Saddam Hussein

Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti was born on April 28, 1937, near the town of Tikrit in central Iraq, the son of a peasant family. He joined the Ba'ath Party in 1957. In 1959, he participated in a failed CIA-linked assassination attempt against Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qassem and subsequently lived in exile in Egypt.¹

CIA and Ba'ath Rise to Power

U.S. intelligence played a documented role in the 1963 Ba'athist coup that first brought the party to power in Iraq. Evidence that Saddam was on the CIA payroll in 1959 emerged in later investigations. After the 1963 coup, the CIA provided lists of suspected communists and leftists to the incoming Ba'athist government; those lists facilitated the killing of thousands of political opponents.¹

The Ba'ath Party was ousted from government in the same year and returned to power in a 1968 coup. Saddam served as deputy to President Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr and was the de facto strongman of the regime through the 1970s. He forced al-Bakr to resign on July 16, 1979, formally assuming the presidency. Within days he convened a party congress at which he personally identified and had arrested dozens of alleged conspirators; hundreds of senior Ba'athists were executed in the following weeks.²

Iran-Iraq War and Western Support

In September 1980, Saddam launched an invasion of Iran following the instability created by the Iranian Revolution. The eight-year Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) killed an estimated half million to one million people. Beginning in 1982, the Central Intelligence Agency began providing Iraq with satellite intelligence during the conflict. The Reagan administration extended credits, arms, and dual-use technology to Baghdad while simultaneously running the secret arms-for-hostages pipeline to Iran that became the Iran-Contra Affair.¹

Donald Rumsfeld visited Saddam in December 1983 as a special envoy for President Ronald Reagan, cementing the relationship at a moment when U.S. intelligence knew Iraq was using chemical weapons against Iranian forces. The arms and technology transfers to Iraq during the 1980s - including chemical and biological precursors - were later examined in congressional investigations and linked to the BNL scandal involving the Atlanta branch of Banca Nazionale del Lavoro.³

Arms Procurement Networks

Iraq's weapons procurement during the 1980s passed through several networks that intersect with vault subjects. Carlos Cardoen, a Chilean arms manufacturer with CIA connections, supplied cluster bombs to Iraq. Iraqi procurement agents operated through front companies in Europe, the United States, and the United Kingdom, the exposure of which became known as the Arms-to-Iraq affair in Britain.³

PROMIS software was among the products allegedly sold to Iraqi intelligence. Ari Ben-Menashe and other sources placed Iraq on the list of recipients of the Israeli-distributed, backdoor-equipped version of the software.⁴

Gulf War and Fall

Saddam invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990. The resulting Gulf War saw a U.S.-led coalition expel Iraqi forces in February 1991. The regime survived until the 2003 Iraq War, during which U.S. and coalition forces invaded and captured Baghdad in April 2003. Saddam was captured in December 2003, tried by an Iraqi tribunal, and executed by hanging on December 30, 2006.²