connivance to help improve the artillery and shells of South Africa, which was then fighting the Moscow-backed Cubans in Angola.
Bull was nothing if not politically naive—to an amazing degree. He went, found he liked the South Africans, and got on well with them.
The fact that South Africa was an international outcast for its apartheid policies did not worry him. He helped them redesign their artillery along the lines of his increasingly sought-after GC-45 long-barreled long-range howitzer. Later, the South Africans produced their own version, and it was these cannon that smashed the Soviet artillery, rolling back the Russians and Cubans.
Returning to the United States, Bull continued to ship his shells. In 1977, however, the United Nations imposed an arms embargo on South Africa, and when Jimmy Carter became president, Bull was arrested and charged with illegal exports to a forbidden regime. The CIA dropped him like a hot potato. He was persuaded to stay silent and plead guilty. It was a formality, he was told; he would get a slap on the wrist for a technical breach.
On June 16, 1980, a U.S. judge sentenced Bull to a year in prison, with six months suspended, and a fine of $105,000. He actually served four months and seventeen days at Allenwood prison in Pennsylvania. But for Bull that was not the point.
It was the shame and the disgrace that got to him, plus the sense of betrayal. How could they have done this to him? he asked reasonably.
He had helped the United States wherever he could, taken her citizenship, gone along with the CIA appeal. While he was in Allenwood, his company, Space Research Corporation, went bankrupt and closed down. He was ruined.
On emerging from jail he quit the United States and Canada forever, emigrating to Brussels and starting all over again in a one-room walk-up with a kitchenette. Friends said later that he was changed after the trial, was never the same man again. He never forgave the CIA, and he never forgave America; yet he struggled for years for a rehearing and a pardon.
He returned to consultancy and took up an offer that had been made to him before his trial: to work for China on the improvement of its artillery. Through the early and mid-1980s Bull worked mainly for Beijing and redesigned their artillery along the lines of his GC-4S
cannon, which was now being sold under world license by Voest-Alpine of Austria, which had bought the patents from Bull for a one-time payment of two million dollars. Bull always was a terrible businessman, or he would have been a multimillionaire.
While Bull had been away in China, things had happened elsewhere.
The South Africans had taken his designs and improved greatly upon them, creating a towed howitzer called the G-5 from his GC-45 and a self-propelled cannon, the G-6. Both had a range with extended shells of forty kilometers. South Africa was selling them around the world.
Because of his poor deal with the South Africans, Bull got not a penny in royalties.
Among the clients for these guns was a certain Saddam Hussein of Iraq. It was these cannon that broke the human waves of Iranian fanatics in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, finally defeating them in the Fao marshes. But Saddam Hussein had added a new twist, especially at the battle of Fao. He had put poison gas in the shells.
Bull then worked for Spain and Yugoslavia, converting the old Yugoslav Army’s Soviet-made 130-mm. artillery to the new 155-mm.
cannon with the extended-range shells. Though he would never live to see it, these were the guns, inherited by the Serbs on the collapse of Yugoslavia, that were to pulverize the cities of the Croats and Muslims in the civil war. And in 1987 he learned that the United States would, after all, research the payloads-into-space cannon—but with Gerry Bull firmly cut out of the deal.
That winter he received a strange phone call from the Iraqi embassy in Bonn: Would Dr. Bull like to visit Baghdad as Iraq’s guest?
What he did not know was that in the mid-1980s, Iraq had witnessed Operation Staunch, a concerted American effort to shut off all sources of weapons imports destined for Iran. This followed the carnage among American Marines in Beirut when Iranian-backed Hezbollah fanatics attacked their barracks.
Iraq’s reaction, although they benefited in their war with Iran from Operation Staunch, was: If the Americans can do that to Iran, they can do it to us. From then on, Iraq determined to import not the arms but wherever possible the technology to make their own. Bull was first and foremost a designer; he interested them.
The mission to recruit him went to Amer Saadi, who was number two at the Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization, known as MIMI. When Bull arrived in Baghdad in January 1988, Amer Saadi, a smooth, cosmopolitan diplomat/scientist speaking English, French, and German as well as Arabic, played him beautifully.
The Iraqis, he said, wanted Bull’s help with their dream of putting peaceful satellites into space. To do this, they had to design a rocket that could put the payload up there. Their Egyptian and Brazilian scientists had suggested that the first step would be to tie together five Scud missiles, of which Iraq had bought nine hundred from the Soviet Union. But there were technical problems, many problems. They needed access to a supercomputer. Could Bull help them?
Bull loved problems—they were his raison d’etre. He did not have access to a supercomputer, but on two legs he himself was the nearest thing. Besides, he told Amer Saadi, if Iraq really wanted to be the first Arab nation to put satellites into space, there was another way—cheaper, simpler, faster than rockets starting from scratch. Tell me all, said the Iraqi. So Bull did.
For just three million dollars, he said, he could produce a giant gun that would do the job. It would be a five- year program. He could beat the Americans at Livermore to the punch. It would be an Arab triumph. Dr. Saadi glowed with admiration. He would put the idea to his government and recommend it strongly. In the meantime, would Dr. Bull look at the Iraqi artillery?
By the end of his one-week visit, Bull had agreed to crack the problems of tying five Scuds together to form the first stage of a rocket of intercontinental or space-reaching performance; to design two new artillery pieces for the Army; and to put a formal proposal for his payload-into-orbit Supergun.
As with South Africa, he was able to block his mind to the nature of the regime he was about to serve. Friends had told him of Saddam Hussein’s record as the man with the bloodiest hands in the Middle East. But in 1988 there were thousands of respectable companies and dozens of governments clamoring to do business with big-spending Iraq.
For Bull, the bait was his gun, his beloved gun, his life’s dream, at last with a backer who was prepared to help him bring it to fulfillment and join the pantheon of scientists.
In March 1988, Amer Saadi sent a diplomat to Brussels to talk to Bull.
Yes, said the gun designer, he had made progress on the technical problems of the first stage of the Iraqi rocket. He would be glad to hand them over on signature of a contract with his company, once again the Space Research Corporation. The deal was done. The Iraqis realized that his offer of a gun for only three million dollars was silly; they raised it to ten million but asked for more speed.
When Bull worked fast, he worked amazingly fast. In one month he put together a team of the best available free-lancers he could find.
Heading the Supergun team in Iraq was a British projects engineer called Christopher Cowley. Bull himself christened the rocket program, based at Saad 16 in northern Iraq, Project Bird. The Supergun task was named Project Babylon.
By May, the exact specifications of Babylon had been worked out. It would be an incredible machine. One meter of bore; a barrel 156 meters long and weighing 1,665 tons—the height of the Washington Monument.
Bull had already made plain to Baghdad that he would have to make a smaller prototype, a Mini-Babylon, with a 350-mm. bore weighing only 113 tons. But in this he could test nose cones that would also be useful for the rocket project. The Iraqis liked this—they needed nose-cone technology as well.
The full significance of the insatiable Iraqi appetite for nose-cone technology seems to have escaped Gerry Bull at the time. Maybe, in his limitless enthusiasm to see his life’s dream realized at last, he just suppressed it. Nose cones of very advanced design are needed to prevent a payload from burning up from friction heat as it reenters earth’s atmosphere. But orbiting payloads in space do not return; they stay up there.
