Gideon's Spies полностью

After each interrogation—which could last for many hours, with the questions coming and going—Saddam would be assessed by the specialists. They were looking to see how he responded to certain questions. Was he lying? Covering up? Did those eye blinks caught on camera indicate sudden fear? Or was it arrogance or even indifference?

Koubi lives today in Ashkelon, near the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. He knew exactly how the interrogators and their support team of specialists were working on Saddam.

“The first thing the interrogators did was to establish their superiority over Saddam. To remove his belief in his self-control. At every stage, they were looking for his weak points. Those would include playing on Saddam’s loss of power and the indifference to his family’s fate. The interrogators would lie to him. They would force him to keep eye contact as they pressed their questions. When he would try to look away, as he was bound to do, they would continue to stare at him silently. Saddam would not be used to this. It would be unnerving for him to experience such treatment,” said Koubi.

From time to time, the interrogators asked questions they knew Saddam could not answer. What was going on in Washington and London in the run-up to the Iraqi war? Where was he on a certain date? When he could not answer, he would be accused of covering up.

“After a while, a question will be slipped in that he can answer. If the interrogators have done their groundwork properly, he will be glad to answer it. Then the questions will move to other questions they want him to answer,” said Koubi.

“Another means to break him would be to offer simple inducements. If Saddam answered a series of questions, he would be promised uninterrupted sleep. And possibly a change in his carefully monitored diet. But always the promises would not be quite kept. And followed by more promises that if he continued to cooperate, they would be fulfilled,” explained Koubi.

In January 2004, he was visited by an International Red Cross team of doctors. They pronounced he was being fairly treated.

The deadly mind games would continue until the interrogators and specialists were satisfied that no more could be wrung out of Saddam Hussein. Then he would be left to his fate. More, he would know by then, he could not expect.

Meanwhile, Mossad had joined other intelligence services in the hunt for Saddam’s missing fortune. By January 2004, Meir Dagan’s team of financially trained agents, some of whom had worked in the City of London and Wall Street before joining the service, had established that the Queen of England’s banker, Coutts of London, was one of eighteen British banks Saddam Hussein had used to hide his $40 billion fortune over the 1980s.

The bulk of that money was stolen by him from the central bank of Iraq, transferred to banks in the Middle East, and then deposited under false names in the London banks. Later, the money was transferred to banks in Switzerland, Germany, Japan, and Bulgaria.

“Any transfer coming from a London bank was assumed to be legitimate,” said Christopher Story, a former financial adviser to British prime minister Margaret Thatcher at the time Saddam was salting away his fortune. Story, the quintessential English gentleman in his pin-striped Savile Row suits and customized shoes, is a recognized authority on the financial duplicity of the Iraqi leader, and his once close relationship with the major banks of the world. A clippedvoiced Englishman, Story edits a respected financial banking journal, the International Currency Review. Its subscribers include the World Bank, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, and the Bank of England.

Story has amassed documentation showing that Robert Maxwell, the disgraced tycoon who once owned the London Daily Mirror newspaper group, arranged for billions of dollars to be laundered through Bulgarian banks to the Bank of New York. It was then owned by Edmund Safra, known as “financier to the mafia.” He died in a mysterious fire in his Monaco penthouse in 1999. Maxwell was killed by Mossad agents when he threatened to reveal Israel’s intelligence secrets.

“If Saddam gives up all the names of those who helped him, it would cause panic greater than any Wall Street crash. Many still hold high office today. It is impossible that they did not know what was going on with Saddam. He was moving out huge sums of money right up until the eve of war,” said Story.

Until now untold, the story of how Saddam Hussein began to amass one of the world’s largest private fortunes began when a private jet took off from London to Baghdad in 1982. During the five-hour flight from London, its solitary passenger, financier Tiny Rowland, spooned beluga caviar into his mouth and sipped vintage Krug champagne. That was his regular diet on a business trip in his Learjet. The delicacies had been sent from Baghdad by Saddam Hussein.