The Fist of God Page 5

  Just before dawn, there was a tank engagement at the small Kuwaiti oil town of Jahra, north of Kuwait City. The only Kuwaiti armored brigade had been rushed northward, having been held back in the week before the invasion in order not to provoke the Iraqis.

  It was one-sided. The Kuwaitis, who were supposed to be no more than merchants and oil profiteers, fought hard and well. They held up the cream of the Republican Guard for an hour, which allowed some of their Skyhawk and Mirage fighters farther south at the Ahmadi air base to get airborne, but the Kuwaitis did not stand a chance. The huge Soviet T-72s cut to pieces the smaller Chinese T-55s used by the Kuwaitis. The defenders lost twenty tanks in as many minutes, and finally the survivors pulled out and back.

  Osman Badri, watching from a mile away as the mastodons swerved and fired in the belching clouds of dust and smoke while a pink line touched the sky over Iran, could not know that one day these same T-72s of the Medina and Tawakkulna divisions would themselves be blown apart by the Challengers and Abramses of the British and Americans.

  By dawn, the first point units were rumbling into the northwestern outskirts of Kuwait City, dividing their forces to cover the four highways that gave access to the city from that quarter; the Abu Dhabi road along the seashore, the Jahra road between Granada and Andalus suburbs, and the Fifth and Sixth Ring highways farther south. After the split, the four prongs headed into central Kuwait.

  Colonel Badri was hardly needed. There were no ditches for his sappers to fill in, nor obstructions to be blown away with dynamite, nor concrete bollards to be bulldozed. Only once did he have to dive for his life.

  Rolling along through Sulaibikhat, quite close (though he did not know it) to the Christian cemetery, a single Sky hawk wheeled out of the sun and targeted the tank ahead of him with four air-to-ground rockets. The tank jolted, lost a track, and began to burn. The panicking crew poured from the turret.

  Then the Skyhawk was back, going for the following trucks, flames flickering from its nose. Badri saw the tarmac erupt in front of him and hurled himself from the door just as his screaming driver hauled the truck off the road, into a ditch, and turned it over.

  No one was hurt, but Badri was furious. The impudent dog. He finished the journey in another truck.

  There was sporadic gunfire all through the day as the two divisions, with their armor, artillery, and mechanized infantry, rolled through the sprawl of Kuwait City. At the Defense Ministry a group of Kuwaiti officers shut themselves in and tried to take on the invaders with some small arms they found inside.

  One of the Iraqi officers, in a spirit of sweet reason, pointed out that they were dead men if he opened up with his tank gun. While a few Kuwaiti resisters argued with him before surrendering, the rest changed out of their uniforms into dish-dash and ghutra and slipped away out the back. One of these would later become the leader of the Kuwaiti resistance.

  The principal opposition occurred at the residence of the Emir Al Sabah, even though he and his family had long before fled south to seek sanctuary in Saudi Arabia. It was crushed.

  At sundown Colonel Osman Badri stood with his back to the sea at the northernmost point of Kuwait City on Arabian Gulf Street and stared at the facade of that residence, the Dasman Palace. Already a few Iraqi soldiers were inside the palace, and now and then one would emerge carrying a priceless artifact torn from the walls, stepping over the bodies on the steps and the lawn to place the booty in a truck.

  He was tempted to take something himself, a gift fine and worthy for his father at the old man’s home in Qadisiyah, but something held him back: the heritage of that damned English school he had attended all those years ago in Baghdad, and all because of his father’s friendship with the Englishman Martin and his admiration of all things British.

  “Looting is stealing, boys, and stealing is wrong. The Bible and the Koran forbid it. So do not do it.”

  Even to this day, he could recall Mr. Hartley, the headmaster of the Tasisiya Foundation Preparatory School, run by the British Council, lecturing his pupils, English and Iraqi, at their desks.

  How often had he reasoned with his father since joining the Ba’ath Party that the English had always been imperialist aggressors, holding the Arabs in chains for centuries to reap their own profits?

  And his father, who was now seventy and so much older because Osman and his brother had been born to the second marriage, had always smiled and said:

  “Maybe they are foreigners and infidel, but they are courteous and they have standards, my son. And what standards does your Mr. Saddam Hussein have, pray?”

  It had been impossible to get through the old man’s thick skull how important the Party was to Iraq and how its leader would bring Iraq to glory and triumph. Eventually he ceased these conversations, lest his father say something about the Rais that would be overheard by a neighbor and get them all into trouble.

  He disagreed with his father on this alone, for he loved him very much.

  So because of a headmaster twenty-five years before, Colonel Badri now stood back and did not join in the looting of the Dasman Palace, even though it was in the tradition of all his ancestors and the English were fools.

  At least his years at the Tasisiya school had taught him fluent English, which had turned out to be useful because it was the language in which he could best communicate with Colonel Stepanov, who had for a long time been the senior engineering officer with the Soviet Military Advisory Group before the cold war came to its end and he went back to Moscow.

  Osman Badri was thirty-five, and the year 1990 was proving to be the greatest of his whole life. As he told his elder brother later:

  “I just stood there with my back to the Gulf and the Dasman Palace in front of me and thought, ‘By the Prophet, we’ve done it. We’ve taken Kuwait at last. And in just one day.’ And that was the end of it.”

  He was wrong, as it happened. That was just the beginning.

  While Ray Walker was, in his own phrase, hauling ass through the Abu Dhabi airport, hammering the sales counter to insist on the American’s constitutional right to an instant airline ticket, a number of his fellow countrymen were ending a sleepless night.

  Seven time zones away in Washington, the National Security Council had been up all night. In earlier days they used to have to meet personally in the Situation Room in the basement of the White House; newer technology now meant they could confer by secure videolink from their various locations.

  The previous evening, still August 1 in Washington, early reports had indicated some firing along Kuwait’s northern border. It was not unexpected. For days sweeps by the great KH-11 satellites over the northern Gulf had shown the buildup of the Iraqi forces, telling Washington more than the U.S.

  ambassador in Kuwait actually knew. The problem was, What were Saddam Hussein’s intentions: to threaten or to invade?

  Frantic requests had been sent the previous day to the CIA headquarters at Langley, but the Agency had been less than helpful, turning in “maybe” analyses on the basis of the satellite pictures garnered by the National Reconnaissance Office and political savvy already known to the State Department’s Middle East Division.

  “Any half-ass can do that,” growled Brent Scowcroft, chairman of the NSC. “Don’t we have anyone right inside the Iraqi regime?”

  The answer to that was a regretful no. It was a problem that would recur for months.

  The answer to the conundrum came before tenP.M. , when President George Bush went to bed and took no further calls from Scowcroft. That was after dawn Gulf Time, and the Iraqi tanks were beyond Jahra, entering the northwestern suburbs of Kuwait City.

  It was, the participants would recall later, quite a night. There were eight on the videolink, representing the NSC, the Treasury, the State Department, the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Pentagon. A flurry of orders went out and were implemented. A similar series was coming out of a hastily convened COBRA (Cabinet Office Briefing Room Annex) committee meeting in London, which
was five hours away from Washington but Only two from the Gulf.

  Both governments froze all Iraqi financial assets lodged abroad, as well as (with the agreement of the Kuwaiti ambassadors in both cities) all Kuwaiti assets, so that any new puppet government working for Baghdad could not get its hands on the funds. These decisions froze billions and billions of petrodollars.

  President Bush was awakened at 4:45A.M. on August 2 to sign the documents. In London, Margaret Thatcher, long up and about and raising seven levels of Cain, had already done the same before going to catch her plane for the States.

  Another major step was to hustle together the United Nations Security Council in New York to condemn the invasion and call for an immediate withdrawal by Iraq. This was achieved with Resolution 660, signed at four-thirtyA.M. that same morning.

  Around dawn the videolink conference ended, and the participants had two hours to get home, wash, change, shave, and be back at the White House for the eightA.M. full meeting of the NSC, chaired by President Bush in person.

  Newcomers at the full meeting included Richard Cheney of Defense, Nicholas Brady of Treasury, and Attorney General Richard Thornburgh. Bob Kimmitt continued to stand in for the State Department because Secretary James Baker and Deputy Secretary Lawrence Eagleburger were both out of town.

  Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell had arrived back from Florida, bringing with him the general in charge of Central Command, a big burly man of whom more would be heard later. Norman Schwarzkopf was at General Powell’s side when they walked in.

  George Bush left the meeting at 9:15A.M. , when Ray and Maybelle Walker were thankfully airborne and somewhere over Saudi Arabia heading northwest for home and safety. The President took a helicopter from the south lawn to Andrews Air Force base, where he transferred to Air Force One and flew to Aspen, Colorado. He was scheduled to give an address on U.S. defense needs. As it turned out, it was an appropriate topic, but the day would be much busier than foreseen.

  In midair he took a long call from King Hussein of Jordan, monarch of Iraq’s smaller and much-overshadowed neighbor. The Hashemite King was in Cairo, conferring with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

  King Hussein was desperate that the United States give the Arab states a few days to try to sort things out without a war. He himself proposed a four-state conference, including President Mubarak, himself, and Saddam Hussein and as chairman His Majesty King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. He was confident that such a conference would persuade the Iraqi dictator to withdraw from Kuwait peaceably. But he needed three, maybe four days, and no public condemnation of Iraq by any of the nations participant to the conference.

  President Bush told him: “You got it. I defer to you.” The unfortunate George had not yet met the lady from London, who was waiting for him in Aspen. They met that evening.

  The Iron Lady soon got the impression that her good friend was about to start wavering again. Within two hours she put a broom handle so far up the President’s left trouser leg that it came out near the collar line.

  “He cannot, he simply cannot, be allowed to get away with it, George.”

  Faced with those flashing blue eyes and the cut-crystal tones slicing through the hum of the air conditioner, George Bush admitted that this was not America’s intention either. His intimates later felt he had been less worried by Saddam Hussein with his artillery and tanks than by that daunting handbag.

  On August 3, the United States had a quiet word with Egypt. President Mubarak was reminded just how much his armed forces were dependent on American weaponry, just how much Egypt owed the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and just how much U.S. aid came his way. On August 4 the Egyptian government issued a public statement roundly condemning Saddam Hussein’s invasion.

  To the Jordanian King’s dismay but not to his surprise, the Iraqi despot at once refused to go to the Jeddah conference and sit beside Hosni Mubarak under the chairmanship of King Fahd.

  For the King of Saudi Arabia it was a brutal snub, delivered within a culture that prides itself on elaborate courtesy. King Fahd, who conceals a shrewd political brain behind an unfailingly gracious persona, was not pleased.

  This was one of the two factors that blew away the Jeddah conference. The other was the fact that the Saudi monarch had been shown American photographs taken from space that proved that the Iraqi Army, far from halting its advance, was still in full battle order and moving south toward the Saudi border on the southern fringes of Kuwait.

  Would the Iraqis really dare to sweep on and invade Saudi Arabia itself? The arithmetic added up.

  Saudi Arabia has the biggest oil reserves in the world. Second comes Kuwait, with over a hundred years of reserves at present production levels. Third is Iraq. By taking Kuwait, Saddam Hussein had reversed the balance. Moreover, ninety percent of Saudi oil wells and reserves are locked into the far northeastern corner of the Kingdom, around Dhahran, Al-Khobar, Dammam, and Jubail, and inland from these ports.

  The triangle lay right in the path of the advancing Republican Guard divisions, and the photos proved that more divisions were pouring into Kuwait.

  Fortunately, His Majesty never discovered that the photos had been doctored. The divisions close to the border were digging in, but the bulldozers that made this evident had been airbrushed out.

  On August 6 the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia formally asked U.S. forces to enter the Kingdom for its defense.

  The first squadrons of fighter-bombers left for the Middle East the same day. Desert Shield had begun.

  Brigadier Hassan Rahmani jumped out of his staff car and ran up the steps of the Hilton Hotel, which had quickly been taken over as the headquarters of the Iraqi security forces in occupied Kuwait. It amused him, as he swung through the glass doors into the lobby that morning of August 4, that the Hilton was right next to the American embassy, both on the seashore with lovely views over the glittering blue waters of the Arabian Gulf.

  The view was all that the staff of the embassy were going to get for a while—at his suggestion the building had been immediately ringed with Republican Guards and would stay that way. He could not prevent foreign diplomats from transmitting messages from inside their sovereign territory to their governments back home, and he knew he did not have the supercomputers needed to break the more sophisticated codes that the British and Americans would be using. But as head of Counterintelligence for the Mukhabarat, he could ensure they had little of interest to send home by confining their observations to the views from their windows.

  That left, of course, the possibility of their obtaining information from fellow nationals still at large in Kuwait by telephone. Another top priority: Ensure that all outside telephone lines were cut or tapped—tapped would be better, but most of his best men were fully engaged back in Baghdad.

  He swung into the suite of rooms that had been set aside for the Counterintelligence team, took off his Army jacket, tossed it to the sweating aide who had brought up his two suitcases of documents, and walked to the window to gaze down into the pool of the Hilton Marina. A nice idea to have a swim later, he thought, then noticed that two soldiers were filling their water bottles from it and that two more were peeing into it. He sighed.

  At thirty-seven, Rahmani was a trim, handsome, clean-shaven man—he could not be bothered with the affectation of a Saddam Hussein—like moustache. He was where he was, and he knew it, because he was good at his job, not because of political clout; he was a technocrat in a world of politically elevated cretins.

  Why, he had been asked by foreign friends, do you serve this regime? The question was usually asked when he had got them partly drunk at the bar of the Rashid Hotel or in a more private place. He was allowed to mix with them because it was part of his job. But every time he remained quite sober. He had no objection to liquor on religious grounds—he just ordered a gin and tonic, but he made sure the bartender knew to give him only tonic.

  So he smiled at the question and shrugged and replied: I am an Ir
aqi and proud of it; which government would you have me serve?

  Privately, he knew perfectly well why he served a regime most of whose luminaries he privately despised. If he had any emotion in him, which he frequently claimed he did not, then it came out in a genuine affection for his country and its people, the ordinary people whom the Ba’ath Party had long ceased to represent.

  But the principal reason was that he wanted to get on in life. For an Iraqi of his generation there were few options. He could oppose the regime and quit, to earn a hand-to-mouth living abroad dodging the hit squads and making pennies translating from Arabic into English and back, or he could stay inside Iraq.

  That left three alternatives. Oppose the regime again, and end up in one of the torture chambers of that animal Omar Khatib, a creature he personally loathed in the full knowledge that the feeling was mutual; or try to survive as a free-lance businessman in an economy that was being systematically run into the ground; or keep smiling at the idiots and rise within their ranks through brains and talent.

  He could see nothing wrong with the latter. Like Reinhard Gehlen, who served first Hitler, then the Americans, and then the West Germans; like Marcus Wolf, who served the East German Communists without believing a word they said, he was a chess player. He lived for the game, the intricate moves of spy and counterspy. Iraq was his personal chessboard. He knew that other professionals the world over could understand that.

  Hassan Rahmani returned from the window, sat in the chair behind the desk, and began to make notes.

  There was one hell of a lot to do if Kuwait were ever to be even reasonably secure as the nineteenth province of Iraq.

  His first problem was that he did not know how long Saddam Hussein intended to stay in Kuwait. He doubted the man knew himself. There was no point in mounting a huge counterintelligence operation, sealing all the leaks and security holes that he could, if Iraq was going to pull out.

  Privately, he believed Saddam could get away with it. But it would mean boxing cleverly, making the right moves, saying the right things. The first ploy had to be to attend that conference tomorrow in Jeddah, to flatter King Fahd until he could take no more, to claim Iraq wanted no more than a just treaty over oil, Gulf access, and the outstanding loan, and he would go home to Baghdad. That way, keeping the whole thing in Arab hands and at all costs keeping the Americans and the Brits out, Saddam could rely on the Arab preference to keep talking until hell freezes over.