The Weight of a Mustard Seed (21 page)

K
AMEL SACHET'S APPREHENSION WAS BOUND TO
Saddam's. Security was a noose that tightened into a garrote. The closer to the throne, the greater the risk. Dr. Hassan had described the atmosphere of fear in the later Saddam era, ever thicker paranoia, dread, a constant unbroken tension—suspicion, surveillance, cars in the rear view mirror, agents, eavesdropping, reports…But a general could never debase himself with fear. Whatever that stomach prickling feeling was, Kamel Sachet suppressed it.

It was a time of plots and plotters and the conspiracies Saddam imagined were real enough. The senior military commanders had never recovered their faith in him after the Kuwait disaster and the subsequent cull; Saddam knew this and was careful to keep their power in check. He kept the regular army in the provinces, diluted with conscription and pressed volunteers, effectively starved of weapons and resources. Even the Republican Guard found their status slipping in favor of the new regiments of Saddam Fedayeen, Saddam's men of sacrifice, commanded by Uday, who swore loyalty not to Iraq but to its president. These units were raised throughout Iraq but Saddam
kept a cohort of them close, a personal paramilitary bodyguard death squad, and fattened their officers with bounties of cash, land, and Toyota pick-ups. Throughout the nineties, the years of constriction, a steady stream of disgruntled senior commanders, men who had fought through the Iran-Iraq war, who had survived Kuwait, left, walked through minefields, smuggled in the boots of cars into Kurdistan or bribed exit visas and drove across the desert to Jordan. The defector-traitors told and sold information (real, exaggerated and bullshit) to the CIA and the Jordanian General Intelligence Department, UNSCOM (United Nations Special Commission) and the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) or to the Kurds or Saudi agents or Iranian middlemen in exchange for cash, stipends, backing, visas, residency permits, passports for their families and protection.

Saddam was penned between two no fly zones, militarily emasculated by the teams of UN weapons inspectors destroying missile stockpiles and any nuclear and biological capabilities he may have hung on to, and impoverished by sanctions. Meantime machination abroad: exile groups and parties, the Shia militias backed by Iran, the Kurds in their rivalrous, but
de facto
independent northern crescent, the old scions—Chalabi, Allawi, various pretenders to the throne—mingled with the new defecting arrivals, set up think tanks and committees, wrote political manifestos and reports, went to conferences, lunched chummily with their friends in Washington, smoked cigars with the mandarins in Whitehall, entertained journalists with their own agendas. Each boasted of networks and support within Iraq; much of it was power dreaming, they could say anything when there was no voice to contradict them; those who remained in Iraq were locked in isolation and no one could ask their opinions.

 

A
DNAN
J
ANABI HAD
told me to look up Nabil Janabi when I was next in London. Nabil Janabi was a Janabi acquaintance of his; “He has some television program now, he is kind of a player, he knew Kamel Sachet, he might be able to tell you something about him.”

I found Nabil Janabi's number through a friend and we arranged to meet at a café on the Edgware Road. I recognized him immediately; he looked like the synthesis of his middle-aged exile demographic: dyed black hair (for the television cameras), beige suit, mustache, cigar. He wore a badge on the lapel of his suit: “I love Iraq” written across the outline of his country. He was helpful, genial, pleased with himself and talked in vague self-aggrandizing terms. He had reinvented himself as a presenter on an Iraqi cable news channel, hosting a daily show of interviews and views. He told me it was the most popular television program in all of Iraq. “All Iraqis, they love me!” He received thousands of emails every day, his mobile rang constantly from Baghdad, from Diala, Mosul, friends, contacts and well-wishers. “They call me the father of Iraq!” he declared, pumping his platform, “I have a great vision for Iraq…I am under pressure to return…I have told Prime Minister al-Maliki this: ‘I know all of Iraq now.'—He doesn't hear as much of Iraq as I hear!” He revealed that there was a secret meeting convening in Iraq of “several groups” who wanted to promote him as a new leader of Iraq, someone who could negotiate with the Americans for them, “We will have a new general election, reconciliation! Not this false al Maliki reconciliation!”

He smiled, mock self-deprecating, as if to say, it was a long shot, yes, but who else could save the country?

His English was accented with a genial growl as he outlined
his biography for me, careful to highlight the key self-mythologized episodes and characteristics that Iraqi men of his generation valued: poetry writing, intelligence, bravery, financial success, respect and popularity. I had listened to other stories like Nabil Janabi's; always roughly the same three acts: Life in Iraq, Prison, Flight.

He grew up in Baghdad well-off and well connected. In his youth he pursued intellectual passions and on 26 February 1976 he was arrested for writing a seditious poem entitled “Blue Democracy.” (Iraqis often don't know their own birthdays, but they always seem to remember exactly, clearly and without hesitation, the date on which they were arrested, the date on which they were released, and the date on which they left Iraq; such are the real milestones of an Iraqi lifetime.) He told me he had laughed at the judge who sentenced him to eight years, been released after two years during a Presidential Amnesty, then set up a construction-import-export company (“I was so successful in that business. I became rich enough to help the sons of the needy!”), which the government subsequently closed, claiming he was using the premises for illegal meetings. By 1982 he was under almost constant surveillance when a Janabi cousin of his, who was an Amn Colonel, told him he had received the order for his arrest. Because they were relatives, he said, he could “lose” the warrant on his desk for three days, but no longer.

Escape stories vary in their details, but they are usually abetted by conniving corruption and end in a heart stopping traverse, across a minefield or a checkpoint or a border. In the next forty eight hours, Nabil found another Janabi relative in the passport office to issue him with an urgent passport under his grandfather's name, managed to get an on-the-spot visa from the Lebanese embassy and bought a ticket to Beirut via
Amman. He asked his Colonel cousin to give him an Amn officer to escort him through the airport because he was worried Mukhabarat officers stationed in the terminal would recognize him. This Amn officer wanted his brand new Mercedes for payment. Nabil told him he couldn't give him the Mercedes because it was in his brother's name; the Amn officer then said he wanted money, $10,000. Nabil got him down to $7,000. 25 February 1982. His brother drove him to the airport and the paid-off Amn officer escorted him inside and then he waited, hiding in the toilet, until the last call for the Middle East Airlines flight to Beirut, his heart thumping, nerves taut. He carried only a briefcase containing $50,000 in cash and three kilos of gold.

He got off the plane in Amman, almost delirious with stress and exhausted with adrenaline. He could still see his brother waving through the terminal window and he could still hear the Amn officer telling him never to come back or they would kill him for sure. He went to a hotel and collapsed on the bed with his mind veering freedom. “And then I was the happiest man in the world.” He stopped and caught himself; he had not told his wife he was leaving or said goodbye to his children. “But still not very happy.”

The Amn officer who had accompanied him at the airport, Nabil added, as postscript, was executed some years later.

He was eventually granted asylum in Britain and he lived twenty years, the patched up half-life of the exile. Back in Iraq, his wife was forced to divorce him and his children were always denied exit visas. He settled in London, studied at the Open University and eventually gained a Ph.D. in linguistics from London University. In time he remarried an Iraqi woman and had two daughters. He kept in touch with the Iraqi community abroad. He saw Jalal Talabani, leader of the PUK (Pa
triotic Union) faction of the Kurds when he visited London and formed a connection with the Jordanian Royal family. “King Hussein was a close friend.” He wrote articles for Arab newspapers calling for regime change and democracy in Iraq and passed on information heard through the exile network and those go-betweens who traveled in and out of Iraq, to the British intelligence service MI6 (on at least one occasion that he admitted to me) and the Americans and the Jordanians.

He was involved. He penned articles and letters, published bits of poetry, connected connections, phone calls, old friends, networks of dissidence and proto-politics. He tried to find links and paths between the outside and the inside, but it was always fraught. Phone calls were monitored, expensive and cracked by terrible lines, fax machines were in the ministries and subject to power cuts and paper shortages, email was virtually non existent. Messages passed friend to friend, cousin to cousin, ear to mouth, but communication of any real kind was slight. Everyone wanted to get rid of Saddam—kill or coup—but still he remained, as implacably absurd as a heavy stone at the center of a web.

In the nineties, Nabil recounted, he visited Sweden several times to send letters from a neutral postmark, part of a broad letter writing campaign, urging officials and officers inside the regime to organize themselves against Saddam. One time he posted three thousand pamphlets exhorting democracy from several post boxes around Stockholm. Nabil Janabi's grandfather had been Sheikh of the Albu Hassoun subdivision of the Janabi tribe, and it was through this family connection that he had known Kamel Sachet well as a young man. He told me that in July 1998 he sent, from Sweden, a handwritten note addressed to Kamel Sachet's address in Saidiya. He knew Kamel Sachet's reputation and standing among the military class from
other exiled officers and he hoped to enlist his leadership. He did not write Kamel Sachet's name on the envelope, nor did he sign the letter; recipient and sender were thus anonymous, and no interlocutor was used. “Between two people there can be a secret,” explained Nabil, “but between three?—No.” Kamel Sachet, he hoped, he claimed, would recognize his handwriting and know, in turn, that Nabil, his old friend and relative, was close to the Jordanian Royal Family and lived in London and therefore his missive would carry the implicit support of these two governments. Kamel Sachet was undoubtedly too intelligent to fall for such a ruse. The letter asked, in general terms, to try to coordinate a cadre of opposition officers.

In August of 1998 Saddam expelled the UN inspection teams as spies. By November he had, under American pressure, allowed them back in again. In the interim he reorganized his national defenses in the face of expected air strikes. Kamel Sachet was appointed to an advisory role with Ali Hassan al-Majid's command of the south. Kamel Sachet never really took up this position, he either refused point blank to serve under Ali Hassan al-Majid, who he reviled, or he simply remained in Baghdad, attending strategy meetings in the Presidency as required.

In the early autumn of that year, Nabil Janabi went to Amman, on one of his regular trips. There he met a Janabi relative who brought him a message from Kamel Sachet.
He had the “amana,” the thing he had given him to keep, was still with him.
By this Nabil understood that he had received the letter.

After this, Nabil had no further communication or news from Kamel Sachet. He heard only rumors, and it was hard to know which ones were true. He continued his exile efforts, kept his close connection to elements of the Jordanian Royal Family and befriended Khalid, Kamel Sachet's brother, when
he was living in Amman in 2000 after his “defection.” Khalid had his own theories and version of events, but these, Nabil knew, were also second-hand.

 

T
IME PASSED, TIMES
changed. When the American tanks rolled into Baghdad, Nabil was poised, like so many Iraqis, to go home. But he went home, like so many Iraqis, as a foreigner, backed by foreigners, with a foreign agenda. He carried a British passport and had money from a Jordanian prince to set up a monarchist party to push their own pretender candidate (there were several disseminated Hashemite princes floating around since the monarchy had been deposed in Iraq in 1958). He found Khalid in prison (on some kind of conspiracy charge) and had him released to his own custody and appointed him his head of security. They took several gunmen and a convoy of landcruisers and drove across the broken border garrisoned by a few uninterested American soldiers, passed the smashed portraits of Saddam, across that long featureless desert, fast down the highway through Ramadi and Fallujah—because there were always a bunch of bandits ready to rob travelers—to the airport outskirts of the capital, the empty sand-concrete military bases still painted with the Iraqi military flag entwined with the Palestinian flag, the blue and white striped traffic police posts, wreckage, black twisted burned cars, kids yelping, a tank impaled by its own turret.

For exiles the return was salutary. They knew it would be bad, they had talked to relatives and watched the news, but when they saw, with their own eyes, the extent of the collapse—Iraq reduced to third world; it looked like Africa! Rackety generators, lakes of sewage, ragged kids in the streets, mounds of fly blown garbage, lumpen empty tracts of con
struction scarred suburb, and so many women covered in black! And where were the old bars and the restaurants they used to go to? Where was the life? The park along the river where they remembered family picnics and fish restaurants was now unkempt and blocked by two American tanks and coils of razor wire. And the people! What had happened to people? Iraqis used to laugh and tease each other and extend their hospitality with largesse at every opportunity and now: what was this sullenness, this resentment, these shifty dark glances, too many lies and their lies were so obvious! (“No,
habibe
, I was never in the Party!”) And always always they wanted money, and more money as if you were an ATM machine! And then all they did was complain: Why were they not given this? Why had they not received that? And the checkpoints and the curfew and the electricity cuts and no jobs and where were they going to get their car registered now that the ministry annex had been looted by “those Kuwaiti gangs”? One Iraqi, who had lived two decades in Vienna, told me, “I don't recognize these people any more; it's as if I had nothing in common with them.”