On the other hand, the idea of creating an atomic bomb from scratch took his breath away. It was truly Faustian: to be given every resource, the latest technology, the country’s finest minds to compete against the West’s best and brightest to build what was truly the ultimate prize in nuclear physics. And yet, what would he sacrifice—his morals, his professional ethics . . . his soul? Years later, Hamza would feel pangs of regret about his part in enabling Saddam’s ambitious plans to become a nuclear state, but as a young scientist eager to prove himself, trapped inside Hussein’s crazy world of intimidation and dreams of world power, he could not resist. Over al-Mallah’s dining room table that night, Hamza, al-Mallah, and Sharif began planning the creation of the first Arab bomb. And, they agreed at once, they would follow the lead of the Israelis.
Once he had dispensed with the Soviets, Hussein began searching for a new partner and, like the Israelis before, he quickly discovered the French. For all their cultured sophistication, in truth, the French loved nothing more than a good bargain. And no one knew how to bargain better than Saddam Hussein.
Early on, Hussein had learned that people were motivated by two things: fear and greed, or at least the prospect of easy money. For the first, Hussein turned to his stick, the Mukhabarat, Iraq’s sadistic secret police; for the latter, he relied on an oil-reserve carrot of $45 billion. He had the power and the wealth. What he didn’t have was time. The ticking clock, as with all dictators, was his enemy—the one thing he could not control.
Indeed, Saddam’s obsession with speed was a constant torture to Baghdad’s construction industry. Neophytes to government service quickly discovered the dangers inherent in working for Hussein. Entifadh Qanbar—who years later would flee Iraq through the dangerous no-man’s-land of the northern Kurdish border and ultimately return with the exile group headed by Ahman Chalabi in 2003—was a young, bright engineer working in Baghdad in the seventies. Short, dark, full of nervous energy, Qanbar looked like an Iraqi Joe Pesci. He had been hired to refurbish Baghdad’s historical palaces as part of Hussein’s vision to restore the city to its Mesopotamian glory. At the time, a friend from engineering school was bidding on his first government contract: a three-story government chemical plant in south Baghdad. Among many stipulations, the bidding specs for the plant called for a one-year construction schedule. Qanbar’s friend had always been a bit of a character—roguish, a gambler who was not averse to cutting corners. In the army he would routinely forge weekend passes for himself at a time when the brutal officers of the Iraqi military were shooting soldiers for far lesser transgressions. Determined to win the bid, the engineer slashed his construction time to six months and submitted his estimate to Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law and the minister overseeing all military procurements. Following standard procedure, Kamel read the proposal, accepted it, and automatically cut the engineer’s deadline in half, to three months, before sending it on to Hussein, who had to approve all government contracts. Hussein read the proposal, okayed it, then slashed the schedule in half once again, this time to forty-five days.
“You have forty-five days,” Kamel informed the shocked engineer. “I’ll give you all the help you need. You can change what you want, requisition whatever you need, charge whatever you decide. But you have to have this done in forty-five days!”
To his horror, the next morning a detail of Hussein’s security men arrived and surrounded the engineer’s work crew and the construction site. No one was allowed to leave until the job was finished. For the next two weeks the engineer and his crew—carpenters, masons, bricklayers, painters, laborers—worked day and night, eating and sleeping in shifts on the construction site. Dispensing with normal construction processes of erecting a building floor by floor, from foundation to roof, the crew poured the foundation, and while it dried, threw up all three floors at once—plus exterior brick walls and roofing, all braced by scaffolding and girders—and then allowed it to dry as one piece in place. Two weeks later they tore down all the scaffolding and retaining braces and there it was, a brand-new building.
The contract also called for a five-hundred-space parking lot. Normally such a lot would be graded out and then refilled gradually with dirt while being compacted every two feet by tamping machinery to ensure a stable foundation. Once solid and leveled, the asphalt would be laid and rolled flat. It’s a time-consuming process. But with two days to complete the entire job, the engineer simply dug out a three-acre rectangular pit and then filled the hole in with thousands of cubic yards of concrete. Scores of cement trucks lined up for miles, pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars of concrete for twenty-four hours straight. When the concrete dried, it was asphalted over. Instant parking lot—and one of the most expensive pieces of land in Baghdad.