“I would like you to explain further what the interrogations have disclosed, and if you do not satisfy me we will have to move on to harsher methods.” He picked up a sheaf from the table and read it. “This business about grabbing the nose and kicking the ass—how would that apply to Kuwait?”
“The best frontal assault on Kuwait City would be an amphibious invasion, coming in around Failaka Island,” I said. “That’s grabbing the nose. Kicking the ass means an attack from the rear. The idea is to occupy the army in one direction, then hit it at its weakest point, which would be the border with Saudi Arabia. Or in a broader scope, attack Kuwait from Saudi Arabia, and then sweep into Iraq from Turkey and capture Baghdad from the north, the kick in the ass.”
“I told you we should fortify the beaches and the seashore,” put in Uday. “We should mine the approaches to the bay too. The landing boats would never get in, and if they try we could sink them all.”
Saddam knitted his brow in thought. He returned to his papers. “Hmmm,” he said. “You went on and on about armored mobility. That means…?”
I couldn’t believe he was focusing on this stuff, all of which had been well known since World War II. “U.S. Army doctrine relies on movement of troops and armor, not static fronts.”
“Ground game… wide-outs… the big bomb? This is some kind of Pentagon terminology?”
“Yes. Ground game means a grinding war of attrition. Wide-outs are flanking attacks from distant bases. The big bomb means a decisive blow.” My bullshit generators were getting a lot of exercise today.
Saddam sat thinking. Uday glared at me. “You may fancy me a backward dictator of a so-called Third World country, Mr. Fonko,” Saddam said slowly and deliberately, “but let me assure you that governing a fractious nation in the Middle East requires a subtle, analytic mind. What I detect here is a double-cross strategy. You tell me the truth thinking that I naturally will assume that you lie. But I am going to jump you one square further on the board and take what you are telling me as the truth. So that is a beginning. We can adjust our defenses in light of what you have disclosed. We’ll need to further fortify the border with Saudi Arabia—lay mines, set up trench networks and so forth against the kick in the ass,” he remarked to Uday.
“We could flood the coast with Kuwaiti petroleum,” put in Uday. “Then set the sea on fire when the Americans try to land.”
“That’s an idea,” said Saddam. He returned to me: “This is more helpful, Mr. Fonko, but there is much more that you know, that we need to find out. For example, the organization of the Kuwaiti resistance and the names of its key leaders. We will have to neutralize them so that they cannot act as a fifth column and cause trouble in the event of an invasion by the Americans. I gather the Americans have some new high-technology weapons they may deploy. The newspapers discuss them in general terms, but we need detailed specifications and capabilities, which you surely must know.”
“Sorry to contradict you,” I said, “but I spent only a few days with a small group of Kuwaitis who were protecting their neighborhood. I know nothing of any organized Kuwaiti resistance force. As for high-tech weapons you’ve read about in the newspapers, I haven’t even seen the newspaper stories. You know more about that than I do.”
“You expect me to believe you?” Saddam scoffed. “A top CIA agent serving as a mere neighborhood watchman? Who knows nothing about current military weaponry? I will let you examine your thoughts and your position, and give you one more chance to be forthcoming. If you are not, further interrogations will take place, which I hope will not have to go so far as to compromise your value as a bargaining chip. Uday, let us give him a taste. Mr. Fonko, sit down on the floor.” I did so. He nodded at the Guards. They unceremoniously bent down, grabbed my ankles, jerked my feet up in the air and wrenched off my shoes. My efforts to squirm out went nowhere.
Uday swung his feet off the table, got up, came around and without warning gave me some sharp whacks across the soles of my feet with his nightstick. Youch! That hurt like hell! He could do it all day and it would leave no mark on my body. If that was a taste, I didn’t want to think about full servings. The Guards dropped me to the floor, grabbed me above the elbows, yanked me upright, and trundled me out the door.
*
I didn’t fully recover from the painful limp back to my cell for a couple days. Grotesqcu had heard about the incident and dropped in to sympathize.
“Is Uday Hussein the sadistic bully he seems to be?” I asked him.
“No, actually he’s much worse,” said Grotesqcu. “He positively delights in torturing prisoners to the point of death and beyond. He’s said to have an actual iron maiden in his chambers, and he uses it on people who displease him. He crashes parties, picks out pretty women, takes them home and rapes them. A real boy scout, as you Americans would say.”
“And he’s going to interrogate me?”
“He’d like to. I’ll put them off as best I can, but he’s trying to convince Saddam that his methods are better than mine. I had an idea. How about if we concoct intelligence that I can say I tortured out of you. Stall them for as long as possible and see how things develop.”
So we put our heads together and dreamed up all kinds of fantasies. Missiles that could be directed to house addresses. Bombs that could be dropped and guided by laser through building windows. Planes that radar couldn’t detect. We described it in great detail, operational specs, performance data and all. Grotesqcu threw in some stuff he remembered from a U.S. Army publication, Field Manual 100-5, that had made the rounds in the KGB, describing the “AirLand Battle.” It was post-Vietnam doctrine conjectured for World War III describing airstrikes to isolate the battlefield by cutting off reinforcements and supply lines. It wasn’t classified, in fact was standard material in our War College, but it sounded impressive. Grotesqcu wrote it all up as the results of advanced interrogations and passed them along to Saddam.
Saddam was intrigued but not satisfied, and Uday started visiting my cell more frequently. He was still on Saddam’s leash but straining at it. He roughed me up right to the line he was told not to exceed. I pushed back right up to the line that would provoke him to exceed his line. I definitely did not want to take that brute on in a context that gave him a chance—he was too big and too tough. Even if I won there’d be a price to pay. I wanted to fight him on my own terms, preferably from behind, in the dark, with something hard and heavy in my hand.
Grotesqcu kept me informed of events in the outside world. On January 15 George Bush set a deadline for diplomatic negotiations on Iraq withdrawing from Kuwait. Two nights later explosions awakened me. I looked out the cell window upon a scene like a distant Fourth of July festival. My view was limited and downtown Baghdad was many miles away, but I could make out tracer streaming upwards from several points closer to Abu Ghraib. The sky in the direction of Baghdad took on an orange glow from fiery explosions that I glimpsed erupting, though I couldn’t hear them. There must have been military targets around Abu Ghraib, judging by loud bursts nearby, some of them close enough to shake the air in my cell. Jets screamed overhead, heading into the city to the accompaniment of wailing prison sirens. Surface-to-air missiles flew up from the outskirts of town, apparently not hitting anything.
The air attack kept on through the night and into the next day. Toward noon, Emil Grotesqcu dropped by in a cheerful mood. “Hi ho, Jake,” he exclaimed, waving an unopened bottle of vodka. “Enjoy the night’s display? I thought we might toast the onset of the Mother of All Battles.”
“I couldn’t see much from here. It looked like a comprehensive attack. Any damage assessment?”
“A lot of the Iraqi Air Force was destroyed on the ground. The Ministry of Defense took a big hit, as did a number of other strategic targets—bases, storage tanks, factories and so forth. Seems your team used a particularly devilish tactic—when Iraqi fire-control tried to track the incoming jets for
targeting, other jets sent radar-seeking missiles at them. Pretty soon the ground crews were launching their SAMs blind. Either that or turn on their radar and get instantly wiped out. U.S. planes struck all over Iraq with surprising accuracy and limited collateral damage. They’re keeping it up this morning. Big missiles are coming in near ground level and heading straight for specific targets. It’s almost as if that pack of lies we sent to Saddam had some truth in it. Where are your glasses? It’s time we bent our elbows.”
It was a little early in the day for me, but what the heck? I poured two shots and we raised them. “Confusion to the enemy… provided he’s not us,” declared Grotesqcu. “In a way, this war is all about excess.”
“How do you mean?”
“In Saddam’s case, he has excess soldiers. He’d been waging war with Iran for ten years, and now that’s over. That left his economy a basket case, stone broke and deeply in debt, such that he hasn’t paid his soldiers in months. So what does he do with hundreds of thousands of hardened and battle-weary troops? If he demobilizes them he’s got a country full of unemployed, armed and seasoned fighters who are rightly outraged about how he’s dealt with them. No police he could muster could stop them if they decided to organize and demand what he owes them. On his doorstep sits a rich and defenseless neighbor. What better solution than to send his excess soldiers to sack the place and collect what they want?”
“Okay,” I said, “from Saddam’s point of view it’s a way of deflecting a potential insurrection, as well as discharging billions of dollars of debt and clasping huge oil wealth to his bosom. What excess is on our side?”
“Weapons. Reagan’s arms buildup in the 1980s left America with a profusion of tanks, planes, bombs, missiles, you name it. The point was to thwart Russian expansion and challenge our hegemony of Eastern Europe. Then suddenly the Iron Curtain comes down and the Fulda Gap is on your side of the fence. No longer any need for all the stockpiles of arms in West Germany. In the meantime your Silicon Valley geniuses have been turning out a new generation of high tech weapons beyond imagining—laser-guided bombs, GPS guided missiles, stealth aircraft designs and who knows what all else? I’m not saying that Bush entered into this war just to pare down his arsenal and test his new toys. But when the opportunity arose they were just sitting there. From a dollars and cents standpoint it’s going to be a cheap war. The money’s been spent already out of Reagan’s budget, and there’ll be no need to rebuild to the same level after this is over. Have your war and a peace dividend to boot.”
Food for thought. We’d finished our drinks—Grotesqcu downed his in one slug, Russian style, and I’d sipped mine empty. I’d picked up the bottle to pour another round when Uday Hussein came storming down the hall and into my cell, red-faced and panting. “Fonko, my father wants to see you! Right now!” he sputtered. His right fist clenched, he grabbed my shoulder with his left and gave me a jarring shake.
“Now wait a minute,” Grotesqcu blurted, giving Uday a sharp shove in the back.
Uday let me go and whirled around, looming over Grotesqcu. “Listen, you worthless Russian bastard,” he snarled, “you’ve fucked this up from the beginning, you and your sophisticated interrogation techniques. I’m taking charge of this prisoner, and from now on we interrogate him my way!”
Grotesqcu backed away a step, putting his weight on his rear foot and adjusting into a ready-to-fight stance. Considering the size differential it was a heroic gesture, but regardless of his martial arts skills he had doubtful chances in the impending brawl, especially when the guards joined in. I stood behind Uday with something heavy and hard—a nearly full bottle of vodka—in hand. It wasn’t dark, my third specification, but you can’t always have it all your way. Bottles in movie bar fights explode on people’s skulls because they use candy bottles. Not the bottle in my hand—it was solid glass. I laid it upside Uday’s temple with a full-arm swing, and he collapsed in a big heap.
“Good move,” said Grotesqcu, “but now what?”
“Obviously, we’ve got to get out of here. Let’s take care of him first.” I checked his pulse, and he still had one. We pulled his shirt off him and ripped it in half up the back (hated to waste a $200 shirt like that). We tied his wrists behind his back with one half and tied his ankles firmly together with the other. Then we muscled him up on my bunk. We stuffed my washcloth into his mouth, knotted his socks together and looped them around his face to secure the gag. As a final touch, we covered as much of him as we could with the cell blanket.
“Any idea where we can go?” I asked.
“I’m staying at the Russian Embassy,” he said. “I can put you up. Saddam can’t bother you there.”
“Are you kidding? You told me I’m on the KGB’s Most Wanted list, and you want me to walk into a Russian Embassy fronting for a spy station?”
“Good point. If they took you out of circulation I’d lose my cushy job. So, what do you suggest?”
“Do they let Arabs in there?”
“The place is swarming with the buggers. They do all the menial tasks.”
“Okay. I’ve got a full Arab outfit from Kuwait in my kit. Take me in as an Arab.”
“Under what pretext?”
“You’ll think of something on the way. Let’s go.”
“Get changed, Jake. I’ll go fix it with the guards.”
He scurried out of the cell. By the time he returned, I was robed and head-dressed. I’d not completely shaved off my beard and mustache, and that rounded out the disguise. He looked shocked when he saw me. “Amazing,” he said. “You’d have fooled me if I didn’t know you. Get your bags and follow me. I have a car and driver waiting out front. I gave the guards a Benjamin to look the other way while an Arab friend and I left the premises. For that amount I believe they’d carry us to the curb on their shoulders.”
Too bad for those guards when Uday came to.
I threw everything into my kit and we strode out the front door. As we approached his car I asked him, “Have you figured out our story yet?”
“I’ve always fancied having an Arab lackey. Come along, Abdul, and mind you don’t damage my luggage.”
Monday, January 18, to Saturday, February 23, 1991
With the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad shut down, the Russian Embassy was my only safe refuge. It commanded a compound in Baghdad which I was confident wasn’t listed on Allied targeting schedules. My safety there depended on successfully playing the most challenging role in my so-called acting career—an Arab errand boy who spoke neither Arabic nor Russian, living among Russians, most of whom couldn’t speak Arabic but many of whom could speak my native tongue, English. Grotesqcu drilled me in some useful Russian phrases: da, ser for “yes sir,” nyet, ser for “no sir”, spasibo, ser for “thank you, sir”, and ya ne ponimayu, ser for “I don’t understand sir.” He taught them to me with an Arabic accent.
By then I’d been around Arabs enough that I could mimic their attitude toward us infidels—oily obsequiousness anchored to a bedrock of smoldering resentment—sufficiently to get by. I scooped my food out of my bowl with my right hand, did not use toilet paper, and dutifully hit the prayer rug five times each day as signaled by ululations from the minarets of nearby mosques. The prayers were an annoyance until I realized that at least it was a little exercise, so I made the most of them with some stretching and isometrics. Being congenitally allergic to work, Arabs avoid exerting themselves unduly, one reason why slavery has always been popular with them. Therefore I couldn’t show too much energy, but I did my best to keep in trim.
The cover story Grotesqcu put about was that when the American attacks began demolishing Baghdad I’d cornered him on the street and begged him to let me work for food and shelter. The shelter they gave me amounted to a closet in a storage building, and the food I got was bleak and grudging. To be fair, rations were short all over Baghdad by that time, thanks to the embargo—not that my Russian hosts st
inted on themselves. At least Ramadan hadn’t yet begun, so I got a couple skimpy meals a day.
In return for their miserly largesse I adopted the Arab penchants for passive resistance and non-work ethic. We coexisted according to the Iraqi equivalent of the Russian dictum, “we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” Grotesqcu, in keeping with the spirit of the situation, hounded and berated me and complained to his buddies about my sloth and incompetence. It played out so convincingly with the Russians that one particularly obnoxious slob offered me ten dinars for a blowjob, making his offer in well-practiced pantomime. I backed away from him bowing with hands clasped prayer-style, shaking my head and babbling “ya ne ponimayu, ser”. Grotesqcu got a hearty laugh out of it. My propositioner, a senior diplomatic attaché, was a standing joke around the Embassy as a loser who couldn’t make out in a whorehouse with a fistful of American fifties. I steered clear of him after that, and after the word got around he kept a proper distance.
My Kuwaiti outfit fooled the Russians, who didn’t much know one wog from another and despised them all equally. The other Arabs who worked around the compound had sharper eyes and posed a different problem. They spotted me for a phony from the git-go, but they couldn’t fathom what kind of phony I was, and I kept them guessing. All but a few cooks and house servants lived outside the compound. The crews of gardeners, cleaners and gofers trooped dutifully in from their hovels for work in the morning and left at dusk. I was the only Arab in the compound that wore a robe and headdress. The rest wore western-style pants and shirt and sweaters, or beige pajamas and tunics. Plus my clothing was of a finer quality fabric than all but a few of the local Arabs could afford. The minions knew there was money behind it, and if I was rich what was I doing running errands for the hated infidels? To up my Muslim cred I made sure some of them saw me at prayer but otherwise I snubbed them with haughty Middle Eastern disdain as I shuffled around the grounds schlepping small items pointlessly from one place to another. As much as possible I skulked out of sight in my closet.
The Jake Fonko Series: Books 4, 5 & 6 Page 57
