He (Saddam) takes his secrets to the
grave.
How the West armed Saddam, fed him intelligence on his 'enemies',
equipped him for atrocities - and then made sure he wouldn't
squeal
Published: 31 December 2006
We've shut him up. The moment Saddam's hooded executioner pulled
the lever of the trapdoor in Baghdad yesterday morning,
Washington's secrets were safe. The shameless, outrageous, covert
military support which the United States - and Britain - gave to
Saddam for more than a decade remains the one terrible story which
our presidents and prime ministers do not want the world to
remember. And now Saddam, who knew the full extent of that Western
support - given to him while he was perpetrating some of the worst
atrocities since the Second World War - is dead.
Gone is the man who personally received the CIA's help in
destroying the Iraqi communist party. After Saddam seized power, US
intelligence gave his minions the home addresses of communists in
Baghdad and other cities in an effort to destroy the Soviet Union's
influence in Iraq. Saddam's mukhabarat visited every home, arrested
the occupants and their families, and butchered the lot. Public
hanging was for plotters; the communists, their wives and children,
were given special treatment - extreme torture before execution at
Abu Ghraib.
There is growing evidence across the Arab world that Saddam held a
series of meetings with senior American officials prior to his
invasion of Iran in 1980 - both he and the US administration
believed that the Islamic Republic would collapse if Saddam sent
his legions across the border - and the Pentagon was instructed to
assist Iraq's military machine by providing intelligence on the
Iranian order of battle. One frosty day in 1987, not far from
Cologne, I met the German arms dealer who initiated those first
direct contacts between Washington and Baghdad - at America's
request.
"Mr Fisk... at the very beginning of the war, in September of 1980,
I was invited to go to the Pentagon," he said. "There I was handed
the very latest US satellite photographs of the Iranian front
lines. You could see everything on the pictures. There were the
Iranian gun emplacements in Abadan and behind Khorramshahr, the
lines of trenches on the eastern side of the Karun river, the tank
revetments - thousands of them - all the way up the Iranian side of
the border towards Kurdistan. No army could want more than this.
And I travelled with these maps from Washington by air to Frankfurt
and from Frankfurt on Iraqi Airways straight to Baghdad. The Iraqis
were very, very grateful!"
I was with Saddam's forward commandos at the time, under Iranian
shellfire, noting how the Iraqi forces aligned their artillery
positions far back from the battle front with detailed maps of the
Iranian lines. Their shelling against Iran outside Basra allowed
the first Iraqi tanks to cross the Karun within a week. The
commander of that tank unit cheerfully refused to tell me how he
had managed to choose the one river crossing undefended by Iranian
armour. Two years ago, we met again, in Amman and his junior
officers called him "General" - the rank awarded him by Saddam
after that tank attack east of Basra, courtesy of Washington's
intelligence information.
Iran's official history of the eight-year war with Iraq states that
Saddam first used chemical weapons against it on 13 January 1981.
AP's correspondent in Baghdad, Mohamed Salaam, was taken to see the
scene of an Iraqi military victory east of Basra. "We started
counting - we walked miles and miles in this fucking desert, just
counting," he said. "We got to 700 and got muddled and had to start
counting again ... The Iraqis had used, for the first time, a
combination - the nerve gas would paralyse their bodies ... the
mustard gas would drown them in their own lungs. That's why they
spat blood."
At the time, the Iranians claimed that this terrible cocktail had
been given to Saddam by the US. Washington denied this. But the
Iranians were right. The lengthy negotiations which led to
America's complicity in this atrocity remain secret - Donald
Rumsfeld was one of President Ronald Reagan's point-men at this
period - although Saddam undoubtedly knew every detail. But a
largely unreported document, "United States Chemical and Biological
Warfare-related Dual-use exports to Iraq and their possible impact
on the Health Consequences of the Persian Gulf War", stated that
prior to 1985 and afterwards, US companies had sent
government-approved shipments of biological agents to Iraq. These
included Bacillus anthracis, which produces anthrax, andEscherichia
coli (E. coli). That Senate report concluded that: "The United
States provided the Government of Iraq with 'dual use' licensed
materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical,
biological and missile-systems programs, including ... chemical
warfare agent production facility plant and technical drawings,
chemical warfare filling equipment."
Nor was the Pentagon unaware of the extent of Iraqi use of chemical
weapons. In 1988, for example, Saddam gave his personal permission
for Lt-Col Rick Francona, a US defence intelligence officer - one
of 60 American officers who were secretly providing members of the
Iraqi general staff with detailed information on Iranian
deployments, tactical planning and bomb damage assessments - to
visit the Fao peninsula after Iraqi forces had recaptured the town
from the Iranians. He reported back to Washington that the Iraqis
had used chemical weapons to achieve their victory. The senior
defence intelligence officer at the time, Col Walter Lang, later
said that the use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis "was not
a matter of deep strategic concern".
We still don't know - and with Saddam's execution we will probably
never know - the extent of US credits to Iraq, which began in 1982.
The initial tranche, the sum of which was spent on the purchase of
American weapons from Jordan and Kuwait, came to $300m. By 1987,
Saddam was being promised $1bn in credit. By 1990, just before
Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, annual trade between Iraq and the US
had grown to $3.5bn a year. Pressed by Saddam's foreign minister,
Tariq Aziz, to continue US credits, James Baker then Secretary of
State, but the same James Baker who has just produced a report
intended to drag George Bush from the catastrophe of present- day
Iraq - pushed for new guarantees worth $1bn from the US.
In 1989, Britain, which had been giving its own covert military
assistance to Saddam guaranteed £250m to Iraq shortly after the
arrest of Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft in Baghdad. Bazoft, who
had been investigating an explosion at a factory at Hilla which was
using the very chemical components sent by the US, was later
hanged. Within a month of Bazoft's arrest William Waldegrave, then
a Foreign Office minister, said: "I doubt if there is any future
market of such a scale anywhere where the UK is potentially so
well-placed if we play our diplomatic hand correctly... A few more
Bazofts or another bout of internal oppression would make it more
difficult."
Even more repulsive were the remarks of the then Deputy Prime
Minister, Geoffrey Howe, on relaxing controls on British arms sales
to Iraq. He kept this secret, he wrote, because "it would look very
cynical if, so soon after expressing outrage about the treatment of
the Kurds, we adopt a more flexible approach to arms sales".
Saddam knew, too, the secrets of the attack on the USS Stark when,
on 17 May 1987, an Iraqi jet launched a missile attack on the
American frigate, killing more than a sixth of the crew and almost
sinking the vessel. The US accepted Saddam's excuse that the ship
was mistaken for an Iranian vessel and allowed Saddam to refuse
their request to interview the Iraqi pilot.
The whole truth died with Saddam Hussein in the Baghdad execution
chamber yesterday. Many in Washington and London must have sighed
with relief that the old man had been silenced for ever.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2114403.ece
