Saddam : His Rise and Fall (9 page)

 

Qassem survived until February 1963 when he was finally overthrown in a coup masterminded by the CIA. The coup, which, even by Iraqi standards, was particularly gruesome, was led by General Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, another of Saddam's mentors to whom he had been introduced by his uncle, Khairallah, when he first moved to Baghdad. Bakr, a fellow Tikriti, had become a prominent member of the Iraqi Baath during Saddam's exile in Cairo. A quiet and determined man, he shared Khairallah's virulent hatred of communists and was consequently held in high regard by the Americans. Bakr had joined the Baath while in jail for plotting against Qassem. The Iraqi leader, who lacked the ruthless streak required to survive in Iraqi politics, was forever releasing political opponents he had jailed for trying to remove him. Bakr was no exception, and soon after he was freed he teamed up with other Baathists to plan the coup to oust Qassem.

The 1963 coup followed the gory tradition that had been established with the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958. The action against Qassem had to be brought forward because some of the conspirators were arrested, and when it was launched many army units refused to mobilize in support of the Baathists. Bakr, drawing on the services of four Hunter Hawker fighter jets, managed to launch an assault on Qassem's well-defended redoubt at the Ministry of Defense. The fighting lasted for two days, leaving hundreds of dead and wounded in central Baghdad, before Qassem was finally forced to surrender. His captors denied his request that he be allowed to keep his firearm, nor would they allow his trial to be held in public. After a summary hearing, Qassem was executed by firing squad. The whole process between his unconditional surrender and his execution took just one hour. To reassure the doubting Iraqi public that the president was indeed dead, Qassem's bullet-riddled body was featured in a grotesque film that was shown repeatedly on Iraqi television. “Night after night…. The body was propped up on a chair in the studio. A soldier sauntered around, handling its parts. The camera would cut to scenes of devastation at the Ministry of Defense where Qassem had made his last stand. Back to the studio, and close-ups of the entry and exit points of each bullet hole. The whole macabre sequence closes with a scene that must forever remain etched on the memory of all those who saw it: the soldier grabbed the lolling head by the hair, came up close, and spat full face into it.”
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Once the television station had finished with the body, the deceased president was still not allowed to rest at peace. Initially Qassem's corpse was buried in a shallow, unmarked grave, but the body was unearthed by dogs who began eating it. Horrified farmers then reburied the body in a coffin, only to have the secret police dig it up again and throw it in the Tigris. Despite this gruesome turn of events—not dissimilar to the treatment Qassem's supporters had meted out to monarchists in 1958—Washington professed itself satisfied with the change of regime. James Critchfield, the head of the CIA in the Middle East at the time and a specialist in communist infiltration, later expressed himself deeply satisfied with the outcome. “We regarded it as a great victory,” he recalled many years later. “We really had the
t
s crossed on what was happening.”
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Saddam, much to his frustration, was marooned in Cairo for the duration of these dramatic events but, once the new regime had been installed, he lost no time returning to Baghdad to participate in the bloody purges that fol
lowed. Saddam flew back to Baghdad with Abdul Karim al-Shaikhly—his fellow conspirator in the plot to assassinate Qassem in 1959—and some of the other Iraqi exiles. They were met at the Baghdad airport by a large crowd of cheering Baathists, family members, and friends. Soon after his arrival Saddam reacquainted himself with Bakr, who had been rewarded for his role in overthrowing Qassem with the post of prime minister by the new president, Abdul Salam Arif. Bakr appointed many fellow Tikritis to positions of prominence, although Saddam initially found himself sidelined from mainstream politics. The party had moved on during his three years in exile, and the new leadership at first would not accept the membership Saddam had acquired in exile. Saddam was offered a lowly position at the Central Farmer's Office, where his duties were to look at ways of improving the lot of the Iraqi peasantry. Despite the difficulties he faced on his return to Baghdad, his friends and acquaintances noticed a significant change in Saddam's development. “When he fled Baghdad, he had not even finished high school. He was a thuggish kid who was good with his fists. But the Saddam who returned from Cairo was better educated and more adult.”
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If Saddam was frustrated in his political ambitions, the bloody clashes that continued between the Baathists and communists after Qassem's overthrow provided him with a more familiar outlet through which to channel his frustrations. The street fighting that took place in Baghdad during the coup itself had claimed anywhere between 1,500 and 5,000 lives. For several weeks after the coup, house-to-house searches were undertaken in pursuit of communists and leftists. The searches were carried out by the National Guard (Haras al-Qawmi), the paramilitary wing of the Baath, which had joined in the street battles that eventually led to Qassem's defeat. The national guardsmen wore green armbands and carried submachine guns and, armed with lists of communist sympathizers, some of which had been provided by the CIA, they spent the first few weeks of the Baath Party's new government indulging in what can only be described as an orgy of violence.

Despite the assurances that the Baathists had given to the CIA that all those detained would be given a fair trial, many of those held by the National Guard were tortured and then summarily executed. Sports clubs, movie theaters, an entire section of Kifah Street, and a number of private houses were requisitioned by the National Guard to be used as prisons and interrogation centers. The liquidation of the communists in Baghdad was in many respects a forerunner of the anti-Leftist purges that were to occur in Chile and
Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s. Saddam's elite Republican Guard units were to behave in a similar fashion following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 when they commandeered government buildings and palaces and turned them into makeshift interrogation and torture chambers. The official Iraqi records claimed that 149 communists were executed, although it was generally accepted that hundreds, if not thousands, of communists suffered excruciating deaths at the hands of their Baathist tormentors. As often happens in such circumstances, many of those killed were either innocent, or the victims of local vendettas that had nothing to do with political ideology.

Dr. Ali Karim Said, a former Iraqi diplomat who was a leading figure in the Baath during this period, said that many innocent Iraqis died in the government-orchestrated purges of the communists. “I still remember when my brother…, who was then a deputy commander of military intelligence and one of the main interrogators, came to my house and threw down his machine gun on the floor and said in a pained voice: ‘I cannot go on, because they arrest and send simple men to the execution courtyard. It is unacceptable and unbearable. They all shout: Please Mohammed, for your sake, Ali, and then they shout: God is Great three times before they die.' My brother continued: ‘If you oppress these simple and helpless people they will definitely turn to the communists.' After this episode I…opposed all execution orders.”
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One of the most notorious torture chambers was located at the aptly named Palace of the End (Qasr al-Nihayah), so called because it was the site where the monarchy had been wiped out in 1958. One of the most notorious practitioners of the torturer's art was Nadhim Kazzar, who would later become Saddam's head of national security. Even by the brutalized standards of modern Iraq, Kazzar's reputation for sadism stood out. Kazzar had joined the Baath Party as a student in the 1950s and quickly rose through the ranks. A hard and ascetic man, Kazzar was one of the party's few Shiites to hold a position of power. He came into his own following Qassem's overthrow when he revealed himself to be a fearsome persecutor of the communists. Kazzar's reputation for indulging in gratuitous violence was such that he even succeeded in terrorizing members of his own party. He had a particular liking for conducting interrogations personally and for extinguishing his cigarette inside the eyeballs of his victims.
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Most of Kazzar's atrocities were committed in the Palace of the End, which the Baathists managed to turn into a laboratory for developing the mechanics of interrogation and where they were able to refine a range of abominable practices that were later to become standard
once Saddam was in power. Hanna Batutu, the distinguished historian on modern Iraq, has, for example, managed to piece together from official government files a horrifying account of what took place at the Palace of the End under Kazzar and the Baathists in 1963:

“The Nationalist Guard's Bureau of Investigation had alone killed 104 persons. In the cellars of the
al-Nihayah
palace, which the bureau used as its headquarters, were found all sorts of loathsome instruments of torture, including electric wires with pincers, pointed iron stakes on which prisoners were made to sit, and a machine which still bore traces of chopped-off fingers. Small heaps of blooded clothing were scattered about, and there were pools on the floor and stains on the wall.”
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This was the work of the party that was to act as the springboard for Saddam's dramatic rise to power.

So what was Saddam's role in these atrocities? There are few precise details of Saddam's whereabouts at this time. The only comment Saddam personally made concerning this period related to the internal battles that were taking place within the Iraqi Baath Party. “There was an atmosphere of terror, and blocs and groupings were formed in the party; obstacles were placed in the way of comrades who wanted to work along proper party lines.”
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As Saddam was later to make Kazzar his security chief, giving him a free hand to institutionalize the diabolical interrogation methods he had developed at the Palace of the End, it is more than likely that the two men became acquainted during their eradication of the communist opposition. Saddam, fresh from his meetings at the American embassy in Cairo, may even have been able to provide some names and addresses of communist sympathizers in Baghdad. Some of Saddam's surviving contemporaries from this period have suggested that, apart from his mundane duties at the Central Farmer's Office, he became closely involved in organizing the National Guard, the Brownshirts of the Baath Party. He visited detention camps in Baghdad and helped to supervise the “punishment” of communist detainees.
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Some of the detainees were held at the Fellaheen, or peasant, camp, which provides an intriguing insight into the likely nature of Saddam's duties at the Central Farmer's Office. Saddam's task, it appeared, was to improve the lot of the peasants, so long as they were peasants who did not have communist sympathies.

As a reward for his diligence in tracking down communists, Saddam was appointed to the Baath Party's intelligence committee, which assumed overall responsibility for the interrogations. In the 1990s an Iraqi communist who was tortured at the Palace of the End claimed that Saddam had personally
supervised his interrogation. “My arms and legs were bound by rope. I was hung on the rope to a hook on the ceiling and I was repeatedly beaten with rubber hoses filled with stones.”
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Saddam has been accused of disposing of the bodies of his torture victims by dissolving them in bathtubs of acid. He was said to have experimented with the various torture techniques developed by Kazzar, sometimes offering the victims a menu from which they could choose their preferred method of interrogation. In the Iraqi-made autobiographical film,
The Long Days,
Saddam comments on his participation in the events of 1963, saying, “We must kill those who conspire against us.”

A more mundane sketch of Saddam at this time was provided by Baha Shibib, who was a member of the Baath Party leadership in Baghdad in 1963 and briefly served as foreign minister. “In the greater scheme of things Saddam was pretty insignificant,” said Shibib. “He was involved with the interrogations, but he was not involved in policymaking. When he came back from Cairo, his main concern was to get a job that paid a monthly salary. He came to us begging for a job, so we gave him something with the farmer's bureau. But the main thing I remember about Saddam then was the way he was always hanging around Bakr. He was the prime minister and clearly had lots of influence and Saddam, as a fellow Tikriti, was always hanging around his office, trying to ingratiate himself. He hung out with Bakr's bodyguards, trying to play the tough guy. But no one took him too seriously. We were far too busy with other matters.”
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Fortunately for the Iraqi people, this particular Baathist reign of terror was short-lived. Factional infighting between rival Baathist groups resulted in the party being ejected from power in November 1963, thereby drawing to a close, for the time being at least, the gratuitous bloodletting taking place at the Palace of the End. The Baath, which had been the dominant party in the government established by President Arif the previous February, soon fell prey to factional infighting. The main cause of the ideological split was the vexed question of whether Iraq should pursue the stated Baathist objective of pan-Arab unity, and form a federation with either Syria or Egypt, or both. The civilian wing of the Baath, led by Ali Salih al-Sadi, favored political union, especially after the Syrian Baath had staged a successful coup d'état in Damascus in March. Sadi was opposed within the Iraqi Baath, however, by the party's more conservative, military wing, which favored the traditional “Iraq first” policy. By the autumn of 1963 Iraq's military establishment had become increasingly irritated by the ill-disciplined behavior of
the National Guard, the Baath Party militia, which was being used by Sadi and his gangs of Baathist thugs to intimidate his opponents and persecute the communists.