you are frisked, how do you explain this?”
He made the three who had written down the address burn their slips of paper.
“How well do you know your city?”
“Pretty well,” said the oldest of them, the twenty-five-year-old bank clerk.
“Not good enough. Buy maps tomorrow, street maps. Study as if for your final exams. Learn every street and alley, every square and garden, every boulevard and lane, every major public building, every mosque and courtyard. You know the street signs are coming down?”
They nodded. Within fifteen days of the invasion, after recovering from their shock, the Kuwaitis were beginning a form of passive resistance, of civil disobedience. It was spontaneous and uncoordinated. One of the moves was the ripping down of street signs.
Kuwait is a complicated city to start with; deprived of street signs, it became a maze.
Iraqi patrols were already becoming comprehensively lost. For the Secret Police, finding a suspect’s address was a nightmare. At main intersections, sign posts were being ripped up in the night or turned around.
That first night, Martin gave them two hours on basic security. Always have a cover story that checks out, for any journey and any rendezvous. Never carry incriminating paper. Always treat Iraqi soldiers with respect verging on deference. Confide in no one.
“From now on you are two people. One is the original you, the one everyone knows, the student, the clerk. He is polite, attentive, law-abiding, innocent, harmless. The Iraqis will leave him alone because he does not threaten them. He never insults their country, their flag, or their leader. He never comes to the attention of the AMAM. He stays alive and free. Only on a special occasion, on a mission, does the other person appear. He will become skilled and dangerous and still stay alive.”
He taught them about security. To attend a meeting at a rendezvous, turn up early, park well away. Go into the shadows. Watch for twenty minutes. Look at the surrounding houses. Check for heads on the roof, the waiting ambush party. Be alert for the scuff of a soldier’s boot on gravel, the glow of a cigarette, the clink of metal on metal.
When they still had time to get home before the curfew, he dismissed them. They were disappointed.
“What about the invaders? When do we start killing them?”
“When you know how.”
“Is there nothing we can do?”
“When the Iraqis move about, how do they do it? Do they march?”
“No, they use trucks, vans, jeeps, stolen cars,” said the law student.
“Which have petrol caps,” said the Bedou, “which come off with a quick twist. Sugar lumps—twenty lumps per petrol tank. It dissolves in the petrol, passes through the carburetor, and turns to hard caramel in the heat of the engine. It destroys the engine. Be careful not to be caught. Work in pairs and after dark. One keeps watch, the other slips in the sugar. Replace the petrol cap. It takes ten seconds.
“A piece of plywood, four inches by four, with four sharpened steel nails through it. Drop it down under your
“There are rats in Kuwait, so there are shops that sell rat poison. Buy the white, strychnine-based kind. Buy dough from a baker. Mix in the poison, using rubber gloves, then destroy the gloves. Bake up the bread in the kitchen oven, but only, when you are alone in the house.”
The students stared open-mouthed.
“We have to give it to the Iraqis?”
“No, you carry the loaves in open baskets on scooters, or in the trunks of cars. They will stop you at roadblocks and steal it. We meet here again in six days.”
Four days later, Iraqi trucks began to break down. Some were towed away and others abandoned, six trucks and four jeeps. The mechanics found out why but could not discover when or by whom. Tires began to blow out and the plywood squares were handed over to the Secret Police, who fumed and beat up several Kuwaitis seized at random on the streets.
Hospital wards began to fill with sick soldiers, all with vomiting and stomach pain. As they were hardly ever given food rations by their own army and lived hand-to-mouth at their roadblocks and in their stone-slab cantonments up and down the streets, it was assumed they had been drinking polluted water.
Then at the Amiri hospital in Dasman, a Kuwaiti lab technician ran an analysis of a sample of vomit from one of the Iraqis. He approached his departmental chief in great perplexity.
“He’s been eating rat poison, professor. But he says he only had bread for three days, and some fruit.”
The professor was puzzled.
“Iraq Army bread?”
“No, they didn’t deliver any for some days. He took it from a passing Kuwaiti baker’s boy.”
“Where are your samples?”
“On the bench, in the lab. I thought it best to see you first.”
“Quite right. You have done well. Destroy them. You have seen nothing, you understand?”
The professor walked back into his office shaking his head. Rat poison. Who the hell had thought of that?
The Medusa Committee met again on August 30, because the bacteriologist from Porton Down felt he had discovered all he could at that point about Iraq’s germ warfare program, such as it was or appeared to be.
“I’m afraid we are looking at somewhat slim pickings,” Dr. Bryant told his listeners. “The main reason is that the study of bacteriology can quite properly be carried out at any forensic or veterinary laboratory using the same equipment that you would find in any chemical lab and that won’t show up on export permits.
“You see, the overwhelming majority of the product is for the benefit of mankind, for the curing of diseases, not the spreading of them. So nothing could be more natural than for a developing country to want to study bilharzia, beri-beri, yellow fever, malaria, cholera, typhoid, or hepatitis. These are human diseases. There is another range of animal diseases that the veterinary colleges might quite properly want to study.”
“So there’s virtually no way of establishing whether Iraq today has a germ-bomb facility or not?” asked Sinclair of the CIA.
“Virtually not,” said Bryant. “There’s a record to show that way back in 1974, when Saddam Hussein was not on the throne, so to speak—”
“He was vice-president, then, and the power behind the throne,” said Terry Martin. Bryant was flustered.
“Well, whatever. Iraq signed a contract with the Institut Merieux in Paris to build them a bacteriological research project. It was supposed to be for veterinary research into animal diseases, and it may have been.”
“What about the stories of anthrax cultures for use against humans?” the American asked.
“Well, it’s possible. Anthrax is a particularly virulent disease. It mainly affects cattle and other livestock, but it can infect humans if they handle or ingest products from infected sources. You may recall the British government experimented with anthrax on the Hebridean island of Grainard during the Second World War. It’s still out of bounds.”
“That bad, eh? Where would he get this stuff?”
“That’s the point, Mr. Sinclair. You’d hardly go to a reputable
European or American laboratory and say ‘Can I have some nice anthrax cultures because I want to throw them at people?’ Anyway, he wouldn’t need to. There are diseased cattle all over the Third World.
One would only have to note an outbreak and buy a couple of diseased carcasses. But it wouldn’t show up on government paperwork.”
“So he could have cultures of this disease for use in bombs or shells, but we don’t know. Is that the position?” asked Sir Paul Spruce. His rolled-gold pen was poised above his note pad.
“That’s about it,” said Bryant. “But that’s the bad news. The better news is, I doubt if it would work against an advancing army. I suppose that if you had an army advancing against you and you were ruthless enough, you’d want to stop them in their tracks.”
“That’s about the shape of it,” said Sinclair.
“Well, anthrax wouldn’t do that. It would impregnate the soil if dropped from a series of air bursts above and ahead of the army.
