The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq

by Steve Coll

The Jordanian monarch was a charming adventurer and political survivor—a pilot, motorcyclist, and amateur radio enthusiast who seemed to regard running secret backchannels in the Middle East as a fun perk of being king. Twetten’s trip to Baghdad was just such an operation, and King Hussein had readily lent the C.I.A. his jet.

The Mukhabarat officer dismissed Twetten’s scruples. He made his point with an anecdote: “A couple of years ago, we had a Russian intelligence officer in Baghdad who ran over and killed somebody on the street. We took care of him. He didn’t have to go home—we just covered it up, paid a little money to the family, and that was that. That’s what intelligence services do for each other. Now, why can’t I have some pistols?”

As reports of Iraq’s chemical attacks on Iranian troops became all but irrefutable, he maintained official denials in public while subtly justifying Iraq’s actions. The Iranians “have very little problem in sending thousands of brainwashed boys and young men to the front lines to meet a certain death,” he said. Iraq merely sought to “minimize casualties” among its own troops in the face of this inhumane onslaught. “We don’t believe in a ‘clean’ war,” Hamdoon continued. “All wars are ugly.”[25]

It was a pattern that would recur between Washington and Baghdad: what many Americans understood as staggering incompetence in their nation’s foreign policy, Saddam interpreted as manipulative genius.

“I swear, I am not surprised” by Iran-Contra, Saddam told his advisers at another meeting soon after Reagan’s initial speech. Even so, “this level of bad and immoral behavior is a new thing.”

“Your relationships with the Third World are like an Iraqi peasant’s relationship with his new wife,” Saddam told the diplomat. “Oh?” “Yes, absolutely—three days of tea and honey, and then off to the fields for life.”

The administration embraced flawed intelligence reports from both the D.I.A. and the C.I.A. that both Iraq and Iran had resorted to gas. On March 23, State Department spokesman Charles Redman said that while Iraq had committed a “grave violation” of the Geneva Protocol at Halabja, Iran “may also have used chemical artillery shells in this fighting.”[6] This was misleading at best. The question of whether Iran had used chemical weapons against Iraq at any point in the war—apart from smoke or tear gas—would remain controversial. It is clear, however, that the impression publicized by the Reagan administration after Halabja—that the use of gas by Iraq and Iran in that atrocity might be militarily and morally equivalent—was false. This line was supported by Pat Lang, the Middle East analyst at the D.I.A. who was deeply involved in the intelligence liaison with Baghdad and who “insisted” that Iran share blame for Halabja. “Who defended the Iraqis?” Lang recalled. “I did.” The “both sides do it” narrative settled like fog over a war the world mainly ignored.

During a speech to Baath Party loyalists, Majid explained his strategy. He recounted how he had recently threatened a Kurdish audience to encourage voluntary evacuations: “I cannot let your village stay. I will attack it with chemical weapons. Then you and your family will die. You must leave right now.” He made a promise to his Baathist comrades: “I will kill them all with chemical weapons! Who is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck them!”

Other of Saddam’s close and highly privileged relatives abused power, but as Uday reached high school, he took this to baroque extremes. He lived out a prolonged arrested adolescence that lasted well into midlife. He was “like a child,” one of his government interpreters remembered. “His ideas were not clear…. He was not really mature.” Tariq Aziz dismissed the adult Uday as “just a kid” whose conduct admittedly “went beyond what is acceptable.”

As Glaspie well understood, her role in circumstances like this was not to invent U.S. policy but to transmit it. She would also record and report on what Saddam had to say, and use her judgment in responding to him spontaneously. This was the essence of ambassadorial tradecraft, and Glaspie had practiced it for many years.

“If we had taken strong action against the Iraqis for what they had done in Halabja, and in their later offensives against both the Kurds and the Iranians…I mean really strong action…would Saddam Hussein, under these circumstances, have believed he could get away with invading Kuwait in August 1990?” asked Charles Cogan, the head of the C.I.A.’s Middle East operations during the early 1980s. “Maybe he would” have invaded anyway, since “the grandiosity of the man’s thinking was immense. But I am not so sure.” Thomas Pickering, a respected career ambassador who served at the United Nations and in Moscow, also concluded “that Saddam was encouraged in his Kuwait adventure by our tolerance for just about everything he did, including his use of chemical weapons.”

Years later, in captivity, Saddam asked U.S. investigators: “If you didn’t want me to go in, why didn’t you tell me?”

On August 5, Bush arrived back at the White House and addressed reporters on the South Lawn. “This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait,” he said. It was his most forceful pronouncement yet, but it was still unclear what America or America’s Arab allies would do to back it up.

As a practical matter, this meant fewer wars, which Powell favored: “Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men most,” read an aphorism he kept on his desk.

The Baker-Aziz meeting proved to be mainly rehearsed theater on both sides, except in one respect: at the urging of Dick Cheney and Colin Powell, Baker issued a stark warning about what the U.S. would do if Saddam used chemical or biological weapons. “The American people will demand vengeance,” Baker said. “And we have the means to exact it. Let me say with regard to this part of my presentation, this is not a threat; it is a promise. If there is any use of weapons like that, our objective won’t just be the liberation of Kuwait, but the elimination of the current Iraqi regime.” The retaliation Iraq would face in that case would leave the country “weak and backward.”

Baath Party men forced suspected rebels to drink gasoline and then shot them in the stomach to see if they would explode, according to a persistent story that circulated among survivors.[13]

After evacuating Baghdad late in 1990, Seidel had taken a leading role for the agency in the Gulf War. “We are not prepared to go down the slippery slope of being sucked into a civil war,” Baker told reporters. “We cannot police what goes on inside Iraq, and we cannot be the arbiters of who shall govern Iraq.” It was another strained formulation of policy, given the administration’s open record of incitement to overthrow Saddam.

After the Gulf War, he judged that by getting rid of prohibited weapons, he might pass U.N. inspection more quickly. Yet if he cooperated with the U.N. and destroyed his inventory as the world watched—if he acquiesced in a public spectacle of defeat, with inspectors from enemy nations recording his humiliation on clipboards—his rule at home might be undermined, and Iran and Israel might feel emboldened to attack him. Finally, Saddam doubted—not without reason—that he would ever be granted relief from sanctions if he admitted the truth about his historical weapons programs. He calculated that honesty would not pay.

Congressmen called for accountability. Hawks demanded Saddam’s overthrow. For analysts at the C.I.A. and elsewhere who lived through the summer of 1991, the lesson would echo for years to come: despite possessing the world’s best satellite and snooping technology, the United States had failed to detect Iraq’s secret bomb program and had badly underestimated Iraqi scientists and Saddam Hussein. They would not let it happen again.

He had served most recently as deputy defense secretary and had grown accustomed to the reflexive deference shown to superiors at the Pentagon. The C.I.A.’s comparative disdain for hierarchy and its culture of creative insubordination (or indiscipline and lack of accountability, depending on the beholder) seemed to stun Deutch, in the judgment of some of his new colleagues.

Even in these early days of PowerPoint’s hegemony over Washington, an overload of colorfully designed but cluttered and questionably relevant information was a common feature of intelligence briefings.

Uday’s bullet wounds turned out to be serious, and his suffering perhaps offered some measure of rough justice to his myriad victims. It required six months of treatment before he could leave the hospital. A German surgeon operated, but even then, Uday “was barely able to walk,” Bashir recalled. His speech could be difficult to understand. He seemed even more irascible and aggressive. Blood loss after he was shot might have damaged his brain, but Bashir felt it was difficult to judge, since “he was already insane.”

Tongsun Park was one player in Saddam’s effort to make Oil-for-Food work to his advantage. For its sheer audacity, Saddam’s manipulation of the program and his parallel illicit oil sales and kickback schemes must be acknowledged as one of his masterworks of asymmetric foreign policy.

Tariq Aziz threatened to cease cooperation as Ritter’s aggression mounted. “Iraq is not a defeated country,” he told Richard Butler. “UNSCOM is not an army of occupation, and you are not General MacArthur!”

Like other flimflammers, Chalabi never apologized; he just kept telling his stories, insisting he had been wronged.

The C.I.A. no longer enjoyed significant support on Iraq from friendly Arab regimes in the region—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan. Generally, they “thought that Saddam was our guy,” meaning that the C.I.A. had deliberately left the Iraqi leader in power as a counter to Iran and was perhaps cooperating with him secretly. “They said, ‘You didn’t kill him, you didn’t overthrow him—ergo, he’s your man. You slapped him for Kuwait, but he’s your man against Iran.’ ” Like Saddam, Arab leaders had difficulty crediting the possibility of American incompetence.

The C.I.A. might offer to pay somebody $5 million to overthrow Saddam, but if the operation failed, Saddam would take the coupmaker “and drill through his kneecaps, burn him in acid, slaughter his family, wipe out his village, and throw salt onto the ground so nothing grows. I can’t compete with that,” Rueda said.

The realm of Bush father-son psychology is long on easy speculation and short on reliable evidence. Clearly, however, September 11 now offered the son an opportunity to make his own mark.

As an advanced student of conspiracies, Saddam was susceptible to emerging internet and Arab media discourse that 9/11 was an inside job, perhaps organized by the C.I.A. or Israel to justify a new American war against the Muslim world.

As during the 1990s, this all but guaranteed that whenever U.N. inspectors headed for sites regarded as sensitive, Saddam’s bodyguards would scramble into defensive action, zipping around in vehicles and chattering over radios as they tried to identify and hide protected places, people, or documents. Their actions made it look like they were hiding something—and they often were, but it was not stocks of WMD.

The Bush administration’s plan was riddled with bad assumptions, but one of the largest blind spots involved Iran. Even though Tehran’s ayatollahs had been seeking Saddam’s overthrow for more than two decades, the president and his advisers failed to think through how Iran would exploit this outcome. For its part, the C.I.A. had never prepared to challenge the ambitious plans of Iran’s security services to influence post-Saddam politics and to oppose an American occupation. The agency had been directed away from postwar planning and the focus was on the conventional war that was about to erupt.