Gideon's Spies полностью

It was Saddam’s obsession with personal violence that was the most terrifying side to his multifaceted personality. He had become obsessed with the dynamics of creating pain, spending countless hours reviewing the videos of those he had tortured and then executed. The methods of killing ranged from a victim being buried alive, to a specialty Saddam learned from the Taliban: a long nail was driven through a victim’s ear into his brain. His torture chambers were reputed to contain effigies made of wood and iron in which a victim was confined. The hollow effigies contained spikes positioned so as to penetrate the victim’s body. Strangulation and being buried alive in the desert were fates reserved for those for whom he had decided hanging was too quick.

Saddam’s fixation with torture was passed on to his sons when they were still in their preteens. Uday and Qusay were both taken on weekly visits to witness torture and executions in Baghdad prisons.

Yet despite the carapace of evil that surrounded him, Saddam had also been known to weep openly after having condemned a friend, a relative, even his two sons-in-law to death. During the 1979 purge of the Baath Party that gave him power, he stood at the lectern and wept openly as he condemned party members. As each man was taken to his death, the conference hall echoed with his amplified sobbing, picked up by the microphones on the podium. It was a macabre piece of theater.

All these personality traits, and more, had been studied by Mossad before a plan of how to assassinate Saddam Hussein was prepared.

Once more the operation revolved around Saddam’s insatiable sexual appetite. A Mossad katsa in Baghdad had learned that a new mistress—the wife of a general Saddam had recently had executed for disobeying an order—had been installed in a villa on the bank of the Euphrates River. Saddam had taken to swimming in the river with his bodyguards before visiting her.

The plan was based on one that the CIA had once used to try to kill Fidel Castro. On that occasion, seashells were rigged with explosives and deposited on the seabed off Cuba, the spot was one where Castro liked to go diving. That operation failed because the CIA had not taken into account that strong sea currents would carry the shells out of the area.

The river would present no such problem. The explosives were designed to be detonated by Saddam and his bodyguards surging through the water.

With days to go before the plan was to be implemented, the Baghdad katsa sent a coded short-burst transmission to Tel Aviv that the mistress had committed suicide.

Two days later, the second Iraqi war started. Mossad agents in Iraq’s western desert, Baghdad, and Basra provided important intelligence that enabled U.S. and British aircraft to launch devastating air attacks. Thousands of Iraqis were killed or injured.

In the run-up to hostilities, Dagan had experienced a familiar pressure. Tenet had started to call several times a day to inquire whether Mossad was able to confirm that Iraq possessed WMD.

Dagan had replied the way he always did: Not yet, but we are still looking. Indeed, the search had become a priority for his deep-cover katsas in Iraq. They had worked independently of the United Nations weapons inspectors, who had had a similar lack of success—much to the barely concealed disappointment of President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair. The UN Security Council had become a forum for their frustration. Both leaders were now committed to the claim that they had to go to war to protect the world against WMD.

But in Tel Aviv, Mossad analysts told Dagan that no matter how the CIA and Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee ( JIC) presented the evidence, there was no “smoking gun” proof that Saddam did have WMD. Nevertheless, Ariel Sharon, committed to Washington’s claims, mobilized Israel’s civilian population: gas masks were widely distributed; a warning of an impending chemical or biological attack was repeated over the radio. The precautions were widely reported in the United States and Britain, creating a mood that WMD were about to be launched. Propaganda fed fear, fear created more propaganda.

There was talk of a preemptive WMD strike against Israel; or Cyprus, where Britain had a sizable force; or the Persian Gulf, where the U.S. Navy had gathered in strength; or Kuwait, the launch point for the assault on Iraq. With every rumor the fear increased.

But nothing happened. Not a single rocket containing so much as one spore of a nerve agent or a drop of chemical poison was launched. In the history of warfare, there had never been such an anticlimax.