods, Mother of All Battles, 155–56, citing Harmony CMPC-2003-004325; estimate of biological weapons prepared from Raymond A. Zilinskas, “Iraq’s Biological Weapons: The Past as Future?,” Journal of the American Medical Association 278, no. 5 (1997): 418–24, and Richard L. Russell, “Iraq’s Chemical Weapons Legacy: What Others Might Learn from Saddam,” Middle East Journal 59, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 187–208.
Iraq Survey Group, Duelfer Report, 1:97–100.
Centrifuge preparations from the CACFD; interviews with Selbi and Janabi; Garry B. Dillon, “The IAEA in Iraq: Past Activities and Findings,” IAEA Bulletin 44, no. 2 (June 2002): 13–16, first published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; C.I.A., “Prewar Status of Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction,” March 1991 (declassified 2002), Document 4 in Jeffrey Richelson, ed., Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 80, February 11, 2004, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB80/wmd04.pdf.
Bush and Scowcroft, World Transformed, locs. 9120–23 of 11461, Kindle.
“We don’t do assassinations”: Brent Scowcroft’s interview with ABC News Saturday Night: Peter Jennings Reporting, season 1, episode 1, “Showdown with Saddam,” aired February 7, 1998; “one-man show” and “ought to be”: Rick Atkinson, “U.S. to Rely on Air Strikes If War Erupts,” Washington Post, September 16, 1990. When Cheney fired Dugan, he told reporters that the general’s comments about targeting Saddam personally were “potentially a violation” of the executive order banning assassinations of foreign leaders.
Schwarzkopf and McPeak estimates from Atkinson, Crusade, 273; Glosson estimate from Gordon and Trainor, The Generals’ War, 137; “Whenever the enemy”: Harmony ISGP-2003-00028432, as excerpted in Woods, Mother of All Battles, 184.
Gordon and Trainor, The Generals’ War, 216; Wanderlodge targeting from Patrick J. Sloyan, “Air Force Hunted Motor Home in War’s ‘Get Saddam’ Mission,” Washington Post, June 23, 1991. According to this account, U.S. strikes destroyed two Wanderlodges used by Iraqi generals.
“I wanted to play”: Gordon and Trainor, The Generals’ War, 315.
Deptula from Gordon and Trainor, 315.
Karsh and Rautsi, Saddam Hussein, 245.
Thomas A. Keaney and Eliot A. Cohen, Gulf War Air Power Survey: Summary Report, vol. 4 of 5 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993), https://media.defense.gov/2010/Sep/27/2001329817/-1/-1/0/AFD-100927-066.pdf.
Woods, Mother of All Battles, 182.
Woods, 182. On deterrence, see Woods, 156.
Francona, Ally to Adversary, 113, and an interview with Francona, who was present.
CRRC SH-SHTP-A-001-043.
Bush and Scowcroft, World Transformed, locs. 9206 and 9210 of 11461, Kindle; Cheney’s remarks from an interview in Frontline, season 14, episode 1, “The Gulf War,” written by Eamonn Matthews, narrated by Will Lyman, aired January 9, 1996, on PBS, transcript, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/oral/cheney/1.html.
“We have been attacked”: Bush and Scowcroft, World Transformed, loc. 9264 of 11461, Kindle; Scowcroft on turning down Shamir’s request from “Brent Scowcroft Oral History Part II,” interview by Philip Zelikow, August 10, 2000, Miller Center, University of Virginia, transcript, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-oral-histories/brent-scowcroft-oral-history-part-ii.
“You are free to fight”: Karsh and Rautsi, Saddam Hussein, 250; “Israel couldn’t do anything”: Bush and Scowcroft, World Transformed, loc. 9266 of 11461, Kindle.
Gravity bombs from Keaney and Cohen, Gulf War Air Power Survey, 4:103; estimated casualties, based on prisoner-of-war interviews, from Frontline, “The Gulf War.”
Aircraft from Woods, Mother of All Battles, 193; oil wells from Marashi, “Nineteenth Province.”
Georges Sada with Jim Nelson Black, Saddam’s Secrets, 181; Pentagon report from Michael R. Gordon, “Iraqi War Crimes Asserted by U.S.,” New York Times, March 20, 1993.
CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-931.
Yevgeni Primakov, “My Final Visit with Saddam Hussein,” Time, March 11, 1991; Gordon and Trainor, The Generals’ War, 333.
Strike on civilians from Alessandra Stanley, “Iraq Says U.S. Killed Hundreds of Civilians at Shelter, but Allies Call It a Military Post,” New York Times, February 14, 1991; additional details and Richard Neal from Robert K. Goldman, The Bombing of Iraqi Cities (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1991), https://www.hrw.org/reports/1991/IRAQ291.htm.
Woods et al., Survey of Saddam’s Audio Files 1978–2001, 225.
George H. W. Bush, “Remarks to Raytheon Missile Systems Plant Employees,” February 15, 1991, Andover, Mass., Government Printing Office transcript, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PPP-1991-book1/html/PPP-1991-book1-doc-pg148.htm.
Interviews with multiple C.I.A. officers familiar with Iraqi sourcing at the time.
Primakov, “My Final Visit with Saddam Hussein.”
Primakov, “My Final Visit with Saddam Hussein”; “neither could we be dissuaded”: Bush and Scowcroft, World Transformed, loc. 9621 of 11461, Kindle.
CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-630.
“very satisfied”: CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-630; “I knew he would betray”: CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-666.
There are three CRRC transcripts of Saddam’s discussions with military and civilian advisers on February 24, including one that takes place after Aziz arrives from Moscow. These are SH-SHTP-A-000-630, 666, and 931. All quotations are drawn from these three transcripts.
CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-630, 666, and 931.
Harmony ISGQ-2003-10151507, as excerpted in Woods, Mother of All Battles, 229.
Statistics from Atkinson, Crusade, 450–51; “pianos, toilets, sinks”: Francona, Ally to Adversary, 140.
Reuters, “The Bush Statement; Transcript of President’s Words on Iraqi Retreat,” New York Times, February 27, 1991, https://www.nytimes.com/1991/02/27/world/war-gulf-bush-statement-transcript-president-s-words-iraqi-retreat.html; Powell from Atkinson, Crusade, 452.
Atkinson, 471. See also Robert A. Divine, “The Persian Gulf War Revisited: Tactical Victory, Strategic Failure,” Diplomatic History 24, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 129–38.
Engel, Into the Desert, 135.
George H. W. Bush, “Address on the End of the Gulf War,” February 27, 1991, Miller Center, University of Virginia, transcript and video, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/february-27-1991-address-end-gulf-war.
James Mann, The Great Rift: Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and the Broken Friendship That Defined an Era (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2020), 138.
Bush and Scowcroft, World Transformed, loc. 9893 of 11461, Kindle.
Interviews with Hussain Al-Shahristani, as well as Shahristani, Free of Fear, 89–93; details on the founding of SCIRI from International Crisis Group, Shiite Politics in Iraq: The Role of the Supreme Council, Middle East Report No. 70 (Brussels: International Crisis Group, 2007).
Interviews with Shahristani, as well as Shahristani, Free of Fear, 95–99.
“complicated if not impossible”: H. Norman Schwarzkopf, It Doesn’t Take a Hero: The Autobiography of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf (New York: Bantam Books, 1992), loc. 8934 of 9729, Kindle. The author covered the cease-fire talks for The Washington Post, flying up to Safwan on a press helicopter. Schwarzkopf describes the landscape and the preparation of the scene (loc. 739 of 9729, Kindle).
Woods, Mother of All Battles, 244–45, citing a memoir by General Sultan Hashim Ahmad al-Tai.
“determined to conduct”: Schwarzkopf, It Doesn’t Take a Hero, loc. 9122 of 9729, Kindle; “I’m not here to give”: Philip Shenon, “Cease-Fire Meeting; A Hard-Faced Schwarzkopf Sets Terms at Desert Meeting,” New York Times, March 4, 1991.
Schwarzkopf, It Doesn’t Take a Hero, loc. 752–57 of 9729, Kindle, and Francona, Ally to Adversary, 147–51. The quotations used here are from Schwarzkopf. The two American accounts of the dialogue are essentially the same and are broadly confirmed by the Iraqi side, according to Kevin Woods’s translation of Sultan Hashim Ahmad al-Tai’s memoir.
Schwarzkopf, It Doesn’t Take a Hero, loc. 752–57 of 9729, Kindle.
Interview with Qasim Albrisem.
Well-documented open-source accounts of the uprising include: Endless Torment: The 1991 Uprising in Iraq and Its Aftermath (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1992), https://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/1992/Iraq926.htm; Ahlulbayt TV’s documentary film The ’91 Uprising: The Story behind the ’91 Uprising in Iraq, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sC38cXiJYw; Iraq: Human Rights Violations since the Uprising, MDE 14/05/91 (London: Amnesty International, 1991), https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde14/005/1991/en/; and the opening chapter of Cockburn and Cockburn, Out of the Ashes, 3–30. After 2003, the Iraqi High Tribunal and international war crimes investigators attached to the court captured and translated many thousands of pages of contemporaneous regime records, audio recordings, and videos, and they received hundreds of witness statements and complaints from Iraqi survivors of the uprising. Sadly, many of these records remain publicly unavailable. Through journalistic sources, I was able to review a sizable section of records once held by the Regime Crimes Liaison Office, a U.S.-funded unit that assisted the Iraqi High Tribunal. These records are hereafter cited as “RCLO records.” The account here is from those and other documentary sources; interviews with Qasim Albrisem and Abbas Kadhim; Albrisem’s memoir (with David Hetherington), Flight from Saddam (Scotts Valley, Calif.: CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2013); and Kadhim’s study, The Hawza Under Siege: A Study in the Baath Party Archive, Occasional Paper No. 1 (Boston: Boston University Institute for Iraqi Studies, 2013).
RCLO records.
ICG, Shiite Politics in Iraq; correspondence with Joost Hiltermann.
RCLO records.
Interviews with Albrisem, as well as Albrisem and Hetherington, Flight from Saddam, 19–21; gasoline rumor from RCLO records.
RCLO records.
Interviews with Kadhim, as well as his interview for The ’91 Uprising.
Shahristani, Free of Fear, 104.
Interviews with Kadhim.
Leaflet from Pollack, Threatening Storm, 48.
Richard Haass, “The Gulf War: Its Place in History,” in Into the Desert, 76; “We made some very overoptimistic”: interview with David Mack.
Interview with Laipson; Boucher from Human Rights Watch, Endless Torment, 94.
Gordon and Trainor, The Generals’ War, 454; “telling the good guys”: Haass, “The Gulf War: Its Place in History,” 74.
CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-614. Hussein Kamel appears to be reporting back after leading counterstrikes against the rebels in Karbala and Najaf.
CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-739.
“been trouble” and “the repression occurred immediately”: CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-739; March 5 announcement of the appointments of Majid and Hussein Kamel from Karsh and Rautsi, Saddam Hussein, 272–73; March 9 order and execution order (dated March 27) from RCLO records.
That sarin bombs were initially dropped but found ineffective, entailing a resort to tear gas, is from Iraq Survey Group, Duelfer Report, 1:25.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Violations since the Uprising; RCLO records; interview with Kadhim.
CRRC SH-RPGD-D-000-581.
Interview with Kadhim; specifics about the assault on Najaf and “orders were given” from CRRC SH-RPGD-D-000-581; execution of Najaf committee members from Shahristani, Free of Fear, 104. Al-Khoei died of natural causes the following year.
Directorate of Intelligence, “Iraq: Implications of Insurrection and Prospects for Saddam’s Survival,” March 16, 1991, released March 19, 2009, C.I.A. FOIA Collection, FOIA Electronic Reading Room, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0001441917.pdf.
Karsh and Rautsi, Saddam Hussein, 274.
Francona, Ally to Adversary, 155–56.
Haass, “The Gulf War: Its Place in History,” 76; interview with Haass.
Interviews with Shahristani.
“iron saws and knives” and “screamed and sobbed”: Jonathan C. Randal, After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness?: My Encounters with Kurdistan (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 49; “by force or willingly”: CRRC SH-MISC-D-000-947; search for prisoners recounted by Shahristani in interviews.
Interviews with Shahristani.
Barzani from Howard Chua-Eoan, “Iraq: Defeat and Flight,” Time, April 15, 1991; Erbil movie theater from Randal, After Such Knowledge, 45.
RCLO records.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Violations since the Uprising.
Daily casualty rate of four hundred from Human Rights Watch, “The Prospects for ‘Safe Areas’ for Internally Displaced Iraqis,” backgrounder in Iraqi Refugees, Asylum Seekers, and Displaced Persons: Current Conditions and Concerns in the Event of War (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2003); in “U.S. Uncertain of Death Rate at Kurds’ Camps,” April 25, 1991, The New York Times estimated the daily rate in late April at between four hundred and one thousand per day; all quotations from Randal, After Such Knowledge, 57.
David Hoffman, “Baker Trip to Mideast Has 2 Goals,” Washington Post, April 8, 1991.
Basra graves, Maysan estimates, and Tariq Aziz estimate from RCLO records.
Interview with Frank Anderson. Twetten confirmed the thrust of the exchange.
Brent Scowcroft’s interview with Peter Jennings, “Showdown with Saddam.”
Interview with Jafar Dhia Jafar; Gudrun Harrer, Dismantling the Iraqi Nuclear Programme: The Inspections of the International Atomic Energy Agency, 1991–1998 (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2014), 53–54.
Interview with Jafar.
Interviews and correspondence with Jafar, as well as interviews with Dhafir Selbi and Imad Khadduri.
Interview with Jafar; “meticulous in documenting”: Harrer, Dismantling the Iraqi Nuclear Programme, 123; number of documents from Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer, “Cheater’s Dilemma: Iraq, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the Path to War,” International Security 45, no. 1 (Summer 2020): 51–89. As noted later in this chapter, according to Jafar, after several intrusive U.N. inspections and Iraq’s admission of the electromagnetic enrichment program, Jafar tracked down the wandering train car. Many of its materials—along with other crucial documentation of Iraq’s WMD programs—remained secret until Hussein Kamel defected in 1995 and Iraq decided to turn over the documents, blaming Hussein Kamel for the deception.
Interview with Jafar.
Harrer, Dismantling the Iraqi Nuclear Programme, 63. Harrer had access to I.A.E.A. files while researching her carefully documented book, which reports on internal records and the I.A.E.A. perspective.
John Googin’s remark as recalled by Dimitri Perricos in an interview by David Albright, June 14–15, 2001, “Understanding the Lessons of Nuclear Inspections and Monitoring in Iraq: A Ten-Year Review,” Institute for Science and International Security, transcript published August 28, 2001, https://isis-online.org/perricos; Margaret Tutwiler from R. Jeffrey Smith, “Reassessing Iraqi Nuclear Capability,” Washington Post, July 10, 1991.
Interview with Jafar; Obeidi and Pitzer, Bomb in My Garden, 139.
Iraq Survey Group, Duelfer Report, 3:32. That Iraq did not admit the destruction until the following March and continued to withhold the full truth about its chemical program is noted in Braut-Hegghammer, “Cheater’s Dilemma,” 51–89.
Interview with Jafar.
Dialogue from a “circa 19–21 August 1991” meeting, in Woods et al., Survey of Saddam’s Audio Files 1978–2001, 306.
Interview with Rolf Ekéus.
The relationship between Hans Blix and Ekéus is from an interview with Ekéus. Ekéus had recently brought out his Swedish-language memoir when I was in Stockholm in September 2018 to interview both him and Blix. When I arrived at Blix’s apartment, I found that the then ninety-year-old retired diplomat had prepared pages on a legal pad—refutations to passages in Ekéus’s book, which he proceeded to go through with crisp articulation.
Interview with Blix. The quotations here are from Hans Blix, Disarming Iraq (New York: Pantheon, 2004), 22–23.
Harrer, Dismantling the Iraqi Nuclear Programme, 82, and Perricos, interview by Albright.
Harrer, 82, and Perricos, interview; correspondence with Jafar.
Harrer, Dismantling the Iraqi Nuclear Programme, 85, and Perricos, interview by Albright.
“cocky”: Blix, Disarming Iraq, 25; interviews with Blix and David Kay.
Interview with the former C.I.A. analyst involved.
Interview with Kay; twenty-two inspection sites from Harrer, Dismantling the Iraqi Nuclear Programme, 89.
Harrer quoting from Kay’s contemporaneous cable to Vienna in Harrer, 98.
Trevan, Saddam’s Secrets, 84.
Team composition and “special people with special skills” from Harrer, Dismantling the Iraqi Nuclear Programme, 106; C.I.A. paramilitary specialists and computer penetration expert from interview with Kay.
Interview with Kay.
Interview with Kay, as well as Trevan, Saddam’s Secrets, and Harrer, Dismantling the Iraqi Nuclear Programme.
Harrer quoting from Kay’s cable in Harrer, 111.
Kay’s estimate of the scale of the Iraqi nuclear program from Jay C. Davis and David A. Kay, “Iraq’s Secret Nuclear Weapons Program,” Physics Today 45, no. 7 (July 1992): 21–27; “We should not go”: transcript excerpt circa September–October 1991 from Woods et al., Survey of Saddam’s Audio Files, 307; “America, comrades, America”: CRRC SHSHTP-A-001-210, as excerpted in Woods, Palkki, and Stout, Saddam Tapes, 39.
Correspondence with Jafar.
Harrer, Dismantling the Iraqi Nuclear Weapons Programme, 117; I.A.E.A.’s assessment of Jafar from Harrer, 118; New York Times headlines: Paul Lewis, “U.N. Says the Iraqis Could Have Devised A-Bombs in the ’90s,” September 14, 1991, and Elaine Sciolino, “Iraq’s Nuclear Program Shows the Holes in U.S. Intelligence,” October 20, 1991.
CRRC SH-SHTP-A-001-458.
“Mr. Max”: interview with Maguire. The account of Amman walk-in recruitment also draws on interviews with other former Near East Division officers.
Interview with Maguire.
Interview with Robert Grenier.
Interviews with Grenier and Frank Anderson. Anderson died in February 2020, at seventy-eight.
Interview with Anderson.
“Falstaffian figure” and “enjoyed nothing so much”: Mark McDonald, “Jalal Talabani, Kurdish Leader and Iraq’s First Postwar President, Is Dead at 83,” New York Times, October 3, 2017.
“We’d like to set up”: interview with Dave Manners, who served as the C.I.A.’s station chief in Amman during the mid-1990s; no permanent base from an interview with Anderson.
Barzan’s financing of an import-export company from “Memorandum of Conversation with Ali Shukri, Chief of Staff to King Hussein,” November 11, 1995, author’s files. Shukri reported that Barzan had been involved in Mercedes imports “for years” and that his partner had recently swindled $5 million from Saddam’s half brother. American election discussion from “Sweet and Bitter Years,” CRRC SH-MISC-D-000-948; Saddam’s comments to comrades about America’s empire from Harmony ISGQ-2003-M0004615, as excerpted in Woods, Mother of All Battles, 301.
Interview with a former Iraqi diplomat.
Interview with Riedel.
Saddam’s celebration from Coughlin, Saddam, 288–89; Aziz and Ramadan from Harmony ISGQ-2003-M0007446, as excerpted in Woods, Mother of All Battles, 304.
“Wasn’t the Mother of All Battles” and “save the West”: Woods, Mother of All Battles, 305; “All the world is now”: Woods, Mother of all Battles, 299; “There are proven facts”: CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-838, as excerpted in Woods, Palkki, and Stout, Saddam Tapes, 41.
CRRC SH-SHTP-A-002-065, as excerpted in Kevin M. Woods et al., Coercion: The United States and Iraq, 1991–2003, Paper P-5281 (Alexandria, Va.: Institute for Defense Analyses, 2016), 38.
“Sweet and Bitter Years,” CRRC SH-MISC-D-001-204.
Tariq Aziz’s comments from contemporaneous notes taken by Vincent.
“orneriest, wiliest, most litigious”: Mimi Swartz, “The Day Oscar Wyatt Caved,” Texas Monthly, November 2007; “He is going to carry” and “not a sneaky person”: CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-753, as excerpted in Woods et al., Saddam Tapes, 48–49.
Interview with Riedel.
Interview with Twetten.
Interviews with Riedel, Charles Duelfer, and Ellen Laipson, who joined the N.S.C. in 1993. Clinton’s February re-endorsement of the Iraq covert action finding from Richard Bonin, Arrows of the Night: Ahmad Chalabi’s Long Journey to Triumph in Iraq (New York: Doubleday, 2011), 86; “toothache” and “It was like bending a pencil” from Martin Indyk, Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), locs. 645 and 676 of 8599, Kindle.
Duelfer, Hide and Seek, 85–86.
C.I.A. spending on the I.N.C. from interviews with Anderson and John Maguire; “Gaullist aspirations and a nature”: Bonin, Arrows of the Night, 84; “I saw them”: Bonin, 96. Chalabi’s biography comes largely from two sources: Bonin’s book, which draws on unique interviews with Chalabi, looking back on his rise a few years before his death in 2015, and Aram Roston, The Man Who Pushed America to War: The Extraordinary Life, Adventures, and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi (New York: Nation Books, 2008), which covers much of the same ground well and is particularly strong on Petra Bank’s collapse.
Bonin, Arrows of the Night, and Roston, Man Who Pushed America to War; “is completely prepared to burn”: Bonin, 28.
Bonin, Arrows of the Night, and Roston, Man Who Pushed America to War; details about Petra’s nonperforming loans from Roston, 58, citing an Arthur Andersen audit.
Whitley Bruner and Linda Flohr from Bonin, Arrows of the Night, 63.
Interviews with Riedel, Maguire, and Anderson.
Interview with Maguire.
RCLO records.
Interview with Shahristani.
Interview with Shahristani, as well as Shahristani, Free of Fear, 111. Abdul Halim made his remarks while being filmed for Saddam’s Killing Fields, a documentary directed by Christopher Jeans, featuring Michael Woods, and broadcast in 1992.
Interview with Shahristani.
Associated Press, “Bush, on a Visit to Kuwait, Is Given Hero’s Welcome,” New York Times, April 15, 1993.
The details of the investigation in this chapter are drawn from three documents. One is a lengthy, redacted, declassified C.I.A. Counterterrorism Center paper titled “The Attack That Failed: Iraq’s Attempt to Assassinate Former President Bush in Kuwait, April 1993,” released in 1995. The two others are a report and a lengthy deposition about the case arising from a Justice Department whistleblower’s complaint that forensic evidence used to draw comparisons between the Iraqi vehicle bombs and the Kuwait bomb was misinterpreted. These documents are hereafter cited as “C.I.A. and Justice documents.”
Remarks by Jeb and George W. Bush from Robert Draper, To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America into Iraq (New York: Penguin Books, 2020), 36–37.
Interviews with Woods and Duelfer.
C.I.A. and Justice documents.
C.I.A. and Justice documents. In the records available, the closest mention of assassination connected to Bush that I could find was in CRRC SH-SHTP-A-001-037, a conversation between Saddam and Yasser Arafat dating to April 1990, before the invasion of Kuwait. Saddam at one point provocatively remarks, “Maybe we cannot reach Washington, but we can send someone who has an explosive belt to reach Washington. . . . For instance, the person with an explosive belt around him would throw himself on Bush’s car.” That is a strikingly specific image, and one notably similar to Wali al-Ghazali’s reported testimony about his backup plan, tainted as his testimony may be by the circumstances in which it was given.
Interview with Riedel.
Powell from Meacham, Destiny and Power, 541–42; interview with Riedel; Clinton from David Von Drehle and R. Jeffrey Smith, “U.S. Strikes Iraq for Plot to Kill Bush,” Washington Post, June 27, 1993.
“Sweet Years and Bitter Years,” CRRC SH-MISC-D-001-204.
Woods et al., Coercion.
UNSCOM, Seventh Report under Resolution 715, April 10, 1995, https://www.un.org/Depts/unscom/Semiannual/srep95-284.htm.
Braut-Hegghammer, “Cheater’s Dilemma,” 51–89.
Ekéus and Tarnoff, Ekéus and Berger from a contemporaneous memorandum of conversation in Ekéus’s personal archive.
Director of Central Intelligence, Prospects for Iraq: Saddam and Beyond, NIE 93-42 (Langley, Va.: Central Intelligence Agency, 1993), 5, C.I.A. FOIA Collection, FOIA Electronic Reading Room, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0001188931.pdf.
“serious, prays, and fasts”: “Sweet and Bitter Years,” CRRC SH-MISC-D-001-204; Uday promotion episode from Ekéus’s personal archive.
Woods et al., Survey of Saddam’s Audio Files 1978–2001, 316.
Ekéus’s personal archive.
Interview with Anderson.
Interview with Anderson; Baer’s biographical details from Robert Baer, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism (New York: Crown, 2003), 10–12.
“helped the big thinkers” and “get to sleep at night”: Baer, See No Evil, 175; DB ACHILLES from interviews with C.I.A. officials familiar with the program. The cryptonym has been published in many open sources (e.g., David Ignatius, “The CIA and the Coup That Wasn’t,” Washington Post, May 16, 2003).
Indyk, Innocent Abroad, loc. 2677 of 8599, Kindle; Bonin, Arrows of the Night, 98.
Indyk, Innocent Abroad, loc. 2682 of 8599, Kindle; Baer, See No Evil, 179. Baer does not name the general he met, but Indyk, who was directly involved at the White House at the time, identifies Samarrai as the coup attempt leader who was the focus of C.I.A. attention.
Baer, See No Evil, 182.
Bonin, Arrows of the Night, 98.
All quotations from a transcript of the meeting in Duelfer’s personal archive.
Baer, See No Evil, 188.
Indyk, Innocent Abroad, locs. 2695–716 of 8599, Kindle. Cockburn and Cockburn, Baer, and other sources provide overlapping accounts.
Bonin’s account adds interviews from Ahmad Chalabi to the version of this episode provided in Baer’s memoir.
As documented by the CRRC’s transcripts, Saddam Hussein and other Iraqi leaders spoke frequently about the history of Hussein Kamel’s brain tumor, his surgery in Jordan, and the possible effects of the tumor and surgery on Kamel’s health (see below). The specifics here about Kamel’s symptoms and the involvement of French surgeons, as well as “experiencing a psychological crisis,” come from Jafar and Niaimi, Last Confession, chapter seven.
CRRC SH-PDWN-D-001-986, a transcript of a 1998 conversation between Saddam and Laith Shubeilat, an Islamist Jordanian political figure. The king’s proposal, including the idea of a visit with Rabin, was first reported in Ashton, King Hussein of Jordan, 337. Ashton’s scoop generated coverage in the Israeli press. His account suggests that Saddam’s initial response may not have been as firm and definitive as Saddam later claimed to comrades; “defeatists” and “need people to be defeated”: CRRC SH-SHTP-A-001-259, in Woods, Palkki, and Stout, Saddam Tapes, 316; “He told me that”: CRRC SH-SHTP-A-001-260; Hussein Kamel’s travel to Russia from CRRC SH-SHTP-A-001-260 and CRRC SH-IISX-D-000-768, a record of Iraqi intelligence reports from June 1995 to July 1997.
Hussein Kamel’s apartment in Amman from CRRC SH-IISX-D-001-000.
“had already decided”: Cockburn and Cockburn, Out of the Ashes, 193. Hussein Kamel’s meeting with a National Monitoring Directorate brigadier is documented in CRRC SH-INMD-D000-657. This includes an August 1995 memo from the NMD’s director, who also reports that Kamel met in the same period with the nuclear scientist Mahdi Obeidi. Obeidi describes such a scene in his memoir (with Kurt Pitzer), Bomb in My Garden, 163. He recounts there in detail that Kamel quizzed him about the centrifuge work, apparently in preparation for debriefings after he defected; “at least $9 million”: CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-762. Saddam repeats this figure in another recorded discussion. That Hussein Kamel indicated indirectly he might defect is from Ashton, King Hussein of Jordan, 337–38, as well as from an interview with a former senior Jordanian official. It was commonly believed in Iraq that King Hussein had conspired to support Kamel’s defection before it took place. The king’s secret outreach to Saddam, to propose a visit by Yitzhak Rabin, complicates the picture, as it is not clear whether this sensitive matter had anything to do with the defection or not, except perhaps as an opportunity Kamel saw to reposition Iraq under his leadership. Saddam told aides (SH-SHTP-A-001-260) that he firmly believed Kamel arranged his defection with King Hussein: “I am sure of this, except for the timing.” That Uday threatened to kill Hussein Kamel in the spring or summer of 1995, according to Kamel, is from interviews with Dave Manners and Ali Shukri.
Raghad Hussein interview with Al Arabiya, February 17, 2021.
“What was I to do?” and “He would drive around Baghdad”: Duelfer, Hide and Seek, 137.
The most thorough account of the night of August 7, drawn from contemporary sources, is in Cockburn and Cockburn, Out of the Ashes, 193–94. Bashir and Sunnanå, The Insider, 162–66, provides another account, citing interviews with a former companion of Uday’s and his own experiences at the hospital. Bashir reviewed the evening’s events in an interview as well.
Interview with Bashir, as well as Bashir and Sunnanå, The Insider, 162–66; Duelfer said in an interview that investigators later found the garage full of torched cars.
Raghad Hussein, interview with Al Arabiya.
Interviews by Sarah Moawad with three former senior officials.
Moawad’s interviews; Prince Turki contact from Ashton, King Hussein of Jordan, 341.
Correspondence with Major from Ashton, 338–40.
CRRC SH-SHTP-A-001-981.
Interview with Manners.
See “Jordan—Kamel Presser,” Hussein Kamel press conference in Amman, August 12, 1995, AP Archive video, streamed on July 21, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52C8IHreWaY.
Moawad interview with Shukri.
Interviews with Manners and former senior Jordanian officials.
Interview with Manners.
Interview with Manners.
Interview with a former senior Jordanian official.
Interview with Ayad Allawi; “C.I.A.-inspired”: Indyk, Innocent Abroad, loc. 2537 of 8599, Kindle.
Interview with Manners.
Jafar and Niaimi, Last Confession, chapter seven.
CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-837. Note that “system” was changed from “regime,” per Ibrahim Al-Marashi’s translation check.
“If he is insane”: CRRC SH-SHTP-A-001-577; “small and weak country”: CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-828.
Moawad interview with Shukri.
Ashton, King Hussein of Jordan, 349–52.
Ashton, 349–52; interview with Manners.
“expect a half-baked presentation” and Oval Office scene from Ashton, King Hussein of Jordan, 342; “new Fidel Castro”: interview with Manners.
Interviews with Rolf Ekéus; Scott Ritter, Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein (New York: Nation Books, 2005), 91ff., describes the Israeli liaison in detail.
CRRC SH-SHTP-A-001-011.
CRRC SH-INMD-D-000-657 contains an August 1995 memo to Saddam’s security services summarizing ten major secrets Iraq still harbored about its biological, missile, and nuclear programs.
CRRC SH-SHTP-A-001-011; that Hussein Kamel ordered the germ weapons destroyed in May but also ordered records not to be kept is from Braut-Hegghammer, “Cheater’s Dilemma,” 51–89; preparations for the 1991 war from Russell, “Iraq’s Chemical Weapons Legacy,” 187–208.
All quotations from contemporary memoranda in Ekéus’s personal archive.
Braut-Hegghammer, “Cheater’s Dilemma,” 51–89.
Ekéus archive.
Ekéus archive. The exchange in which Aziz offered Ekéus a bribe is not recorded in these records but comes from an interview with Ekéus. He has recounted this anecdote in several other interviews, noting in those an offer of $1 million. I have used the figure that Ekéus recalled in our interview.
Rolf Ekéus, Between Two Wars: Saddam’s Fall and the Birth of ISIS (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2018), 225–26, as well as an interview with Ekéus and Trevan, Saddam’s Secrets, 331–32.
Ekéus’s archive. The conversation outside about Israel is from Ekéus, Between Two Wars, 227–33. Ekéus also reviewed the meeting in an interview.
Interview with Odeh Aburdene.
“what was on his mind”: Pipes, “ ‘Thank You for Everything,’ ” 33–44; “Where have we gone wrong?”: interview with a colleague of Hamdoon’s.
“good candidate for democracy”: Pipes, “ ‘Thank You for Everything,’ ” 33–44; interview with Aburdene.
Interview with a colleague of Hamdoon’s.
Description of Saddam’s reply letter from Pipes, “ ‘Thank You for Everything,’ ” 33–44.
“You know as well”: Richard Butler, The Greatest Threat: Iraq, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the Growing Crisis of Global Security (New York: PublicAffairs Books, 2001), 87.
CRRC SH-MISC-V-001-426.
CRRC SH-MISC-D-000-772.
Interview with Ekéus, as well as Ekéus, Between Two Wars, 241–42.
CRRC SH-IISX-D-001-000. The reporting about Hussein Kamel from Iraqi intelligence’s Amman station suggests that the Iraqis had thoroughly penetrated Kamel’s communications and inner circle during his exile in Jordan.
Interview with Manners.
Sarah Moawad interviews with senior Jordanian officials.
CRRC SH-IISX-D-001-000.
Cockburn and Cockburn, Out of the Ashes, 207.
Guardian, November 6, 1995; for the eulogies delivered by Clinton and Hussein, see “Yitzhak Rabin: Eulogies at Rabin’s Funeral,” November 6, 1995, Jewish Virtual Library, partial transcripts, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/eulogies-at-the-funeral-of-yitzhak-rabin.
CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-877, undated but recorded soon after Rabin’s funeral. The discussion makes clear that Saddam and his comrades had watched at least some of the funeral on television.
All quotations from CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-789. Describing what transpired after the disclosures of 1995, Braut-Hegghammer writes, “Neither the leadership nor officials down the chain of implementation had reliable information about the other’s intentions and actions. The result was disobedience, shirking behaviors, and mistakes by Iraqi scientists and guards interacting with U.N. inspectors on the ground.” This is the context for incidents such as the dumping of gyroscopes in the Tigris.
The letter is recited in CRRC SH-BATH-D-000-197.
CRRC SH-BATH-D-000-197.
Raghad Hussein’s Al Arabiya interview, February 17, 2021.
Interviews with Manners and senior Jordanian officials. Another Tikriti in the brothers’ Jordan party, Major Izzadeen al-Majid, who was married to a sister of Hussein and Saddam Kamel’s, happened to be visiting Turkey. He escaped the ordeal to follow. Ritter (Iraq Confidential, 258) recounted that he led a Special Commission team to debrief Izzadeen in Jordan, in May 1996, and later at a “C.I.A. safe house in Washington.” He described Izzadeen’s information about Saddam’s use of the Special Republican Guard to hide illicit weapons as “invaluable.”
Raghad, Al Arabiya interview.
Raghad, Al Arabiya interview.
CRRC SH-IDGS-D-000-383. This file contains interrogation records of intelligence officers who were ordered to search for the Kamel brothers in the early hours of February 23, 1996.
CRRC SH-IDGS-D-000-383.
CRRC SH-IDGS-D-000-383; “Sweet and Bitter Years,” CRRC SH-MISC-D-001-204.
Raghad, Al Arabiya interview.
The February 18 press conference is from Ashton, King Hussein of Jordan, 343; covert-action funding of $6 million from, among other media sources from that period, Peter Jennings Reporting, “Showdown with Saddam”; “We think that any uprising”: John Lancaster and David B. Ottaway, “With CIA’s Help, Group in Jordan Targets Saddam,” Washington Post, June 23, 1996.
Interviews with Manners, Maguire, and a third former C.I.A. operations officer. Public release of the chronology of Clinton’s revised findings and memoranda of understanding on Iraq would clarify how the “wait and exploit” policy evolved during the 1990s and what specific authorities were in place during the first six months of 1996.
Interview with Maguire.
Interviews with Charles Duelfer and Scott Ritter; “More sophisticated equipment”: Duelfer, Hide and Seek, 130; “my ass if it blew”: Duelfer, 125. Duelfer’s book and Ritter’s memoir, Iraq Confidential, provide the most authoritative available accounts of the eavesdropping program.
“Mukhabarat culture of intimidation”: Jon Lee Anderson, “A Man of the Shadows,” New Yorker, January 16, 2005.
Interview with Allawi.
Interview with Allawi.
Interview with Allawi; interview with Marik.
“You can do whatever” and “a dream for us”: interview with Allawi. Julian Walker died in 2018 at age eighty-nine.
“defect and defend” and “We had a very strong”: interview with Allawi; “trigger an event”: interview with Maguire.
“would have to hold out”: interview with Allawi; “the preferred choice”: interview with Mack; “thought Allawi was the savior”: interview with Francona; “We were in love”: interview with the former C.I.A. analyst on Iraq.
Interview with Allawi.
Twice used telephones from Iraq Survey Group, Duelfer Report, 1:11; “acute spying disease”: Majid, Les années Saddam, 118.
“Sweet and Bitter Years,” CRRC SH-MISC-D-001-204; Tariq Aziz’s quotation from CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-762.
Saddam’s mistrust of even his own relatives from Iraq Survey Group, Duelfer Report, 1:19; travel restrictions from Joseph Sassoon, Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 118.
“How does the enemy think?”: CRRC SH-SSOX-D-000-869, circa 1993; “collecting information about”: CRRC SH-IISX-D-000-360, 2001.
Sassoon, Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘th Party, 97–119.
CRRC SH-IISX-D-000-360.
Interviews with Manners, Maguire, and Francona; George Tenet and Bill Harlow, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 388.
Interview with Allawi and Francona.
Interview with Maguire.
Interview with Laipson.
For Ritter’s description of how the C.I.A. and possibly Britain ran the eavesdropping operations during the coup-planning period, see Ritter, Iraq Confidential, 213–22; Duelfer’s remark from Ritter, 222.
Interview with Allawi. Shawani declined to be interviewed.
Lancaster and Ottaway, “With CIA’s Help, Group in Jordan Targets Saddam”; interview with Francona.
Interviews with Francona and Riedel; John Deutch’s remarks from Peter Jennings Reporting, “Showdown with Saddam,” transcript.
Ashton, King Hussein of Jordan, 346.
Randal, After Such Knowledge, 312–24; Joost Hiltermann, “The Demise of Operation Provide Comfort,” Middle East Report no. 203 (Summer 1997), https://merip.org/1997/06/the-demise-of-operation-provide-comfort/. The Iraq Survey Group’s report on the Baghdad regime’s illicit finance found that total off-the-books oil sales through Kurdistan after 1990 amounted to more than $500 million.
Tony Lake, “Building Peace and Security in the Middle East,” speech, American Israel Public Affairs Committee Capitol Club Summit, October 15, 1996, Clinton Presidential Library, transcript, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/9571.
Interview with Riedel; “This system is here”: CRRC SH-SHTP-A-001-997. Note “regime” changed to “system,” per Ibrahim Al-Marashi’s translation check.
All quotations from Bashir and Sunnanå, The Insider, 193–201, and an interview with Bashir. Duelfer, Hide and Seek, 191, describes the hit and reports that Uday was driving a Porsche. Cockburn and Cockburn, Out of the Ashes, 251–60, describe a tape-recorded bedside rant by Saddam early in 1997. During the diatribe, he denounced his half brothers for their incompetence and asked Uday, “Are you a politician, a trader, a people’s leader, or a playboy?” Saddam also declared, “We are not a monarchy, at least not yet.” The Cockburns identified the Awakening as a suspect in the hit, based on interviews with participants.
Bonin, Arrows of the Night, 115.
Interview with Allawi.
Bashir and Sunnanå, The Insider, 193–201.
Jeffrey A. Meyer and Mark G. Califano, Good Intentions Corrupted: The Oil-for-Food Scandal and the Threat to the U.N. (New York: PublicAffairs Books, 2006), 12–15. The book draws heavily on an independent investigation of the Oil-for-Food program that was carried out by former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, who wrote an introduction.
Robert B. Boettcher and Gordon L. Freedman, Gifts of Deceit: Sun Myung Moon, Tongsun Park, and the Korean Scandal (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1980), 56–64. See also Phil McCombs, “Tongsun Park’s Club,” Washington Post, October 16, 1977, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1977/10/16/tongsun-parks-club/.
Commissions, gifts, and Richard Hanna from Freedman, Gifts of Deceit, 70–77; Tongsun Park’s indictment from Anthony Marro, “Indictment of Park Charges 36 Crimes; Bell Seeking Return,” New York Times, September 7, 1977.
Meyer and Califano, Good Intentions Corrupted, 9.
Iraq’s economy from “Iraq GDP 1960–2023,” Macrotrends, https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IRQ/iraq/gdp-gross-domestic-product. For another estimate, see Joy Gordon, Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 21. During the years that Saddam refused to participate in Oil-for-Food, Iraq restricted the operations of U.N. aid agencies. The agencies did manage to contribute, but except in the North, where they benefited from Kurdistan’s de facto autonomy, they could not open offices outside Baghdad, and Iraqi minders kept them under surveillance. See Sarah Graham-Brown, Sanctioning Saddam: The Politics of Intervention in Iraq (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999), 315–16.
Interview with Vincent.
Meyer and Califano, Good Intentions Corrupted, 10; that Hamdoon was the intermediary comes from an interview with Vincent.
Meyer and Califano, 6–20.
Saddam’s comment about Boutros-Ghali’s mother from CRRC SH-SHTP-A-001-010; “Egyptian government is a conspirator”: CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-774; “political situation in the world”: CRRC SH-SHTP-A-001-143.
Meyer and Califano, Good Intentions Corrupted, 14–15.
Meyer and Califano, 14–15, as well as an interview with Nat Kern; Clinton and Blair from “Telcon with British Prime Minister Blair,” February 16, 1998, Clinton Digital Library, William J. Clinton Presidential Library, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/48779 (hereafter cited as Clinton Digital Library).
For Madeleine Albright’s 1996 exchange with Lesley Stahl, see Jon Jackson, “Watch: Madeleine Albright Saying Iraqi Kids’ Deaths ‘Worth It’ Resurfaces,” Newsweek, March 23, 2022, video clip and article, https://www.newsweek.com/watch-madeleine-albright-saying-iraqi-kids-deaths-worth-it-resurfaces-1691193; “a terrible mistake”: Madeleine Albright, Madam Secretary: A Memoir (New York: HarperCollins, 2013), 275; for the F.A.O. study from which Stahl’s figure was drawn, see Food and Agriculture Organization, “Iraq Sanctions Lead to Half a Million Child Deaths,” BMJ 311, no. 7019 (December 1995): 1523, https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.311.7019.1523; proportion of aid to Kurdistan versus the rest of Iraq from Graham-Brown, Sanctioning Saddam, 277.
Interview with Hans-Christof von Sponeck by Sarah Moawad.
Typhoid and cholera statistics from Gordon, Invisible War, 34; “grossly inadequate”: Gordon, 112.
CRRC SH-BATH-D-000-492.
Faust, Ba‘thification of Iraq, 64.
Interview with von Sponeck. See also Hans-Christof von Sponeck, “The Politics of the Sanctions on Iraq and the U.N. Humanitarian Exception,” in Land of Blue Helmets: The United Nations and the Arab World, ed. Karim Makdisi and Vijay Prashad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 278.
“political literature”: CRRC SH-SHTP-A-001-253, as excerpted in Woods, Palkki, and Stout, Saddam Tapes, 267–68; profit opportunity per barrel from Iraq Survey Group, Duelfer Report, 1:31.
Iraq Survey Group, 1:31.
“President’s Dinner with President Yeltsin,” cable, January 14, 1994, Clinton Digital Library, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/58577.
“Telcon with President Chirac of France,” November 4, 1998, Clinton Digital Library, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/16192; Indyk, Innocent Abroad, loc. 3140 of 8599, Kindle.
Just under $11 billion in hard currency from all illicit means between 1990 and 2003 is from Iraq Survey Group, Duelfer Report, 1:24.
Gordon, Invisible War, 101.
Pollack, Threatening Storm, 86–87.
Madeleine Albright, “Policy Speech on Iraq,” March 26, 1997, Iowa State University, transcript, https://awpc.cattcenter.iastate.edu/2017/03/21/policy-speech-on-iraq-march-26-1997/.
CRRC SH-SHTP-A-001-970.
Interview with Riedel; Duelfer, Hide and Seek, 135; “Sanctions without all these sacrifices”: CRRC SH-SHTP-A-001-298, as excerpted in Woods et al., Coercion.
All quotations from a memorandum reviewed by the author.
“was like a surgical operation”: Memorandum of conversation reviewed by the author; Supreme Court dinner from an interview with Ekéus and Ekéus, Between Two Wars, 400–401.
Interviews with Scott Ritter and Charles Duelfer; “alpha dog” and “tail held high” from Peter J. Boyer, “Scott Ritter’s Private War,” New Yorker, November 9, 1998; “Ritter was a character”: Duelfer, Hide and Seek, 134; “The entire purpose”: Ritter, Iraq Confidential, 200. In 2011, Ritter was convicted in New York of six counts involving sex with a minor. Ritter served several years in prison.
Duelfer, Hide and Seek, 142.
“they were concealing”: Ritter’s October 27, 1998, interview with James Sutterlin for the Yale-U.N. Oral History Project, as excerpted in Gregory D. Koblentz, “Saddam versus the Inspectors: The Impact of Regime Security on the Verification of Iraq’s WMD Disarmament,” Journal of Strategic Studies 41, no. 3 (April 2018): 372–409.
Koblentz, “Saddam versus the Inspectors,” 372–409.
Interview with McLaughlin.
Statement of commitment from CRRC SH-GMID-D-000-890, records pertaining to an Iraqi Air Force investigation into poorly controlled WMD documents. See also Koblentz, “Saddam versus the Inspectors,” 372–409.
Butler, The Greatest Threat, 114.
“Telcon with British Prime Minister Blair,” February 16, 1998, Clinton Digital Library, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/48779.
“Telcon with British Prime Minister Blair,” Clinton Digital Library.
Transcript of press conference by Secretary-General Kofi Annan at U.N. headquarters, February 24, 1998, United Nations Digital Library, https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/250793.
Duelfer, Hide and Seek, 142–44.
Interview with Jafar.
“has for some time”: Hans Blix, forty-first regular session of the I.A.E.A. General Conference, September 24, 1997, Vienna, Austria, transcript submitted by the Permanent Mission of Iraq to the I.A.E.A., https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/gc/gc41inf-20_en.pdf; number of inspections from the CAFCD; Jafar and Niaimi, Last Confession, chapter seven.
Interview with al-Janabi.
“Memorandum of Telephone Conversation with Russian President Yeltsin,” November 22, 1997, Clinton Digital Library, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/57569.
“Telcon with British Prime Minister Blair,” February 16, 1998, Declassified Documents Concerning Tony Blair, Clinton Digital Library, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/48779.
“little space it takes”: “Telcon with British Prime Minister Blair,” Clinton Digital Library; exchange with Gore from “Memorandum of Conversation: Meeting with Tony Blair, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom,” February 5, 1998, Clinton Digital Library, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/48779.
CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-756, as excerpted in Woods, Palkki, and Stout, Saddam Tapes, 56–57.
“more of a car salesman”: Ritter, Iraq Confidential, 236; “witting partner”: Richard Roth and Reuters, “U.N. Weapons Inspector in Iraq Offers Angry Resignation,” CNN, August 26, 1998, http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/meast/9808/26/iraq.ritter/index.html.
“Telcon with President Chirac of France,” November 4, 1998, Clinton Digital Library, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/16192.
Indyk, Innocent Abroad, locs. 3229 and 3465 of 8599, Kindle; Duelfer, Hide and Seek, 160.
“There won’t be a single”: Indyk, Innocent Abroad, loc. 3355 of 8599, Kindle; “Draft Memcon: POTUS–PM Blair,” December 15, 1998, Clinton Digital Library, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/49412.
William M. Arkin, “Desert Fox Delivery,” Washington Post, January 17, 1999.
“Telcon with President Chirac of France,” December 17, 1998, Clinton Digital Library, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/16192; Clinton and Blair from “Memorandum of Telephone Conversation,” December 18, 1998, Clinton Digital Library.
“long-term strategy is clear”: Bill Clinton, “Iraq Radio Address 12/19/98,” December 19, 1998, Clinton Digital Library, transcript, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/9946.
“When Chalabi showed up”: Bonin, Arrows of the Night, 142; for a thorough history of the “neoconservatives” who ultimately championed the invasion of Iraq, see Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservative and the Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
ABC, “Were 1998 Memos a Blueprint for War?,” ABC News, March 10, 2003, https://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/story?id=128491.
Bonin, Arrows of the Night, 146; Zinni’s quotation from Bonin, 163.
Figure of $150,000 a month from Bonin, 126.
“Memorandum of Conversation: King Hussein of Jordan,” January 5, 1999, Clinton Digital Library, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/101248; specifics about the I.N.C.’s funding and allocation of funds from General Accounting Office, Issues Affecting Funding of Iraqi National Congress Support Foundation, GAO-04-559 (Washington, D.C.: General Accounting Office, 2004), https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-04-559.pdf.
Pollack, Threatening Storm, 95–99. Also, interviews with Pollack and Riedel.
“Memorandum of Conversation: Meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia,” September 6, 2000, Clinton Digital Library, https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/100505.
Interview with Saman Abdul Majid and Majid, Les années Saddam, 134–38.
Sassoon, Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘th Party, 68–69. “Saddam Hussein’s personal interest in culture and poetry cannot be underestimated,” Sassoon writes. “Saddam saw himself as a writer and a poet, and thus he felt a kinship towards artists of all kinds.”
The translations here are from Saddam Hussein, Zabiba and the King, ed. Robert Lawrence (College Station, Tex.: VBW Publishing, 2004).
Majid, Les années Saddam, 134–38.
Hassan, “Propaganda Literature”; description of the role of novels as mass-produced propaganda in Baathist Iraq from an interview with Hassan; for Saddam’s attendance at the musical, see Ali Daham al-Nasseri, “Mr. President Commander Saddam Hussein Attends Zabiba,” streamed on December 10, 2017, https://youtu.be/7F846WMqnK0.
Hassan, “Propaganda Literature”; Bashir and Sunnanå, The Insider, 283.
CRRC SH-PDWN-D-000-499 and CRRC SH-SPCC-D-000-588 contain unintentionally funny accounts of Saddam’s bureaucrats trying to manage the output and money demands of the regime’s official writers. Poetry fee from Sassoon, Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘th Party, 68.
Samir Vincent’s contemporaneous notes of the meeting.
All quotations from an interview with Majid and from his memoir, Les années Saddam, 110; Tokarev pistol from Duelfer, Hide and Seek, 149.
Ten thousand sorties and February 5 meeting from Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack: The Definitive Account of the Decision to Invade Iraq (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 10–13.
George W. Bush, Decision Points (New York: Crown, 2010), 230.
All quotations from “Meeting with British Prime Minister Blair,” declassified transcript, Targeting Iraq, Part 1: Planning, Invasion, and Occupation, 1997–2004, Digital National Security Archive, https://proquest.libguides.com/dnsa/iraq97 (hereafter cited as NSA Targeting Iraq).
CRRC SH-SHTP-A-001-197, as excerpted in Woods, Palkki, and Stout, Saddam Tapes, 57–58.
Iraqi Intelligence analysis of new administration’s ties to Iraqi opposition from CRRC SH-IISX-D-000-488; strategic study from SH-IISX-D-000-360.
CRRC SH-SHTP-A-000-874.
“Sweet and Bitter Years,” CRRC SH-MISC-D-001-204.
CRRC SH-MISC-D-000-249.
CRRC SH-SPPC-D-000-334.
Hassan, “Propaganda Literature,” and interview with Hassan.
Rumsfeld memo to Rice, July 27, 2001, Document 6 in Joyce Battle, ed., The Iraq War–Part I: The U.S. Prepares for Conflict, 2001, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 326, September 22, 2010, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB326/doc06.pdf.
Wolfowitz’s presentation is from Bonin, Arrows of the Night, 188; “U.S. policy remained”: Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 419.
Interviews with Luis Rueda and John Maguire.
Duelfer, Hide and Seek, 591–92.
Interview with Rueda. Although Rueda is not named, his appointment that summer is described in Tenet and Harlow, At the Center of the Storm, 304. Tenet described him as “an articulate, passionate, smart, and savvy Cuban American.”
Interview with Rueda.
Interview with Rueda. Tenet, in his memoir, recalls Rueda’s advice similarly. It was very much aligned with what Tenet had been telling the Clinton White House for several years: “Saddam was not going to be removed via covert action alone. As much as some would wish for an ‘immaculate deception’—some quick, easy, and cheap solution to regime change in Iraq—it was not going to happen.”
Interview with a participant in the discussion. Mohammed Aldouri could not be reached.
George W. Bush, “Honoring the Victims of the Incidents on Tuesday, September 11, 2011,” Proclamation 7461, September 11, 2001, Government Printing Office transcript, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/WCPD-2001-09-17/pdf/WCPD-2001-09-17.pdf.
Interview with discussion participant.
Anthony H. Cordesman, “Saudi Official Statements on Terrorism after the September 11 Attacks,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, November 2001, https://www.csis.org/analysis/saudi-official-statements-terrorism-after-september-11th-attacks.
“condemning the terrorists”: Iraq Survey Group, Duelfer Report, 1:33; “it will mean that”: CRRC SH-PDWN-D-000-812, which includes Saddam’s remarks during a meeting with a visitor from Chechnya, September 26, 2001.
“no different than the many”: Saddam’s F.B.I. detention interview, June 28, 2004, Document 6 in Joyce Battle, ed., Saddam Hussein Talks to the FBI: Twenty Interviews and Five Conversations with “High Value Detainee # 1” in 2004, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 279, July 1, 2009, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB279/26.pdf.
“The American people should remember”: Karsh and Rautsi, Saddam Hussein, 2. The biographers attribute this oft-cited remark to Baghdad Television. It does not appear in available CRRC records. However, it closely tracks with what Saddam repeatedly said in recorded and minuted remarks during September and October. “America needs someone to tell”: CRRC SH-PDWN-D-000-812, which includes a recorded meeting with the “Tunisian president’s delegate,” September 14, 2001.
CRRC SH-PDWN-D-000-806.
Peter Baker, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House (New York: Doubleday, 2013), 144–46.
“I believe Iraq was involved”: Lewis D. Solomon, Paul D. Wolfowitz: Visionary Intellectual, Policymaker, and Strategist (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2007), 80; “we must come back to Iraq”: Baker, Days of Fire, 152.
Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 424–25.
Bush, Decision Points, 229.
Harmony ISGQ-2003-M0007419, as excerpted in Woods and Lacey, Iraqi Perspectives Project: Primary Source Materials for Saddam and Terrorism, 4:21. An introductory paragraph to the transcript mistakenly attributes this discussion to the autumn of 2001, but the record makes clear that Saddam is talking about the 1993 attack soon after it took place. The investigation into that bombing was complicated by the involvement of Abdul Rahman Yasin, an Iraqi American who afterward fled to Baghdad. Saddam’s regime imprisoned Yasin and could not figure out what to make of him. Seemingly wishing to deflect blame, Saddam suggested privately to colleagues that Iraq could send evidence about Yasin to the U.S. Congress “to aid their investigations.”
Saddam’s comments to Kadyrov recorded in CRRC SH-MISC-D-000-456.
George W. Bush, “Presidential Address to the Nation,” October 7, 2001, White House press release, George W. Bush White House Archives, National Archives, transcript and RealMedia webcast, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/10/20011007-8.html.
CRRC SH-PDWN-D-000-812.
CRRC SH-PDWN-D-000-145.
CRRC SH-PDWN-D-000-409.
All quotations from Frank Carlucci’s letter to William Burns, September 27, 2001, and Tariq Aziz’s reply memo, NSA Targeting Iraq.
All quotations from contemporaneous memoranda in Samir Vincent’s archive, reviewed by the author.
Vincent, contemporaneous memoranda.
Duelfer, Hide and Seek, 220–22.
For an authoritative account of Ahmad Chalabi’s use of defectors and their influence on media and official statements, see Roston, Man Who Pushed America to War, 184–228.
Bonin, Arrows of the Night, 193.
Paul R. Pillar, Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 11.
CRRC SH-PDWN-D-000-409 and CRRC SH-PDWN-D-000-499.
Michael Morell, The Great War of Our Time: The CIA’s Fight against Terrorism—from al Qa‘ida to ISIS (New York: Twelve, 2015), 81.
Powell from John Chilcot et al., The Report of the Iraq Inquiry (London: Stationery Office, 2016), 1:345. Resulting from seven years of work by a committee chaired by Sir John Chilcot, this British investigative report is hereafter cited as the Chilcot Report. See all volumes at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-report-of-the-iraq-inquiry. Meyer from Chilcot et al., Chilcot Report, 1:344; Blair with Bush and subsequent memo from Chilcot et al., 1:367–70.
Woodward, Plan of Attack, 56–66.
George W. Bush, “President Delivers State of the Union Address,” January 29, 2002, White House press release, George W. Bush White House Archives, National Archives, transcript and RealMedia webcast, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020129-11.html.
Baker, Days of Fire, 191.
Duelfer, Hide and Seek, 201; Iraq Survey Group, Duelfer Report, 1:61.
CRRC SH-PDWN-D-000-409.
CRRC SH-SHTP-A-001-441.
CRRC SH-SPPC-D-000-304.
Jafar and Niaimi, Last Confession, chapter nine, as well as an interview and correspondence with Jafar.
Jafar and Niaimi, Last Confession, chapter nine, and Jafar, interview and correspondence.
Jafar and Niaimi, chapter nine, and Jafar, interview and correspondence.
Interviews with Rueda and Maguire.
CRRC SH-IISX-D-000-088. Note that the qualifying phrase “There is the possibility” added during translation review by Ibrahim Al-Marashi.
Interview with Fadhil al-Janabi. After the U.S. invasion, the scientist was detained for eight months.
Interviews with Rueda and Maguire. See also Woodward, Plan of Attack, 71–73, 107–16.
Interviews with Rueda and Maguire.
Blix, Disarming Iraq, 62.
Blix, 44.
Jafar and Niaimi, Last Confession, chapter nine, and interview with Jafar.
Jafar and Niaimi, chapter nine, and an interview with Jafar; Kofi Annan’s remark from “ ‘Useful and Frank’ U.N.-Iraq Talks End; Next Round Planned within One Month,” UN News, May 3, 2002, https://news.un.org/en/story/2002/05/34172-useful-and-frank-un-iraq-talks-end-next-round-planned-within-one-month-annan.
Jafar and Niaimi, Last Confession, chapter nine, and interview with Jafar.
Interview with Rueda. When he led the Iraq Survey Group, Charles Duelfer interviewed Naji Sabri in Qatar in 2004. “He was simply not in a position to have direct access to WMD programs,” Duelfer later wrote. “He would not have known about any clandestine, retained WMD.” See Duelfer, Hide and Seek, 341.
Interviews with Maguire and Rueda; DB ROCKSTARS cryptonym from Woodward, Plan of Attack, 144. For more on Nahro al-Kasnazan, see Joshua Partlow, David A. Fahrenthold, and Taylor Luck, “A Wealthy Iraqi Sheikh Who Urges a Hard-Line U.S. Approach to Iran Spent 26 Nights at Trump’s D.C. Hotel,” Washington Post, June 6, 2019. Kasnazan acknowledged his work with the C.I.A after 2001.
Duelfer, Hide and Seek, 235–36, 262.
Jane Arraf, “Millions Mark Saddam Hussein’s Birthday,” CNN, April 28, 2002.
Thom Shanker and David E. Sanger, “U.S. Envisions Blueprint on Iraq Including Big Invasion Next Year,” New York Times, April 28, 2002.
“we ought to get ready”: CRRC SH-MISC-D-000-780; cabinet meetings from CRRC SH-PDWN-D-000-409.
CRRC SH-SPCC-D-000-452.
Dearlove, Manning, and Tebbit from Chilcot et al., Chilcot Report, 2:54–55, 2:60; Straw from Chilcot et al., 2:60–62.
‘‘the biggest shift” and “It’s worse than you think”: Alastair Campbell, The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq, vol. 4, The Alastair Campbell Diaries (London: Hutchinson, 2012), 279.
Chilcot et al., Chilcot Report, 2:72–75.
“regime changers” and “multilateralists”: David Manning’s testimony to the Iraq Inquiry, November 30, 2009, U.K. National Archives, transcript, http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/transcripts/oralevidence-bydate/091130.aspx; Manning’s meeting with Bush from Chilcot et al., Chilcot Report, 2:82.
CRRC SH-MISC-D-000-780. Note that “not Churchill” changed from “no Churchill,” in translation review. George Galloway later said that the Iraqi record of the conversation—“Minutes of Galloway’s Meeting with the President,” not a transcript of a recording—was inaccurate. A parliamentary committee investigated Galloway’s relations with the Iraqi government and the activities of a charity he had created, the Mariam Appeal, which raised money from Iraq and other Arab governments to provide cancer treatment and other aid to the Iraqi population. The parliamentary committee recommended that Galloway be suspended from Parliament for eighteen days. Galloway said that he had never personally benefited from any of the charity’s funds. The parliamentary committee, without specifically commenting on Galloway’s allegations that the Iraqi record was inaccurate, concluded that the “alleged record of the meeting . . . is authentic.” See Select Committee on Standards and Privileges, “Introduction,” in Conduct of Mr. Galloway: Sixth Report of Session 2006–07 (London: House of Commons, 2007), https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmselect/cmstnprv/909/90903.htm#a7.
“insane, criminal”: Duelfer, Hide and Seek, 206; Taha Yassin Ramadan’s duel suggestion from Robert Siegel, “Bush-Hussein Duel Proposed,” All Things Considered, NPR, October 4, 2002, audio and transcript, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1151149; fishbowl story from CRRC SH-MISC-D-000-780.
Brent Scowcroft, “Don’t Attack Saddam,” Wall Street Journal, August 15, 2002, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1029371773228069195.
Baker, Days of Fire, 209.
Dick Cheney, “Vice President Speaks at VFW 103rd National Convention,” August 26, 2002, White House press release, George W. Bush White House Archives, National Archives, transcript, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/08/20020826.html; Bush asking Rice to handle Cheney from Baker, Days of Fire, 211.
Chilcot et al., Chilcot Report, 2:127–28.
Bush, Decision Points, 239. Rice’s account and other accounts of the National Security Council meeting also quote the president’s declaration. Blair from Chilcot et al., Chilcot Report, 2:162–68.
“coercive diplomacy” and “come clean”: Chilcot et al., Chilcot Report, 2:160; all other quotations from Manning’s testimony to the Iraq Inquiry.
Meyer from Chilcot et al., Chilcot Report, 2:252.
George W. Bush, “President’s Remarks at the United Nations General Assembly,” September 12, 2002, White House press release, George W. Bush White House Archives, National Archives, transcript and RealMedia webcast, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/09/text/20020912-1.html.
Chilcot et al., Chilcot Report, 2:209.
Chilcot et al., 2:213–15.
Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government (London: Stationery Office, 2002), 3; for the excised line in context, see House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee, Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction—Intelligence and Assessments (London: Stationery Office, 2003), 26, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/272079/5972.pdf. This report contains the findings of the parliamentary committee regarding Blair’s misleading dossier.
Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, 5–6. The reporting about Niger and uranium appears to have originated with an Italian intelligence report passed to the C.I.A. in February 2002. The report included fabricated documents that used stationery stolen from Niger’s embassy in Rome. The documents circulated among intelligence agencies until they were revealed as forgeries on the eve of war in 2003. For a well-reported book-length account of the episode, see Peter Eisner and Knut Royce, The Italian Letter: How the Bush Administration Used a Fake Letter to Build the Case for War in Iraq (New York: Rodale Books, 2007).
George W. Bush, “President Bush Outlines Iraqi Threat,” October 7, 2002, Cincinnati, Ohio, White House press release, George W. Bush White House Archives, National Archives, transcript, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/10/20021007-8.html; Bush, “Remarks by the President at Thaddeus McCotter for Congress Dinner,” October 14, 2002, Dearborn, Mich., White House press release, George W. Bush White House Archives, National Archives, transcript, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/10/20021014-3.html.
Director of Central Intelligence, Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs (Langley, Va.: Central Intelligence Agency, 2002), Document 14 in Jeffrey Richelson, ed., Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 80 (hereafter NSA EBB 80), updated February 11, 2004, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB80/wmd14.pdf; assessment of white paper and NIE from U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq, S. Rept. 108-301 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2004), 14–15, https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/publications/108301.pdf (hereafter cited as the Senate Intelligence Report).
Senate Intelligence Report, 55–56.
Mobile lab claims from Director of Central Intelligence, “Key Judgments,” extract of Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction, NIE 2002-16HC (Langley, Va.: Central Intelligence Agency, 2002), Document 15, NSA EBB 80, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB80/wmd15.pdf; “credible source”: Senate Intelligence Report, 148; for a thorough and readable book-length account of the Curveball fiasco, see Bob Drogin, Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War (New York: Random House, 2007).
Senate Intelligence Report, 18. The report points out that the presumption of Iraqi guilt was “so strong that formalized [intelligence community] mechanisms established to challenge assumptions and ‘group think,’ such as ‘red teams,’ ‘devil’s advocacy,’ and other types of alternative or competitive analysis” were not used.
“having trouble holding” and “ruthless about its own power”: Campbell, Burden of Power, 317–18.
Straw from Campbell, 316; Chirac, My Life in Politics, 265–67; Blair’s ground forces offer from Chilcot et al., Chilcot Report, 2:329–30.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441, S/Res/1441, 4644th meeting (2002), https://www.un.org/depts/unmovic/documents/1441.pdf.
Chilcot et al., Chilcot Report, 2:347.
Harrer, Dismantling the Iraqi Nuclear Programme, 219, and from an interview with Jafar.
CAFCD.
Interview and correspondence with Jafar.
Blix, Disarming Iraq, 101; interview with Blix.
Saddam Hussein, “First Interview with Saddam Hussein in 12 Years,” interview by Sayyid Nassar, Middle East Media Research Institute, Special Dispatch No. 43, November 4, 2002, https://www.memri.org/reports/first-interview-saddam-hussein-12-years.
Chilcot et al., Chilcot Report, 3:45–47.
Blair and Dearlove remarks from Chilcot et al., 3:52–53. See also 4:311–12.
Blix, Disarming Iraq, 107; interview with Blix.
“neither in a position”: Blix, Disarming Iraq, 108.
Blair and intelligence paper from Chilcot et al., Chilcot Report, 3:10–11.
Saddam and Huwaysh from Iraq Survey Group, Duelfer Report, 1:59; “something in his hand”: Iraq Survey Group, 1:65.
Ali Hassan al-Majid’s F.B.I. detention interview, January 31, 2004.
Iraq Survey Group, Duelfer Report, 1:65.
Author’s interview with Taiee for “Hussein Was Sure of Own Survival,” Washington Post, November 3, 2003, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/11/03/hussein-was-sure-of-own-survival/.
Iraq Survey Group, Duelfer Report, 1:64.
U.S. military deployments by the end of 2002 from Woodward, Plan of Attack, 257. See also “Iraq—U.S. Forces Order of Battle, December 2, 2002,” GlobalSecurity.org, https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iraq_orbat_021202.htm. The Pentagon disguised the buildup by embedding forces that would eventually invade within its broader security presence in the region.
Iraq Survey Group, Duelfer Report, 1:66–67.
For a detailed review of professional Iraqi military planning before and after December 2002, see Woods et al., Iraqi Perspectives Project: A View of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 75–84.
Woods et al., 81–83.
“demolish and burn,” “cease all internal,” and “stolen weapons”: CRRC SH-PDWN-D-000-012; “Our enemy will fight,” “work in a non-central form,” and “signals, animals, bicycles”: CRRC SH-BATH-D-000-702; “had specific aims” and “We are on our land”: CRRC SH-IZAR-D-000-377.
Baker, Days of Fire, 239–40; Tenet’s recollection from Tenet and Harlow, At the Center of the Storm, 360–61; Bush’s recollection from Bush, Decision Points, 242.
Chilcot et al., Chilcot Report, 3:75–76.
Chilcot et al., 3:88–89.
“like issuing a subpoena”: Blix, Disarming Iraq, 88.
Blix, 117.
Jafar and Niaimi, Last Confession, chapter ten.
Obeidi and Pitzer, Bomb in My Garden, 10.
Jafar and Niaimi, Last Confession, chapter ten.
Obeidi and Pitzer, Bomb in My Garden, 193–94.
“The president has made”: Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 450; Bush and Powell from Baker, Days of Fire, 241.
Draper, To Start a War, 272; “loyalty is a trait”: ABC, “Colin Powell on Iraq, Race, and Hurricane Relief,” ABC News, September 8, 2005.
Chirac, My Life in Politics, 272–74.
Blix, Disarming Iraq, 127–28.
Chilcot et al., Chilcot Report, 3:111–12.
Iraq Survey Group, Duelfer Report, 1:47–51.
Majid, Les années Saddam, 14–15.
Colin Powell, “Secretary Powell at the U.N.: Iraq’s Failure to Disarm,” address, February 5, 2003, U.S. Department of State Archive, transcripts, video clips, and presentation slides, https://2001-2009.state.gov/p/nea/disarm/index.htm. That Powell’s remarks reflect embellishments on the material he presented is from Gilbert Cranberg, “Bring Back the Skeptical Press,” Washington Post, June 29, 2003.
February 2003 inspections from Chilcot et al., Chilcot Report, 3:124–30; “amazing”: Chilcot et al., 3:281; “tended to think”: Blix, Disarming Iraq, 194.
Chilcot et al., Chilcot Report, 3:199, 3:201.
Chirac, My Life in Politics, 276; Bush, Decision Points, 245.
CRRC SH-IISX-D-001-083.
Nizar Hamdoon’s cancer diagnosis is from Eric Pace, “Nizar Hamdoon, 59, Former Iraqi Diplomat under Hussein,” New York Times, August 10, 2003, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/10/world/nizar-hamdoon-59-former-iraqi-diplomat-under-hussein.html; “a personal gift” and “personal trust and knowledge”: Nixon, Debriefing the President, 152; that Hamdoon moved in with Aldouri from an interview with a former colleague in the New York mission.
Interview with Duelfer and Duelfer, Hide and Seek, 258, 260.
Interview with the participant.
Bashir and Sunnanå, The Insider, 289.
“Sweet and Bitter Years,” CRRC SH-MISC-D-001-204.
New benefit from CRRC SH-IZAR-D-000-819.
CRRC SH-IISX-D-000-442.
Robocall from Wendell Steavenson, The Weight of a Mustard Seed: The Intimate Story of an Iraqi General and His Family during Thirty Years of Tyranny (New York: Harper Books, 2009), 80.
CRRC SH-GMID-D-001-080.
Chilcot et al., Chilcot Report, 3:332.
ElBaradei from Chilcot et al., 3:378; “clearly very irritated” and Bush and Blair from Chilcot et al., 3:409.
Campbell, Burden of Power, 491–92; Chilcot et al., Chilcot Report, 3:446–47, 3:449.
Interview with Rueda.
Rueda, interview; “had recruited or debriefed”: Sam Faddis, The CIA War in Kurdistan: The Untold Story of the Northern Front in the Iraq War (Havertown, Pa.: Casemate Publishers, 2020), 81.
Faddis, CIA War in Kurdistan, 79; phone silence after agent tortured from Woodward, Plan of Attack, 337.
Interviews with two former C.I.A. officers familiar with the Czech embassy placement.
Faddis, CIA War in Kurdistan, 143.
Faddis, 139, 143; interview with Dave Manners, a former colleague and friend of Charlie Seidel’s; “get out of your uniform”: interview with Rueda.
Duelfer, Hide and Seek, 379. The timing of Primakov’s visit is confirmed in Chilcot et al., Chilcot Report, 3:352–53.
Mubarak’s visit from Woodward, Plan of Attack, 314; Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 457.
Interview with Rueda; Bush, Decision Points, 253.
George W. Bush, “President Says Saddam Hussein Must Leave Iraq within 48 Hours,” March 17, 2003, White House press release, George W. Bush White House Archives, National Archives, transcript and RealMedia webcast, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/iraq/news/20030317-7.html; Bush’s comments to Blair from Campbell, Burden of Power, 510–11.
Iraq Survey Group, Duelfer Report, 1:66.
Money dispersal from Iraq Survey Group, Duelfer Report, 1:47; Saddam’s verses and reading of Ho Chi Minh’s manual from Majid, Les années Saddam, 140–41.
Majid, 16, 23, 134; interview with Majid.
For an analysis of Get Out, You Damned One!, see Hassan, “Propaganda Literature.” The novel was later translated into Japanese.
Tenet and Harlow, At the Center of the Storm, 391–92; Woodward, Plan of Attack, 373–74; interview with Rueda.
Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 460.
Rumsfeld, 460; Cheney from Woodward, Plan of Attack, 391. See also Cheney and Cheney, In My Time, 399.
Interviews and correspondence with Jafar. The physicist had divorced and remarried during the 1980s.
Interviews and correspondence with Jafar.
Interviews and correspondence with Jafar. The United States soon imprisoned Amer Mohammed Rasheed al-Obeidi. Charles Duelfer had known Rasheed during the 1990s. He considered him a “talented technocrat.” By the end of 2004, when it was evident that Rasheed harbored no secrets about Iraq’s nonexistent WMD, Duelfer advocated at the White House and before Congress for Rasheed’s release from detention. But the U.S. system “was designed to detain people, not release them,” Duelfer later wrote, and there was “especially strong resistance from civilian leaders at the Pentagon.” So Rasheed “continued to languish in prison on the weakest of rationales.” He wasn’t released until 2012, after nine years in detention.
Interviews and correspondence with Jafar.
Interviews and correspondence with Jafar.
Interview with Scott McLaughlin.
McLaughlin, interview.
Pipes, “ ‘Thank You for Everything,’ ” 33–44.
Pipes, 33–44.
Interview with Al-Shahristani.
Interview with Al-Shahristani, as well as correspondence with Jafar.
“Bury the enemy” and war bounties from CRRC SH-MISC-D-000-593; looting order from CRRC SH-IZAR-D-000-819.
CRRC SH-IZAR-D-000-368.
Agence France-Presse (AFP), “Sunnis Recall Saddam’s Parting Words before He Fled Baghdad,” Asharq Al-Awsat, December 29, 2007, https://eng-archive.aawsat.com/theaawsat/news-middle-east/sunnis-recall-saddams-parting-words-before-he-fled-baghdad.
“I was knowledgeable”: “Saddam Adviser Surrenders to US,” Guardian, April 13, 2003; Saadi’s detention and release from an interview with Jafar.
Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti was convicted of crimes against humanity and hanged on January 15, 2007. Tariq Aziz was convicted of several crimes and sentenced to death in 2010. Diplomats from Europe and elsewhere campaigned for clemency for Aziz. Though he ultimately escaped execution, he was imprisoned for the remainder of his life and often suffered from poor health. In 2015, after having a heart attack and several strokes, he died in an Iraqi hospital at the age of seventy-nine.
The movements of Qusay and Uday, including their entry into and expulsion from Syria, come from Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006), 656; the State Department announced the $30 million award payment ($15 million for each of Saddam’s sons) on July 31, 2003; Mustafa’s death from Julian Borger and Jonathan Steele, “The Last Moments of Saddam’s Grandson,” Guardian, July 23, 2003.
Ali Hassan al-Majid was executed for crimes against humanity on January 25, 2010. The charges against him included his role in ordering the gassing deaths at Halabja, Iraq, in 1988.
U.S. military casualties through 2009 from “U.S. Casualties in Iraq,” GlobalSecurity.org, https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iraq_casualties.htm.
Steve Russell, We Got Him!: A Memoir of the Hunt and Capture of Saddam Hussein (New York: Threshold Editions, 2011), 358–65. Russell was a battalion commander in the U.S. Army’s 4th Infantry Division who participated in the search for Saddam.
Russell, We Got Him!, 358–65.
Will Bardenwerper, The Prisoner in His Palace: Saddam Hussein, His American Guards, and What History Leaves Unsaid (New York: Scribner, 2017), 128. See also Robert Ellis and Marianna Riley, Caring for Victor: A U.S. Army Nurse and Saddam Hussein (St. Louis: Reedy Press, 2009), a memoir by a U.S. Army nurse who looked after Saddam during his detention. Other details from Nixon, Debriefing the President, 63–64.
Nixon, 68–69.
Nixon, 64.
Quotation from CBS, “Saddam: ‘Real Criminal Is Bush,’ ” CBS News, July 2, 2004.
Nehal Bhuta, Judging Dujail: The First Trial before the Iraqi High Tribunal (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2006).
Iraq Body Count, a nonprofit that tracks the country’s civilian casualty toll since the 2003 invasion, reports that 29,526 civilian deaths from violence occurred in 2006; Nouri al-Maliki’s quotation is from “No Delay in Saddam Execution, Iraqi PM Says,” Guardian, December 29, 2006.