re: yak:plot to blow up dam!
Dub, the following excerpt came from one of my earlier posts.
I dont think that scenario has been overlooked , in a region that coined the word "assassin".
The echoes of history would be uncanny if they were not entirely deliberate. Saddam is an abject Stalinophile. He has an entire roomful of biographies of Georgia’s most murderous son, and as a young man boasted openly that he would turn Iraq into ”a Stalin state”.
His endlessly expanding security web can seem confused and wasteful even by Stalin’s standards — except that it isn’t. Seen through the lens of his paranoia, it is quite logical. It exists so that he survives, and to see how well it works, it is worth considering what an assassin would have to do to get to him.
First, he would have to find him, which is impossible without intelligence from his closest confidants, because he employs eight doubles, moves constantly, sleeps only in anonymous private houses (never his palaces) and has every meal prepared in several different places, descending on the chosen one with little or no notice.
If the assassin had a pretext for an audience, he would be strip-searched before it and shot dead by bodyguards of the Special Protection Apparatus if he came within striking distance of his target during it. If not, he would have to penetrate two further layers of security: the 15,000-strong Special Republic Guard, and Qusay’s al-Amn al-Khas. Beyond these, the hitman would still have to reckon with Saddam’s all-day body armour, including a Kevlar-lined straw hat.
Assassinations require planning, and it is said that when three or more Iraqis plan anything they stand to be exposed by an informer. The CIA learnt this to their cost in 1996, recruiting agents from Saddam’s inner circle and equipping them with special mobile phones.
Once all the traitors had been arrested, tortured and killed, an Iraqi voice used one of the phones to call the CIA. “Your men are dead,” it said. “Pack up and go home.”
A key question facing Western Intelligence agencies is whether any of Saddam’s security chiefs will ever turn on him successfully. Britain’s Foreign Office thinks it could happen, but there are plenty of reasons for it not to. Every head of the Iraqi security hydra is implicated in Saddam’s reign of terror and knows revenge from its enemies will be swift and brutal when it ends.
As Saddam himself once told a plaintiff brave enough to complain that a relative had been unjustly executed: “Do not think you will get revenge. If you ever have the chance, by the time you get to us there will not be a sliver of flesh left on our bodies.”
In the meantime, would-be traitors know that their fate, if caught, will mirror that of Saddam’s own sons-in-law. They defected to Jordan in 1995 and told the West of the extent of Iraq’s chemical and bioweapons programme. They were lured back with promises of clemency, only to be separated from their wives and summarily killed.
Saddam’s rule is thug rule. It wields carrots as well as sticks — security personnel earn fat wages and have comfortable flats — but its structure and methods still resemble those of the Mob. In the run-up to the Gulf War its chief thugs even looted like the Mob, squabbling over Kuwaiti zoo animals and the Kuwaiti royal family’s fleets of Cadillacs and power yachts.
