“Absolutely. The nuclear scientists all agree it simply cannot be true.
So Saddam was lying.”
Privately, Martin thought it was a very odd radio intercept. It sounded more like information from inside a closed meeting.
“Saddam lies,” Martin said, “all the time. But usually for public consumption. This was to his own inner core of confidants? I wonder why? Morale booster on the threshold of war?”
“That’s what the powers think,” said Paxman.
“Have the generals been told?”
“No. The reasoning is, they are extremely busy right now and do not need to be bothered by something that simply has to be rubbish.”
“So what do you want from me, Simon?”
“Saddam’s mind. No one can figure it out. Nothing he does makes sense in the West. Is he certifiably insane or crazy like a fox?”
“In his world, the latter. In his world, what he does makes sense. The terror that revolts us has no moral downside for him, and it makes sense. The threats and the bluster make sense to him. Only when he tries to enter our world—with those ghastly PR exercises in Baghdad, ruffling that little English boy’s hair, playing the benign uncle, that sort of thing—only when he tries that does he look a complete fool. In his own world he is not a fool. He survives, he stays in power, he keeps Iraq united, his enemies fail and perish.”
“Terry, as we sit here, his country is being pulverized.”
“It doesn’t matter, Simon. It’s all replaceable.”
“But why did he say what he is supposed to have said?”
“What do the powers think?”
“That he lied.”
“No,” said Martin, “he lies for public consumption. To his inner core, he doesn’t have to. They are his, anyway. Either the source of the information lied and Saddam never said that; or he said it because he believed it was true.”
“Then he was himself lied to?”
“Possibly. Whoever did that will pay dearly when he finds out. But then, the intercept could be phony. A deliberate bluff, designed to be intercepted.”
Paxman could not say what he knew: that it was not an intercept. It came from Jericho. And in two years under the Israelis and three months under the Anglo-Americans, Jericho had never been wrong.
“You’ve got doubts, haven’t you?” said Martin.
“I suppose I have,” admitted Paxman.
Martin sighed.
“Straws in the wind, Simon. A phrase in an intercept, a man told to shut up and called a son of a whore, a phrase from Saddam about succeeding and being seen to succeed—in the hurting of America—and now this. We need a piece of string.”
“String?”
“Straw only makes up a bale when you can wrap it around with string.
There has to be something else as to what he really has in mind.
Otherwise, the powers are right, and he will go for the gas weapon he already has.”
“All right. I’ll look for a piece of string.”
“And I,” said Martin, “did not meet you this evening, and we have not spoken.”
“Thank you,” said Paxman.
Hassan Rahmani heard of the death of his agent Leila two days after it happened, on January 19. She had not appeared for a scheduled handover of information from General Kadiri’s bed, and fearing the worst, he had checked morgue records.
The hospital in Mansour had produced the evidence, though the corpse had been buried, with many others from the destroyed military buildings, in a mass grave.
Hassan Rahmani no more believed that his agent had been hit by a stray bomb while crossing a piece of waste ground in the middle of the night than he believed in ghosts. The only ghosts in the skies above Baghdad were the invisible American bombers of which he had read in Western defense magazines, and they were not ghosts but logically contrived inventions. So was the death of Leila Al-Hilla.
His only logical conclusion was that Kadiri had discovered her extramural activities and put a stop to them. Which meant she would have talked before she died.
That meant, for him, that Kadiri had become a powerful and dangerous enemy. Worse, his principal conduit into the inner councils of the regime had been closed down.
Had he known that Kadiri was as worried as he himself, Rahmani would have been delighted. But he did not know. He only knew that from thenceforward he was going to have to be extremely careful.
On the second day of the air war, Iraq launched its first battery of missiles against Israel. The media at once announced them as being Soviet-built Scud-Bs, and the title stuck throughout the rest of the war.
In fact, they were not Scuds at all.
The point of the onslaught was not foolish. Iraq recognized quite clearly that Israel was not a country prepared to accept large numbers of civilian casualties. As the first rocket warheads fell into the suburbs of Tel Aviv, Israel reacted by going on the warpath. This was exactly what Baghdad wanted.
Within the fifty-nation Coalition ranged against Iraq were seventeen Arab states, and if there was one thing they all shared apart from the Islamic faith, it was a hostility to Israel. Iraq calculated, probably rightly, that if Israel could be provoked into joining the war by a strike against her, the Arab nations in the Coalition would pull out. Even King Fahd, monarch of Saudi Arabia and Keeper of the Two Holy Places, would be in an impossible position.
The first reactions to the fall of the rockets on Israel was that they might be loaded with gas or germ cultures. Had they been, Israel could not have been restrained. It was quickly proved that the warheads were of conventional explosives. But the psychological effect inside Israel was still enormous.
The United States immediately brought massive pressure on Jerusalem not to respond with a counterstrike. The Allies, Itzhak Shamir was told, would take care of it. Israel actually launched a counterstrike in the form of a wave of her own F-15 fighter-bombers but called them back while still in Israeli air space.
The real Scud was a clumsy, obsolete Soviet missile of which Iraq had bought nine hundred several years earlier. It had a range of under three hundred kilometers and carried a warhead of close to a thousand pounds. It was not guided, and even in its original form it would, at full range, land anywhere within half a mile of its target.
From Iraq’s point of view, it had been a virtually useless purchase. It could not reach Teheran in the Iran-Iraq war, and it certainly could not reach Israel, even if fired from the extreme western border of Iraq.
What the Iraqis had done in the meantime, with German technical help, was bizarre. They had cut up the Scuds into chunks and used three of them to create two new rockets. To put not too fine a point on it, the new Al- Husayn rocket was a mess.
By adding extra fuel tanks the Iraqis had increased the range to 620 kilometers so that it could (and did) reach Teheran and Israel. But its payload was cut to a pathetic 160 pounds. Its guidance, always erratic, was now chaotic. Two of them, launched at Israel, not only missed Tel
Aviv, they missed the entire republic and fell in Jordan.
But as a terror weapon it almost worked. Even though all the Al-Husayns that fell on Israel had less payload than one American two-thousand-pound bomb falling on Iraq, they sent the Israeli population into something approaching panic.
The United States responded in three ways. Fully a thousand sorties were flown to shoot down the incoming rockets and the even more elusive mobile launchers.
Batteries of American Patriot missiles were sent into Israel within hours in an attempt to shoot down the incoming rockets but mainly to persuade Israel to stay out of the war.
