The Saddam Files: Hussein Kamel, Iraq’s Wars, and Saddam’s Own Audio Tape Transcripts

The Saddam Tapes and the Iran-Iraq War

While reviewing the influx of records to be eventually made available at the Conflict Records Research Center, Department of Defense contractor linguists spent thousands of hours not only listening to audio recordings Saddam Hussein made of his meetings, but also typing English translations of them, along with Arabic transcriptions of many. Because these audio files vary widely in quality, the linguists could not always identify the voices of the speakers participating in each meeting, especially when they came from below the regime’s highest echelons. 

As this new batch of records indicates, the staff of Saddam’s Presidential Diwan and a committee of Iraqi military officers, many of whom had retired from active duty, found themselves similarly tasked with transcribing tapes of old meetings between Saddam and the General Command of the Armed Forces. Perhaps for the purpose of official historical studies of Iraq’s war with the Islamic Republic of Iran between 1980 and 1988, the tapes were transcribed by hand during the 1990s, although the accompanying documentation does not specify the exact reason. 

Recorded during the early years of the war with Iran, the tape transcripts reflect the difficulties that Iraq faced as a result of an unanticipatedly protracted conflict. The search for spare parts and munitions on the international arms market was a recurring theme even during the war’s first year. 

In the first meeting, the Soviet Union’s arms embargo against Iraq, stemming from Baghdad’s decision to invade Iran without Soviet approval (and without even notifying Moscow in advance), led Saddam to order his officials to contact India and Yugoslavia to inquire about selling Soviet munitions. The same record also contains valuable insights on the diplomatic dimensions of this period. 

Despite Iraq’s anger towards its Soviet patron, the Iraqi position regarding the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, where the resistance supported Iran, remained one of official neutrality. As Saddam explained Iraq’s neutrality to those gathered, “because the Afghan resistance is against us in favor of the al-Khomeini side, so that is what we will tell the Non-Aligned states when they ask. Why give them something for free?” 

In another meeting on the progress of the war in 1981, Saddam’s youngest daughter Hala appears in the middle of the discussion. At one point, Saddam turns to her and says, “You are now a big girl and can stay by yourself at the house.” Observing the actions of the meeting’s attendees seated around the table, Hala announces, “Daddy, I want a pen!”

Saddam’s meetings with the military leadership during this time often combined current events and historical topics, with parallels drawn between the former and the latter. An unidentified speaker in a partial transcript of a 1981 meeting invoked collaboration between Arabia’s Jewish tribes and rebellious Arab tribes during the Ridda (“apostacy”) wars, which occurred after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, seeing it as a historical antecedent to perceived current cooperation between Iran and Israel against Iraq. The same meeting later turned to the issue of foreign exchange, especially French Francs needed to fulfill an artillery contract, along with the need to transfer funds to Jordan, which would remain a crucial financial hub for Saddam’s regime until 2003. 

The transcript of a 1983 meeting detailed technical discussions about targeting Iran’s oil infrastructure to degrade its export capacity, along with Iraq’s commercial dealings on the international arms market. The attendees discussed the delivery of Egyptian missiles, along with recent visits by an Egyptian major general and the intelligence director to Iraq. They mentioned Iraq’s purchase of 155mm artillery pieces from both Austria and France while underscoring the importance of expanding Iraq’s domestic production of artillery rounds. With respect to the latter, the Soviet Union, which had lifted its arms embargo against Iraq the previous year, reportedly authorized the transfer of Soviet factory equipment from Switzerland to Iraq. Chile had allegedly offered Iraq five thousand American-made cluster bombs for $30 million, although the offer was declined.

The Saddam Tapes on Syria and the United States

Most of the audio tape records in this batch are among those that were translated, but not transcribed, or have corrupted Arabic transcriptions alongside legible English translations. The first comes from the partial recording of a November 1979 meeting on the subject of Iraqi-Syrian relations. Saddam’s ascendancy to the presidency was accompanied by a July 1979 purge of the Iraqi Baʿth Party, which dramatically terminated unification talks between the Iraqi and Syrian branches of the party, along with bilateral relations between the two countries. During the November meeting, Saddam explained to the attendees, “Any relationship between Iraq and the regime in Syria must take one of two directions and there is not a third direction. It is either collision or merger; there is not a medium in this matter.” 

In another undated meeting from the 1980s, undoubtedly colored by Syria’s subsequent support for and warm relations with Iran, Saddam quipped, “Syrians have twisted minds — they are dubious — they are experts on hurting the Arab nation.” A 1982 meeting revolved around another critical period in the history of the Iraqi Baʿth Party during the 1970s. Saddam and the Revolutionary Command Council reminisced about General Security Directorate head Nadhim Kzar’s failed coup attempt of 1973 against President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr. Saddam mentioned his growing suspicions of Kzar prior to this event and claimed to have warned Bakr not to accept any invitation to visit him in isolation.

Another tape from the 1980s is of a November 1986 meeting about President Ronald Reagan’s speech addressing the Iran-Contra revelations, or “Irangate” as Saddam and his advisers preferred to call the scandal. Turning to the role of the United States providing weapons during the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam mentions a private American company that allegedly offered Iraq mortar rounds, but went on to explain, “When the Americans wanted to establish new relations with Iraq, we were in deep need of weapons, but we never asked for their help. However, the Iranians have established their relations with the Americans based on an armaments deal.”

The final three tapes come from the years after Iraq’s defeat in the 1990-1991 Gulf War. Returning to more positive subjects, the first meeting focused on the successful Iraqi military operations during the Iran-Iraq War’s final stages, including the recapture of the Faw peninsula, which had been occupied by Iran. A prominent voice in this meeting is that of Iraqi Army Chief of Staff Nizar al-Khazraji, who recently published the second volume of his memoirs. The next meeting pertains to Iraq’s dealings with the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) weapons inspectors, then led by Swedish diplomat Rolf Ekeus, whom Saddam colorfully referred to as “Ekeus and the forty thieves.” 

Last but not least, the final meeting was held in the wake of the April 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing, an attack that the most determined conspiracy theorists would attempt to blame on Saddam Hussein and Iraq. After discussing the security threat of the militia movement in the United States, Saddam and Tariq Aziz turned to the subject of immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border. Saddam speculated that states on the land seized from Mexico during the 1846-1848 Mexican-American War would vote for succession from the United States and reunification with Mexico once a majority of the population in each originated from Mexico. Arguably both a more perceptive and enduring insight on U.S. politics was offered by Aziz when he stated, “The center has become despicable. When one wants to become popular, he starts to attack the federal government. He attacks Washington, saying ‘Washington is bureaucratic’, ‘Washington is corrupt,’ and ‘Washington is distant from the people's concerns.’ I mean, he attacks the federal government; thus, he gains popularity.”

Baʿth Party Policies and Ideology

Like previous installments in the Saddam Files, this release contains documents related to Baʿth Party policies and ideology. In a 1980 Presidential Diwan file, Saddam emphasizes the flexibility of the party to empirical reality, underscoring the importance of socialist adaptation in contrast to total collectivization and the resulting serious harm to national development. Drawing on Soviet history, he stated, “these experiments resulted in costly strangulation from the viewpoint of development and human loss; for example, these sacrifices, in addition to other factors cost Stalin approximately thirteen million human beings, and one third of the livestock wealth of the Soviet Union.”

In a 1989 meeting about the Baʿth Party’s view of religion, Islam, and Christianity, Saddam echoes the views of Baʿth Party founder Michel ‘Aflaq, stating that the party is neither atheistic nor Islamist, yet values the role of Arab culture, heritage, and spirit. He also states that Arab nationalism enjoyed a major advantage over Turkish and Iranian nationalism during the twentieth century in that it did not attempt to relegate the role of religion, especially Islam. In a meeting held shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, Saddam spoke with Iraqi officials and diplomats about the implications of the Cold War’s end on various countries, including the matter of increased migration of Soviet Jewry to Israel. A cabinet meeting held after the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait was a chorus of praise for Saddam’s decision to annex the country, paired with occasional mention of practical considerations related to absorbing the Kuwaiti population and economy.

The General Military Intelligence Directorate has been a recurring entity in the releases to date. This batch contains a 1979 file reporting on developments from Iran’s western Khuzestan province in the wake of the Islamic Revolution. In contrast to Iraq’s official rhetoric and justifications for invading Iran in September 1980 after a year of rising tensions, the directorate’s leadership at this time was skeptical toward the more sensationalist human intelligence reports coming out of Iran. When Iraq’s military attaché in Tehran relayed that Arabs in southern Iran had taken over naval facilities and demanded independence, an intelligence officer surmised, “We do not have enough information about the subject, and we think that it is exaggerated.” 

Included among the records in this release is an Iraqi Intelligence Service assessment of President Bill Clinton’s policies toward Iraq. Perceptively noting the shift from balancing Iraq and Iran against each other to the strategy of dual containment “aimed at weakening and containing both countries,” the report’s authors recognized that Clinton faced pressure from more hawkish critics, although he “did not go along with the voices calling for the partitioning of Iraq.”

Hussein Kamel al-Majid

The final three records in this release all pertain to Hussein Kamel al-Majid, Iraq’s powerful head of the Military Industrialization Commission and Saddam’s son-in-law, who defected to Jordan in 1995. Married to Saddam’s daughter Raghad, Hussein’s brother Saddam Kamel was married to Saddam’s daughter Rana. As feuding escalated between the Kamel brothers and Saddam’s sons Uday and Qusay, the brothers fled to Jordan with their wives. After cooperating with international weapons inspectors and the Central Intelligence Agency while calling for his father-in-law’s overthrow, the highly tainted Hussein Kamel found little interest in him among the Iraqi opposition and potential foreign patrons. 

The first of the three records contains memos from the Iraqi Intelligence Service and General Security Directorate, along with the transcription of a recorded call between Hussein Kamel and unnamed individual, discussing the former’s bid to solicit political support in exile. 

After these efforts fell flat, the second record contains two handwritten letters from Hussein Kamel to Saddam Hussein, begging for forgiveness and requesting permission to return to Iraq. Eager to get his daughters back, Saddam acquiesced. However, upon their return to Iraq in 1996, the Kamel brothers were quickly separated from Saddam’s daughters, whom they were compelled to divorce. 

The third record contains the documents of the commission established to report on what transpired next. Rushing to the sounds of an erupting gun battle, the personnel of the General Security Directorate arrived to find the house of the Kamel brothers surrounded, noticing Uday and Qusay, along with Ali Hassan al-Majid, among the attackers. Unaware of the attack plan, the General Security Directorate was contacted by the Special Security Organization and ordered to stand down from what was “a tribal matter.” By the time the shooting ended, the Kamel brothers were dead. Their house was demolished the following day.

Like the previous releases, this latest batch of records, largest by volume of documents, contains information on a wide range of subjects related to internal Iraqi and regional political history.