Working for Saddam = 'Sweating in Fear'

Feb. 25, 2003 -- It would be bad enough working for a boss with a reputation for paranoia and murderous purges. But imagine that he also believes he can read your mind — just by staring into your eyes.

That's what it's like working under Saddam Hussein, according to former Iraqi officials and Western diplomats who have seen his administration up close.

"At times, he has actually sent people to execution because he looked in their eyes and decided they were traitors, or that these were people he cannot trust," said Hussain al-Shahristani, who was Saddam's chief scientific adviser during the 1970s.

When Saddam became president in July 1979, one of his first moves was to eliminate potential rivals in his own Baath Party. One by one, he called out 60 of his colleagues and accused them of plotting against him. As each man was led from the chamber — reportedly to torture and then execution — Saddam wept. A film recording the purge was distributed throughout the country, inaugurating his reign of terror and announcing its rules.

"Saddam doesn't trust anybody, sometimes not even his leaders," said Saad al-Bazzaz, former director of the Iraqi News Agency and Iraqi TV.

Foreign diplomats say the effect on his officials is apparent. "You see these chaps sweating," said Stephen Egerton, the former British ambassador to Iraq. "You're in this icy, air-conditioned room — the coldest air conditioning I've ever known — and the chap's absolutely sweating with fear."

‘Pleasant’ at First

At first meeting, Saddam can seem pleasant and accommodating, according to people who have dealt with him.

"When you meet him, you think he's a decent person," said Mahmoud Osman, former chief negotiator for the Kurdish Democratic Party. "He listens very carefully to what you say. Then he picks up your ideas and usually talks in a flexible way. He makes a concession to you … but at the same time, he's thinking of another policy: how to destroy you if you don't follow him."

When George Galloway, a British member of Parliament, met Saddam in 2001, the Iraqi leader looked down at the floor, which Galloway saw as "generally a sign of shyness." He describes Saddam's handshake as "surprisingly soft."

Another British politician, former Foreign Office minister David Mellor, remembers Saddam as being "very pleasant" until he presented him with a letter inquiring about a political prisoner. "He just stuffed it unread down the side of the settee," Mellor said.

Stephen Egerton, Britain's ambassador to Iraq in the early 1980s, recalls introducing his 15-year-old son to Saddam. "Saddam looked him up and down and said, 'Ah, well, grand boy, I suppose you've come back to join my army to fight the Kurds.' And my son's face fell a million miles, and Saddam laughed. That's the kind of jokes he made, always at your discomfiture."

Visitors have also found some of Saddam's security requirements unsettling. Before being admitted to an audience with the Iraqi leader, visitors are not only searched for weapons, but are sometimes told to wash their hands and have their mouths checked for signs of sickness. "If you asked, 'Why are you checking the mouth?' they said, 'You might have a cough, and your cough shouldn't be transferred to His Excellency,'" said al-Bazzaz, the former Iraqi TV director.

Tell Him What He Wants

When Saddam hears something he doesn't like, his demeanor changes, according to former Planning Minister Salah Shaikhly. "He began to get irritated when you mentioned something which he didn't like. And sometimes, without mentioning names, he would turn back and say, 'Well, look, each one of us in this room have a limit beyond which you should not go.'"

Al-Shahristani, the former nuclear scientist, remembers crossing that line in 1979 when Saddam asked him to help build nuclear weapons. "I pointed out the fact that Iraq had signed the nonproliferation treaty in Vienna, and that we're obligated by international commitment not to develop any military applications," al-Shahristani said.

"He just looked at me, thinking how naïve I was, and said, 'Dr. Hussain, you are a good scientist. Mind your scientific work and leave politics to us.'" Al-Shahristani says he was arrested and tortured, then kept in solitary confinement for the next 11 years.

‘Streetwise’ Rise to Power

Saddam's colleagues were not always so scared of him. Shaikhly remembers how the future president was regarded in his first few years in the Baath Party, which seized power in 1968.

"He was a totally insignificant kind of person, driving a Volkswagen Beetle, sort of no importance in the party at all," Shaikhly said.

However, he said, the young Saddam was ambitious and quickly rose through the party ranks. "He was always in a hurry. He didn't stay in one place more than a few minutes, and he had to drive. People sort of spoke to him as somebody totally in a hurry, wanting to get somewhere," according to Shaikhly.

Shaikhly also remembers Saddam's reading material at the time. "[He] always had the copy of Mein Kampf in his back pocket, the Arabic version, what Hitler had written about Germany."

However, it was another totalitarian leader who had even more of an influence over Saddam, Shaikhly believes: Josef Stalin, the Soviet leader who came to power by ruthlessly eliminating his fellow revolutionaries.

Saddam was, above all, "streetwise," said Shaikhly. "He learned his tricks in the normal sort of non-academic way. He learned to ask questions. He always looked forward with some suspicions. He didn't take things at face value at all."

This report aired on Nightline on Jan. 20, 2003.