Real Dictators - Saddam Hussein Part 1: Son of the Alleyways

Episode Date: November 15, 2023

In the spring of 1937, a child dies and his brother is born. Translated from Arabic, the newborn’s name - Saddam - means ‘one who confronts’. As his life will demonstrate, it couldn’t be more appropriate. So how does a boy from a tough peasant background go on to rise to the very top of Iraq’s leadership? How does his journey towards global infamy begin? Narrated by Paul McGann. A Noiser production, written by Duncan Barrett. Get every episode of Real Dictators a week early with Noiser+. You’ll also get ad-free listening, bonus material and early access to shows across the Noiser network. Click the Noiser+ banner to get started. Or, if you’re on Spotify or Android, go to noiser.com/subscriptions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. It's spring 1937 in Baghdad, Iraq. Outside a hospital, a black sedan screeches to a halt. Out of the car comes a heavily pregnant woman. Her name is Super Tulfa. Following just behind is their 12 year old son. The boy's been vomiting, complaining of unbearable

headaches. For his mother, a peasant woman who barely scrapes a living as a fortune teller, these are bad omens. And Suba isn't the only one who's concerned. Her neighbors have taken pity on her, driving them to the hospital. They know she's been struggling to make ends meet since her husband disappeared several months earlier. Now her son is displaying symptoms of a possible brain tumor.

At the hospital, despite the doctor's best efforts, they're unable to save the boy. He dies on the operating table. Unstable and superstitious at the best of times, Tsuba now becomes convinced that her unborn child is somehow responsible for his brother's demise. He wants to be the only man in the family, she tells the shocked neighbors, who've been waiting to drive her back home. On their way out of the hospital, she hurls herself against the heavy double doors,

attempting to trigger a miscarriage. When that doesn't work, she tries to throw herself under a bus. Super screams, I'm carrying Satan in my belly. A month later, in her small mud-brick dwelling, Super gives birth. But given her fragile mental health, it's the baby boy's uncle you must look after him to begin with. In fact, it's not until three years later that the naughty, boisterous toddler returns

to his mother's home. By now he's been given a name. Saddam. Translated from Arabic, it means one who confronts. And, as his life will make clear, it couldn't be more appropriate. Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq for more than three decades, be more appropriate. Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq for more than three decades, holding onto power despite multiple

assassination attempts and failed rebellions. Modelling himself on Joseph Stalin, right down to the moustache, he constructed a grandiose personality cult and oversaw brutal purges of political rivals. Saddam is believed to be responsible for the deaths of a quarter of a million Iraqis. His use of chemical weapons against the Kurds was nothing short of genocidal. During his time in office, he took on the might of the US military not once, but twice. A staple of fraught policy discussions and newspaper front pages the world over, Saddam was finally toppled and then captured during the war on terror.

Though in the ensuing power vacuum, new malevolent forces soon came to the fore. How did a young man from a tough peasant background rise to the very top of Iraq's leadership? How did he manage to stay in power for so long, in a country where coups came around almost as often as elections? And was Saddam's ultimate downfall a matter of cosmic irony, or just unbelievably bad timing? cosmic irony, or just unbelievably bad timing. From Noisa, this is part one of the Saddam Hussein story. And this is Real Dictators. Almost 20 years after his death, Saddam Hussein still casts an extremely long shadow. Professor Juman Kubba is author of The First Evidence, a memoir of life in Iraq under Saddam Hussein.

This thug, Saddam and his gang came to power. They took Iraq into a path of destruction and a path of chaos and a path of death, of sectarianism, of wars upon wars upon wars. I call it the biggest crime of the previous century. For many, Saddam is the archetypal crackpot dictator, capricious, ruthless and eccentric. A man who, when he wasn't committing war crimes, spent his time penning bizarre romance novels and living it up in a series of increasingly gaudy palaces. It's telling that he was presented as a figure of fun in 1999's South Park movie, which saw him cast as a bullying lover to no less a figure than Satan.

Saddam's legendary personality cult speaks, at the very least, to a heavy dose of narcissism, and perhaps more. Will Barden-Weber is author of The Prisoner in His Palace, Saddam Hussein is American Guards and What History Leaves Unsaid. He certainly did exhibit certain attributes that are commonly found in clinical psychopaths. Not all of them, but I think, you know, if there's a spectrum, he certainly was towards that end of the spectrum. James Hyder is a former Middle East bureau chief for The Times and author of The Spiders of Allah.

I don't think he was really afraid of anything. I saw him once in the whole time I was there. I was covering his trial after he was captured. He looked around at the bulletproof mirror that I was behind and he must have guessed there were people behind there and he just gave us this utter look of contempt. The most terrifying looking person. To understand

Saddam, it's worth considering the Iraq he's born into and how its turbulent political history helped shape his earliest years. It's April 1937 when he's born in Al-Aujar. It's a tiny village outside the city of Tikrit, to the north of Baghdad. At this time the Kingdom of Iraq itself is still barely in its teens.

It was established after the First World War, made up of three provinces of the now defunct Ottoman Empire – Basra, Baghdad and Mosul. The area was bitterly fought over during the global conflict, seeing British and Indian troops sustain around 100,000 casualties. One of those sent there was Lieutenant T.E. Lawrence, immortalized in the film Lawrence of Arabia. In 1916, Lawrence worked with a man called Faisal Hussein to lead a revolt against Ottoman rule. After the war, Faisal was proclaimed king of the newly created Kingdom of Iraq. He was crowned in a lavish ceremony held in the citadel of Baghdad, featuring a new Iraqi flag, black, white and green horizontal stripes,

combined with a bold red triangle. But the new country had yet to produce a national anthem, so the band was forced to make do with the British one instead. God save the King. It was a symbolic choice. Iraq had been freed from Ottoman rule, but was now governed under a slightly slippery British mandate. Not quite a colony, but not exactly independent either.

Many of those who'd fought alongside the British in World War I, inspired by the promise of a fully autonomous Arab state, were unhappy with the new arrangement. Soon after King Faisal's coronation, 9,000 rebels were killed in a brutal crackdown that cost the British government 40 million pounds. War Minister Winston Churchill had advocated using poison gas against the insurgents. Facing calls for Britain to withdraw from the region, he had penned an impassioned letter to the Prime Minister. he had penned an impassioned letter to the Prime Minister. We marched into Mesopotamia during the war and rooted up the Turkish government, he wrote. We accepted before all the world a mandate for the country and undertook to introduce much better methods of government in the place of those we'd overthrown.

If, following upon this, we now ignominiously scuttle for the coast, leaving sheer anarchy behind us and ancient historic cities to be plundered by the wild bedouin of the desert, an event will have occurred not at all in accordance with what has usually been the reputation of Great Britain. Almost a century later, Everyone. So, the story starts. Better Man, now playing in select theaters. With TD Direct Investing, you can get live support. So whether you need help buying a partial share from your favorite tech company, opening a TFSA, or learning about investing tools, we're here to help.

But keeping your cat off your keyboard? That's up to you. Reach out to TD Direct Investing today and make your investing steps count. Plus enjoy 1% cash back. Conditions apply. Offer ends January 31st, 2025. Visit td.com slash dioffer to learn more. One man more than any other will come to embody the bloody history of 20th century Iraq. And even in early childhood there are some clues as to the kind of man Saddam Hussein will grow up to be.

Dr Ali Ali is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Sussex. He grows up without a father. His father leaves his mother before he's born. His brother dies. He's bullied at school for not without a father. His father leaves his mother before he's born. His brother dies. He's bullied at school for not having a father. He doesn't have an older brother to protect him. There are stories of him carrying a metal rod to defend himself. He came from a very, very sort of hard, scrabble, poor background, a lot of violence there.

His mother remarried and apparently his stepfather was quite brutal and beat him a lot. Constantly exposed to a violent and unforgiving world where at the end of the day you have nothing to fall back on, kind of, but your own street smarts and your strength. Basically forced to survive, you know, on his own from a very young age. Professor Joseph Sassoon is director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. He says, at nine, I was beating kids who were 11, 12. And I learned that they will be loyal if I beat them. I mean, I believe that he did it.

I believe that. He realized, you know what? I might not be the strongest and I might not be the oldest, but with the strength and power, I can control others who will do for me what I want them to do. I think if you look back, I think that helps to explain the way in which he viewed the world and the way in which he viewed power and how to get it and how to keep it. The psychiatrist, Gerald Post, spent two decades studying world leaders for the US intelligence services.

None of them, Post claimed, had suffered more childhood trauma than Saddam. Prowling the streets of Al-Aujar with his iron bar in hand, he acquires the nickname Ibn Shawari, son of the alleyways. For Saddam, though, there's a chance of redemption. And it comes thanks to his uncle, Kerala, the same uncle who raised him for the first three years of his life. Saddam's violent stepfather, Hassan, is illiterate. An education, the boy realizes, might offer an

escape from the daily beatings. Predictably, Hassan is dismissive of the proposal. So once again, Uncle Kerela steps in. He craves an education as a young boy. He's not allowed to go to school when he's in an auja, so he leaves home, he walks to Tikrit and lives with his uncle so he can attend school. He was very instrumental in actually grooming Saddam and pulling him out of the misery of his stepfather. So he had a very strong influence on him. But under Kerala's roof in Tikrit, Saddam's education goes way beyond the three R's. His uncle is a veteran of the Iraqi independence movement. He recently served a five-year prison sentence.

Kerala took part in another attempted coup in the spring of 1941, at the height of the Second World War. With German support, they had hoped to drive the British out of Iraq for good. But just as happened all those years before, the rebellion had collapsed. The four Iraqi colonels who led it were put to death. collapsed. The four Iraqi colonels who led it were put to death. Saddam's uncle was one of more than a thousand of their followers who ended up in jail. For Kerala, the failed uprising remains an open wound, a humiliation that his nephew will grow up determined to avenge. revenge.

In the late 1940s, Kerala's house becomes a popular meeting place for the embittered revolutionaries. Among them is his friend and cousin, Hassan al-Bakir, a man with political ambitions of his own. In later years, al-Bakir will take Saddam under his wing. While Kerala and his friends are plotting the future of Iraq, the young nephew is still adjusting to life at school. He doesn't exactly prove a model student.

The future dictator has a fondness for pranks, but in Saddam's case, these go beyond cheeky schoolboy fare. One day, pretending to embrace a teacher, he slips a snake into the poor man's pocket. Another time, threatened with expulsion, he brings a gun into school. His terrified headmaster agrees he can stay on after all. Then there's the mysterious incident that takes place after Saddam receives a bout of corporal punishment. That evening, the teacher who beat him in class receives a visit from a man on horseback, who shoots him in the leg before vanishing into the darkness. The police show up at Kerala's house with some questions,

but Saddam is already tucked up in bed, apparently sleeping like a baby. As Saddam enters his teenage years, the independence movement in Iraq is growing, though perhaps we should say movements, since not everyone is on the exact same page. The pan-Arabists favor an alliance with other Arab countries in the region, while the Iraqi nationalists want to focus on their own. Then there's the rapidly growing communist movement, with its links to the USSR. But on one thing all are agreed.

The monarchy installed by the British a quarter of a century earlier has failed the country. The Brits, they don't really invest much in state building. And there's this idea that Britain will build institutions. But it doesn't really do that. It neglects the construction of institutions, it neglects investment in institutions that would make Iraq a stable, prosperous political entity. Baghdad in particular has become a playground for the rich and well-connected. There's real inequality in the city. There's a lot of poverty in the country.

A small elite has become wealthy. You have large landowners who are accumulating wealth. You can't have the majority of the population living on a kind of subsistence level to really thrive. Soon, Saddam's uncle is offered a teaching position in Baghdad. His family, including his nephew, move with him. The bright lights and busy cafes of the capital are a world away from Al-Aujar and Tikrit. Taking odd jobs

in coffee houses and peddling cigarettes on the side, Saddam sees more clearly than ever that Iraq is a country of two halves. It was beautiful.

Baghdad was very beautiful. A lot of serene neighborhoods, a lot of trees, a lot of beauty. It was pretty safe. Myself and my sisters and my cousins, we could easily walk down the street to go buy ice cream or something by ourselves. In 1957, the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright visits Baghdad. He's been commissioned to draw up plans for the city's new opera house. His grand design includes a bazaar and even a zoo on an island in the middle of the Tigris River.

It evokes the city's glorious heyday, more than a thousand years earlier. Back in the 8th century AD, Baghdad was a true global powerhouse. It was the center of learning, it was the center of mathematics, astronomy, philosophy. It was this incredibly rich place that was seen as the envy of the rest of the world. It has this incredible history and Iraqis are proud of that. The two rivers that provide Iraq with its lush wetlands, the Tigris and the Euphrates, are even held by some to mark the location of the Garden of Eden. The countryside around the south of Baghdad is very lush. Farmlands, palm trees, date orchards, little rivers, the irrigation canals that have been there for

thousands of years between the rivers. You see water buffaloes bathing in the rivers. A lot of it's quite beautiful. Not for nothing is Iraq known as the cradle of civilization. The earliest known work of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, was written here almost 4,000 years ago. the Epic of Gilgamesh, was written here almost 4,000 years ago. It was the first center of grain cultivation which allowed the rise of cities and the birth of writing of civilization as we call it in the modern sense.

The Babylonians, the Assyrians, countless numbers of civilizations have been built around these two rivers because you have this area of land that's so fertile. It's long supported cities and civilizations. There's this idea of Birat as this artificial creation that it was put together by the Brits and it didn't really exist before that. In a sense, there's some truth in that. It didn't exist as a state in the way that we think of states today. But there are three Ottoman provinces around Baghdad, around Mosul, around Basra.

And if you look at the geography of that, you have these two rivers. You have economies and social and economic exchanges spanning from ancient times. I think, yes, it was put together by the British. There were Arabs and there were Kurds, there were Christians, there were Jews. But what was remarkable about the country is how quickly the sense of Iraqism developed. Jews and Christians were in parliament, in newspapers, in business, in everything,

and they truly felt Iraqis above anything else. By the mid-1950s, this sense of a distinctly Iraqi identity is very much coming of age, and it's helped on its way by events in nearby Egypt. In 1956, the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalizes the Suez Canal. Many Iraqi activists are emboldened to make their own stand against the British. In Baghdad, a student movement grows increasingly confrontational. Saddam, still in high school, finds himself organizing street gangs.

He takes the entrance exam for the Baghdad Military Academy, but fails to get in. So instead he joins the Ba'ath Party. This will prove to be a crucial moment. The Ba'ath Party is a relatively new political grouping. On paper, they're socialists. In practice, they're more interested in pan-Arabism, the idea of Arab autonomy and unity beyond national borders. And they're not averse to getting their hands dirty.

He's a tough guy. He's had a tough upbringing. He's not afraid to use violence. He joins the Ba'ath Party when he's around 20 years old, and he makes a name for himself as an enforcer. In 1957, the Ba'ath joined forces with the National Democratic Party and the Communists Together they will take on the ruling elite First, they boycott Iraq's official elections Next, they work with a group of free officers within the army

To remove King Faisal II from power The leader of these free officers is a charismatic brigadier called Abdul Karim Qasim. He's known to his comrades as the Snake Charmer, for his ability to bend others to his will. Right now, though, Qasim is doing most of his persuading with a gun in his hand. When he and his officers take over the country, the king and his family are summarily executed. Some historians call it a coup, many call it a revolution. Because although the modus operandi was that of a coup,

there was a real discontent in the country, there was real inequality. When Abdul Karim Qasim takes over, he has this eye on making the country a more equitable place to live for the poor, the working classes. He tries to create a middle class. He invests, he redistributes land. It's also to do with building a power base for himself. Whatever the intention, Qasim's policies do herald a clear improvement in living standards. I grew up after the 58th revolution. Huge, huge construction. You know, one of the things that the previous regime like the royal from 1932 to 1958,

like the Royal from 1932 to 1958, there was really not enough spending on education, on health, on infrastructure. And suddenly you started seeing everything. So public parks were opened. Art was developed. Illiteracy was going down. I mean, that's really the sad story of the country. The trajectory was that by the year 2000, Iraq would be among the top 15, 20 economies of the world.

Why? Because it had a huge wealth. Iraq men and women were educated with high caliber. And so the country could have continued to develop dramatically. Unfortunately, the Ba'ath Party have other ideas. Qasim has come to power as part of a broad revolutionary movement. But having taken over, he's proven rather less keen on power sharing. It turns out that he's no friend of pan-Arabists like the Ba'ath Party. Qasim's days are already numbered.

Aged just 21, Saddam has already made a strong impression on Nabath leadership. Details are hard to come by, but we know that he recently spent six months in jail. He was accused of murdering a communist in Tikrit, though the charges were dropped before it went to trial. This close shave with the law has done wonders for Saddam's street cred. By October 1959, the Ba'ath have decided to move against Prime Minister Qasim, and Saddam is just the young man to action their plan. It's October 7th, 1959. On Rashid Street in downtown Baghdad, Saddam Hussein and his accomplices gather.

He's wearing a large coat, and underneath it he's holding a rifle. The Prime Minister's car turns onto the street. As it passes, the would-be assassin can hardly contain his excitement. Saddam jumps the gun, literally. He pulls out his weapon and fires on Qasim's vehicle. Caught off guard, the other Ba'athist shooters follow suit. In the chaos, Qasim is hit in the arm and the shoulder, but they're little more than flesh wounds. With a screech of tires, the Prime Minister's vehicle is gone.

As they depart, Qasim's security men return fire. One of the hitmen falls to the ground, dead. Saddam is shot in the leg. He limps away, making for the getaway car. Before long, he and the other surviving Bathists are departing at speed. But in the chaos, the body of their fallen comrade has been left behind. When the police find him, there'll be no doubt who's responsible for the attack. Saddam and his friends are now Iraq's most wanted.

The botched assassination is an embarrassing failure for the Ba'ath Party. But in years to come, Saddam will recraft it into an epic drama. The bungled operation will become a defining moment

of thwarted patriotism. Later, when Saddam is in charge, everyone in Iraq will know the tale. It will be retold again and again, in biography, fiction, and even cinema. All of these versions will be carefully supervised by Saddam himself. All of these versions will be carefully supervised by Saddam himself. They bring this famous Italian director to make a movie. And they sit in the palace, you know, private screening, about 30, 40 of them. And they're all getting excited.

And the director is there. And the film finishes. And Saddam looked grim and he turned to the director and he says, this is unacceptable. He says, you know, when I was hit by the bullet and I went to a doctor and the doctor was taking it out in the movie, I grimaced and looked I was in pain. That's not true. I smiled at the pain. You have to redo the scene. I want the crowd to see me smiling because it's heroic. Amidst such carefully crafted melodrama,

it can be hard to separate fact from fiction. What we do know is that in the wake of the failed hit on Qasim, Saddam is forced to flee Iraq altogether. He'll spend the next four years living as a political exile. The way Saddam tells it, he rides off from Baghdad on horseback, disguised as a simple peasant. Other versions of the story have him dressed in women's clothes to avoid the police. On the run, Saddam spends several nights with local Bedouin tribes, and even makes time to attend a traditional wedding. Finally, after dodging an armed police squad, he reaches the banks of the Tigris River With a knife gripped between his teeth and his clothes tied around his neck

He somehow finds the strength to swim across to the other side Late that night, Saddam reaches his hometown of Al-Aujar From here, local Baathist representatives help get him over the Syrian border Late that night, Saddam reaches his hometown of Al-Aujar. From here, local Baathist representatives help get him over the Syrian border. Saddam spends a few months in Damascus, before moving on to Egypt. In Cairo, he rents a room overlooking the Nile. As Iraqi dictator, Saddam will repeatedly re-enact his nighttime swim across the Tigris, sometimes for the benefit of the state TV cameras.

In the late 1990s, he'll give an interview about his iconic feat of endurance. It was like you see in the movies, but worse, Saddam explains. My clothes were wet, my leg was injured, and I hadn't eaten properly for four days. How can I describe it? It's hard to describe how I got out of the water." In Egypt, Saddam finally graduates high school, at the age of 24. He finds a thriving community of Iraqi exiles. He makes the most of his extended stay. He takes boat trips along the Nile, visits the legendary Japanese gardens

and tours the ancient monuments at Alexandria, Luxor and Aswan. He also gets engaged, albeit remotely, to his cousin Sajida. She is Uncle Kerala's eldest daughter. For now, though, with Saddam stuck in Cairo, it seems unlikely that the promised wedding will be possible any time soon. But back in Iraq, events are about to take a turn in his favor. The Ba'athists aren't done with Prime Minister Qasim. In 1963 they launch a second attempt on his life, and this time they're successful.

Saddam's uncle Kerala is part of a group that captures Qasim at the Ministry of Defense. After a brief show trial, the Prime Minister is subjected to a volley of machine gun fire. His bullet-ridden corpse is gory displayed in a five-minute propaganda video broadcast by the Ba'ath Party. People spit on his body as the camera lingers on multiple bloody bullet holes. Iraq's new president is a man called Abdul Salam Arif. His vice president and prime minister is someone familiar to Saddam, Hassan al-Bakr, Uncle Kerala's old friend and cousin from Tikrit. A thousand miles away in Egypt,

it's unclear whether Saddam played any role in the coup against Qasim. It's certainly not out of the question. There are rumors that he was seen visiting the United States Embassy in Cairo to meet with representatives of the CIA. The Americans certainly distrusted Qasim's increasingly close ties with the Soviet Union. Some experts see the Ba'athist coup as a clear case of US-backed regime change. Most Iraqis know today, maybe then they didn't know, that the Ba'ath was installed by foreign

countries, Western countries. They are clients for foreign powers. You know, there are a lot of evidence that Saddam was recruited by foreign intelligence and he was groomed for this position.

Either way, the removal of Qasim is particularly bad news for Iraq's Communist Party. Almost immediately, Iraqi National Guardsmen begin dragging suspected communists from their homes. Before long, the number of dead runs into the thousands. There are rumors that in 1963, when the Ba'ath Party came to power, when the Ba'ath Party came to power, the CIA gave the party a list of more than 2,000, 3,000 members of the party.

There is no way, given how small the Ba'ath Party in 1963, that it could have amassed those names within 10 days of reaching power. So it is highly likely that this took place. The Cold War, the so-called Cold War, is cold as long as those two powers are safe and their citizens are safe. But to the rest of the world,

there were these coups and these dictators were installed in so many countries. And Iraq is one very big example to do the dirty work under the banner of fighting communism, you know, that they did. They killed a lot of communists in the 60s in Iraq. So under this banner, you get all these massacres to thousands of people and install this regime, which is going to create a chaos for the next 60 years. Less than a fortnight after the coup, Saddam leaves Cairo and returns home to Baghdad.

Here, he finally marries his cousin Sajida. By the end of the year, she is pregnant with their first child, Uday. Meanwhile, Saddam rejoins his old comrades. He is now working directly for the new vice president, Hassan al-Bakr. Saddam participates in al-Bakr's campaign against the communists. It's unclear whether he is involved purely on the organizational side, or whether he personally tortures and kills people. Both are plausible. And it's not just the communists who are in their sights. The Kurds, too, suffer devastating reprisals for their opposition to the new regime. Whole villages are destroyed by reigning napalm. As we shall see, this is only the beginning of the horrors that Saddam will inflict on the Kurds.

Outwardly, the Ba'ath party seem to be very much in the ascendancy. But internally, this new government is riddled with infighting. President Arif is deeply suspicious, and with some justification, of his deputy al-Bakir. Just a year into the regime, Arif attempts to shore up his own position. He has al-Bakir arrested and issues a warrant for Saddam's arrest as well. When police surround Saddam's house, he swiftly surrenders. There's just enough time to grab a packet of cigarettes before he's taken away to prison. He will spend the next two years behind bars. In many ways, it will prove to be a formative experience.

He managed to read most of Stalin's writings while he was in prison. Later on, when he was invited to the Soviet Union, he wanted to visit some of the houses that Stalin lived and I think he really felt an affinity. Saddam is a huge admirer of the former Soviet leader. He will make a conscious decision to emulate him. But it's not just heavy Stalinist tracts that Saddam uses to while away his time inside. He also devours the complete works of Ernest Hemingway, attracted perhaps by the author's unsentimental machismo.

As he paces the prison courtyard, dressed in his pyjamas and slippers, this Saddam might seem a far cry from the brutal Ba'ath enforcer. But his comrades on the outside haven't forgotten him. But his comrades on the outside haven't forgotten him. Every week, Sajida brings baby Uday to see his father. Smuggled in the folds of the infant's clothes are secret messages from Saddam's allies. While he's still in jail, they see to it that he's made deputy secretary general of the party's regional leadership. And then finally in July 1966, after two years inside, Saddam receives his escape plan. It's been timed to coincide with his trial. One day on the way to the courthouse, he persuades his jailers to stop off at an Italian restaurant

for lunch. During a brief toilet break, he simply slips out of the back door. A getaway car is ready to whisk him away. Back on the outside, Saddam goes to ground. He makes contact with his former boss, al-Bakir. Together, the two men plot their return to power. Fortune, it seems, is on their side. President Arif soon dies in a helicopter crash.

He's succeeded by his brother, Abdul Rahman Arif. And so the stage is set for the fourth Iraqi coup in less than a decade. On July 17, 1968, al-Bakir and his supporters arrive at the presidential palace. Saddam, who failed the army entrance exam a decade earlier, is now dressed in full military regalia and he's riding on a tank. This time around the political transition is accomplished without bloodshed. The second Arif sees which way the wind is blowing, he hops on the first flight to London. Hassan al-Bakir promptly assumes the presidency.

There are rich rewards for those Ba'ath Party loyalists who helped him to power. Saddam's uncle is offered the governorship of Baghdad. A couple of weeks later, when al-Bakr appears on TV to announce his new cabinet, Saddam is standing right behind him, holding a machine gun. By the end of the year, it's official. He's announced as the vice-chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. By any calculation, that makes Saddam Hussein the second most powerful man in Iraq. For the next decade, al-Bakr and Saddam will rule as a double act, their twin portraits hanging in every school, mosque, and hospital.

While the president handles delicate matters of state, his bullish deputy is always on hand to do the dirty work. But as the years go by, many Iraqis will start to wonder who is really in charge. He was referred to as Sayyid al-Na'ib, which means the vice or the vice president. In fact, when you read memoirs from various Baathists, they all reiterate how al-Bakr, who was the president, wasn't calling the shots. how al-Bakr, who was the president, wasn't calling the shots. So even though he wasn't the president,

he was really the number one man. Effectively, he was leading the show. I think he took his time to build his base and ensure that he's going to take over. I don't think he had any doubt about it, that that was the path for him. I think he was absolutely bloodthirsty. I think he understood the zero-sum power politics of what Iraqi politics were in those days. He would say that he understood his people.

He would say that this is a hard place. You've got to be hard to rule it. He was fiercely ambitious and very shrewd and very strategic as far as the relationships that he developed. One of the big, I think, misunderstandings is that he was able to get to the top and stay on top purely by virtue of being bloodthirsty and violent. And that was part of it, no doubt. But he was also capable of real charm. I spoke to an Iraqi academic who drew a comparison between Saddam and Bill Clinton in that regard. He said both of them had the ability to go into a room full of strangers and make every stranger in that room believe that he cared more about you and your well-being than anyone he had ever met.

Now, you know, the difference between, I think, him and Bill Clinton is that he would not hesitate to turn around two days later and order that person he had just charmed to get shot in the head. And so, you know, this capacity for charm coupled with this capacity for violence was a powerful combination. In the next episode... With the Bath Party in power,

we hear a remarkable account from a woman whose own family was targeted by the secret police. Saddam consolidates his own power base, appointing friends and relatives to key positions. Soon he'll be in pole position to move against his mentor. And after that, he will shore up the loyalty of his party with an act of political theatre for the ages. That's next time.