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 Iraqi 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.
The West, with its attention span of a few weeks, would get fed up and leave it to the four Arabs—two kings and two presidents—and so long as the oil kept flowing to create the smog that was choking them, the Anglo- Saxons would stay happy. Unless Kuwait was savagely brutalized, the media would drop the subject, the Al Sabah regime would be forgotten in exile somewhere in Saudi Arabia, the Kuwaitis would get on with their lives under a new government, and the quit-Kuwait conference could chew words for a decade until it didn’t matter anymore.
It could be done, but it would need the right touch. Hitler’s touch—“I only seek a peaceful settlement to my just demands. This is absolutely my last territorial ambition.” King Fahd would fall for it—no one had any love for the Kuwaitis anyway, let alone the Al Sabah lotus-eaters.
King Fahd and King Hussein would drop them, as Chamberlain had dropped the Czechs in 1938.
The trouble was, although Saddam was street-smart as hell or he wouldn’t still be alive, strategically and diplomatically he was a buffoon. Somehow, Hassan Rahmani reasoned, the Rais would get it wrong; he would neither pull out nor roll on, seize the Saudi oil field, and present the Western world with a fait accompli that they could do nothing about except destroy the oil and their own prosperity for a generation.
“The West” meant the Americans, with the Brits at their side, and they were all Anglo-Saxons. He knew about Anglo-Saxons. Five years at Mr. Hartley’s Tasisiya prep school had taught him his perfect English, his understanding of the British, and his wariness of that Anglo-Saxon habit of giving you a very hard punch on the jaw without warning.
He rubbed his chin where he had collected such a punch long ago, and laughed out loud. His aide across the room jumped a foot. Mike bloody Martin, where are you now?
Hassan Rahmani—clever, cultured, cosmopolitan, educated, and refined, an upper-class scion who served a regime of thugs—bent to his task. It was quite a task. Of the 1.8 million people in Kuwait that August, only 600,000 were Kuwaitis. To them you could add 600,000
Palestinians, some of whom would stay loyal to Kuwait, some of whom would side with Iraq because the PLO had done so, and most of whom would keep their heads down and try to survive. Then 300,000
Egyptians, some of them no doubt working for Cairo, which nowadays was the same as working for Washington or London, and 250,000
Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, and Filipinos, mainly blue-collar laborers or domestic servants—as an Iraqi, he believed the Kuwaitis could not scratch a fleabite on their arse without summoning a foreign servant.
And then 50,000 First World citizens—Brits, Americans, French, Germans, Spanish, Swedes, Danes—name it. And he was supposed to suppress foreign espionage. ... He sighed for the days when messages meant messengers or telephones. As head of Counterintelligence, he could seal the borders and cut the phone lines. But now any fool with a satellite could punch numbers into a cellular phone or a computer modem and talk to California. Hard to intercept or track the source, except with the best equipment, which he did not have.
He knew he could not control the outflow of information or the steady dribble of refugees escaping over the border. Nor could he affect the overflights of American satellites, all of which he suspected had now been reprogrammed to swing their orbits over Kuwait and Iraq every few minutes. (He was right.)
There was no point in attempting the impossible, even though he would have to pretend he had, and had succeeded. The main target would have to be to prevent active sabotage, the actual killing of Iraqis and destruction of their equipment, and the formation of a real resistance movement. And he would have to prevent help from outside, in the form of men, know-how, or equipment, from reaching any resistance.
In this he would come up against his rivals of the AMAM, the Secret Police, who were installed two floors below him. Khatib, he had learned that morning, was installing that thug Sabaawi, an oaf as brutal as himself, as head of the AMAM in Kuwait. If resisting Kuwaitis fell into
