The Prisoner in His Palace Page 11

  Perhaps sparked by something he’d come across in an article, Saddam began to ruminate aloud on the 1995 defection. His interpreter, Joseph, with whom he enjoyed discussing the latest headlines, sat next to him. Hutch was on guard duty, sitting across the courtyard from the two. Saddam had positioned his chair so that the glare of the hot afternoon sun came down over his shoulder, warming the pages of the paper, rather than shining in his face. He was clad in his dishdasha, which was considerably cooler than Hutch’s long-sleeved Army combat uniform.

  I would never hurt my daughters, Saddam said, as if responding to an unspoken criticism.

  Still, when they left, it endangered everything. My daughters weren’t happy in Jordan, and I had to find a way to get them back.

  Hutch couldn’t have known that this was a lie—that the two girls had, in fact, been afforded the opportunity to return to Iraq without their husbands, and had refused. Hutch was unfamiliar with the story of their defection, and therefore had a tough time following Saddam’s broken English as he labored to recount it. But he was able to grasp what seemed to be the highlights.

  My daughters were scared, Saddam continued to his audience of Joseph and Hutch. They were scared of what I might do to their husbands and to them. I’d never have hurt them, but I knew that if I couldn’t convince the boys to return I might never see my daughters again. I also knew I couldn’t trust those boys.

  Saddam was panicked by what Hussein Kamel could have been telling foreign intelligence agents.

  I would never hurt my daughters, Saddam repeated. But I couldn’t let the boys live. It would have shown weakness.

  Baghdad, Iraq, and Amman, Jordan—August 1995

  The soldier approached General Ra’ad al-Hamdani gravely. Sir, you’re needed on the palace phone.

  Hamdani moved across the open room in the Iraqi First Division Headquarters and picked up the red hotline. He knew that only three people were permitted to call it: Saddam, his son Qusay, and his secretary, Abed Hamoud.

  Hamdani gingerly picked it up. He heard a flurry of shouts and curses, interrupted by shuffling and ominous echoes. Hello? Hamdani asked. As he tried to make out the indistinct voices, he clearly detected Saddam’s thick Tikriti accent. The president sounded unhinged and panicked. Hamdani had never heard him like this.

  He heard movement. Then, a new voice. “Abu Ahmed.”

  It was the familiar voice of Qusay, Saddam’s son, addressing him by the patronymic.

  Hamdani had gotten to know Qusay when Saddam assigned the young man to his unit during the Iran-Iraq War. There was a brief silence, followed by more commotion.

  Dad!

  It was Qusay’s frantic voice again. He was calling out to his father. It would be the only time Hamdani ever heard one of Saddam’s boys call him that. Hamdani tried to imagine the scene unfolding inside the Presidential Palace. While morbidly curious, he was also grateful for his distance from it.

  Tell Hamdani that there is a conspiracy against us from within the family, he heard Saddam bellow. Hussein Kamel betrayed me.

  Hamdani’s stomach sank further. A more serious betrayal was scarcely imaginable.

  Not long after the hotline in General Hamdani’s headquarters had rung, another phone rang about five hundred miles to the west in the CIA’s Amman, Jordan, station. Dave Manners, the new CIA station chief, had just arrived in the country with his six children. He picked up the phone.

  Hello, Dave, Ali Shukri said in flawless, Oxford-accented English. Are you getting settled in? Ali Shukri was a senior advisor to Jordan’s King Hussein and former head of the Jordanian Royal Court.

  Sure. I’m living out of a suitcase, we haven’t found a house yet, but my family and I are getting there.

  The boss would like for you to come over and visit now. He wants to welcome you to Jordan. Shukri was referring to King Hussein.

  Manners quickly rifled through his suitcase, pulled on the least wrinkled clothes he could find, and left for the palace. When he arrived, he found Shukri out front smoking. Looking like he could have stepped from the pages of a Brooks Brothers catalog, the advisor escorted the trim CIA officer into an elegantly appointed diwan where they found King Hussein, also smoking. The room’s furniture and decorations were understated yet refined, free of garish extravagance.

  The king politely welcomed Manners to the Hashemite kingdom and went on to reveal that the previous day an Iraqi entourage, including two of Saddam Hussein’s daughters and sons-in-law, had sped across the desert border in a heavily armed convoy of luxury sedans. The sons-in-law happened to be brothers, and one, Hussein Kamel, had headed Saddam’s weapons development program. The Iraqis were reported to have flagged down an Egyptian taxi driver in Amman and asked for directions to a hotel. They received directions to the Amra Hotel, a comfortable, though hardly luxurious, spot in leafy East Amman. When King Hussein learned of their arrival, he had them relocated to the unoccupied Hashmiya Palace.

  When they met with King Hussein, the Iraqis explained that they no longer felt safe in Iraq, and they asked if they could find refuge in Jordan. King Hussein had gotten along well with Saddam in the 1980s, but the goodwill had dried up when the latter invaded Kuwait. The king was a shrewd strategist, though, and with the Kamel brothers’ defection he saw an opportunity. To offer protection to the fleeing Iraqis would at once honor the tribal code upheld by descendants of the Bedouin and provide a chance to repair relationships with the West that had been damaged by his refusal to join the coalition against Saddam after his invasion of Kuwait.

  The king chose to welcome the Iraqis without qualification.

  And so it began. Intelligence agencies from across the globe began dispatching their WMD experts to Amman for a chance to debrief Hussein Kamel and learn more about Iraq’s suspected clandestine weapons program.

  The Jordanians would host an introductory dinner to provide American intelligence agents an opportunity to meet the Kamel brothers. The dinner was held at the Hashmiya Palace. The Americans, clad in the Joseph A. Bank–style suits favored by American bureaucrats, arrived to discover the Kamels’ entourage clad in Hawaiian shirts, guns tucked noticeably into their waistbands, with the exception of Hussein himself, who was wearing a dark suit. It felt like a scene from Miami Vice—as if the Iraqis had seen too many movies and embraced the image of hedonistic outlaws.

  The dinner started off poorly, and never improved. In a culture in which patiently developing relationships is critical, the Americans engaged in little small talk. For his part, Hussein Kamel—an abstemious psychotic whose eyes, when they weren’t staring blankly, darted crazily—volunteered a number of ridiculous proposals.

  If you deliver five thousand Mercedes to the Iraq-Jordan border, and use loudspeakers to explain to the Iraqis on the other side that the first five thousand soldiers to cross the border will be awarded one, the Army will experience mass defections and crumble, he suggested.

  It was a patently absurd idea.

  Undeterred, his wild eyes now furiously scanning the room, Kamel floated what was perhaps an even more ridiculous idea. I ask that you support Hussein Kamel as a replacement for Saddam, he said, referring to himself in the third person, in a manner eerily similar to his former patron. Provide an American military division for me to command, he continued, and I can take Baghdad.

  The Jordanians said nothing. Meanwhile, the Americans tried to be receptive and polite while aware that these ideas were nonstarters. Recognizing that the discussion was destined to go nowhere, Dave Cohen, the Americans’ lead negotiator, eventually turned to Manners and whispered, I can’t say anything more to him . . . what do we do now?

  We leave, Manners replied flatly.

  The Americans stood up. Thank you very much, gentlemen, for your hospitality. It is late and we must go, they explained. Walking out the door, the men eyed each other quizzically. None of their training could have prepared them for such a preposterous discussion. As they slid into their waiting car, Cohen, still nonplussed, asked
Manners, That guy was a big deal in Iraq? How?

  Despite the inauspicious start, the Americans and Jordanians persisted in their efforts to see if they could pry any useful information from the brothers. It became more and more clear, though, that “something was off” about them, says Ali Shukri. Even Saddam Kamel’s young boys, who could be observed playing at the palace guesthouse while waiting to meet with their father, shared their father’s vacant look, more reptilian and cold than human.

  At first, little the Kamel brothers said was of any intelligence value, though they did provide another window into the ghoulish landscape of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Saddam Kamel boasted that his brother, Hussein, had punished an aide for not punctually completing an assigned task by forcing him—at gunpoint—to drink a gallon of gasoline, before loading his weapon with an incendiary munition and shooting the man so that he’d explode.

  He was glowing with pride as he recounted the story.

  Hussein Kamel then offered: Everyone thinks that my brother, Saddam Kamel, is the nice and soft one. Well, let me tell you about the time that a soldier argued with one of his commands. He started beating him until he lay on the ground bleeding, at which point he stomped on his head until the man’s brains came out.

  The Kamel brothers’ Jordanian interlocutors, working to develop a rapport to elicit information from the two, simply nodded at these tales of violence, concealing their revulsion. Though separated from Amman by only about five hundred miles of desert, Baghdad under Saddam Hussein had clearly become a largely unrecognizable place where over-the-top cruelty was routine.

  Ali Shukri would meet with Hussein Kamel a mind-numbing 181 times, adapting to his preferred nocturnal schedule, with the marathon meetings beginning around 10:00 p.m. and sometimes dragging on until the sun began to creep up over Amman. He was struck by how Kamel would never refer to Saddam by name but always as “the president,” even as he was scheming to overthrow him, so deep was fear of the regime ingrained in his psyche.

  By the end of these meetings, Shukri was convinced that Iraq no longer possessed weapons of mass destruction.

  As weeks dragged into months and the Iraqi guests struggled to find ways to pass the time sequestered in their guesthouse, disenchantment increased for both hosts and visitors. Hussein Kamel seemed unable to adjust to the fact that, once his utility as a defector had run out, he’d become a nobody.

  Meanwhile, Saddam hadn’t given up trying to get the Kamels and his daughters to return. He enlisted Uday and even his wife Sajida to help lobby them, promising immunity if they chose to come back. Saddam even called Hussein Kamel directly, assuring him in an almost hypnotic voice, “Do you think I could harm the father of my grandchildren?”

  Recognizing that his dreams of leveraging international support to unseat Saddam and install himself as Iraq’s new ruler had no chance of being fulfilled, Hussein Kamel made what just about everyone but himself would agree was a suicidal decision: he chose to return to Iraq.

  This is madness. If you return, you’re a dead man, Kamel’s Jordanian hosts told him.

  I’ve been granted immunity, Kamel responded, with a blank stare.

  Even Hussein Kamel’s none-too-swift brother, Saddam Kamel, recognized that this was a disastrous idea. “You donkey, you want us to go back to our deaths?!” he shouted at his brother. But Hussein Kamel had always wielded authority over Saddam Kamel, and he was determined to leave.

  Hussein Kamel had sent Saddam Hussein a groveling letter a few days before the defectors left Amman. The letter was filled with tortured explanations for Kamel’s defection, along with shameless flattery. One of the more egregious portions reads:

  I want Your Excellency to know that your photo and the photo of your kind family is hanging in every angle of the house. Our children do not know until today the reason for leaving Baghdad . . . they will always recall Papa Saddam and Mama Sajida. I hope that Mr. President, the Commander, will forgive us and permit us to return to our country, Iraq, so that we can live under your umbrella and large tent.

  On the day of their scheduled departure, Saddam Kamel took ill, perhaps in part from the stress of what he suspected was an avoidable march to his death. At gunpoint, Hussein Kamel forced his brother, who was wrapped in a blanket to ward off his feverish chills, to get into a car for the return drive.

  As the convoy of returning Iraqis, accompanied by a Jordanian government escort, sped through the eastern Jordanian desert, creeping ever closer to the border they’d crossed with such grandiose plans just months before, there is evidence that Hussein Kamel began to get cold feet. Every half hour or so he’d command the fleet of Mercedes to stop on the side of the desert highway, explaining that he needed to relieve himself. In fact, all he did when exiting the car was “pace up and down as if he were making up his mind.” After each of these bouts of doubt, he’d eventually climb back into the waiting car and continue his fateful journey back into Saddam’s deadly orbit.

  If the Jordanian escorts had any doubt as to the fate that the Kamel brothers would soon meet, it was dispelled when they arrived at the border and saw what was waiting on the other side. In a scene that was something of a hybrid between a western, with a desert wasteland as a backdrop, and the gangster film Scarface, with Saddam’s son Uday playing the role of debauched villain, two helicopters stood idling on the Iraqi side of the border. Uday emerged from one, smoking a large Cohiba cigar. He embraced his sisters, before ushering them into one of the waiting helicopters. He then politely escorted the Kamel brothers into the other. The Jordanian intelligence officers, behind the safety of the border demarcation, joked to each other, in the dry manner unique to those who’ve spent careers observing the uglier sides of human nature, that they wouldn’t want to be going wherever Uday was ferrying the men.

  While waiting for the helicopters to lift off, the Jordanians placed macabre wagers on how many more days the Kamels would have among the living. A week was the longest anyone gave them.

  As the helicopters pulled skyward, banking to the east toward Baghdad, one of the Jordanians entered the border checkpoint and phoned the king’s palace in Amman.

  “Khallas,” he said. “They’re finished.”

  Upon the Kamel brothers’ return, Saddam forced them to divorce his daughters. He then ordered the Kamels’ uncle, Chemical Ali, to lead a tribal hit squad to exact revenge for the “dishonor” the brothers had brought upon their tribe when they defected. Within days, an assault force of roughly forty al-Majid family members, led by Chemical Ali, made their way to a house in a southern suburb of Baghdad where the Kamels had holed up. Uday and Qusay, forbidden by Saddam from participating in the act of revenge, were eager spectators, parking nearby in the hope that they might get a look at the brutal spectacle.

  The ensuing shoot-out would last for nearly thirteen hours, in a bizarre scene that could only take place in the phantasmagoria of Saddam’s Iraq. In keeping with tribal tradition, Ali had even sent a Honda packed with weapons to the Kamel stronghold in advance to ensure they could put up a fight.

  Dr. Ala Bashir, Saddam’s personal doctor, reports being on call at Ibn Sina Hospital that day as wounded family members who were carted in provided real-time updates on how the gun battle was going. At one point, impatient to see an end to the Kamels’ stubborn resistance, Chemical Ali decided to launch a rocket-propelled grenade at the besieged home. It killed Saddam Kamel, as well as his sister and her three young children, who were between the ages of three and six and had been hiding in a bathroom of the house.

  Hussein Kamel fought on.

  As the sun began to set, he finally staggered, wounded, from the house, shouting operatically, “I am Hussein Kamel.”

  He was cut to pieces by automatic weapons fire. As the smoke of hot lead rose from his fallen body, Ali strode up to him and stood on his face, a grave insult, before emptying one final magazine into the dying body.

  “This is what happens to traitors,” Ali shouted.

  Accounts differ
as to what happened next. Some say that Ali severed the bloodied head from the mangled body and delivered it to Saddam. Others report that the al-Majids put meat hooks in the eyes of the slaughtered brothers and dragged them away.

  That night Saddam arrived at Ibn Sina Hospital to check on the wounded. He appeared somber but relaxed as he calmly surveyed the collateral damage of his decision to make the Kamels pay. As he did so, Dr. Bashir was reminded of something remarkable that had occurred at Ibn Sina years before.

  Dr. Bashir had patched up Saddam Hussein after he’d been injured in a car accident during an American air strike in the first Gulf War. Also wounded in his car that night had been Saddam Kamel, the son-in-law who’d just met his end in the bloody shoot-out with Ali’s hit squad. Dr. Bashir would never forget how, on the day of the bombing many years before, Saddam Hussein, wounded himself, had visited the room in which Bashir was preparing to operate on his son-in-law. Saddam politely asked, “May I come in?”

  Following Bashir’s approval, the president entered the room and quietly took Saddam Kamel’s hand. He’d hold it for the duration of the forty-five-minute procedure, asking Bashir to do his best to make sure there’d be no scar left on the young man’s face.

  The affection that Saddam had once felt for the boys wouldn’t be enough to spare them from the deadly punishment they’d earned with their defection. After they’d breathed their last breaths, Saddam—from his vantage point next to the Ibn Sina emergency rooms—wondered aloud, “I can’t think how they could have left Iraq, and I certainly don’t understand how they could have thought of returning.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Baghdad, Iraq—2006

  Saddam no longer wielded the power of life or death. His day-to-day existence was now entirely in the hands of others. Still, he did the best he could to derive happiness from his daily routine, even as he stood trial with his life in the balance.