ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Planning for this book commenced a month before the invasion of Kuwait on 2nd August 1990, our intention being to publicise the brutal nature of Saddam Hussein and his regime and to draw attention to the assistance that he was receiving from the West for his arms procurement programme. It seemed incredible to us that European companies, with little or no hindrance from their governments, were actively involved in the supply of equipment and technology for the manufacture not only of conventional armaments but also of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
The tragic events in Kuwait on 2nd August 1990 interceded, attracting the attention of the world media, and since then there has been much detailed coverage of the Gulf Crisis. This book, however, is concerned with the story of Saddam Hussein and his rise to power, and with the West’s role as ‘kingmakers’: the political assistance afforded him both before, during and after the Gulf War as well as the economic and industrial assistance which enabled him to create the most powerful military machine in the Middle East.
We have received much assistance during the research and writing of this book. We owe special thanks to many brave men and women who provided us with much valuable information from inside Iraq but whose identities we cannot reveal for their sakes. We hope that one day we will be able to thank them personally in a happy Iraq free from tyranny.
Seyyed Abd al-Azziz al-Hakim, Hanni al-Fekaiki, Dr Tahseen Me’alla, Dr Ahmad Chalabi, Dar Majid, Sa’ad Saleh Jabr, Dr Sahib al-Hakim, Dr Bahr al-O’Loum, the Iraqi Communist Party, the Campaign for Human Rights in Iraq, the Islamic Da’wa Party, and the Iraqi Students Society all rendered us invaluable help and to them all we extend our grateful thanks.
Abd al-Majid Farid and Amin al-Ghafari of the Arab Research Centre were extremely kind in granting us interviews and in providing us with much valuable material. We are most grateful to them both.
A number of diplomats and officials from the Middle East, Europe and America were kind enough to give us interviews and to provide us with first-hand information. For obvious reasons we are unable to identify them but we are most grateful to them for their help and co-operation.
We would also like to express our appreciation to the following for their generous help: Will Fowler, Chris Jenkins and Michael Gething of Defence magazine; Henry Dodds of fane’s Soviet Intelligence Review, Christopher Foss of fane's Defence Weekly, and Brian Walters, James Shortt, Christopher Bellamy and Anthony Preston, all of whom were extremely generous in providing assistance with technical information on weapon systems.
Dr Eric Groves, Naval Research Director of the Foundation for International Security, was kind enough to provide us with information concerning the 1961 Kuwait Crisis and we are most grateful to him. We also received invaluable assistance from a number of individuals and organisations who have over the years been monitoring the supply of arms and the support given to Saddam Hussein and his regime by Western industry. These include: Herr Norbert Gansel of the Federal German Parliament and Social Democratic Party, who was kind enough to supply us with information concerning the involvement of German companies in the supply of equipment and technology to Iraq; Leonard Spector, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who provided us with information on Iraq’s nuclear development programme; Hugh Dowson of the Clifton Diocesan Justice and Peace Commission, who provided details of chemicals supplied by Western companies to Iraq; the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute; the librarians at the International Institute of Strategic Studies; the Campaign Against the Arms Trade; BUKO-Koordinationsstelle in the Federal German Republic; AMOK in Holland; France’s Centre de Documentation et de Recherche; the International Peace Information Service in Belgium; and Sweden’s SPASS. To them all we would like to express our sincere thanks.
Justin Arundale, Jon Hall, Ken Gresham, Brita Latham, Stephen McEntee, Jeremy Turner, Barry Perkins, Giovanni Vasco, Gertrud Erbach, Marian Carey, Katharine Jacob and Larry Lawrence of the library at the Independent all gave us wonderful support with our research, and no words can express sufficiently our gratitude for the time and effort they devoted to helping us.
Independent columnist Annika Savill and Deputy Foreign Editor Harvey Morris helped us with research; and Middle East Editor
Patrick Cockburn gave us valuable briefings on the Iraqi position during the crisis. Special thanks are also due to Foreign Editor Godfrey Hudgson, without whose help and support this book would have been longer in the writing. Further assistance with research came from Andrew Graham Yool and Philip Spender at Index on Censorship, whilst John Bulloch and Jill Brown both provided us with photographs. Again, to them all, we extend our sincerest thanks.
Much of the information supplied to us came from organisations and individuals in other parts of Europe, and we are most grateful to Mr Jim Beveridge, Sylvia Bahr and Therese Chantal Leignel for their help in translating documents for us.
We also wish to express our appreciation to Liz Knights, Editorial Director of our publisher Victor Gollancz, for her great support; to our researcher Caspar Henderson for his tireless work in tracking down material; and to Duncan Snelling, our unpaid sub-editor, for spending so many hours at the keyboard sorting eveiything out. Last, but by no means least, our gratitude and thanks go to our agent, Dianne Coles, whose idea it was for us to write this book.
PrologueAt 1805 GMT on 1st August 1990, British Airways flight BA149 took off from Heathrow for Kuala Lumpur, via Kuwait and Madras. The plane was carrying 367 passengers, mostly Britons. In Kuwait it was 2105 on a hot August night.
Four hours later, Kuwait City was asleep, the only movement coming from the odd car which could be seen speeding along the wide, well-lit, modern highways. Suddenly, the sound of sirens rent the still night air and shortly afterwards Kuwaiti ministers and officials could be seen running half-dressed for their air-conditioned limousines. Soon the cellphone network was buzzing as they frantically called from their cars, waking up their bank managers or instructing their wives to gather together valuables and documents. Kuwait City was suddenly like a hive of disturbed bees.
Panic and shock rippled throughout the city as the news spread like wildfire that Saddam Hussein, the ‘Butcher of Baghdad’, had carried out his threat and ordered his tanks to cross the border. Even now, the leading elements of the Iraqi forces were advancing along the Basra-Kuwait Highway on their way to seize control of the tiny emirate.
Two of the diminutive Kuwaiti armed forces’ Scorpion light tanks attempted to engage the leading Iraqi armour as it reached the outskirts of Kuwait City at 0200 local time. However, they stood little chance against the 125mm guns of the T-72s - although each T-72 had one shell only; they destroyed the two Kuwaiti tanks within thirty seconds.
Half an hour earlier the Dasman palace, residence of the Emir Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmad al-Sabah and his family, had been alerted by the Saudi Arabians, whose AWACS aircraft had detected the advance of the Iraqi forces. The emir’s personal bodyguards bundled him, the crown prince and their families into armoured Mercedes limousines and they sped towards the Saudi borders.
By this time, Captain Richard Brunyate, the pilot of BA149, had already made his first contact with the control tower at Kuwait Airport and had been instructed by the air traffic controller to proceed as normal. From his cockpit, Captain Brunyate could see the city ahead of him, apparently peacefully asleep. At 0113 GMT, or 0413 local time, on 2nd August, Flight BA149 touched down at Kuwait. Neither the crew nor the passengers were aware that they had landed in a war zone. It was only when a new crew had come aboard and the plane was preparing to take off fifty-two minutes later that the new pilot saw Iraqi tanks near the runway.
Shortly afterwards, the passengers, including eleven children, were disembarked and, with the aircraft’s crew, taken by Iraqi troops to a hotel in Kuwait.
When the rest of the world awoke the following morning, it was to the news that Iraq had invaded Kuwait and that there was fighting in and around Kuwait City. As the day wore on, news filtered out of the emirate of the stand made by the emir’s brother, Sheikh Fahd al-Ahmad, who was killed whilst leading the royal guards in the defence of the Dasman palace.
As the West recovered from the initial shock, some began to ask very pertinent questions: ‘How and why could this happen?’ ‘Why was there no warning?’ ‘Why was the pilot of Flight BA149 not warned to divert his plane to another airport?’ ‘What were our intelligence services doing?’ Indeed, there was every reason to ask.
Meanwhile, more Iraqi troops were approaching Kuwait City. With them came members of the Mukhabarat, the dreaded Iraqi intelligence service, equipped with lists of individuals who were to be arrested and taken to Baghdad. Accompanied by detachments of the Iraqi army’s special forces, they made their way unerringly to the homes of those unfortunate people whose names were on their lists.
In fact, warning of the Iraqi invasion had been given, but it had been virtually ignored by politicians in the West and the Middle East. America’s Central Intelligence Agency and Egypt’s Mukhabarat had both presented their governments with over a dozen reports, the last three of which stated that invasion was imminent. The very same leaders who ignored those intelligence reports were now woken by their aides to be told of the invasion. President Hosni Mubarak in the Egyptian city of Alexandria had three days earlier chosen to accept Saddam Hussein’s word, confirming that he was not planning to invade Kuwait, against that of his own intelligence service which possessed evidence of the Iraqi dictator’s hidden intentions. Mubarak repeated Saddam Hussein’s assurances to President George Bush who, on 31st July, ignored the CIA’s warning, ‘They are ready, they will go.’
During the seven months prior to the invasion, Saddam Hussein had steadily escalated his political confrontation with the West and with his own neighbours; yet Western governments had not acted, despite obvious and increasing concern amongst the Gulf nations. They were merely following a pattern of diplomacy established and adhered to during previous years, despite continual reports and warnings from human rights organisations and the media of Saddam Hussein’s relentless brutality towards his own people and his increasing belligerence towards his Gulf neighbours. Even in Britain, those journalists who attempted to focus public attention on the excesses of the Ba’ath regime in Baghdad were subjected to smear campaigns and attempts, some traced to Whitehall, to blacken their names in an effort to deter them from harming Anglo-Iraqi trade and diplomatic relations. It was the same in Washington and Paris.
Nearly 95 per cent of Saddam Hussein’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction was imported - from France, the United States, West Germany, Britain, Egypt, Brazil and Chile, as well as from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, his main supplier. Massive financial credit, provided on extremely generous terms, was extended by Western banks with the connivance and support of their respective governments. This enabled Saddam Hussein not only to purchase large numbers of sophisticated aircraft and weapons systems from the West, but also to establish his own arms industry, develop ballistic missiles, construct chemical weapons production plants and further his development of nuclear weapons.
By the time the world had woken up, it was too late for Kuwait. Iraq’s seizure of the oil-rich emirate was holding the whole world to ransom -almost every nation in the world seemed to be represented amongst the hostages who were eventually taken to Iraq or amongst those who remained in hiding in Kuwait; there were over a million expatriates working in the emirate and in Iraq at the time of the invasion.
Oil prices rocketed as the world reacted to the fact that Saddam Hussein was not only in possession of Iraqi and Kuwaiti oil fields but also virtually in control of 40 per cent of the world’s known oil reserves; Saudi Arabia’s oil fields were within range of his missiles and three hours’ drive away for his armoured divisions massed on the borders.
President George Bush faced the most serious crisis to confront the world since the Korean War. As troops of the 82nd Airborne Division landed in Saudi Arabia a few days after the invasion, he addressed his nation and the world, declaring that American forces were being deployed to defend Saudi Arabia against an ‘imminent’ Iraqi attack. The arrival of US forces was the manifestation of the nightmare long feared by conservative pro-Western Arab regimes, resulting in a show of sympathy towards Iraq from elements of the Arab populace throughout the Middle East - sympathy which Saddam Hussein was quick to exploit by linking any solution to the Kuwaiti crisis with one for the Palestinian problem.
Sadly, the people who, at the time this book was written, were taking a moral stand against the Iraqi dictator are themselves far from blameless. It was they who, for one reason or another, allowed him thirteen years of freedom to establish a ruthless and brutal dictatorship supported by a powerful war machine. Worse, in trying to deal with the 1990 crisis, they allied themselves with regimes whose records on human rights were little better than that of the Ba’athists in Baghdad.
Was Saddam Hussein really planning to invade Saudi Arabia? Or was America’s military response just an excuse to cover up a major blunder in US foreign policy? The Americans had continually misread Saddam Hussein’s hints and signals and had sent him the wrong messages in return. Moreover, why had American analysts failed to see the ‘writing on the wall’ to such an extent that the Pentagon had no contingency plans to cope with an Iraqi invasion of any of the Gulf States? One valid question asked by a small number of people in the United States after the invasion was ‘What happened to $50 billion worth of advanced weapon systems sold to the Saudis for their self-defence over the past few years?’
On the second day after American troops started arriving in Saudi Arabia, the joke being told in a cafe in Jordan’s capital, Amman, where Saddam Hussein enjoyed the most popular support outside Iraq, went as follows: Saddam Hussein was discussing the plans to outmanoeuvre the Americans who were about to land and he asked his chief of staff, ‘How long did it take your men to capture Kuwait?’
The chief of staff replied, ‘Six hours, sir.’
The president asked, ‘If we were to take Saudi Arabia?’
‘Twelve hours, sir.’
‘And the United Arab Emirates?’
‘Another three hours’ drive, sir.’
‘What about Bahrain?’
‘We can take it by fax, sir.’
The Roots of Conflict
1 Lines in the SandOne Sunday evening in June 1961, twenty-four-year-old Saddam Hussein al-Takriti sat in the Indiana Cafe in Dukkie, the university quarter of Cairo. He had become a familiar face for the past year after registering at a sixth form college. Now a member of a Ba’ath party ‘sleeping cell’, Saddam lived nearby in a flat by the Nile. When the evening news bulletin was broadcast on Cairo Radio, Saddam was playing dominoes, drinking sweet black tea and smoking his water-pipe. He suddenly dropped the dominoes, pausing to listen motionlessly to a two-minute item from an Egyptian correspondent in Baghdad. Not bothering to wait for the end of the report, he jumped into a taxi and asked the driver to take him over the Attahrir Bridge, and again over the Qasr al-Nile Bridge, to the late-night post office in Rue Parliament. Quickly drafting a telegram, he sent congratulations and a message supporting the policies and the moves of the man whom he had tried to assassinate eighteen months earlier. It was this botched murder attempt which had forced him into exile, and he was still wanted for a number of crimes in his homeland, Iraq.
The news item that had so excited Saddam was a report on a press conference held by the Iraqi Prime Minister, General Abd al-Karim Qasim, in Baghdad to announce that Kuwait, which had won its independence from Britain only six days earlier, was to become part of Iraq.
Saddam sent his telegram without first discussing the matter with Midhat Juma’h, the man who had recruited him into the cell of Ba’athist exiles in Cairo a year earlier. Juma’h was the most senior member of the cell and had direct links with the Egyptian intelligence service. The Ba’ath party was in fact opposed to General Qasim’s move to annex Kuwait for a number of reasons, the most obvious of which was that it needed Cairo’s support if it was to make a bid for power.
Britain had recognised Kuwait’s independence on 19th June 1961, abrogating an agreement signed in 1899 which had made the emirate a British protectorate - an agreement which Baghdad had always refused to recognise.
During his press conference a few days later, General Qasim said, ‘Kuwait is an inseparable part of Iraq; the Iraqi republic has decided not to…
