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We've shut him up. The moment Saddam's hooded executioner
pulled the lever of the trapdoor in Baghdad yesterday
morning, Washington's secrets were safe. The shameless,
outrageous, covert military support which the United States
- and Britain - gave to Saddam for more than a decade
remains the one terrible story which our presidents and
prime ministers do not want the world to remember. And now
Saddam, who knew the full extent of that Western support -
given to him while he was perpetrating some of the worst
atrocities since the Second World War - is dead.
Gone is the man who personally received the CIA's help in
destroying the Iraqi communist party. After Saddam seized
power, US intelligence gave his minions the home addresses
of communists in Baghdad and other cities in an effort to
destroy the Soviet Union's influence in Iraq. Saddam's
mukhabarat visited every home, arrested the occupants and
their families, and butchered the lot. Public hanging was
for plotters; the communists, their wives and children, were
given special treatment - extreme torture before execution
at Abu Ghraib.
There is growing evidence across the Arab world that Saddam
held a series of meetings with senior American officials
prior to his invasion of Iran in 1980 - both he and the US
administration believed that the Islamic Republic would
collapse if Saddam sent his legions across the border - and
the Pentagon was instructed to assist Iraq's military
machine by providing intelligence on the Iranian order of
battle. One frosty day in 1987, not far from Cologne, I met
the German arms dealer who initiated those first direct
contacts between Washington and Baghdad - at America's
request.
"Mr Fisk... at the very beginning of the war, in September
of 1980, I was invited to go to the Pentagon," he said.
"There I was handed the very latest US satellite photographs
of the Iranian front lines. You could see everything on the
pictures. There were the Iranian gun emplacements in Abadan
and behind Khorramshahr, the lines of trenches on the
eastern side of the Karun river, the tank revetments -
thousands of them - all the way up the Iranian side of the
border towards Kurdistan. No army could want more than this.
And I traveled with these maps from Washington by air to
Frankfurt and from Frankfurt on Iraqi Airways straight to
Baghdad. The Iraqis were very, very grateful!"
I was with Saddam's forward commandos at the time, under
Iranian shellfire, noting how the Iraqi forces aligned their
artillery positions far back from the battle front with
detailed maps of the Iranian lines. Their shelling against
Iran outside Basra allowed the first Iraqi tanks to cross
the Karun within a week. The commander of that tank unit
cheerfully refused to tell me how he had managed to choose
the one river crossing undefended by Iranian armor. Two
years ago, we met again, in Amman and his junior officers
called him "General" - the rank awarded him by Saddam after
that tank attack east of Basra, courtesy of Washington's
intelligence information.
Iran's official history of the eight-year war with Iraq
states that Saddam first used chemical weapons against it on
13 January 1981. AP's correspondent in Baghdad, Mohamed
Salaam, was taken to see the scene of an Iraqi military
victory east of Basra. "We started counting - we walked
miles and miles in this fucking desert, just counting," he
said. "We got to 700 and got muddled and had to start
counting again ... The Iraqis had used, for the first time,
a combination - the nerve gas would paralyze their bodies
... the mustard gas would drown them in their own lungs.
That's why they spat blood."
At the time, the Iranians claimed that this terrible
cocktail had been given to Saddam by the US. Washington
denied this. But the Iranians were right. The lengthy
negotiations which led to America's complicity in this
atrocity remain secret - Donald Rumsfeld was one of
President Ronald Reagan's point-men at this period -
although Saddam undoubtedly knew every detail. But a largely
unreported document, "United States Chemical and Biological
Warfare-related Dual-use exports to Iraq and their possible
impact on the Health Consequences of the Persian Gulf War",
stated that prior to 1985 and afterwards, US companies had
sent government-approved shipments of biological agents to
Iraq. These included Bacillus anthracis, which produces
anthrax, and Escherichia coli (E. coli). That Senate report
concluded that: "The United States provided the Government
of Iraq with 'dual use' licensed materials which assisted in
the development of Iraqi chemical, biological and
missile-systems programs, including ... chemical warfare
agent production facility plant and technical drawings,
chemical warfare filling equipment."
Nor was the Pentagon unaware of the extent of Iraqi use of
chemical weapons. In 1988, for example, Saddam gave his
personal permission for Lt-Col Rick Francona, a US defense
intelligence officer - one of 60 American officers who were
secretly providing members of the Iraqi general staff with
detailed information on Iranian deployments, tactical
planning and bomb damage assessments - to visit the Fao
peninsula after Iraqi forces had recaptured the town from
the Iranians. He reported back to Washington that the Iraqis
had used chemical weapons to achieve their victory. The
senior defense intelligence officer at the time, Col Walter
Lang, later said that the use of gas on the battlefield by
the Iraqis "was not a matter of deep strategic concern".
I saw the results, however. On a long military hospital
train back to Tehran from the battle front, I found hundreds
of Iranian soldiers coughing blood and mucus from their
lungs - the very carriages stank so much of gas that I had
to open the windows - and their arms and faces were covered
with boils. Later, new bubbles of skin appeared on top of
their original boils. Many were fearfully burnt. These same
gases were later used on the Kurds of Halabja. No wonder
that Saddam was primarily tried in Baghdad for the slaughter
of Shia villagers, not for his war crimes against Iran.
We still don't know - and with Saddam's execution we will
probably never know - the extent of US credits to Iraq,
which began in 1982. The initial tranche, the sum of which
was spent on the purchase of American weapons from Jordan
and Kuwait, came to $300m. By 1987, Saddam was being
promised $1bn in credit. By 1990, just before Saddam's
invasion of Kuwait, annual trade between Iraq and the US had
grown to $3.5bn a year. Pressed by Saddam's foreign
minister, Tariq Aziz, to continue US credits, James Baker
then Secretary of State, but the same James Baker who has
just produced a report intended to drag George Bush from the
catastrophe of present- day Iraq - pushed for new guarantees
worth $1bn from the US.
In 1989, Britain, which had been giving its own covert
military assistance to Saddam guaranteed £250m to Iraq
shortly after the arrest of Observer journalist Farzad
Bazoft in Baghdad. Bazoft, who had been investigating an
explosion at a factory at Hilla which was using the very
chemical components sent by the US, was later hanged. Within
a month of Bazoft's arrest William Waldegrave, then a
Foreign Office minister, said: "I doubt if there is any
future market of such a scale anywhere where the UK is
potentially so well-placed if we play our diplomatic hand
correctly... A few more Bazofts or another bout of internal
oppression would make it more difficult."
Even more repulsive were the remarks of the then Deputy
Prime Minister, Geoffrey Howe, on relaxing controls on
British arms sales to Iraq. He kept this secret, he wrote,
because "it would look very cynical if, so soon after
expressing outrage about the treatment of the Kurds, we
adopt a more flexible approach to arms sales".
Saddam knew, too, the secrets of the attack on the USS Stark
when, on 17 May 1987, an Iraqi jet launched a missile attack
on the American frigate, killing more than a sixth of the
crew and almost sinking the vessel. The US accepted Saddam's
excuse that the ship was mistaken for an Iranian vessel and
allowed Saddam to refuse their request to interview the
Iraqi pilot.
The whole truth died with Saddam Hussein in the Baghdad
execution chamber yesterday. Many in Washington and London
must have sighed with relief that the old man had been
silenced for ever.
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