24

Iraq and Kuwait

ASSESSING BRITAIN’S OPTIONS IN THE GULF IN JUNE 1957, THE foreign secretary Selwyn Lloyd admitted that the country’s dominant position in the sheikhdoms, and the security of her oil supplies from Kuwait, depended to a great extent on Iraq. As long as Iraq remained friendly, she would prefer to see the sheikhdoms of the Gulf come under British protection and not Saudi influence. “Collapse in Iraq,” he went on to imagine, “would of course at once create an extremely dangerous situation.” When, a year later, Abdel Karim Qasim ousted the Hashemites, the British government was forced to confront it.¹

Iraq had always maintained what the British ambassador called “a shadowy claim” to Kuwait. In the months before the July 1958 coup in Baghdad, the Hashemites had put heavy pressure on their neighbor to join their ill-starred Arab Union, and after Abdel Karim Qasim seized power, many Kuwaitis expected him to invade as soon as he had consolidated his position. But Qasim never managed to do so. He quickly fell out with his conspirator, Abdul Salam Arif, who wanted Iraq to join the United Arab Republic. That September, he ousted Arif, but he grew increasingly dependent on the Iraqi Communist Party.²

The British and the Americans reacted differently to this development. While the Americans, encouraged by Nasser, started to consider how they might remove Qasim, the British were more sanguine. Although they readily acknowledged that Qasim’s was “not… a very savoury government,” once they had decided that he posed “no immediate danger” to Kuwait and was not in Nasser’s pocket, they were content to wait and see.³

The effect of these conflicting analyses of the situation would pit the British and the Americans against each other in Iraq for most of the next year. In the autumn of 1958, the British received intelligence of a plot to overthrow Qasim. Having told the Americans that they felt they should tip off the dictator, it seems they went ahead and did so. The Americans—who certainly knew about the plot and may actually have been encouraging it—were annoyed by Britain’s course of action. Although the new British ambassador, Humphrey Trevelyan, would later claim that it would have been “stupid of us to get mixed up in any local plots, whether by encouraging them or by warning Qasim about them,” that was not a denial, and it appears that he went on to warn the Iraqi prime minister of another plot to kill him soon afterward. Britain’s strange determination to protect Qasim bemused the Americans. Ike’s vice president Richard Nixon hit the nail on the head when he wondered aloud whether the British “considered Nasser a greater danger than the Communists to the Near East.” The short answer was they did.⁴

In early March 1959 a revolt did break out in Mosul. Half-heartedly supported by Nasser, it was supposed to be one of several simultaneous uprisings across the country, which would have challenged Qasim severely had the others ever happened. But they did not, and Kurdish forces loyal to the Iraqi dictator were able to subdue the rebellion in the restive northern city four days later, by which time as many as three thousand people were dead. The revolt, and Iraq’s subsequent signing of an economic agreement with Moscow and withdrawal from the Baghdad Pact, all nourished fears about the direction the country was heading in.

In late June an Egyptian newspaper reported the discovery of another plot, this time implicating Qasim’s own aide-de-camp. Although the Iraqis denied the story, Qasim was unable to conceal the signs of growing paranoia. He had started going out, late at night or early in the morning, to see things for himself. The Ministry of Defence became “the only place he dared to live,” according to the British ambassador Humphrey Trevelyan, but a visitor to the building reported that Qasim’s relations with his henchmen were obviously tense. Then, at a press conference early in July he lost his temper and shouted at a questioner. When, later the same day, at a reception for a militia, which he had created but recently disarmed, the militia men asked for their weapons back, he retorted, “I have not come here to listen to you, but to talk to you.”⁵

In July 1959 Qasim launched a crackdown on the communists, sanctioning a massacre in Kirkuk. The Americans were delighted at this turn of events, but the British were unnerved, believing that Qasim was isolating himself. Those concerns grew when, a few weeks later Qasim suddenly ordered the executions of those convicted in the show trials that had been held after the fall of the ancien régime. Qasim had resisted pressure from the communists to carry out the death sentences ever since, and the issue had acquired something of a barometer-like status among Western analysts and expats: the stay of executions had been a welcome sign of strength.

One of those hanged was a good friend of the British, the country’s former interior minister, Said Qazzaz. Just two days earlier his wife had received a reassurance from Qasim that her husband would not be executed. Trevelyan, who described Qazzaz as “a man of superb courage” because of how he had handled himself during his trial, was horrified: the executions caused him to advocate a complete change of policy toward Qasim. “We should not now deliberately take action designed to help him remain in the saddle,” he wrote to London five days later. “The situation is too uncertain for that, and he is far too uncertain a character for us to be sure that his retention of power will be a certain benefit to… ourselves.”⁶

While foreign diplomats were still struggling to interpret Qasim’s abrupt change of heart, on October 7, 1959, a group of Baathists, including a young activist named Saddam Hussein, tried and failed to assassinate the Iraqi prime minister in the main street in Baghdad, firing eighty bullets at his car, three of which hit him in the arm and the shoulder. “The Baathists had been criminally careless,” recalled Trevelyan. As a result of the circular firing squad that they had organized, “a bullet from one side of the car had killed one of the gang on the other side. In his pocket-book was a note with the names of the conspirators.” And so, while Saddam got away, several of his accomplices were arrested and sentenced to death.⁷

This time, however, Qasim commuted the death sentences. Trevelyan suspected he did this because some communists were also awaiting execution. With Moscow calling for clemency, Qasim could not be seen to be hanging Baathists but not communists. On the other hand, to hang both groups of condemned men might cause an irredeemable breach with the communists whose support—he now realized—he still needed. Qasim celebrated his discharge from the hospital two months later by giving a six-hour speech in which he blamed the Baathists for the attempt on his life.

It had long been said that Qasim lived “in a little pink cloud three feet off the ground,” and Trevelyan and his oriental counsellor Sam Falle had nursed doubts about his sanity since they first met him, mainly because he had strange eyes “We’re off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz!” the British ambassador would sing en route to meetings with him. But Qasim’s behavior after the attempt on his life grew still more disconcerting. He had the bloodstained shirt he had been wearing on that day displayed in a glass-fronted bookcase—“next to the cuckoo clock” Trevelyan noted—in the room in the Ministry of Defence where he saw visitors. He talked about building a monument that encased his colander-like car inside a dome made out of bulletproof glass. “I am above trends and inclinations,” he proclaimed—always a bad sign. Falle’s conclusion at the end of 1959 was that the Iraqi dictator “genuinely believes that he is divinely-protected.” The British were not alone in being alarmed by Qasim’s increasingly unpredictable behavior. So too was the Kuwaiti emir.⁸

WHILE KUWAIT’S OIL boom had made the emir one of the richest men in the world, ordinary Kuwaitis had to cope with the boom’s downsides. The mass of migrant workers that the oil industry demanded caused overcrowding, inflation, and disease. Meanwhile, the ruling family’s unwillingness to share the proceeds of the boom, and its unconcealed fondness for “Cadillacs and concubines” made it deeply unpopular. In a bid to defuse mounting political pressure, soon after Egypt and Syria joined to form the United Arab Republic, in February 1958 the emir revived a system of councilors, which he had abandoned four years earlier. But he refused to allow direct elections, creating a five-hundred-strong electorate instead.

Not surprisingly, the emir’s nod in the direction of democracy was not enough. A British salesman who went to a cinema in Kuwait City the following month noted that the audience sat through a cowboy film impassively. But when the Western was then followed by an Egyptian newsreel showing Nasser’s latest exploits, “the place became a pandemonium of cheering, shouting, etc.” In February 1959, a meeting of the country’s youth clubs, held to celebrate the first anniversary of the UAR, turned into a rally in support of the Egyptian leader and then got out of hand. “We will make the Princes slaves, and the slaves Princes!” the young men chanted. “Kuwait oil belongs to the Arabs and not to the Ruling Family!” After the police broke up the meeting, and the authorities banned four of the clubs, a British man who worked for the Kuwait Oil Company observed that the reaction had been “pretty drastic.” He thought that the authorities might get away with such action once or twice more but not indefinitely. There was “bound to be an explosion sooner or later.”⁹

The possibility that Qasim might invade his country joined the emir’s growing list of worries. In May 1959, he took the unprecedented step of inviting the British political resident to come to see him. At the meeting that then followed, the emir expressed his hope that Britain and Kuwait might jointly work out how they would confront such a threat. No planning ever happened; it seems the ruler simply wanted reassurance that the British were behind him. But in London, the War Office had been pondering the same possibility. In response to its request, the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) predicted that the Iraqis could mobilize a force comprising two brigades and no more than seventy tanks. Crucially—because of the implications for British planning of the defense of Kuwait—the JIC also warned that, although the British government might expect “no less than four days’ warning” of the assembly of the force in the Basra area, there could be “little or no warning of an actual invasion” because Basra was so close to Kuwait. This challenge created what Macmillan called “the usual dilemma. Shall we go in now? If so, it is ‘aggression’. Shall we wait? If so, we may be too late.”¹⁰

That choice presented itself abruptly once again midway through 1961. Following Kuwaiti pressure, on June 19, 1961, the British and Kuwaitis exchanged notes, canceling the 1899 treaty and Kuwait’s status as a British protectorate. Anticipating the possible Iraqi reaction, the notes agreed that Britain would provide military assistance if the emir requested it.

Qasim welcomed the end of British rule but, ominously, did not mention Kuwaiti independence. Then six days later in a speech he declared that Kuwait was an integral part of Iraq and designated the emir its qamaikam—the local governor subordinate to the governor of Basra province. In Baghdad, Trevelyan was now faced with a vital and very unenviable task: trying to work out whether Qasim would actually attack.

BRITAIN’S PLAN TO defend Kuwait against an Iraqi invasion was code-named Operation Vantage and was shaped by Kuwait’s political constraints and Britain’s limited military resources, since the Americans were only willing to be discreetly involved. The hostile political climate in Kuwait was such that the emir would not ask for British help before he absolutely had to. The demands on Britain’s military meant that they could not keep forces on standby in the vicinity. Vantage therefore relied on the JIC’s assessment that the British would have four days’ warning of Iraqi intentions and that the emir would react promptly enough that British forces could then be landed in sufficient numbers in time to deter the Iraqis from crossing the Kuwaiti border, which lay just forty miles from Basra.

A few years earlier the British would have used high-altitude surveillance to corroborate the sources MI6 had inside the Iraqi army. But since Khrushchev had threatened retaliation following the U2 incident, the British government was reluctant to sanction photographic reconnaissance of Iraq, at least while Qasim’s intentions were still unclear. A lot therefore depended on the human factor, and especially on Trevelyan.

Trevelyan would have been all too aware that the career of his predecessor in Baghdad, Michael Wright, had never recovered from his failure to predict the bloody removal of the Hashemites. His own previous posting, to Egypt, had been cut short by the Suez crisis, and he must have wondered whether his time in Baghdad was about to be abbreviated too. To cover himself, the day after Qasim’s speech he warned London that, although there was a chance that he and his staff might see Iraqi troops moving from the north of the country toward Basra, if the Iraqis deployed forces already based south of Baghdad, it was unlikely he would be able to give London any warning. Precisely for this reason, MI6 had once considered sending Wilfred Thesiger back to the marshlands of southern Iraq (where he had spent a chunk of the early 1950s) to win over the tribes by providing them with antimalarial medicine and turn them into scouts who could warn of any Iraqi troop movement southwards. But this idea was never followed up.

Clearly, there was debate within the embassy about the likelihood of an attack. Although the MI6 station took the view that Qasim’s announcement was propaganda because neither the air force nor the main tank force had been mobilized (although railway transport was available to take it south), the military attaché disagreed. He thought that the Iraqis’ most likely move would be “a quick dash from Basra,” involving a much smaller force than the JIC predicted, which would enable them to retain an element of surprise.¹¹

In a memoir, Trevelyan later claimed that the military attaché then made a breakthrough at a cocktail party. Sidling up to a senior Iraqi railway official, who had had too much to drink, he asked him, “Why did you allow your rolling stock to be used for moving tanks?”

“Yes, I am very angry,” the unwitting official answered. “They arranged it through my subordinates without telling me.”¹²

It is a funny anecdote, and it is quite possible the conversation took place. But it seems likely that more definite information came from a different source. Declassified files from early 1962 refer to the fact that the military attaché had a good source, a staff officer, inside Iraq’s first tank regiment. Besides recounting the party anecdote, Trevelyan also later admitted that “we began to get reliable information that the first tank regiment was moving to Basra.” Early on June 29, Trevelyan told London that he now believed Qasim was indeed planning to attack with a light force that could enter Kuwait by July 1. Crucially, this was much faster than the JIC envisaged. Lord Home reported this fact to the cabinet that morning. In a message to Washington, he admitted that the evidence was “still somewhat tenuous but pointing unmistakeably at preparations by Qasim to reinforce his troops near Basra with a tank regiment.”¹³

Trevelyan’s telegram caused a flap. The fastest that the British could land troops in Kuwait would be toward the end of July 1, by which time the Iraqis might already be in Kuwait City. As the emir of Kuwait had still not asked for help, Home sent him the same information that day, in an attempt to chivvy him along. When there was still no answer from Kuwait, he sent another message early on Friday, July 30. By the time that the cabinet met midway through the morning, he had had a positive response. That afternoon, Macmillan decided to send in five hundred Royal Marines Commandos by helicopter from HMS Bulwark.

By Monday morning, July 3, the Iraqi attack had still not materialized. When Macmillan addressed the cabinet that morning, he reminded his colleagues, a touch defensively, that when they had taken the decision to send in troops there were “indications that the Iraqis could have moved.” As further justification for the deployment, he added that it was believed that the Iraqis had been planning a coup on July 12. The job was done, he said, but “how we extricate ourselves is another matter.”¹⁴

Once it became clear that Qasim was not going to attack, Macmillan soon faced international pressure to withdraw the force he had sent in, not least from the Americans who believed that the British had walked into a trap set by Qasim to show that Kuwait was not really independent at all. They also wondered whether the intelligence London had shared with them had any basis at all.

Britain was by no means the only country alarmed by Qasim’s increasing volatility, however, and help ultimately came from the Arab League, which quickly admitted Kuwait to its ranks and then sent a force that allowed the British to disentangle themselves. Macmillan realized he had had a lucky escape. “Our policy is a pretty short-run affair,” he admitted to the cabinet secretary, Sir Norman Brook, a few weeks later. “What we are doing is to get the oil out of these territories for as long as the inhabitants remain fairly primitive… We ought not to be looking at Kuwait as a long-term commitment.”¹⁵

It soon became clear that the threat to Kuwait was likely to recur. At the end of 1961, there were again reports that Qasim was planning to invade. Once again, the British heard rumors at a party—this time that Iraqi paratroopers were being deployed south. Once again, the rumors came to nothing. The Turkish military attaché assured the British that Qasim’s comments were a smoke screen, designed to divert people’s attention away from the parlous state of Iraq, which had once been a net exporter of wheat but, following a botched land reform effort and drought, was now in the humiliating position of having to buy both grain and rice. By now Qasim was also fighting a Kurdish rebellion in the north of the country. A Kurd himself, such was his lack of trust in his own kinsmen that he removed Kurdish officers and non-commissioned officers from the forces fighting the insurgency, but not before there had been desertions to the rebel side.

Abdel Karim Qasim. Fear for his own life, rather than an extreme work ethic, led him to sleep in his Ministry of Defence office.

Qasim accused the Iraq Petroleum Company of supporting the Kurdish insurgency to justify taking a harder line against it. After talks between his government and the company collapsed, in December 1961 Qasim issued Public Law 80, under which the Iraqi government clawed back rights over certain territory from the company, most importantly in the south of the country.

Qasim’s aggressive move against the company furnished critics of American policy in Iraq with ammunition, on the grounds that two American oil majors owned nearly a quarter of the Iraq Petroleum Company. By now John F. Kennedy was president, and although experts in the State Department argued that Qasim was best left alone, his national security adviser, by now McGeorge Bundy, and Bundy’s deputy Robert Komer took a different view. They convinced him to put pressure on the State Department to consider regime change.

The CIA had been working on this goal fitfully since 1960, the year that it set up the Iraqi Health Alteration Committee. This disturbingly named outfit apparently came up with the idea of sending Qasim a handkerchief “treated with some kind of material for the purpose of harassing that person who received it.” Certainly, Qasim did not receive it; what is not clear is whether it was ever sent.¹⁶

At the same time the CIA considered trying to help the regime’s opponents inside Iraq and exiles who had left the country to oust Qasim. In February 1960, the former CIA officers Miles Copeland and James Eichelberger, who had by now set themselves up as consultants in Beirut, stuck their oar in. In a letter, possibly written to the CIA’s head of station in Lebanon, they argued that “nobody of any significance in Iraq thinks there is any chance whatever of stopping the Communists through the internal mobilization of non-Communist elements.” Their sources said that the only real chance of removing Qasim would be through external intervention. As old allies of Nasser, they suggested that the Egyptian leader and the Baathist exiles he was giving sanctuary to were more likely to be successful. One of these was the twenty-six-year-old Saddam Hussein.¹⁷

With much of his army tied up fighting the insurgency in the north of the country, Qasim was vulnerable. On February 8, 1963, Baathist officers launched a coup in Baghdad. Trevelyan recalled how on the following day Iraqi television interrupted an episode of the cartoon Felix the Cat to show footage of Qasim sitting in a chair in his office in the palace and surrounded by rebel officers. William Lakeland—the man who some years earlier had made friends with Nasser—was now working at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. He also saw the footage. Years later he recalled how the rebels had turned Qasim’s head “so we could see where the bullet had gone through his temple, just so nobody would doubt the fact that he was dead.” This brief intermission was then followed by an English program on gardening.¹⁸

“While it’s still early, the Iraqi revolution seems to have succeeded. It is almost certainly a net gain for our side,” Komer told President Kennedy in Washington later the same day, as the details of what had happened started to become clear. A leading Baathist would later claim that Lakeland was in touch with the conspirators, and it is widely believed that the CIA and Egyptian intelligence then supplied the new government with lists of the names of Iraqi communists. Certainly, Qasim’s murder was followed by a purge in which several thousand people were murdered. Iraq’s new interior minister was candid. “We came to power on a CIA train,” he admitted later.¹⁹