Raid on the Sun(3)

One year later Saddam found himself waiting on a darkening Baghdad street not far from the West German embassy. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, awkwardly trying to conceal the submachine gun beneath his cloak. How far Hussein had advanced in the Ba’th Party was confirmed by his selection as part of the hit team to assassinate the repressive Prime Minister Qassem, who had fallen out of favor with the radical Ba’this. As Qassem’s car pulled to the curb on the other side of the street, a deafening blast of machine gun fire mowed down everything in sight, bodyguards and hit men alike, throwing the scene into bedlam. In the ensuing confusion the prime minister’s bodyguards, recovering from their initial shock, shoved Qassem into a passing taxi, which rushed him safely to the hospital.

As the official legend would later explain the apparent screw-up, Saddam, “when he found himself face to face with the dictator, was unable to restrain himself. He forgot all his instructions and opened fire.” Saddam’s job, in fact, was simply to provide cover for the hit men, who were to converge on the car from two sides and liquidate Qassem. Instead, Saddam panicked and opened fire on everyone, including fellow conspirator Abdul-Whahab al-Ghariri, who managed only two shots, one into Qassem’s shoulder, before being dropped by Saddam’s deadly fusillade. In the counterfire, Hussein was wounded in the leg and fled for his life, leaving behind al-Ghariri, who was quickly identified by Qassem’s security team. Al-Ghariri’s name led them to the rest of the team, and in short order Qassem’s agents were hunting down one by one the surviving conspirators, including Saddam.

Again, according to the official Ba’thist story, Saddam, in pain and under sentence of death, dug the bullet out of his leg with a knife and, helped by kindly nomadic Bedouins and simple peasants, limped his way to Tikrit disguised as an Arab wanderer. In truth, a local doctor removed the bullet, and Saddam’s uncle helped him cross the border by car into Syria and then finally to Cairo, where Ba’th Party loyalists took the young rebel in and enrolled him at the university.

For the next decade Hussein lived meagerly in a modest student tenement building not far from Cairo University, where he took up studying law. He was supported by a monthly government stipend granted by Egyptian president Gamal Nasser’s regime, which had made Cairo a safe harbor and side station for revolutionaries and Arab nationalist dissidents from across the Middle East. For most of the next decade, Saddam lived cheaply and spent his time studying and working for the Ba’th Party. Occasionally, when the young Arab nationalist would run short of funds, the kindhearted bawab, or porter, of his building would loan him money. (Years later, after Saddam rose to power, he sent to Cairo for the old bawab and bestowed upon him a brand-new house as a reward for his earlier kindnesses.) The many dissident exiles in Cairo grew together to form a tight-knit community of idealists and revolutionaries. Sporting ethnic kaffiyehs and colorful regional dress from their various nations of exile, the foreign students, dissidents, and party chiefs gathered regularly in the capital’s downtown cafés and coffeehouses to argue politics and promote socialism and pan-Arab nationalism. Among the most strident of the Arab one-worlders was Saddam Hussein, who lobbied loudly and tirelessly for his Ba’th Party back in Iraq.

In 1968, the Iraqi Ba’th Party finalized secret plans to take over the Iraqi government. Saddam promptly left his law studies and returned to Iraq to help foment the revolution. Hussein worked his way up the ranks to become head of the Ba’th security brigade, whose function was to eliminate enemies and protect party leaders, among them Saddam’s cousin, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, a former schoolteacher who had become head of the Iraqi Ba’th. Adapting his own version of the carrot and stick—tarhib and targhid (“terror” and “enticement”)—Hussein formed friendships and alliances when they furthered his career and broke them when they did not. He displayed a gift for understanding human nature at its most basic level and grasped early on that physical punishment was a great motivator, but fear of physical punishment was even greater. He found he had only to make one or two particularly dramatic examples and a reputation for his ruthlessness and retribution would grow by itself—the myth, in fact, far outstripping the reality. Years later, after he had become a complete tyrant, Hussein arrested a general, Omar al-Hazzaa, who had been heard to speak badly about him. He did not just sentence al-Hazzaa to death. Saddam first had al-Hazzaa’s tongue cut out and then had his son executed as well. His home was bulldozed flat and his wife and surviving children turned out on the street. Such horrors, Hussein found, were a much greater deterrent than simply planting the general in the ground.