Throughout 2002, for his speeches to Congress and his military commanders, in his folksy weekly radio talks to the nation, and in meetings with world leaders, Bush drew on passages in Graham’s leather-bound gift to reinforce the notion that the War on Terrorism had the total approval of God. Holy war—the jihad of Islamic fundamentalism—had taken on a new meaning.
President Bush’s insistence that he would conduct a preemptive strike against Iraq was also deeply rooted in the religious faith of the neoconservatives around him.
Against that background of increasing religious fervor, Mossad monitored Washington’s progress to try to assassinate Saddam Hussein—a move that could head off an all-out war against Iraq.
In early February 2003, after a telephone conversation between Ariel Sharon and President Bush, Israel’s prime minister told Dagan he had offered to allow Mossad to become directly involved in the assassination of Saddam. Bush had accepted.
In Tel Aviv, the operation planning followed a well-tried procedure. First, previous attempts to kill Saddam were examined to understand why they had failed. In the past ten years there had been fifteen separate attacks on the Iraqi leader. They had been sponsored by either Mossad or MI6. Their failure was due to inadequate planning, or enlisting Iraqi assassins who had either been discovered by Saddam’s formidable security apparatus, or simply been unable to get close to their target.
Mossad had made one previous attempt itself, in November 1992. Its agents in Iraq had discovered that Saddam was planning to visit one of his several mistresses, who lived near Tikrit. The agents had learned that Saddam intended to arrive around dusk at the woman’s home. Next day, he would visit a military base close by before flying back to Baghdad. In the estimated fifteen minutes between leaving the woman’s villa and reaching the air base, Saddam could be vulnerable to attack.
Under the personal control of General Amiram Levine, at the time the deputy director of Mossad, the plan to kill Saddam was approved by Israel’s then prime minister, Benyamin Netanyahu. Code named Skah Atad, the assassination team trained for weeks in the Negev Desert.
Details of the operation offer an insight into the thoroughness of the planning. The Mossad kidon team would be supported by forty hand-picked members of Israel’s Special Forces Unit 262—burned into Israel’s memory as the one that in 1976 rescued the hostages from Entebbe airport in Uganda, where they were being held by terrorists who had hijacked their passenger plane.
Using two Hercules C-130 aircraft, the assassins would fly into Iraq below radar range. On the ground they would divide. The kidon would move to within two hundred meters of the route Saddam would travel from his mistress’s villa to the air base. The main group would wait about six miles away, equipped with a special Mossad-developed radar-controlled missile, code named Midras, Hebrew for “footstep.”
The kidon team was to target Saddam and open fire on his car. At the same time one of the assassins was to signal the missile team to fire from the precise coordinates the kidon would provide—and destroy the vehicle.
But Ariel Sharon, then foreign minister, and Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai had ordered the operation canceled because the risks of failure were too high.
Now, almost a decade later, supported by Washington, there was no such hesitation in trying to kill Saddam.
Each morning as the creeping gray ended and another day began—the moment Saddam Hussein’s mother had taught him was the “first dawn”—a truck drove to one of his palaces, in which the country’s self-appointed president for life would have spent another secure night.
The truck contained live lobsters, fresh shrimps, and sides of fresh lamb and beef, all fat had been trimmed from the meat. There was a variety of yogurts and cheeses, and a special favorite of Saddam Hussein’s, olives picked from Syria’s Golan Heights. He likes to spit out the pips, “the way I will one day spit out the Israelis from their land,” he once said to his former chief of intelligence, General Wafic Samarai.
Later, when he fell out of favor, the spymaster had fled for his life, walking for forty hours to escape through the north of Iraq into Turkey. Samarai was lucky. Most of those who crossed Saddam Hussein were killed by methods that surpassed the torture chambers of ancient times. Samarai’s input to the plan to kill Saddam was fed into the Mossad computers.
While the sixty-five-year-old Saddam still slept, perhaps in the arms of another young girl selected by his Republican Guards to satisfy his voracious sexual needs, the truck was unloaded.
