Saddam : His Rise and Fall (6 page)

The other crucial geopolitical dynamic that had a bearing on the politics of Baghdad in the 1950s was the emergence of the Soviet Union as a superpower. Not only were the Soviets keen to export their ideology to the Middle East; they were eager to break what they regarded as the West's monopoly of control over the region's vast oil wealth. The communist menace was regarded as a very real threat both in Washington, which after American president Dwight Eisenhower's intervention over Suez, had increased its involvement in the Middle East, and in London, which was still trying to maintain some vestige of control. In 1955 the Iraqi government was instrumental in setting up the Baghdad Pact, a regional defense organization comprising the unlikely alliance of Britain, Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan. The pact's raison d'être was to confront the Soviet threat, although Nuri Said secretly hoped it would provide Arab opinion with an alternative rallying point to Nasserism. Nasser's response to the pact was to sign a massive arms deal with the Soviets and the following year to nationalize the Suez Canal. Apart from making Nasser the undisputed champion of Arab nationalism, the pact made the Iraqi government appear the stooge of Western interests.

As one of the veterans—and in Saddam's eyes, one of the heroes—of the 1941 uprising, Khairallah was heavily involved in the political currents of the day. Khairallah's family moved to the Karkh neighborhood of Baghdad, a rough, run-down residential area on the western outskirts of the city. Karkh was a mixed neighborhood of Sunnis and Shiites, and there were frequent outbreaks of violence between the two communities. While working as a schoolteacher, Khairallah was very much involved in political agitation and, not surprisingly, his main political contacts tended to be among those of his own class and background. One of Khairallah's associates at this time was Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, a Tikriti army officer and the future Iraqi president who would play a central role in Saddam's rise to power. Bakr was a leading light in the newly formed Baath (meaning renaissance) Party, an Arab nationalist movement that had been formed in Syria in the late 1940s. A radical and secular party, its main goals were the creation of a united Arab state that dispensed with the arbitrary imperialist boundaries that were imposed on the
Middle East after the First World War, and a more equal distribution of the vast oil wealth that was starting to transform the economics of the region. Nationalist and patriotic in outlook, the Baathists were the declared enemies of the Soviet-backed communists, whom they suspected of wanting to replace one form of colonialism with another, the only difference being that one emanated from London while the other had its roots in Moscow.

Saddam's recollections of these formative years in his political development are hardly profound. He told one of his biographers that his uncle's main motivation was “resistance and struggle” against the ruling elite that surrounded the monarchy and their British backers,
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while to another he said his uncle “spoke in nationalist but not in communist terms.”
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A more illuminating insight into his uncle's political development is provided in a pamphlet written by Khairallah himself, entitled “Three Whom God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews, and Flies.” Although published in 1981 after Saddam became president, it indicates the rudimentary thought processes to be expected from a keen adherent of the Nazis. Persians were “animals God created in the shape of humans” while Jews were “a mixture of dirt and the leftovers of diverse people.” Flies, by contrast, were poor, misunderstood creatures “whom we do not understand God's purpose in creating.”
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This weak Iraqi attempt at imitating
Mein Kampf
nevertheless had a bearing on Saddam's future policymaking. As president of Iraq, Saddam's foreign policy was determined by his hatred of the Persians, or Iranians as they are now better known, and the Israelis. In 1980 he provoked the disastrous eight-year war with Iran that cost an estimated one million Iraqi and Iranian lives, while the high point for Saddam during the Gulf War in 1991 came when he fired a succession of Scud missiles at Tel Aviv. Khairallah's indoctrination of Saddam was rewarded with his appointment as mayor of Baghdad, a post he exploited with such exuberant venality that in the 1980s Saddam was forced to remove him from office, close down seventeen of his companies, and arrest their executives.

There is little doubt that Khairallah's influence on Saddam was as pernicious as his stepfather's had been, and it was not long before Saddam was running his own street gang in Karkh, intimidating political opponents or, as a true son of Tikrit, anyone else who caused him offense. By his late teens Saddam had grown into an impressive physical specimen. At six foot two inches tall, he was unusually tall for an Arab, and had a muscular build to go with it. He spoke with a thick, peasant accent and his speech was littered with Tikrit colloquialisms, much to the amusement of the more sophisticated
Baghdadis with whom he was beginning to associate. Saddam never lost his peasant accent or dialect, not even after he had become president. His public speeches were ungrammatical, as were his private conversations, which would later cause the official translators no end of problems. His inability to converse on equal terms with other members of Iraq's ruling elite would do little to help his deep-seated sense of insecurity.

In Baghdad during the late 1950s, Saddam may have been involved with the Futuwa, a paramilitary youth organization modeled on the Hitler Youth, which had been set up during the reign of the flamboyant King Ghazi in the 1930s. The Futuwa wanted Iraq to unite the Arabs in the same manner that the Prussians had united the Germans, and their ideology neatly dovetailed with that of the Baathists. Encouraged by Khairallah, Saddam was usually to be found at the forefront of any antigovernment demonstration or riot. In such an environment of perpetual violence and unrest, it was simply a question of time before Saddam killed someone.

As with so much else from Saddam's early history, there is a degree of uncertainty about the precise identity of his first murder victim. Although mainly resident in Baghdad, Saddam traveled frequently to Tikrit where he was involved on the periphery of politics, mainly organizing street violence. The inhabitants of Tikrit would have expected nothing less from someone like Saddam; the townsfolk have a saying to the effect that when the villagers from Al-Ouja come knocking, it is time to close up shop. One suggestion was that Saddam's first capital offense occurred when he murdered a cousin who had unwittingly offended his stepfather, Hassan al-Ibrahim. Although there is no supporting evidence to back the claim, such killings were so commonplace that it is not inconceivable that Hassan would have called on his burly stepson to apply his newly acquired skills to resolve a local dispute.

Where there is incontrovertible evidence of Saddam's involvement in committing murder concerns the case of Saadoun al-Tikriti, a Communist Party member who worked as the local party official and who was killed in October 1958. The Baathists were bitter enemies of the communists and Khairallah, who was one of the main Baath representatives in Tikrit, would have taken great exception to a communist holding a position of authority in the city. The real motive for the murder, however, was that Tikriti was well aware of Khairallah's unsavory background. In the summer of 1958 Khairallah managed to persuade the government to appoint him to a new position as director of education in Baghdad. When the communist Tikriti heard of Khairallah's
appointment he informed the authorities about Khairallah's past, with the effect that a few months later Khairallah was sacked from his new job.
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Khairallah was incensed and reacted in the only way he knew how. Claiming that Tikriti had denounced him for political, rather than personal, reasons, Khairallah ordered his nephew to exact revenge. Saddam carried out his uncle's orders without hesitation. The killing took place in Tikrit as Tikriti was walking home, having spent the evening with some of his friends at a local coffee shop. His house was located in a road with no street lighting, and as he approached the gate Saddam stepped out from behind a bush and shot him dead with a single shot to the head with a pistol given to him by Khairallah.

Immediately following the shooting Saddam and Khairallah were arrested and detained for six months, but eventually the two men were freed through lack of evidence. There were no witnesses to the shooting and no one in Tikrit seemed too concerned about the murder of a communist. The “blooded” Saddam now enjoyed a degree of notoriety among Iraq's young revolutionaries, and made his way back to Baghdad where he resumed his activities as a political agitator while earning a modest living by working as a bus conductor.

A brief snapshot of Saddam and Khairallah at the time of their imprisonment has been provided by Hani Fkaiki, a former Baath Party official, who shared a prison cell with the two men in Tikrit. “What has stuck in my mind most of all was how Saddam and his uncle kept to themselves in prison. They would choose a far-away corner, away from the rest of the inmates. Despite the small size of the cell in which we were all held, the two of them never gave us a chance to enter into conversation with them. In an attempt to break down this barrier between us, I sent another imprisoned Baath party member to try to get close to them and find out the details behind their imprisonment.” The overture was rebuffed.
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Saddam's only official comment on these events implied that he had been framed for the murder. “An official in Tikrit was murdered: the authorities accused Saddam Hussein of killing him and throwing him in jail,” wrote one of his biographers.
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However, the transcripts of court documents relating to another case, and seen by this author, confirmed that Tikriti was murdered by Saddam because he had crossed Khairallah. During the trial in 1959 of Abdul Salam Arif—who was later to become another of Iraq's postrevolutionary presidents—by a special military tribunal, Tikriti's brother gave evidence in support of Arif and, in passing, provided a detailed account of the murder. He related how Khairallah had been appointed a director of education, but
then demoted to inspector because of Tikriti's intervention. In his witness statement Tikriti's brother states bluntly: “Accordingly Khairallah sent his nephew from his sister [Saddam] on 24th October…to shoot my brother and kill him.”
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Another indication of Saddam's guilt can be drawn from the fact that twenty years later, when Saddam had risen to the position of vice chairman of the Baath's Revolutionary Command Council, he visited the school of a relative of Tikriti in Baghdad and, in keeping with the tribal custom, gave him blood money and a Browning pistol.
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As a consequence of his murderous activities in Tikrit, Saddam had made a name for himself, not, as he had once hoped, as a dashing young officer training at the Baghdad Military Academy, but as a political agitator who was not averse to committing murder to achieve his goal. The Baath Party might be small (it had just three hundred members in 1958), but it had ambitions, and its leaders were not slow in recognizing the particular talents of their young recruit. If the Baath Party was to achieve its goal of taking over the country, first it had to get rid of the government. And so for his next official assignment, Saddam was to be given the task of assassinating Iraq's newly appointed president.

The overthrow of the Iraqi monarchy in the revolution of 1958 was one of the most bloodthirsty episodes in the recent history of the Middle East. Early on the morning of July 14, a group of army units calling themselves the “Free Officers” stormed the royal palace at Qasr al-Rihab. Artillery fire destroyed the top of the building, forcing the young King Faisal II, the regent, and their families to flee the building into the palace courtyard. There they were confronted by a semicircle of army officers who, without any regard for the women and children, massacred them all. The only survivor of the bloodbath was the wife of the former regent, and she only survived because she was left for dead in the middle of a pile of royal corpses. The coup leaders, perhaps taking their cue from the Bolsheviks' elimination of the Romanov dynasty at Ekaterinburg, were determined that no trace of the Iraqi royal family should survive as a rallying point for future loyalists. The only act of respect displayed by the coup leaders was to take the body of the young king to a secret location for burial.

The nonroyal victims, on the other hand, were shown no respect whatsoever. The body of the king's uncle and former regent, Abdul Ilah, was removed from the pile of corpses and handed over to the mob. Ilah and the prime minister, Nuri Said, were generally held responsible for Iraq's pro-British policy, and were even suspected of responsibility for the death of King Ghazi, the only monarch who had aroused anything approaching feelings of loyalty among the Iraqi people during his brief reign in the 1930s. Ilah's body was dragged through the streets tied to a car before being dismembered in the most grotesque fashion. The remains were then put on show at the Ministry
of Defense at the same spot where the bodies of the four colonels hanged by the British for their part in the 1941 revolt had been displayed. The revolution was as much an attempt to rid the country of British influence as it was to dispose of the monarchy. Nuri Said survived the coup for another couple of days until he was caught, dressed as a woman, trying to escape. Said tried to fight off his captors with his pistol, but was quickly overwhelmed and killed. To make certain, his killers reversed their cars over his body several times. The remains were then buried, but a few days later the mob had second thoughts, and Said's body was disinterred and horrifically mutilated. Parts of his body were then paraded as trophies through the streets by the mob.

Saddam's precise whereabouts during the heady days of the 1958 revolution are not known, although it can safely be assumed that the young Baathist and his vehemently anti-British uncle acquitted themselves during the mob violence that erupted in the immediate aftermath of the monarchy's overthrow. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Iraqis died in the ensuing bloodshed and the Baathists, who fully supported the military coup, were determined to make sure that the revolution succeeded. Scant mention is made in Saddam's official biographies of his activities at this time, which claim he was then twenty-one years old, so it must be assumed that he was engaged in nothing more eventful than his customary rabble-rousing.

The new political agenda of the coup leaders was set out at 6:30
A.M
. on July 14 in a special radio broadcast made to a stunned, but jubilant, Iraqi populace. The declaration was made by Abdul Salam Arif, one of the coup leaders. In the first proclamation of the new regime, Arif stated that the army had liberated “the beloved homeland from the corrupt crew that imperialism installed.” The coup was immensely popular, and even though martial law and a curfew were imposed with immediate effect, no one appeared to take much notice. The first acts of the new government were to abolish all the main institutions of the ancien regime, including the monarchy, and to issue warrants for the arrest of all those who had supported the status quo ante.

The pressures for constitutional reform in Iraq had been accumulating almost from the time the country was first established by Winston Churchill in 1922. The desire for change increased significantly in the summer of 1958 as a consequence both of Iraq's support for the Baghdad Pact (discussed in Chapter One) and Nasser's success in defying Britain and France over the Suez Canal in 1956. Indeed by 1958, buoyed by his diplomatic triumph, Nasser was effectively trying to take over the Baathist cause for himself by proposing
a prototype for a united Arab state. In February 1958 a political union of Syria and Egypt was established. Yemen joined later in the year and the new confederation became the United Arab Republic (UAR), with Nasser as its president and Cairo as its capital. Most of the Free Officers who had carried out the July 14 coup in Iraq supported the principle of joining the federation, especially those who were members of the Baath Party, who believed that this was the most likely means of achieving their goal of creating a pan-Arab state.

The Baathists consequently lent their full support to the new government established in Baghdad in the summer of 1958 by General Abdul Karim Qassem, the leader of the Free Officers. A thin-voiced and rather humorless army officer, Qassem appointed Baathists to twelve of the sixteen cabinet positions in his new government. Baathist support for Qassem was, however, contingent upon him promptly signing up for Nasser's prototype Arab nation. Some of the Free Officers had promised Nasser they would join the UAR in return for his support in helping them to overthrow the monarchy. Once in power, however, Qassem adopted a more cautious approach. In this Qassem was merely acting in a manner that would be copied by numerous Iraqi leaders in the turbulent years ahead. When in opposition it was customary for Iraqi politicians to support the notion of forming alliances with their Arab neighbors; once in power they quickly took up the cause of “Iraq First,” a policy whereby Iraq's national interests were placed above all else. Having established himself in office, Qassem soon adopted an Iraq First approach. As an Iraqi nationalist, he had reservations about subsuming Iraq's hard-won independence under Nasser's control. He was also suspicious of the motives of some of his fellow coup conspirators, especially Arif, whom he suspected of pressing for membership of the confederation with Egypt and Syria as a means of strengthening his own political position in Iraq. As so often happens with the revolutionary process, the revolutionaries quickly found themselves at odds with each other over which direction the revolution should take. By the early autumn Qassem had rejected the notion of joining Nasser's confederation. Furthermore, in an attempt to assert his authority, he ordered the arrest of Arif and several other members of the Free Officers, who were then put on trial for treason (it was at this trial that Saddam's involvement in the murder of Saadoun al-Tikriti was revealed). Arif and his co-defendants were convicted and sentenced to death, although their sentences were later commuted to life imprisonment.

In a further attempt to strengthen his power base, Qassem struck up an alliance with the Iraqi Communist Party, which for its own ideological reasons
was fundamentally opposed to joining the Nasser-sponsored union of Arab states: the only union Iraqi communists supported was with Moscow. Qassem's pact with the devil, as many of the nationalists came to regard it, and the show trials of noncommunist Iraqis, caused a rapid deterioration in relations between Qassem and many of the Free Officers who had supported the overthrow of the monarchy: they were not prepared to tolerate the replacement of one dictatorship by another. The decisive moment came in March 1959 when a group of nationalist officers, in protest against the communists' mounting influence over the nation's affairs, staged a coup against Qassem. The coup was an ignominious failure and, to teach the perpetrators a lesson, Qassem encouraged the communists to conduct a witch-hunt of their nationalist adversaries. The result was yet another blood-soaked episode in Iraq's modern history. In addition to disposing of all the officers who had staged the rebellion in Mosul, the communists killed many Arab nationalists who had supported them. Some of the Free Officers who had helped to overthrow the monarchy were tried as traitors. In Mosul itself a communist-inspired mob indulged in a weeklong orgy of rape, looting, and summary trials, which culminated in the accused being machine-gunned to death in front of cheering mobs.

For the Baathists, Qassem's conduct amounted to nothing less than betrayal. They felt that they had given the coup leaders their full backing in the summer of 1958 to overthrow the monarchy on condition that Iraq join Nasser's union of Arab states. Less than a year later their hopes had been dealt a cruel blow. So long as Qassem remained in power, it was quite obvious that they stood no chance of attaining their goal of creating a pan-Arab state. Their only chance of realizing that ambition was to remove Qassem from power, and this they resolved to do by the time-honored method of assassination.

That Saddam's name should have been put forward for the assignment is hardly surprising. At this stage in its development, the Baath Party of Iraq was more of an ideological sounding board than a fighting machine. Most of its three hundred members were either students or professional people who wanted to create a fairer society in which the government served the interests of the people, rather than the interests of foreign powers. When it came to implementing these high ideals, however, the Baath leadership counted on likeminded individuals to do the dirty work for them. The Baath Party had supported the overthrow of the monarchy, but none of them was actually present when the royal family was butchered to death. The Baathists had supported the revolt in Mosul, but were not actively involved. Now that they had decided
Qassem must be removed from power, they had the will, but not the means. It is possible that the idea of assassinating Qassem did not come from the Iraqi Baathists themselves, but from Nasser, that master manipulator who had assumed control of the Baath, even though he himself, of course, remained a committed Nasserite. Some of the participants in the assassination attempt may have traveled to Damascus for training by Nasser's police, although no evidence has ever been produced to implicate Nasser directly in the plot.

Saddam claims he joined the Baath Party in 1957, when he was still a pupil at Karkh High School, and there seems no reason to dispute this. What is surprising is that Saddam should have chosen to join a party that, by the standards of the day, was relatively obscure and did not, at that stage, look as if it had the makings of an organization that would become one of the dominant forces in modern Arab politics. According to one of his official biographers, Saddam joined the Baath because “he found its principles a reflection of his own nationalist ideals.” The biographer also drops a strong hint as to how the young Saddam was steered toward the Baathists. “He had considered himself a nationalist from the time his mother told him stories of how his uncle [Khairallah] Tulfah had fought against the British.”
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Although Khairallah himself had no time for the Baath Party, and never joined it, he had befriended Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, a fellow Tikriti who was a general in the Iraqi army with Baathist sympathies and who would become one of the key figures in the party and the first Baathist president of Iraq. Bakr liked to portray himself as a moderate, decent person, but behind this facade there was a brutal, ruthless streak, which would come to full prominence after he assumed the office of president. While Bakr's public persona was of a law-abiding officer, he nevertheless appreciated how Saddam's brutish force could be of use to him and, encouraged by Khairallah, he took Saddam under his wing to forge a powerful partnership that would ultimately result in the two men running the country for ten years. It was through Bakr, therefore, that Saddam was first introduced to the Baath Party. At this stage in his career, however, Saddam was a mere supporter of the party rather than a full member. Membership of the Baath was strictly controlled and limited only to those who had proved their loyalty to the party, and their commitment to its ideology. The account provided by Saddam's biographer of how he came to be involved with the party encapsulates Saddam's nascent nationalism.

“His relatives had been killed by the British, and their houses burned down; his forefathers had fought bravely against the Turks. With this background,
Saddam Hussein was all too aware of British imperialism and how the government in Iraq remained a prisoner of the imperialist will. He decided to become involved in political activity.”
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The same sentiments could easily have been attributed to Khairallah Tulfah.

Saddam's involvement in the plot to assassinate Qassem has contributed greatly to his cult status in Iraq, and in terms of capturing the full dramatic impact of the incident, there is no better account of his participation than that provided by Saddam himself.
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Saddam's narrative traces his involvement back to the prison in Tikrit where he was held for six months from late 1958 on suspicion of murdering Saadoun al-Tikriti. Saddam's murder of Tikriti took place shortly after Qassem seized power. As a consequence Saddam was locked up in jail with Khairallah during the orgy of violence that erupted throughout the country. Saddam claimed that he used his confinement to save his fellow Baathists from being murdered by communists in Tikrit. Some of those communists, of course, may have well been seeking to avenge Saddam's murder of Saadoun al-Tikriti. According to Saddam's version of events, however, he bribed some of the more sympathetic prison guards to arrest Baathist activists on trumped-up charges and have them thrown into jail for their own protection. “A number of Baathists were thus brought into the jail. For many days they remained in prison until nightfall, when they were released to carry out their activities, returning to the jail before sunrise.”

This would have taken place during Qassem's purge against the Baathists during late 1958 and early 1959. Saddam claimed he was released, sometime in early 1959, as a result of what he describes as “national pressure,” whereas in fact it was because of the prosecuting authorities' inability, or unwillingness, to find sufficient evidence to charge him with Tikriti's murder. Saddam said that he then returned to Baghdad at the request of the party, where he was asked by one of his “comrades” if he would be willing to assassinate Qassem. He accepted at once because he “considered the assignment an honor.” He then began training in the use of automatic weapons, “having already mastered the use of the revolver”—as his successful dispatch of Tikriti amply demonstrated. The plan was conceived by Fouad al-Rikabi, the Baath secretary-general who had briefly held a cabinet post in Qassem's cabinet and who was later murdered in one of Saddam's prisons.