The Fist of God

out quite like that.

There were in fact several resistance movements in existence, most of them random and uncoordinated. In the Shi’a district of Rumaithiya,

Iraqi soldiers simply disappeared. The Shi’a Moslems had special reason to loathe the Iraqis, for their coreligionists, the Shi’a of Iran, had been slaughtered in hundreds of thousands during the Iran-Iraq war. Iraqi soldiers who wandered into the rabbit warren of alleys that make up the Rumaithiya district had their throats cut, and their bodies were dumped in the sewers. They were never recovered.

Among the Sunnis, the resistance was centered in the mosques, where the Iraqis seldom ventured. Here messages were passed, weapons swapped, and attacks planned.

The most organized resistance came from the leadership of Kuwaiti notables, men of education and wealth. Mr. Al-Khalifa became the banker, using his funds to provide food so that the Kuwaitis could eat, and other cargos hidden beneath the food that came in from outside.

The organization aimed at six goals, five of them a form of passive resistance, and each had its own branch. One was documentation; every resister was supplied with perfect documentation forged by resisters within the Interior Ministry. A second branch was for intelligence—keeping a stream of information about Iraqi movements heading in the direction of the Coalition headquarters in Riyadh, particularly about Iraqi manpower and weapon strength, coastal fortifications, and missile deployments. A third branch kept the services functioning—water, electricity, fire brigades, and health.

When, finally in defeat, Iraq turned on the oil taps and began to destroy the sea itself, Kuwaiti oil engineers told the American fighter-bombers exactly which valves to hit in order to turn off the flow.

Community solidarity committees circulated through all the districts, often contacting Europeans and other First World residents still holed up in their flats and keeping them out of the way of the Iraqi trawl nets.

A satellite phone system was smuggled in from Saudi Arabia in the dummy fuel tank of a jeep. It was not encrypted like Martin’s, but by keeping it constantly on the move, the Kuwaiti resistance could avoid Iraqi detection and contact Riyadh whenever there was something to pass. An elderly radio ham worked throughout the occupation, sending seven thousand messages to another ham in Colorado, which were passed on to the State Department.

And there was the offensive resistance, mainly under the leadership of a Kuwaiti colonel who had escaped the Ministry of Defense building on the first day. Because he had a son called Fouad, his code name was Abu Fouad, or Father of Fouad.

Saddam Hussein had finally given up trying to form a puppet government and appointed his half-brother Ali Hassan Majid as Governor-General.

The resistance was not just a game. A small but extremely dirty war developed underground. The AMAM responded by setting up two interrogation centers, at the Kathma Sports Center and the Qadisiyah Stadium. Here the methods of AMAM chief Omar Khatib were imported from the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad and used extensively. Before the liberation, five hundred Kuwaitis were dead, of whom two hundred fifty were executed, many after prolonged torture.

Counterintelligence chief Hassan Rahmani sat at his desk in the Hilton Hotel and read the reports prepared by his on-the-spot staff. He was making a brief visit from his Baghdad duties on September 15. The reports made gloomy reading.

There was a steady increase in attacks on Iraqi outposts on lonely roads, guard huts, vehicles, and roadblocks. This was mainly the AMAM’s problem—local resistance came under them, and—predictably, in Rahmani’s view—that brutal oaf Khatib was making a camel’s breakfast out of it.

Rahmani had little time for the torture to which his rival in the Iraqi intelligence structure was so devoted. He preferred to rely on patient detective work, deduction, and cunning, even though he had to concede that in Iraq it was terror and nothing else that had kept the Rais in power all these years. He had to admit, with all his education, that the street-wise, devious psychopath from the alleys of Tikrit frightened him.

He had tried to persuade his president to let him have charge of internal intelligence in Kuwait, but the answer had been a firm no. It was a question of principle, Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz had explained to him. He, Rahmani, was charged to protect the state from espionage and sabotage from foreign sources. The Rais would not concede that Kuwait was a foreign country—it was the nineteenth province of Iraq.

So it was Omar Khatib’s job to ensure compliance.

As he contemplated his sheaf of reports that morning in the Hilton Hotel, Rahmani was rather relieved that he did not have the task. It was a nightmare, and as he had predicted, Saddam Hussein had played his cards consistently wrong.

The taking of Western hostages as human shields against attack was proving a disaster, totally counterproductive. He had missed his chance to roll south and take the Saudi oil fields, forcing King Fahd to the conference table, and now the Americans were pouring into the theater.

All attempts to assimilate Kuwait were failing, and within a month, probably less, Saudi Arabia would be impregnable with its American shield along the northern border.

Saddam Hussein, he believed, could neither get out of Kuwait without humiliation, nor stay in there if attacked without a bigger one. Yet the mood around the Rais was still one of confidence, as if he were convinced something would turn up. What on earth did the man expect? Rahmani wondered. That Allah himself would lean down from heaven and smash his enemies in the face?

Rahmani rose from his desk and walked to the window. He liked to stroll as he thought; it marshaled his brain. He looked down from the window. The once-sparkling marina was now a garbage dump.

There was something about the reports on his desk that disturbed him.

He went back and scanned them again. Yes, something odd. Some of the attacks on Iraqis were with handguns and rifles; others with bombs made from industrial TNT. But here were others, a constant niggling stream, that clearly indicated that a plastic explosive had been used.

Kuwait had never had plastic explosives, least of all Semtex-H. So who was using it, and where did they get it?

Then there were radio reports of an encrypted transmitter somewhere out in the desert that moved all the time, coming on air at different times, talking scrambled nonsense for ten or fifteen minutes and then going silent, and always on different bearings.

Then there were these reports of a strange Bedou who seemed to wander about at will, appearing, disappearing, and reappearing, and always a trail of destruction in his wake. Before they died of wounds, two badly injured soldiers had reported seeing the man, tall and confident in a red-and-white checkered keffiyeh, one trailing end drawn across his face.

Two Kuwaitis under torture had mentioned the legend of the invisible Bedou but claimed they had never actually seen him. Sabaawi’s men were trying to persuade the prisoners with even more pain to admit they had. Fools. Of course, they would invent anything to stop the agony.

The more Hassan Rahmani thought about it, the more he became convinced that he had a foreign infiltrator on his hands, definitely part of his authority. He found it hard to believe that there was any Bedou who knew about plastic explosives and encrypted transceivers—if they were from the same man. He might have trained up a few bomb planters, but he also seemed to be carrying out a lot of the attacks himself.

It would just not be possible to pick up every Bedou wandering around the city and the desert—that would be the AMAM way, but they would be pulling out fingernails for years and getting nowhere.

For Rahmani, the problem resolved itself into three choices: Capture the man during one of his attacks—but that would be haphazard and possibly never happen. Capture one of his Kuwaiti associates and trace the man to his lair. Or take him crouched over his transmitter in the desert.

Rahmani decided on the last. He would bring in from Iraq two or three of his best radio-detector teams, post them at different points, and try to triangulate on the source of the broadcast. He would also need an Army helicopter on standby, with a team of Special Forces ready to move. As soon as he got back to Baghdad, he would set it in motion.

Hassan Rahmani was not the only man that day in Kuwait who was interested in the Bedou. In a suburban villa miles away from the Hilton, a handsome, moustached young Kuwaiti Army colonel in a white cotton thob sat in an armchair and listened to a friend who had come to him with an interesting snippet.