A defector who never was!!!

NEWSWEEK sparked a controversy by its report last
month that Hussein Kamel Hassan Al Majed, Saddam
Hussein’s son-in-law who was in charge of Iraq's
military production for about 10 years, had told
Western intelligence agents and UN weapons inspectors
in 1995 that Iraq had destroyed all its chemical and
biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver
them after the 1991 war.
As such, the Newsweek article implies, there could not
be much truth in the American and British allegations
that Iraq continues to hide a massive stockpile of
such weapons in violation of UN Security Council
resolutions. The argument here is that if Kamel is to
be taken as seriously as the British and US
administrations have previously held him to be, then
his claim that "all weapons — biological, chemical,
missile, nuclear —  were destroyed" should be taken
equally seriously. That pulls the rug further from
under the feet of the American and British charges
that Iraq has a stockpile of weapons of mass
destruction.
That might indeed be the case. But the point I'd like
to raise here is how far Kamel's "defection" itself
was authentic. For all we know, the possibility could
not ruled out outright that it was a stage-managed
affair although a conventional analysis would rule
that out. But then, there is nothing conventional
about Iraq and Saddam Hussein.
Kamel, who "defected" to Jordan in 1995 and went back
home seven months later only to be (allegedly) lynched
by his clan, had declared that he fled Iraq because he
wanted to reveal all information regarding his
country's military industry and weapons programmes.
While in "exile," he met Central Intelligence Agency
and British intelligence agents in the Jordanian
capital and revealed to them what the latter
considered as closely guarded secrets of the Saddam
regime's arsenal.
Kamel's prime revelations were made to Rolf Ekeus, the
then head of the UN Special Commission (Unscom)
entrusted with ensuring that Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction were scuttled and the country stripped of
the ability to produce them.
Ekeus found himself almost overburdened with the
"details" provided by Kamel. It took him and his
experts several months to match the information
provided by Kamel with that was "voluntarily" to given
to them by the Iraqi government. By the time Ekeus
drew up more pointed questions to be put to Kamel,
the Iraqi was no longer alive to answer them. Since
then, it has remained a closely guarded secret what
exactly Ekeus learnt from the files and what questions
he had for Kamel.
Kamel was director of Iraq's Military
Industrialisation Corporation and in charge of Iraq's
weapons programme and he superised Iraq’s nuclear,
chemical, biological and missile programmes. His
bother Colonel Saddam Kamel was the head of
presidential security.
Kamel, who arrived in Jordan in the second week of
August 1995 with his wife and children as well as his
brother and his family and cousin Izzeddine plus a
dozen or so bodyguards, was the most senior official
from Saddam's inner circle to defect.
As such, he was a prize catch for Western
intelligence.
His made his first public appearance at a press
conference on the lawns of the Royal Palace on Aug.12,
and his interpreter was the head of Jordan Television
and Radio Corporation and a son-in-law of the then
crown prince of Jordan. That reflected the importance
the Jordanian leadership gave to Kamel, who was also
given accommodation at one of the palaces in the
Jordanian capital before being moved to a smaller
palace in the suburbs.
"We will work inside Iraq and in the whole Arab World
to topple the Iraqi regime," Kamel declared at the
press conference. But his words were not convincing
since Kamel was considered as ruthless as Saddam
Hussein by many Iraqi exiles.
I was almost a minority of one among Amman-based
journalists who did not fully buy Kamel's story. I
subsequently pulled a few strings and managed to get
an exclusive interview with him (for your info Rosh,
it was a world exclusive!!!!). His comments during
that 65-minute encounter -- and in other interviews
thereafter -- only strengthened my suspicion that his
so-called defection could have been stage managed and
that Saddam was as much a part of the drama as much as
Kamel himself.
The best argument against that theory was that it was
not Saddam's style to resort to such a deception. It
is simply beyond him, many argued. The very fact that
his defection was a "body blow" to Saddam was a
central pillar of argument for those who inisted that
it was no drama. "After all, in a society like Iraq,
Saddam lost much face among his people because the
defection proved that he could not control his own
family," was the comment of a veteran journalist with
extensive Middle Eastern experience. "If you cannot
control your own family, how could you maintain
control over the whole country?"
The argument was strengthened in February 1996 when
Kamel and his brother as well as their father were
murdered when the two brothers returned home. However,
even their murder does not really rule out the
possiiblity that the defection was a drama.
The arguments in favour of the theory that the
defection was stage managed hinged on several
contentions and assumptions as opposed to the "facts"
as they appeared to the world at large.
These contentions and assumptions are:
In 1995, it was four years after the UN weapons
inspectors launched their mission in Iraq and were
engaged in on-again off-again standoffs with Iraqi
officials. No real progress was made in their work,
and it seemed every day that passed by was only
furthering the realisation of the UN objectives and
chances of Iraq returning to the international fold
were receding.
By mid-1995, Saddam should have realised that he
could not hope to continue to conceal his weapons
programmes from the UN inspectors, who were backed by
satellite spying information provided by the US. He
should have summarised that the UN inspectors would
gradually unearth whatever military programmes he had.
But it would have taken years if not decades and in
the meantime he could not hope for a lifting of the
crippling UN sanctions imposed on Iraq in 1990.
However, he could not very well order his people on a
fine morning to reveal everything to the UN inspectors
because that would be an indignified affair for him.
That realisation prompted him to seek a face-saving
formula under which he would not be held personally
responsible for concealing the weapons and programmes
but the details would nonetheless be made available to
the UN inspectors.
Kamel's "defection" was that compromise.
Having reached that "foundation," it is relatively
easy to figure out the rest if one suspects that
there was no real defection at all.
Kamel was not supposed to have lived in "exile" in
Jordan for more than three to four months during which
he was supposed to "tell all" to the UN inspectors.
Another mission was added to his "defection" at some
point: Penetrate the Iraqi exile movements and be
Saddam's Trojan horse among them.
Let us look at what happened after Kamel arrived in
Amman in August.
In less than 24 hours, he was denounced as a traitor.
In a week's time the Iraqi government declared that
Kamel had unilaterally, without informing Saddam,
concealed a lot of information from the UN inspectors.
Baghdad requested Ekeus to visit Iraq to collect all
information that Kamel had purportedly held back from
him.
The contention was clear: Saddam had ordered every
Iraqi official to reveal all information on the
country's military industry to the UN inspectors, but
his own son-in-law disobeyed him for reasons of his
own.
Ekeus flew to Baghdad in the third week of August.
Sure enough, masses of files on Iraq's military
industry were handed over to him along with
explanations that had Saddam been aware of Kamel's
deception, the information would not have been held
back from the UN inspectors.
The clinch came when a senior Iraqi minister drove
Ekeus to Kamel's chicken farm outside Baghdad and
showed the UN inspector several locked cupboards
there. These were found to contain more "confidential
and vital" information on Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction. Kamel had secreted these files at his
farmhouse without informing anyone, Ekeus was told.
The UN official carted off all the files to Baghdad
from where they were shipped to Vienna and the UN
headquarters in New York. Some were also sent to
Bahrain where the Unscom had set up base for its Iraq
mission.
Ekeus's next stop was Amman, where he, Maurizio
Zifferero, deputy director of the International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA) and head of the inspections team
in Iraq, and Nikita Smidovich, a Russian diplomat who
led UNSCOM's ballistic missile team and former deputy
director for operations of Unscom, interviewed Kamel.
Major Izzeddin Al Majid, a cousin of Kamel, who had
also defected, acted as an interpreter (Izzeddin Al
Majid did not return with them to Iraq in 1996. He is
now believed to be living somewhere in Europe).
Obviously, whatever information the UN inspectors had
gleaned from the newfound files in Baghdad were
confirmed point to point by Kamel during that Amman
encounter. However, he did not provide an iota of
information more than what Ekeus had gathered from the
files except that he had ordered all weapons of mass
destruction be destroyed.
The transcript of the Ekeus-Kamel meeting was
classified as sensitive and was not made public.
However, a copy was "leaked" to Glen Rangwala, the
same person who exposed that the recent British
intelligence report on Iraq was a partial reprint of
an academic study conducted by a California student in
1991. The "leak" came after the Newsweek article was
published.
What the transcript does not contain is that at the
beginning of the meeting, Kamel told Ekeus to get rid
of his main translator, a Syrian or a Tunisian, saying
he was on Iraqi payroll.
"That was perhaps the only new revelation that Kamel
made during his meetings with Ekeus," according to a
source close to the Ekeus-Kamel encounter. "Everything
else Kamel told Ekeus was only confirmation of what
was contained in the files given to the inspectors by
the Iraqi government."
Ekeus left Amman, apparently happier than ever since
he began his mission in Iraq in 1991.
The data contained in the Iraqi files took several
months to be deciphered into practical information and
Ekeus either overlooked that the Iraqi defector did
not give him any information not available in the
files or was too overwhelmed by the details given to
him.
By the time he was ready for another meeting with
Kamel, the defector had returned to Iraq and was
killed along with his brother by "vengeful" members of
their Majed clan despite a pardon offered to them by
Saddam. Some of those who killed him were "executed."
It was reported that Saddam's eldest son Uday
supervised the killing of his brother-in-laws. The
sisters and children were reportedly sent off to the
family home on Tikrit. Kamel's wife was reported since
then to have lost her mind.
There are many who believe that the entire script of
the "defection, revelations, pardon and return home"
drama was written by none other than Saddam himself
and agreed with Kamel. But what Kamel did not account
for was that his father-in-law had rewritten the happy
ending without his knowledge.
Why was the script rewritten?
Again, it is conjecture. Saddam had not anticipated
the kind of approach that the Western media would take
to Kamel, who was described, immediately after his
"defection," as Saddam's replacement as Iraq's
president after a Western-engineered coup in Baghdad.
The Clinton administration sought to portray Kamel as
an alternative to Saddam and gave public assurances of
support to Jordan's King Hussein for granting asylum
to the Iraqi defectors. That was an unexpected
development for Saddam, who was, at best, expecting
the outside world see his son-in-law as an "important"
Iraqi defector but not of presidential material.
Furthermore, Saddam had allowed for a three-to-four
month stay for Kamel in Jordan (Kamel actually never
left Jordanian territory during his seven-month
"exile," except, according to unconfirmed reports,
when the late King Hussein took him along to perform
Umra in Saudi Arabia). The stay had to be extended
because Kamel's second mission -- of penetrating the
camp of Iraqi dissidents-- was faltering because no
Iraqi exile leader was ready to accept him as the
future president of Iraq; if anything, they did not
trust him as far as they could throw him.
Prominent Iraqi exile leaders were unanimous in their
opinion of Kamel: He could have been helpful in
securing the support of senior Iraqi military generals
from the Sunni community and could at best be rewarded
with a ministerial post in a post-Saddam government.
Saddam was more disturbed, according to those who who
advocate the theory that the defection was a drama,
that Kamel in Amman was in almost daily contact with
senior CIA officials and other Western intelligence
agencies, which used their good offices with the
Jordanians to remain in touch with him.
Obviously, Saddam put himself in Kamel's shoes and
applied his own philosophy and approach. He reached
the conclusion that Kamel could have been "turned" by
the CIA and the possibility could not be ruled out
that his son-in-law might shoot him in the back at the
first given opportunity in a carefully orchestrated
plot and take over the helm in Iraq with CIA backing.
That was not something that he had not provided for in
the original script for the defection drama.
After all, goes the theory, Saddam would have thought
that had he been Kamel he would not waste an
opportunity to grab power, father-in-law or no
father-in-law, and as such, he posed a major risk if
readmitted to the ruling circles as written in the
original defection script.
Kamel belonged to the same clan as Saddam's father. He
was a member of the presidential security guard and
steadily rose in prominence. He was known for his
efficiency in arranging Saddam's security details and
this brought him into close quarters with the
president. Saddam was obviously taken to the man since
he found common streaks, including a ruthlessness that
is so vital to survival in the labrynth of power in
Baghdad (Kamel was known for his brutality while
handling the Kurdish rebellion in the north and Shiite
unrest in the south, and he also showed that trait
while handling Kuwaiti resistance during the Iraqi
occupation of the emirate).
Apparently, Saddam decided that it was ideal to seal
Kamel into his camp by marrying off his daughter,
Raghad, to him. That was done. And Kamel manipulated
the pawns and arranged his brother Saddam Kamel to
marry the president's younger daughter Rana and
elevate him as head of presidential security. At some
point, reports have said, Saddam Hussein considered
Kamel closer to him than his own sons Uday and Qusai
and that was one of the reasons that Uday was hostile
to Kamel and his brother.
Is there any hard evidence that Kamel's "defection"
was faked?
Consider this: In mid-October 1995 -- two months after
Kamel defected -- I was told aan interesting story
about a Jordanian woman who was giving private tution
to the children of the Iraqi defectors. At one point,
she was being a bit harsh with the children for
truancy, but was told by Kamel's wife to "take it
easy."
"Don't take these tutions too seriously," she was
told. "We should be going back in a few weeks anyway,
so don't bother too much and don't be too tough on the
children."
Consider this: During my interviews with Kamel -- and
others have said the same thing -- I found him
largely naive to the ways of life outside Iraq. He
came across like a villager who was suddenly
catapulted into a position of power and influence and
did not know what to do with his newfound strength. He
spoke little English and even his Arabic was deemed by
experts to be too sub-standard for someone who served
as a minister of Iraq.
Consider this: Kamel blamed Saddam's eldest son Uday
for all the troubles of Iraq. He contented that Saddam
was surrounded by people who told him only what he
wanted to hear and who manipulated him. Thes included
Tareq Aziz and Taha Yassin Ramadan. He said he himself
was finding it difficult to get access to the
president despite his position as a member of the
cabinet as well as his family relationship. He said he
chose to leave Iraq because he feared for his life
since Uday was plotting against him.
Consider this: Kamel never gave a straight answer to
the question whether he envisaged himself to be
Saddam's successor as president of Iraq. In fact, he
seemed to be taken aback when the question was put to
him for the first time as if the thought had never
occurred to him earlier.
Consider this: Kamel said while in Jordan that he knew
of an impending Iraqi plan to reinvade and reoccupy
Kuwait and that a massive force was being assembled
near the border. The US was alarmed, particularly
after satellite spying spotted some movements near the
border. However, what were supposed to have been a
concentration of battle tanks disappeared overnight in
what many experts then theorised as a replay of the
feigned allied invasion of France during World War II.
But for sceptics, it was the enactment of a
pre-arranged Saddam ploy aimed at giving credence to
Kamel's "revelations."
The theory that the defection was faked does not make
much sense when seen from a conventional vantage
point. That apporoach would see Hussein Kamel as a
man who was fed up of his father-in-law's machinations
and wanted to put an end to the cat-and-mouse game
with the UN inspectors. "I made the decision to
disclose everything so that Iraq could return to
normal," he had told Ekeus. "They (Saddam and others
in the regime) are only interested in themselves and
not worried about economics or political state of the
country. I can state publicly I will work against the
regime."
He fled his country with his family, hoping that his
revelations would help hasten the demise of Saddam
from power and he stood a chance to succeed his
father-in-law as president of Iraq. He was
disillusioned when Iraqi exile groups turned down his
overtures and labelled him as untrustworthy as Saddam
himself.
Kamel also realised that the Americans were not
taking him seriously. His wife and sister-in-law
pleaded to be allowed to return to their homeland. His
will was weakened by the arrival of his weeping
mother-in-law, Sajida, who told him Saddam had
promised her that he would forgive him and his brother
if they would return to Baghdad.
He established contacts with the Iraqi diplomatic
mission in Amman and informed Saddam he regreted his
decision to defect and wanted to return home. Soon
word came through the mission that he was given a
presidential pardon and he could return. On Feb.20,
1996, he, his brother and their families crossed the
border back into Iraq. The moment they were in Iraqi
territory, they were separated from their wives and
taken to their home in Baghdad where they were kept
under house arrest.
Their divorces from Saddam's daughters were announced
immediately thereafter.
Their repeated appeals for a meeting with their
father-in-law were rejected. On the night of Feb.23, a
group led by elders of their Majed clan attacked them.
Both brothers as well as their father and a few
supporters were said to have put up a brave battle
before all of them were shot down by the clansmen who
claimed they were cleansing the honour of the clan by
killing the "traitors."
The bodies of the Kamels were never seen. That leaves
open speculation that even their "death" was faked and
that the Kamel brothers are living in secret with
their families somewhere in Iraq. That is a theory
that is equally fascinating but impossible.