From henceforth, all operations against Iraq that concerned the search for, and destruction of, the device the Allies assumed to be code-named Qubth-ut-Allah, or the Fist of God, would be undertaken under the cover of active measures designed to terminate Saddam Hussein himself, or for some other plausible reason.
Two such attempts had in fact already been made. Two locations had been identified at which the Iraqi President might be expected to reside, at least temporarily. No one could say precisely when, for the Rais moved like a will-o’-the-wisp from hiding place to hiding place when he was not in the bunker in Baghdad.
Continuous overhead surveillance watched the two locations. One was a villa out in the countryside forty miles from Baghdad, the other a big mobile home converted into a war caravan and planning center.
On one occasion the aerial watchers had seen mobile missile batteries and light armor moving into position around the villa. A flight of Strike Eagles went in and blew the villa apart. It was a false alarm—the bird had flown.
On the second occasion, two days before the end of January, the large trailer had been seen to move to a new location. Again an attack went in; again the target was not at home.
On both occasions the fliers took enormous risks in pressing their attacks, for the Iraqi gunners fought back furiously. The failure to terminate the Iraqi dictator on both occasions left the Allies in a quandary.
They simply did not know Saddam Hussein’s precise movements. The fact was, no one knew them, outside of a tiny group of personal bodyguards drawn from the Amn-al-Khass, commanded by his own son Kusay.
In reality, he was moving around most of the time. Despite the assumption that Saddam was in his bunker deep underground for the whole of the air war, he was really in residence there for less than half that time. But his safety was assured by a series of elaborate deceptions and false trails. On several occasions he was “seen” by his own cheering troops—cynics said they were cheering because they were the ones not at the front being pounded by the Buffs. The man the Iraqi troops saw on all such occasions was one of the doubles who could pass for Saddam among all but his closest intimates.
At other times, convoys of limousines, up to a dozen, swept through the city of Baghdad with blackened windows, causing the citizenry to believe their Rais was inside one of the cars. Not so; these cavalcades were all decoys. When he moved, he sometimes went in a single unmarked car.
Even among his innermost circle, the security measures prevailed. Cabinet members alerted for a conference with him would be given just five minutes to leave their residences, get into their cars, and follow a motorcycle outrider. Even then, the destination was not the meeting place.
They would be driven to a parked bus with blackened windows, there to find all the other ministers sitting in the dark. There was a screen between the ministers and the driver. Even the driver had to follow an Amn-al-Khass motorcyclist to the eventual destination.
Behind the driver, the ministers, generals, and advisers sat in darkness like schoolboys on a mystery tour, never knowing where they were going or, afterward, where they had been.
In most cases these meetings were held in large and secluded villas, commandeered for the day and vacated before nightfall. A special detail of the Amn-al-Khass had no other job than to find such a villa when the Rais wanted a meeting, hold the villa owners incommunicado, and let them return home when the Rais was long gone.
Small wonder the Allies could not find him. But they tried—until the first week of February. After that, all assassination attempts were called off, and the military never understood why.
Chip Barber arrived at the British villa in Riyadh just after midday on the last day of January. After the greetings, the four men sat and waited out the hours until they could contact Martin, if he was still there.
“I suppose we have a deadline on this?” asked Laing. Barber nodded.
“February twentieth. Stormin’ Norman wants to march the troops in there on February twentieth.”
Paxman whistled. “Twenty days, hell. Is Uncle Sam going to pick up the tab for this?”
“Yep. The Director has already authorized Jericho’s one million dollars to go into his account now, today. For the location of the device, assuming there’s one and only one of them, we’ll pay the bastard five.”
“Five million dollars?” expostulated Laing. “Christ, no one had ever paid anything like that for information!”
Barber shrugged. “Jericho, whoever he is, ranks as a mercenary. He wants money, nothing else. So let him earn it. There’s a catch. Arabs haggle, we don’t. Five days after he gets the message, we drop the ante by half a million a day until he comes up with the precise location. He has to know that.”
The three Britishers mulled over the sums that constituted more than all their salaries combined for a lifetime’s work.
“Well,” remarked Laing, “that should put the breeze up him.”
The message was composed during the late afternoon and evening. First, contact would have to be established with Martin, who would have to confirm with preagreed code words that he was still there and a free man. Then Riyadh would tell him of the offer to Jericho, in detail, and press on him the massive urgency now involved.
The men ate sparingly, toying with food, hard pressed to cope with the tension in the room. At half past ten Simon Paxman went into the radio shack with the others and spoke the message into the tape machine. The spoken passage was speeded to two hundred times its real duration and came out at just under two seconds.
At ten seconds after eleven-fifteen, the senior radio engineer sent a brief signal—the “are you there”
message. Three minutes later, there was a tiny burst of what sounded like static. The satellite dish caught it, and when it was slowed down, the five listening men heard the voice of Mike Martin: “Black Bear to Rocky Mountain, receiving. Over.”
There was an explosion of relief in the Riyadh villa, four mature men pumping each other’s backs like football fans whose team has won the Super Bowl.
Those who have never been there can ill imagine the sensation of learning that “one of ours” far behind the lines is still, somehow, alive and free.
“Fourteen fucking days he’s sat there,” marveled Barber. “Why the hell didn’t the bastard pull out when he was told?”
“Because he’s a stubborn idiot,” muttered Laing. “Just as well.”
The more dispassionate radio man was sending another brief interrogatory. He wanted five words to confirm—even though the oscillograph told him the voice pattern matched that of Martin—that the SAS
major was not speaking under duress. Fourteen days is more than enough to break a man.
His message back to Baghdad was as short as it could be:
“Of Nelson and the North, I say again, of Nelson and the North. Out.”
Another three minutes elapsed. In Baghdad, Martin crouched on the floor of his shack at the bottom of First Secretary Kulikov’s garden, caught the brief blip of sound, spoke his reply, pressed the speedup button, and transmitted a tenth-of-a-second burst back to the Saudi capital.
The listeners heard him say “Sing the brilliant day’s renown.” The radio man grinned.
“That’s him, sir. Alive and kicking and free.”
“Is that a poem?” asked Barber.
“The real second line,” said Laing, “is: ‘Sing the glorious day’s renown.’ If he’d got it right, he’d have been talking with a gun to his temple. In which case ...” He shrugged.
The radio man sent the final message, the real message, and closed down. Barber reached into his briefcase.
“I know it may not be strictly according to local custom, but diplomatic life has certain privileges.”
“I say,” murmured Gray. “Dom Perignon. Do you think Langley can afford it?”
“Langley,” said Barber, “has just put five million greenbacks on the poker table. I guess it can offer you guys a bottle of fizz.”
&nbs
p; “Jolly decent,” said Paxman.
A single week had brought about a transformation in Edith Hardenberg—a week, that is, and the effects of being in love.
With Karim’s gentle encouragement she had been to a coiffeur in Grinzing, who had let down her hair and cut and styled it, chin-length, so that it fell about her face, filling out her narrow features and giving her a hint of mature glamour.
Her lover had selected a range of makeup preparations with her shy approval; nothing garish, just a hint of eyeliner, foundation cream, a little powder, and a touch of lipstick at the mouth.
At the bank, Wolfgang Gemütlich was privately aghast, secretly watching her cross the room, taller now in one-inch heels. It was not even the heels or the hair or the makeup that distressed him, though he would have flatly banned them all had Frau Gemütlich even mentioned the very idea. What perturbed him was her air, a sense of self-confidence when she presented him with his letters for signing or took dictation.
He knew, of course, what had happened. One of those foolish girls downstairs had persuaded her to spend money. That was the key to it all, spending money. It always, in his experience, led to ruin, and he feared for the worst.
Her natural shyness had not entirely evaporated, and in the bank she was as retiring as ever in speech if not quite in manner. But in Karim’s presence, when they were alone, she constantly amazed herself with her boldness. For twenty years things physical had been abhorrent to her, and now she was like a traveler on a voyage of slow and wondering discovery, half abashed and horrified, half curious and excited. So their loving—at first wholly one-sided—became more exploratory and mutual. The first time she touched him “down there,” she thought she would die of shock and mortification, but to her surprise she had survived.
On the evening of the third of February he brought home to her flat a box wrapped in gift paper with a ribbon.
“Karim, you mustn’t do things like this. You are spending too much.”
He took her in his arms and stroked her hair. She had learned to love it when he did that.
“Look, little kitten, my father is wealthy. He makes me a generous allowance. Would you prefer me to spend it in nightclubs?”
She liked it also when he teased her. Of course, Karim would never go to one of those terrible places.
So she accepted the perfumes and the toiletries that once, only two weeks ago, she would never have touched.
“Can I open it?” she asked.
“That’s what it’s there for.”
At first she did not understand what they were. The contents of the box seemed to be a froth of silks and lace and colors. When she understood, because she had seen advertisements in magazines—not the sort she bought, of course—she turned bright pink.
“Karim, I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”
“Yes, you could,” he said, and grinned. “Go on, kitten. Go into the bedroom and try. Close the door—I won’t look.”
She laid the things out on the bed and stared at them. She, Edith Hardenberg? Never. There were stockings and girdles, panties and bras, garters and short nighties, in black, pink, scarlet, cream, and beige. Things in filmy lace or trimmed with it, silky-smooth fabrics over which the fingertips ran as over ice.
She was an hour alone in that room before she opened the door in a bathrobe. Karim put down his coffee cup, rose, and walked over. He stared down at her with a kind smile and began to undo the sash that held the robe together. She blushed red again and could not meet his gaze. She looked away. He let the robe fall open.
“Oh, kitten,” he said softly, “you are sensational.”
She did not know what to say, so she just put her arms around his neck, no longer frightened or horrified when her thigh touched the hardness in his jeans.
When they had made love, she rose and went to the bathroom. On her return she stood and looked down at him. There was no part of him that she did not love. She sat on the edge of the bed and ran a forefinger down the faint scar along one side of his chin, the one he said he had sustained when falling through a greenhouse in his father’s orchard outside Amman.
He opened his eyes, smiled, and reached up for her face; she gripped his hand and nuzzled the fingers, stroking the signet ring on the smallest finger, the ring with the pale pink opal that his mother had given him.
“What shall we do tonight?” she asked.
“Let’s go out,” he said. “Sirk’s at the Bristol.”
“You like steak too much.”
He reached behind her and held her small buttocks under the filmy gauze.
“That’s the steak I like.” He grinned.
“Stop it—you’re terrible, Karim!” she said. “I must dress.”
She pulled away and caught sight of herself in the mirror. How could she have changed so much? she thought. How could she ever have brought herself to wear lingerie? Then she realized why. For Karim, her Karim, whom she loved and who loved her, she would do anything. Love might have come late in her life, but it had come with the force of a mountain torrent.
United States Department of State
Washington, D.C. 20520
February 5, 1991
MEMORANDUM FOR: Mr. James Baker
FROM: Political Intelligence and Analysis Group
SUBJECT: Assassination of Saddam Hussein
CLASSIFICATION: EYES ONLY
It will certainly not have escaped your attention that since the inception of hostilities between the Coalition Air Forces flying out of Saudi Arabia and neighboring states, and the Republic of Iraq, at least two and possibly more attempts have been made to achieve the demise of the Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein.
All such attempts have been by aerial bombardment and exclusively by the United States. This group therefore considers it urgent to spell out the likely consequences of a successful attempt to assassinate Mr. Hussein.
The ideal outcome would, of course, be for any successor regime to the present Ba’ath Party dictatorship, set up under the auspices of the victorious Coalition forces, to take the form of a humane and democratic government.
We believe such a hope to be illusory.
In the first place, Iraq is not nor ever was a united country. It is barely a generation away from being a patchwork quilt of rival, often warring tribes. It contains in almost equal parts two potentially hostile sects of Islam, the Sunni and Shi’a faiths, plus three Christian minorities. To these one should add the Kurdish nation in the north, vigorously pursuing its search for separate independence.
In the second place, there has never been a shred of democratic experience in Iraq, which has passed from Turkish to Hashemite to Ba’ath Party rule without the benefit of an intervening interlude of democracy as we understand it.
In the event, therefore, of the sudden end of the present dictatorship by assassination, there are only two realistic scenarios.
The first would be an attempt to impose from outside a consensus government embracing all the principal factions along the lines of a broadly based coalition.
In the view of this group, such a structure would survive in power for an extremely limited period.
Traditional and age-old rivalries would need little time literally to pull it apart.
The Kurds would certainly use the opportunity, so long denied, to opt for secession and the establishment of their own republic in the north. A weak central government in Baghdad based upon agreement by consensus would be impotent to prevent such a move.
The Turkish reaction would be predictable and furious, since Turkey’s own Kurdish minority along the border areas would lose no time in joining their fellow Kurds across the border in a much invigorated resistance to Turkish rule.
To the southeast, the Shi’a majority around Basra and the Shatt-al-Arab would certainly find good reason to make overtures to Teheran. Iran would be sorely tempted to avenge the slaughter of its young people in the recent Iran-Iraq war by entertaining those overtures in the hope of annexing southeastern Iraq in
the face of the helplessness of Baghdad.
The pro-Western Gulf States and Saudi Arabia would be precipitated into something approaching panic at the thought of an Iran reaching to the very border of Kuwait.
Farther north, the Arabs of Iranian Arabistan would find common cause with their fellow Arabs across the border in Iraq, a move that would be vigorously repressed by the Ayatollahs in Teheran.
In the rump of Iraq we would almost certainly see an outbreak of intertribal fighting to settle old scores and establish supremacy over what was left.
We have all observed with distress the civil war now raging between Serbs and Croats in the former Yugoslavia. So far, this fighting has not yet spread to Bosnia, where a third component force in the form of the Bosnian Moslems awaits. When the fighting enters Bosnia, as one day it will, the slaughter will be even more appalling and even more intractable.
Nonetheless, this group believes that the misery of Yugoslavia will pale into insignificance compared with the scenario now painted for an Iraq in full disintegration. In such a case, one can look forward to a major civil war in the rump of the Iraqi heartland, four border wars, and the complete destabilization of the Gulf. The refugee problem alone would amount to millions.
The only other viable scenario is for Saddam Hussein to be succeeded by another general or senior member of the Ba’ath hierarchy. But as all those in the present hierarchy are as bloodstained as their leader, it is hard to see what benefits would accrue from the replacement of one monster by another, possibly even a cleverer despot.
The ideal, though admittedly not perfect, solution must therefore be the retention of the status quo in Iraq, except that all weapons of mass destruction must be destroyed and the conventional weapons power be so degraded as not to present a threat to any neighboring state for a minimum of a decade.
It could well be argued that the continuing human rights abuses of the present Iraqi regime, if it is allowed to survive, will prove most distressing. This is beyond any doubt. Yet the West has been required to witness terrible scenes in China, Russia, Vietnam, Tibet, East Timor, Cambodia, and many other parts of the world. It is simply not possible for the United States to impose humanity on a worldwide scale unless it is prepared to enter into permanent global war.