The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, The C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq

Abstract

The publication of The Achilles Trap in February 2024 was followed by a wave of overwhelmingly positive reviews in the press and policy journals. Most of these reviews highlighted the centrality of Iraqi records, including documents and the recordings Saddam made of his meetings, in Steve Coll’s narrative tracing the contours of US–Iraqi relations between 1979 and 2003.1 Coll, the former dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and most recently a visiting senior editor at The Economist, was previously awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice, for both Explanatory Reporting and General Non-Fiction. As a leading expert on the oil industry and the origins and course of the US war in Afghanistan who also wrote a history of the Bin Laden family, Coll’s turn to Iraq seems like a fitting choice. Working as a reporter and then editor at the Washington Post, Coll was just as much a contemporary observer who helped cover many of the events he details in The Achilles Trap as in his other books. Originally planning to focus on the 1991 to 2003 period, Coll listened to Charles Duelfer, previously deputy executive chairman and then acting chairman of the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM) from 1993 to 2003, then head of the Iraq Survey Group after the invasion, who suggested that he begin his history earlier with Saddam’s rise to power.2 As a result, The Achilles Trap includes many of the events during the 1980s that were decisive in fostering the mutual misunderstandings between Iraq and the United States that precipitated their direct conflict.Coll’s book was published amidst a wave of recent works around the twentieth anniversary of the 2003 Iraq War, which have offered insights on the period between the 1990–91 Gulf War and the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, while also incorporating both American and Iraqi perspectives and previously unavailable sources.3 Along with utilizing many of these works, Coll also engages with and draws upon the growing body of scholarship based on digitized copies of Iraqi records captured by the US military in 1991 and 2003.4 In addition to charting the evolution of US–Iraq relations across four presidential administrations, Coll tells a human-centric story that follows the pioneers of Iraq’s nuclear weapons program. Of the more than one hundred interviews conducted by Coll for the book, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) officers assigned to Iraq feature prominently. These interviews are additionally beneficial because much of the US government documentation from even the early phase of Coll’s narrative, the Iran–Iraq War and US intelligence sharing with Iraq, remains classified at present. Paired with internal Iraqi sources, readers can see how Saddam’s own view of the CIA and the United States more broadly evolved from suspicion and hostility to an uneasy cooperation against a shared enemy in the Islamic Republic of Iran, to a vindicated sense of betrayal following the revelations of the Iran–Contra scandal. Even though Saddam’s regime survived the internecine eight-year war with Iran and then brutally suppressed Iraq’s Kurdish rebels and civilians alike in the Anfal campaigns, the dictator faced the economic hardships of peacetime with a wary eye toward a perceived American, Israeli, and Kuwaiti conspiracy closing in on him as the Cold War waned.5A major takeaway from both the Iraqi records and Coll’s book is what a watershed moment the November 1986 Iran–Contra scandal revelations, or “Irangate” as it was termed by the Iraqis, were in Saddam’s thinking and in his road to war with the United States. The unforeseen and unintended consequences from what began as an ad hoc workaround by the Reagan administration to continue supporting the anti-Sandinista Contra rebels of Nicaragua after Congress cut off funding while ostensibly securing the release of American hostages held by Iran’s allies in Lebanon, reverberated across the Middle East over the next half-decade. As Coll writes, “Perhaps the CIA never would have overcome Saddam’s mistrust, but if the Reagan White House hadn’t conceived the foolhardy and criminal scheme that became known as Iran-Contra, the agency might have helped Washington learn how to contain and perhaps even manage Saddam for the sake of regional stability.”6 Although the rupture in the CIA’s relationship with Iraq created a temporary opening for the DIA, this proved short lived and was similarly terminated after the end of hostilities with Iran.With respect to Saddam’s subsequent invasion of Kuwait, Coll comes down on the side of those who have argued that the administration of President George H. W. Bush may have been able to deter him with credible threats of military force. Clearly refuting both the “green light” thesis that H. W. Bush encouraged Saddam’s invasion, along with the attempts by various parties to pin responsibility on US Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie, Coll’s treatment of this issue is nevertheless not entirely convincing. This point was similarly made by Daniel Chardell, a leading scholar of the 1990–91 Gulf War.7 Scholarship based on the Iraqi records has raised serious questions about Saddam’s deterrability following Iran–Contra, his later “If you didn’t want me to go in, why didn’t you tell me?” quip regarding Kuwait from captivity notwithstanding.8 The issue is further complicated by the fact that it took on a partisan political nature in the subsequent presidential campaign between H. W. Bush and Democrat opponent Bill Clinton.9 Following up on the charges that Reagan and H. W. Bush had emboldened and even encouraged Saddam, Democrats in Congress produced a steady stream of “Iraqgate” revelations documenting prior US support for Baghdad under the Republican Reagan and H. W. Bush administrations, which was detailed in several similarly themed articles and books during this period.10 The charges that H. W. Bush failed to deter Saddam foreshadowed Republican claims that Democrat President Joe Biden failed to deter Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, more than three decades later.11On the question of the H. W. Bush administration’s actual ability to have deterred Saddam, however, the Iraqi dictator’s memory of CIA and Iranian support for Iraqi Kurdish rebels during the 1970s, paired with the vindication of his lingering suspicions with Iran–Contra, shaped his views during the period between the end of the war with Iran in September 1988 and his decision to invade Kuwait in August 1990.12 Saddam went as far to announce in one meeting, likely held in late 1988, that he was convinced, based on instinct alone, that the CIA had recently attempted to assassinate him. As he told the attendees, “It is—my conviction. I don’t have information. Nobody told me. I have a strong feeling that they were behind it.”13 In this light, it doesn’t seem surprising that reassurances from the H. W. Bush administration and congressional Republicans in 1989 and 1990 failed to convince Saddam of positive US intentions toward him and Iraq. Saddam’s mindset and view that he was already involved in his next war with the United States raises doubts that even credible US threats of force could have deterred his next moves, which he viewed as reactive, in a conflict with the United States that was already well underway. After the 1990–91 Gulf War, the discovery of the extent of progress in Iraq’s development of nuclear weapons, which the CIA had missed, created an overcompensation in intelligence assessments thereafter, where Saddam’s intentions, perceived as unchanging, mattered more than physical evidence. As this view spread among American policymakers, it took on unstoppable momentum in the administration of President George W. Bush, where the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the presence of a core group of officials who had long advocated for the direct overthrow of Saddam, brought about the 2003 Iraq War. For his own part, Saddam, who viewed the CIA as ubiquitous, never believed that the agency did not know he had in fact destroyed his Weapons of Mass Destruction programs following the 1990–91 Gulf War. He never imaged the collective failure of imagination that gripped the corridors of power in Washington, DC. This story could not have been told in such detail without access to Iraqi records, which Coll spent years working to obtain.In July 2019, a friend Coll and I have in common shared the news with me that someone was working on a major book that would trace the relationship between Saddam and the United States from the beginning up to the 2003 Iraq War. Although our mutual friend did not yet disclose who the author of the book was, our conversation that day clearly indicated that it was someone prominent. Furthermore, I learned that the author was especially interested in drawing on Iraqi perspectives and archival sources while telling this story, having submitted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to obtain the digital copies of Iraqi records previously made available to academic researchers at the National Defense University’s Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC) between 2010 and 2015.14 Not yet having received an official fulfillment or outright rejection, a common enough occurrence in an era of seemingly ever-growing secrecy aptly termed “America’s declassification crisis,”15 the author managed to have a letter on the subject hand-delivered to Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis by an official serving in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. However, the letter arrived on Mattis’s desk just prior to his departure from the Trump administration in January 2019.I discovered that the author was Steve Coll in fall 2021, shortly after he had filed suit against the Department of Defense for failing to respond to his FOIA requests within the legally stipulated timeline. Represented by Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the lawsuit sought to obtain the release of the former CRRC records.16 When Coll and I met at Small World Coffee on Princeton, New Jersey’s Witherspoon Street a couple days before Christmas that year, he told me that after initial resistance, the Pentagon, in coordination with the Department of Justice, was working to figure out a way forward toward sharing the requested records. The judge presiding over the case, Rudolph Contreras, seemed favorably disposed to these developments as well. In the meantime, I was glad to be able to share with Coll a trove of materials preserved and circulated among scholars since the CRRC closed its doors in June 2015. Much of it I had gathered during the center’s final days and hours with the help of Gideon Moorhead, a friend and classmate at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Despite operating on an annual budget of $1 million dollars at a time when defense budgets routinely surpassed $1 trillion, a percentage accurately described as a “rounding error” by veteran national security correspondent Michael R. Gordon, the center had been a victim of spending cuts.17 Just a few short years after the final withdrawal of US forces from Iraq at the end of 2011 and still in the early stages of Operation Inherent Resolve to roll back the advances of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the US defense establishment was sending a clear message. Sponsoring the study of Iraq’s history prior to 2003, including US–Iraq relations since Saddam’s formal takeover of Iraq’s presidency in 1979, no longer stood to benefit US national security interests, even for the most comparatively modest monetary investment.Hoping to keep the issue alive in the Pentagon, where it always ranked low on the list of priorities even before considering the effects of personnel turnover, limited institutional memory, and budget cuts, Bruce P. Montgomery, former director of the University of Colorado Boulder Library and Archives, and I wrote an article about the CRRC in September 2019. We called on Pentagon officials to revive or at least transfer the records of the CRRC to a civilian academic institution, such as the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, which had been on the brink of obtaining the archive in 2015 before government lawyers halted the deal. We argued that such a move only stood to benefit US national security and improve public understanding of the successive decades of American involvement in Iraq.18 Anticipating the Department of Defense’s line of argumentation that digital copies of Iraqi records in its Harmony Database were exempt from FOIA, a rationale it initially employed in responding to Coll’s lawsuit, we never submitted FOIA requests for the digital records, instead focusing our efforts on obtaining information about the repatriation of the original hard copy records to Iraq in May 2013.19 Behind the scenes, our public appeal to renew study of digital records came in the wake of the ongoing efforts of a small number of dedicated individuals who sought to overcome the Pentagon’s bureaucratic stasis on the matter.However, the transition from the Trump to Biden administrations, combined with the lawsuit brought by Coll and Reporters Committee, proved decisive in both putting the issue back on the radar of Pentagon officials and breaking the bureaucratic gridlock. The trove of materials Coll and Reporters Committee received after settling their case included metadata sheets, scans of the original Arabic documents, mp3 audio files, and English translations and Arabic transcriptions of many tapes.20 Nearly half of the audio tapes that had been in the original CRRC archive were included. Coll’s settlement also paved the way for renewed efforts by the Hoover Institution to obtain the CRRC archive, a “recovered” 30 gigabytes of which the Pentagon agreed to transfer in 2023 and sent to Stanford University in 2024. Although the complete details are still forthcoming at the time of writing, the Department of Defense claimed that physical disks on which the CRRC records were stored had deteriorated since the center closed in 2015, requiring a data recovery operation.21 When I inquired by email, Hoover Institution Library and Archives Director Eric Wakin replied, “Thank you for your interest in the CRRC collection that will soon be available at Hoover Library & Archives. My colleagues are working to make the material available soon. A public announcement concerning the opening of the collection will appear in the fall and will address the content and access.”22 Time will tell how close to the complete archive the Hoover Institution received.During the final days of the CRRC, Moorhead and I had been somewhat constrained by the center’s rules, which stipulated we could only copy metadata sheets, English translations of documents, and the Arabic transcriptions and English translations of the audio tapes. Researchers were also required to obtain Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval. We were not permitted to copy the original Arabic documents and audio files, although what we obtained was considerable. Although less than ideal given that translation is an inexact science even under ideal conditions with unlimited time, to say nothing of translating tens of thousands of pages of Arabic documents while racing against the clock, the gathered materials continued to show the value of the archive and the imperative for unlocking its full potential.Having subsequently shared this trove of records with the History and Public Policy Program at the nonpartisan Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, which hosted several events with the staff of the CRRC during the center’s short life,23 I drew on it to write about historical case studies transcending Iraq’s borders, demonstrating the utility of the archive for studying the wider international history of the Middle East.24 Coll’s more recent trove from his settlement included many records for which we had only English translations, or audio tapes with only transcriptions or translations, along with adding full records Moorhead and I had missed altogether. Although still not consisting of the entire CRRC archive, combined, these troves of records were the most complete version in the public domain to date and would yield valuable information and insights from Saddam’s perspective over the long durée of US–Iraq relations, especially during the 1980–88 Iran–Iraq War, its aftermath, and the period between the 1991 and 2003 wars.Seamlessly incorporating the Iraqi records into the historical narrative of these events is one of the major accomplishments of Coll and strengths of The Achilles Trap. As publication of the book approached, Coll’s decision to share the CRRC records he obtained with the Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program to make available on its Digital Archive for the interested public was also in keeping with the legacy of cooperation between the CRRC and Wilson Center. After being screened and redacted for Personally Identifiable Information (PII) as needed on a highly limited basis, beginning in February 2024, the records have been released online.25 In consultation with Coll, I have worked with the History and Public Policy Program staff to introduce each batch of records. Following the completion of this project, the Wilson Center will add the trove of CRRC records Moorhead and I gathered to the Digital Archive as well, granting interested Americans, Iraqis, and anyone else anywhere in the world with an internet connection access to the valuable historical records that were central to The Achilles Trap. As Coll states in “A Note on Sources” following the conclusion of his book, “It is long past time for the White House and Department of Defense to release the full archive and make it accessible to global researchers, with procedures in place to protect vulnerable individuals.”26The Achilles Trap will be of interest to scholars and general readers alike. For anyone interested in the history of American involvement in Iraq over the previous decades, it is essential reading. It will also be of interest to scholars interested in the history of Iraq, the modern Middle East, US foreign policy, nuclear proliferation and and the of for which they will be hard to a case study with captured records to its case for the 2003 Iraq War, the Bush administration instead had in detail the why its various were Coll’s book as an and to continue these valuable historical sources for their full