WHEN MY TEAM and I walked into northern Iraq on January 21, 1995, we had no idea anyone was making plans to move against Saddam. I’d volunteered to take a team into the north because I knew it was the only way the CIA could get a heads-up if Saddam was about to invade another neighbor. I also knew it was the best place to recruit Iraqi military officers.
Our first task after crossing the border was to meet an Iraqi major general, in Zakhu, a small town the Kurds had seized in the March 1991 uprisings. Until he defected to the north in November 1994, the general had been an adviser in the Iraqi presidency. The hope was that he might know something about where the Scuds were hiding and, even more important, about Saddam’s biochemical warheads.
The general must have found the group of us an odd sight when his driver pulled up in front of our house at exactly eleven A. M. We had spent the last two days in the back of trucks getting into the north, only to discover the house we were to live in had no electricity, water, or heat—this on a night so cold the water in our canteens froze. Unshaven and unbathed, wearing surplus military cold-weather gear and cradling automatic rifles, we looked more like stragglers left behind by a routed army than representatives of the United States.
Nonplussed, the burly general rolled out of the car, straightened himself up, and offered me a hand of tempered steel. He was wearing an unremarkable suit, scuffed penny loafers, and a paisley silk tie, but his tar-black regimental mustache, squared shoulders, and stiff gait gave away the soldier underneath. Besides, I recognized him from a press photo, sitting next to Saddam in a bunker during the Gulf War.
We sat down in our living room as the cook served us tea, but the general found it difficult to start. He kept asking whether we were comfortable, how we liked Iraq, and whether we needed anything. It was a polite ritual I’d gotten used to working in the Middle East.
“General, could we talk a little about Saddam’s strategic weapons?” I asked, cutting him off.
My question surprised him. “I don’t know anything about them,” he said. “Only Saddam, Saddam’s son-in-law Hussein Kamil, and a few people around Saddam know where they’re hidden.”
We sat without saying anything for a minute. I was about ready to thank him for the meeting when he cleared his throat and asked, “Does the U.S. want Saddam to remain in power?”
Here we go again. The general was alluding to a vintage conspiracy theory that dogged everything we tried to do in Iraq—the myth that the U.S. secretly kept Saddam in power. I’d heard it from just about every Iraqi I’d met. Some even believed Saddam was a paid CIA agent. The theory dovetailed nicely with the Iraqi belief that dark, unseen forces ran the world and history could be reduced to a series of conspiracies, interconnected by an overarching design known to only a few. It followed, then, in this twisted scheme of things, that a foreign policy of any consequence had to be scripted according to a secret plot. As one theory went, Saddam and the U.S. had struck a secret agreement in 1980 for Iraq to invade Iran. The sole objective was to take Iran down a peg. Then, when Iraq emerged from that war as a menacing giant in the Gulf, the U.S. conspired with Kuwait to lure Iraq into invading Kuwait—only so the U.S. could smash Iraq’s army. It was Iraq’s turn to be taken down a peg. Imperialism couldn’t work any other way.
The theory explained a lot of otherwise inexplicable mysteries, such as why the U.S. Army didn’t hunt down Saddam at the end of the Gulf War, and even permitted him to put up his helicopters so he could crush the popular insurrections. It explained why the U.S. allowed Saddam to smuggle oil through countries allied with the U.S., like Turkey and Jordan. It also explained why, after Saddam’s attempted assassination of ex-president George Bush during his visit to Kuwait in 1993, President Bill Clinton fired a couple of cruise missiles into empty buildings in Baghdad rather than go after Saddam.
The theory got still nuttier in 1993 when the son of a former Iraqi prime minister living in London, Sa’d Salih Jabir, started the rumor that the CIA had deliberately betrayed a coup against Saddam, even giving him the list of the plotters. Although the lie was cut from whole cloth, many Iraqi military officers accepted it as the truth. It made our job of recruiting them nearly impossible.
And what was our motivation for keeping Saddam in power? He was our surrogate, bogeyman, and neighborhood bully rolled into one. The U.S. needed Saddam to keep the peace in the Gulf. Whisper Saddam’s name and the Arab Gulf states would huddle around the U.S. like pups around a bitch. And the price the Gulf Arabs paid for American protection was not raising the price of oil. It all made perfect sense to Iraqis.
There was only one way to deal with a conspiracy theory like that: Take it head-on. “We want Saddam out. It’s the Iraqi people who’ve kept him in power all these years,” I said.
The general considered my answer for a moment. Deciding he had no choice except to trust me, he said, “Let’s go outside.”
We had gone about twenty yards down the street when the general turned to face me.
“I’ve been dispatched to the north by a group of military officers who intend to get rid of Saddam,” he said in a hoarse whisper, looking around to make sure no one could overhear us. “We need to know whether your country will stand in our way or not.”
He looked me in the eye for what seemed like a full minute, to make absolutely sure I understood. I didn’t say anything. It was no time to interrupt.
“And there’s a second request we make,” he continued. “The moment we take power, we need the U.S. to grant us immediate diplomatic recognition—otherwise there will be a fight for power, a civil war.”
The general stopped talking. It was clear that this was all he was authorized to say. It was a lot for him, to be sure, but not nearly enough if he expected U.S. support.
“Washington will need to know the details, like who’s involved,” I said.
The general held up his hand to stop me. “Please get an answer from Washington first, and we will talk about details then.”
We came to the edge of town and turned back. The general had a meeting with the Turkish general staff in Ankara. A Turkish military helicopter was waiting for him on the other side of the border. He intended to tell the Turks about the coup.
“I know you would like to ask the question, but maybe you’re too polite,” the general said as we walked back. “Yes, we know what we are doing. And we know what the penalty for failure is.
“I’ve seen firsthand how good Saddam’s security is. During the war I briefed Saddam three or four times. Do you know how I—and everyone else—met with Saddam then? You were told to go to a certain street corner in Baghdad and wait, sometimes for up to two or three hours. Eventually a car would approach and stop. You were told to get in the back and lie down on the floor. A blanket was thrown over your head so you couldn’t see anything. The car would drive around Baghdad for at least an hour. You had no idea where you were. Then the car would stop. And there Saddam would be, waiting in front of a very ordinary house, probably commandeered for only that one meeting. When the meeting was over, the same car took you back in the same way. You never knew where you were. Saddam’s security is very, very good, but we know its vulnerabilities. Please trust us that we know what we are doing.”
As the general was ready to leave, he rolled down the window to say one last thing.
“All that we ask of Washington is that it be frank with us. We must know whether it wants Saddam out or not. Nothing more. I’ll be back from Ankara in two or three days. I hope you will have our answer by then.”
As soon as I got back inside, I sent a report to headquarters about what the general had told me.
I KNEW THE GENERAL’S MESSAGE wouldn’t go very far without any details, but I hoped Washington would at least take his defection seriously. Not only was he the first general to break ranks since the end of the war, but he also was from a politically prominent upper Euphrates family. Even more important, he was a Sunni Muslim, the same sect Saddam belonged to, the one that kept him in power. Although the Sunni Arabs made up only 20 percent or so of Iraq’s population, they controlled the armed forces and the security services with an iron grip. No tank, airplane, or unit larger than a company could move without authorization from a Sunni officer who had unquestioned loyalty to Saddam. Without the support of Iraq’s Sunnis, Saddam couldn’t last a day in power. Moreover, the signs were mounting that the general’s departure had rattled Saddam’s cage.
In the past, Saddam had made a point of ignoring defections, but on November 8, in addition to dispatching assassination teams to hunt down the general, Saddam took the unprecedented step of ordering the senior cleric for the general’s clan to publicly denounce him—a Muslim version of excommunication. Saddam wanted to make sure the rest of the Sunnis understood there was no place for apostates in the congregation. Clearly, he feared that the general might be the first frayed thread in an unraveling mantle of power.
Even if Washington decided not to support the coup, I figured we would have to take a fresh look at the stability of Saddam’s regime. Was his Sunni core of support headed toward meltdown? We couldn’t accept the general’s word at face value, but the CIA should have been in a position to check the general’s information with clandestine sources in Iraq—Sunnis still living inside and serving military officers. And there, of course, was the snag. By 1995, three years after scores of nations and more than half a million coalition forces had gone to war against Saddam Hussein, the CIA didn’t have a single source in Iraq who could back up or refute what the general had told us. Not one.
Not only were there no human sources in country, the CIA didn’t have any in the neighboring countries—Iran, Jordan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia—who reported on Iraq. Like the rest of the U.S. government, its intelligence-gathering apparatus was blind when it came to Iraq. The general’s credibility would have to be established in other ways, and his information painstakingly vetted.
Ideally, we would have met face-to-face with the officers preparing the coup and heard the story directly from their mouths, but even that wasn’t possible. Iraq was what the CIA called a “denied” area. All communication had to be by go-betweens, because no CIA personnel could visit any part of the nation controlled by Saddam. In effect, the designation created a catch-22, since Iraqi military officers were not permitted to travel outside Iraq, including the Kurdish north. Getting caught earned an officer a ticket to an acid bath, a good excuse to stay home. That meant the only way to communicate was through a cutout, a courier, who could travel back and forth across the lines without being noticed. It wasn’t a perfect system—imagine watching a play in which all the action takes place in the wings, relayed by an intermittently onstage narrator—but it was all the choice we had.
A week after I sent off word of the general’s intentions, headquarters came back with a snappy, five-word reply: “This is not a plan.”
I recognized the prose as belonging to a CIA officer who had worked for me in the Iraqi Operations Group. He’d spent only one year overseas, in Vietnam, twenty-five years earlier. He’d never set foot in the Middle East. Even still, headquarters’ reaction struck me as bizarre. It didn’t ask for additional details or even offer encouragement. It was as if the CIA had hundreds of agents on the ground and no sparrow fell in Iraq without our knowing about it.
I went to see the general the next day, at his house in the middle of Salah al-Din at the end of a tangle of narrow, muddy streets. Sparsely furnished, the place looked as if he’d fled to the north with his family and only what they could carry. We sat cross-legged on the floor while his wife served us tea and their children peered at us from behind a door. I’d already made up my mind that it was pointless to tell him about the message from headquarters. He wouldn’t have understood; and, not understanding, he would have been even more reluctant to confide in me. Anyhow, the way I read the message, Washington hadn’t rejected the coup; it just needed more details, such as the names of the officers involved.
When I told the general that I hadn’t yet received an answer about the coup, a flicker of foreboding passed across his face. The secret committee had hoped for a twenty-four-hour turnaround on their message, he said. Couriers were crossing the lines every night, expecting to return with an answer. It was incomprehensible to the general that Washington couldn’t decide on a matter of this importance within hours.
I tried to turn the conversation in a different direction. We talked a little about the situation in the north, the problems he was having with his children out of school, the shortage of food.
As I was standing up to leave, the general motioned me to stay. “Tell Washington this.”
I sensed the general was about to open a door he would have preferred not to—to give me the details of the coup. If I was right, there would be no going back for him. The general and his colleagues, his secret committee, would be putting their lives in our hands, accepting on faith that the story about the CIA betraying a 1993 coup wasn’t true. I suspected they had decided to take the risk because they knew it was the only way to get Washington’s attention. They were still convinced they needed America’s permission to move against Saddam. And I was right. To win the CIA’s support, the general sang like a canary.
THE BACKBONE OF THE COUP was three seasoned combat units—the 76th Brigade, the 15th Infantry Division, and the 5th Mechanized Division. Among them, the general said, they had enough firepower to hold off any single combat unit loyal to Saddam, including an elite Republican Guard’s division, the military units responsible for keeping Saddam in power. Admittedly, they couldn’t defeat a combined Republican Guards force, but they expected to move on Saddam before loyalists had the time to organize and deploy. The plan would start like lightning, arrive like thunder, and be over before anyone could do anything about it.
There was also a fourth unit, one absolutely crucial to the coup’s success: a tank-training company attached to the Salah al-Din Armor School, which was located just outside of Tikrit. Its commander, a colonel, would spearhead the coup. As soon as he received the go from the secret committee, he would commandeer twelve tanks and their crews from the school, drive them to Saddam’s compound in ’Awjah, and box him in long enough for the other three units to arrive and deliver the coup de grâce.
A small village east of Tikrit, ’Awjah had been chosen as the venue to corner Saddam because everyone knew, in the inner circle at least, that ’Awjah was Saddam’s bolt-hole, the place he took refuge when anything went wrong in Iraq. Saddam had been born in ’Awjah and had a strong sentimental attachment to it. After coming to power, he built a sprawling, moderately well-defended compound at the village’s edge. The committee’s plan was to create a diversion away from ’Awjah, perhaps in Baghdad, and wait for Saddam to arrive there before the colonel put his tanks on the road. Although the committee could pretty much count on Saddam’s heading to ’Awjah when the diversion started, it sought to leave nothing to chance: A source inside Saddam’s security detail would notify the plotters as soon as Saddam had left for ’Awjah.
The key to the coup’s success was maintaining its integrity right up until the first shot was fired—Saddam couldn’t have the slightest suspicion he would be targeted at’ Awjah—and the way to do that was to limit knowledge of the coup to family members. Everyone on the secret committee and the commanders of the four units were related by blood. Most were first cousins.
“That’s the only kind of conspiracy that can survive in Iraq today without being immediately betrayed,” the general told me. Moreover, most of the troops who would participate in the attack on ’Awjah were from the Shummar tribal confederation. With Iraq disintegrating under the UN embargo, old tribal bonds were replacing loyalty to the state.
The committee figured that as long as the secrecy of its plan held, and if there were no other competing troop movements, the colonel’s tanks would need about twenty minutes to get to ’Awjah. Another ten to twenty minutes for the other units to arrive, and Saddam, surrounded, could either give up or the tanks would level his compound. It would all be over in less than an hour.
OVER THE NEXT TWO WEEKS the general gave me the names of the four commanders and their unit designations. He drew family trees for me and explained the relations among the officers. He also named the officers who would be in the transitional military government. Three of them knew nothing about the coup or even that they had been chosen to serve. They wouldn’t be told until the colonel’s tanks were on the road. It was all part of compartmentalizing information and keeping the coup secret.
After each meeting I sent a message to headquarters. The names of the key participants checked out with the databases at CIA headquarters, but Washington still hadn’t said what it wanted to do about the coup.
IN LATE FEBRUARY the general came over to our house, discouraged by my masters’ silence. At our last meeting he had asked if one U.S. fighter, on a given date at a given time, could fly over central Iraq as a signal to the committee that the U.S. supported the coup. I hadn’t even bothered relaying that one. If Washington wasn’t going to acknowledge the coup, it would ridicule the idea of an air force flyover.
After tea was served and we lapsed into our customary silence, the general finally turned to me, putting his hand on my arm.
“The Kurds are about to wreck everything. Please arrange a truce between them. A truce will signal that the U.S. is serious about removing Saddam.”