Raid on the Sun(11)

In fourteen days Saddam Hussein’s military, biological, and chemical weapons division had a new research building. Qanbar’s friend charged the government one dinar a brick—a rate that would translate in American dollars to charging three dollars apiece for twenty-five-cent bricks. Kamel and military procurement did not raise an eyebrow at the exorbitant fee.

With outsiders, Saddam’s business strategy was less Draconian but just as direct: You give me what I want—hard-to-get items like tanks and uranium and nuclear reactors—and I will give you rich contracts—obscenely rich contracts. This was in essence what he told Jacques Chirac during the French prime minister’s groundbreaking visit to Baghdad in early 1974. It turned out to be an offer the French P.M. could not refuse.

The infamous OPEC oil embargo of 1973–74 had just ended, sending gasoline prices to unimaginably high levels and shifting a trillion dollars of global wealth suddenly eastward. France was already dependent on Iraq for 20 percent of its oil. As part of the deal, Hussein offered France 70 million barrels of oil a year at present market prices for ten years. In addition, Iraq would purchase billions of dollars of French military hardware, including tanks, helicopters, antiaircraft missiles, radar, and one hundred Mirage F-1 fighters. Chirac practically trembled when Saddam threw in gratis contracts to purchase 100,000 Peugeots and Renaults in two blocks of 50,000 each. And as a final sweetener, the French would develop a planned billion-dollar lake resort outside Habbaniyah, the location of a large air force base west of Baghdad. In return, Saddam got his nuclear reactor.

In September 1975, Hussein entered Paris like a conquering pasha out of 1001 Arabian Nights. Flanked by a troupe of barrel-chested bodyguards, he led a parade of festively clad Iraqi fishermen bearing flaming braziers of roasted Tigris River fish down the banks of the Seine. As news cameras rolled, Jacques Chirac and various government ministers of President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s administration gathered around the Middle Eastern cooking demonstration, tittering and smiling gamely as they sampled bites of fish served on aluminum foil, Baghdad-style.

“C’est bon,” they declared, fastidiously wiping fish oil from their fingers with paper napkins.

The fishermen, their hair tousled and looking as though they had slept in their clothes on the plane ride over, moved self-consciously between the fish and the French, exchanging anxious glances lest someone make a mistake. Faux pas in the service of the Great Uncle could often be fatal. But nothing was amiss this beautiful fall night along the glittering bank of the Rive Gauche, while above it all Saddam looked on, beaming like the proud father.

Those of the educated class back in Baghdad would cringe in mortification at the television news images of their leader, like some cartoon Ahab, trying to impress the gourmand diplomats with fish in foil. But smiling in his trademark black fedora, Saddam was enjoying his own private joke. As wags later quipped, he knew Chirac and his entire cabinet would happily have eaten old tires from the Tigris if it would have bought them hundreds of millions of dollars in cheap oil.

Hussein’s trip was the reciprocal visit to seal the deal struck in Baghdad. Hamza and his colleagues had picked out the perfect reactor for the Nuclear Research Center: the Osiris reactor, a huge, aluminum-domed, top-of-the-line research reactor, named for the Egyptian god of the underworld. France would oversee the production, shipping, and construction of the reactor and train Iraqi technicians in its operation. Ironically, as it turned out, many of the French companies contracted to do the work were the exact same government-approved outfits that had secretly built Israel’s Dimona reactor a decade earlier. France also expanded the original nuclear trade treaty to include yet another, smaller research reactor, “Isis,” named after Osiris’s wife, which would be erected alongside Osiris. Finally, in a rare and controversial decision, France agreed to supply Iraq with seventy-two kilograms of highly regulated enriched, or “weapons-grade,” uranium for start-up fuel. This last agreement quickly caught the attention of the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency, which kept a keen watch on any movement of U235 because it could be readily converted to use in an atomic bomb.

The reactor “listed” for $150 million. The price tag for Saddam was $300 million.

“We were happy to pay,” Hamza would recall later. “After all, who else was going to sell us a nuclear reactor?”

Euphoric, Hussein rechristened the nuclear reactor Osiraq (incorporating the name Iraq), or “Osirak” in English, and the Nuclear Research Center “Tammuz,” after the Arabic word for July, in honor of the month of the Ba’th revolution. Tammuz would form the centerpiece of Iraq’s new nuclear energy industry centered at al-Tuwaitha, “the truncheon,” in the brown flatlands of the Tigris.