Iraq’s former deputy prime minister, now in US custody, was the urbane public face of the Saddam regime. But he may have helped the allies to target his boss, The Sunday Telegraph reported on April 27.
Iraqi security services placed members of Tariq Aziz’s family under arrest shortly before the start of the war to make sure that the former Iraqi foreign minister did not defect to the West, The Telegraph added.
Concerns about the fate of his family, in particular his eldest son, if he surrendered to US forces was Aziz’s primary concern during the negotiations that resulted in his decision to give himself up at the end of last week.
“Tariq was still terrified of what the remnants of Saddam’s regime would do to his family if he surrendered to us,” said a Western security officer, according to the British publication. “Even if Saddam were dead, he knew that there were still Ba’ath Party loyalists who would want to exact revenge on his family.”
As part of Aziz’s surrender terms, US commanders agreed to place the Iraqi politician’s immediate family under the equivalent of protective custody to ensure that they were safe from revenge attacks by Saddam supporters.
British newspapers have been reported that Aziz, had told his US captors he will reveal all about the Iraqi regime in exchange for a new identity and cushy life in the UK.
An insider told The Sun: "Aziz has made it clear he is ready for a total sell-out. He knows we are anxious to retrieve this information and is playing hard-to-get. He has his price and he's sticking out for it.
"He is trying to do a deal to get himself off the hook. Aziz is a walking goldmine of information about Saddam and the regime - and he knows it. "He sees his knowledge as an insurance policy which he is now trying to cash in to buy himself out of jail."
The favourable surrender terms agreed prompted speculation that Saddam’s trusted foreign policy adviser may in fact be the Iraqi spy who provided the intelligence responsible for the cruise missile attack on the Iraqi leader’s bunker in southern Baghdad in the opening salvoes of the war.
Intelligence officials have claimed that the information they received that allowed them to target Saddam’s bunker came from a “senior official” within the Ba’ath regime, and as one of the leading members of the ruling Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) Aziz would have prior warning that Saddam was planning to hold a meeting at one of his heavily-fortified bunkers.
“You get the feeling, now that Aziz is safely in American custody, that he will be getting re-acquainted with people he has known for quite some time,” said a former CIA officer who specializes in Iraq.
There has been intense speculation about Saddam’s fate since the attack on the bunker in the early hours of March 20. At first it was reported that Saddam had been killed in the attack, then it was suggested that he had suffered non-life threatening injuries that had been treated by a specialist team of Russian doctors.
US officials appeared to confirm that Saddam had survived the initial strike when they bombed a restaurant complex in central Baghdad on April 7 at which the Iraqi ruler had been seen arriving with his younger son, Qusay, and other Ba’ath Party officials.
According to the USA Today, Aziz has told his interrogators he saw Saddam Hussein alive after the two airstrikes mounted by US forces to kill him.
Whether or not Aziz was responsible for providing intelligence about Saddam’s whereabouts during the war, there is no doubt that the ex-Iraqi president had become deeply suspicious about his deputy prime minister’s intentions.
Born in 1936 as the son of a waiter, Aziz majored in English at Baghdad University and was a newspaper editor before he went to work with Saddam.
Relations between the two men had become strained in the aftermath of the Gulf war in 1991 when Saddam became concerned that Aziz, who was then his foreign minister, enjoyed too much popularity among Iraqis as a result of his well-publicized international diplomatic activities.
As the only Christian among the ruling elite, Aziz has always been regarded as an outsider since he came to Saddam’s attention in the 1970s for his staunch anti-Communist views, which he regularly aired in the columns of al-Thawra, the Ba’ath Party newspaper that he edited. In recent years, Aziz had been sidelined following his appointment as deputy prime minister, although he managed to retain his position on the all-important RCC, the Ba’athists’ main decision-making body.
In the late 1990s, when Aziz failed to persuade the United Nations to lift the sanctions imposed on Iraq at the end of the Gulf war, Saddam briefly imprisoned the politician’s eldest son as punishment. In the weeks preceding Operation Iraqi Freedom, Saddam ordered the detention of several members of Aziz’s family following suspicions that he was preparing to defect to the West.
When, shortly before the conflict started, however, media reports indicated that the Iraqi official had defected, Aziz appeared before journalists in Baghdad angrily denouncing the claims, saying that he would “rather die” than be taken into custody by the Americans.
Aziz’s surrender is an important propaganda achievement for US commanders. The question if he can provide details of the fate of Saddam’s family remains unclear. Throughout the 30 years that Aziz worked for Saddam, he was never a member of the Iraqi leader’s inner circle. Spy or not, it seems the US will not get the desired "smoking gun" evidence from cigar-smoking Aziz...(Albawaba.com)
© 2003 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
