The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Saddam Hussein.md

category	tags	summary	created	updated	born	died	location
Political Figure	KeyFigure Person Iraq CIA Ba'ath	President of Iraq from 1979 to 2003, whose Ba'ath Party took power in a 1963 coup the CIA welcomed, and whose regime received U.S. intelligence during the Iran-Iraq War.	2026-05-14	2026-05-14	1937-04-28	2006-12-30	Al-Awja, Iraq

Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti was born on April 28, 1937, near the town of Tikrit in central Iraq, the son of a peasant family. He joined the Ba'ath Party in 1957. On October 7, 1959 Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qassem was wounded in the shoulder in an assassination attempt.¹ The journalist Richard Sale reported in 2003, citing unnamed former U.S. intelligence and diplomatic officials and the writer Adel Darwish, that Saddam Hussein was part of a "CIA-authorized six-man squad" tasked with killing Qasim and was later paid and trained by the Central Intelligence Agency in Beirut and watched over in Cairo, in Egypt; the CIA declined to comment, and the historian Bryan Gibson has cited declassified records showing that on October 1, 1959 Allen Dulles told the National Security Council only that an attempt might be made in the next two months.²

CIA and Ba'ath Rise to Power

A Defense Department memorandum of February 8, 1963 quoted White House aide Robert Komer's note to President John F. Kennedy that the Iraqi coup was "almost certainly a net gain for our side," and the State Department asked on February 9 for authority to recognize the new regime.³ Historians disagree about a CIA role in the coup: Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt cites "compelling evidence of an American role," while Bryan Gibson concludes the preponderance of evidence shows the CIA was not behind it.⁴ King Hussein of Jordan was reported in September 1963 as saying that a secret radio beamed to Iraq on February 8 supplied the coup plotters with the names and addresses of Communists, and Richard Sale reported in 2003, citing unnamed former U.S. intelligence officials, that the CIA gave Iraqi National Guardsmen lists of suspected communists; the same report quotes a former very senior CIA official as saying the Agency was "absolutely stunned" by the coup, and the CIA declined to comment.²⁴

The Ba'ath Party was ousted from government in the same year and returned to power in a 1968 coup. Saddam served as deputy to President Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr and was the de facto strongman of the regime through the 1970s. He forced al-Bakr to resign on July 16, 1979, formally assuming the presidency. Within days he convened a party congress at which he personally identified and had arrested dozens of alleged conspirators; hundreds of senior Ba'athists were executed in the following weeks.⁵

Iran-Iraq War and Western Support

In September 1980, Saddam launched an invasion of Iran following the instability created by the Iranian Revolution. The eight-year Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) killed an estimated half million to one million people. A State Department memorandum of October 7, 1983 assumed that the United States was already providing tactical intelligence to Iraq, and on November 29, 1984 Secretary of State George Shultz told Tariq Aziz that superior intelligence must be an important factor in Iraq's defense.⁶ According to a January 31, 1995 affidavit by former National Security Council staff member Howard Teicher, Director of Central Intelligence William Casey led efforts to ensure that Iraq received weapons, financial credits, intelligence and strategic military advice.⁶ The administration meanwhile ran the secret arms-for-hostages pipeline to Iran that became the Iran-Contra Affair.

Donald Rumsfeld visited Saddam in December 1983 as a special envoy for President Ronald Reagan, cementing the relationship at a moment when U.S. intelligence knew Iraq was using chemical weapons against Iranian forces.⁶ The arms and technology transfers to Iraq during the 1980s, including chemical and biological precursors, were later examined in congressional investigations and linked to the BNL scandal involving the Atlanta branch of Banca Nazionale del Lavoro.⁷

Arms Procurement Networks

Iraq's weapons procurement during the 1980s passed through several networks that intersect with vault subjects. Carlos Cardoen, a Chilean arms manufacturer with CIA connections, supplied cluster bombs to Iraq.⁶ Iraqi procurement agents operated through front companies in Europe, the United States, and the United Kingdom, the exposure of which became known as the Arms-to-Iraq affair in Britain.⁷

PROMIS software was among the products allegedly sold to Iraqi intelligence. Ari Ben-Menashe and other sources placed Iraq on the list of recipients of the Israeli-distributed, backdoor-equipped version of the software.⁸

Gulf War and Fall

Saddam invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990. The resulting Gulf War saw a U.S.-led coalition expel Iraqi forces in February 1991. The regime survived until the 2003 Iraq War, during which U.S. and coalition forces invaded and captured Baghdad in April 2003. Saddam was captured in December 2003, tried by an Iraqi tribunal, and executed by hanging on December 30, 2006.⁵

Footnotes

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1. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, vol. XII, Near East Region; Iraq; Iran; Arabian Peninsula, document 205 (editorial note on the October 7, 1959 attempt) and document 206 (CIA memorandum of October 13, 1959). https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v12 ↩︎

2. Richard Sale, "Exclusive: Saddam key in early CIA plot," United Press International, April 10, 2003, https://www.upi.com/Exclusive-Saddam-key-in-early-CIA-plot/65571050017416/ ; Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, vol. XII, document 204 (NSC 420th meeting, October 1, 1959); Bryan R. Gibson, Covert Relationship: American Foreign Policy, Intelligence, and the Iran-Iraq War, 1980-1989 (Praeger, 2010). ↩︎

3. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, vol. XVIII, Near East, 1962-1963, documents 153 (memorandum from Stephen O. Fuqua to Sloan, "Iraqi Coup," February 8, 1963) and 154 (Rusk to Kennedy, February 9, 1963). https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v18 ↩︎

4. Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt, "Embracing Regime Change in Iraq: American Foreign Policy and the 1963 Coup d'Etat in Baghdad," Diplomatic History 35, no. 1 (2011); Bryan R. Gibson, Covert Relationship (Praeger, 2010); King Hussein's remarks as published in Al-Ahram, September 27, 1963. ↩︎

5. "Saddam Hussein," Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saddam-Hussein ↩︎

6. Joyce Battle, ed., "Shaking Hands with Saddam Hussein: The U.S. Tilts toward Iraq, 1980-1984," National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 82, February 25, 2003, documents 22, 24, 26, 29, 31, 53, 60 and 61 (document 61 is the affidavit of Howard Teicher, United States v. Cardoen, S.D. Fla., January 31, 1995). https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/ ↩︎

7. Friedman, Alan. Spider's Web: The Secret History of How the White House Illegally Armed Iraq. Bantam Books, 1993. ↩︎

8. Ben-Menashe, Ari. Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network. TrineDay, 1992. ↩︎