Back in the Gulf, Saddam and Khomeini had long hated each other. Saddam had almost had Khomeini assassinated; instead he killed the Shiite ayatollah al-Sadr. The Iraqis had long resented Iranian superiority and the shah’s power: Saddam’s surrogate father Uncle Talfah had written a pamphlet, Three Whom God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews and Flies. Now Saddam flew down to Riyadh to get Saudi support. Khomeini detested the Saudis, whom he had mocked as ‘the camel-grazers of Riyadh and the barbarians of Najd’. Fahd, Saudi crown prince and son of Abdulaziz, promised Saddam a billion dollars a month. The Americans greenlighted the war; so did Brezhnev, who had just taken a fatal decision.
OPERATION 333 IN KABUL
Operation Storm-333 was the most successful commando mission of modern times. At 19.15 on 27 December 1979, more than a thousand Soviet commandos, disguised in Afghan uniforms, stormed the Tajbeg Palace ten miles outside Kabul, to liquidate the Afghan general secretary Hafizullah Amin, whose radical policies and murderous purges, admiration for Stalin, and American education, alarmed the Soviets. Brezhnev’s senile elation was disturbing: he tangoed with typists and waitresses, but in public he could not finish a sentence, becoming a national joke. But the omnipotent geriatrics agonized about Amin. ‘Under no circumstances,’ said Andropov, ‘can we lose Afghanistan.’
The generals had warned against invasion. Privately Gorbachev thought it ‘a fateful mistake’, but on 12 December Andropov won the argument. As troops were mustered, Amin had moved out of the Presidential Palace to the heavily defended Tajbeg. Andropov’s Agent Patience was now Amin’s chef. If he could kill Amin, an Afghan invasion could be avoided.
On 13 December, Agent Patience poisoned Amin, but his nephew ate most of the poisoned food and had to be flown to Moscow and treated with an antidote. Then a sniper tried to shoot him but could not get close. Andropov ordered a quick surgical strike to liquidate Amin and pacify the country. On 25 December, Soviet forces started arriving with Amin’s approval. On the 27th, just hours before Storm-333, Amin presided over a banquet where he was poisoned again: he and his guests were all ill. Amin went into a coma but his Coca-Cola addiction diffused the poison and a Russian doctor, unbriefed by the KGB, revived him. Once news reached the hit squad that Amin was alive, 700 commandos led by twenty-five assassins of the Thunder unit of Alpha Group along with KGB and GRU contingents backed by 700 paratroopers and Spetsnaz operators stormed the palace, defended by 1,500 troops, who fought back.
‘The Soviets will save us,’ said Amin as Andropov’s commandos blasted their way in.
‘They are the Soviets,’ replied his adjutant.
‘It’s all true,’ said Amin. Once inside the palace, the assassins slaughtered Amin and virtually his entire family, his wife and son aged eleven and 350 guards; a daughter was wounded but survived. The parquet floors were awash with blood. A pro-Soviet president Karmal was installed; 80,000 troops with 1,500 tanks seized the cities, soon rising to 125,000; and at its peak over 600,000 personnel were drawn into the war. The invasion sparked a growing insurgency by around 250,000 mujahedin under tribal and religious leaders,* backed first by Pakistan, then by the CIA and the Saudis.
Afghanistan provided perfect cover for Saddam. On 22 September 1980, he invaded Iran, calling it ‘Saddam’s Qadisiyya’, referring to the 638 Arab defeat of the Persians. Yet Saddam failed to destroy Khomeini; on the contrary, the Arab attack rallied Islamic zealotry and Iranian nationalism behind the imam, saving the regime. Thousands of Iranians volunteered to wear the red bandannas of martyrdom and were sent over the top of the trenches, often unarmed except for the key to the gates of heaven, in human waves that halted the Iraqi advance. As Khomeini executed Marxists and liberal ‘traitors’ in massive numbers, he rushed 200,000 recruits to his new army, the Revolutionary Guards. America and Russia lavished military aid on the Iraqi dictator. ‘It’s a pity,’ said Kissinger, ‘both sides can’t lose.’ The war would last ten years and kill a million young men – a forgotten catastrophe that encouraged Khomeini to consolidate his theocracy and Saddam to take more risks, funded by the Saudis.
King Fahd, fourth of Abdulaziz’s sons to be king, reacted to the Iranian challenge – and an attack by Islamicist rebels on the Mecca shrine – by tightening religious observance in the kingdom, changing his title to Guardian of the Two Sanctuaries and funding a Wahhabi campaign across the Arab world to confront Khomeini in a battle of faith that intensified a competition of fanaticism. His brother Salman, the intelligent, wilful, irascible governor of Riyadh (later king in the 2020s),* who often punished the impertinent with a slap across the face, took over the funding of Islamic charities – channelling the money to fund the Afghans – and the small coterie of Saudis who went to fight for them.
Osama bin Laden, now twenty-two, was one of the fifty-six children of the king’s builder, Muhammad bin Laden, a Yemenite who had started as a porter in Jeddah, then in 1930 won the favour of Abdulaziz and befriended Faisal, rebuilding Mecca and Medina for the Saudis. The family were experts at cultivating not only the royal family but also American grandees.
Muhammad bin Laden educated most of his children in Britain or the USA: his heir Salem was at a British boarding school. When his father died in a plane crash, Salem bin Laden built on his relationship with Faisal but also bought houses in Florida and became friends with a useful patrician family. In April 1979, he invested in the oil start-up of George W. Bush, the swaggering and hard-drinking son of an upper-class politician, George H. W. Bush, who was planning to run for president.
POPPY, OSAMA AND W
Tall, reedy-voiced and preppy, inarticulate and bereft of ‘the vision thing’, George senior suffered from the clash between his upper-class decency and his voracious ambition. A scion of the type of American family that owned its own ‘family compound’, the Bushes were descended from English blacksmiths, teachers and prospectors; they were radical abolitionists and supporters of female suffrage but also members of an east coast business elite. George’s grandfather Samuel, son of an Episcopalian vicar, made money by managing a steel company that manufactured parts for the Gilded Age robber baron E. H. Harriman. His son, Prescott, worked at the Harriman Brothers investment bank and married the daughter of the bank boss George Herbert Walker. From Walker the Bushes inherited their Maine compound, Kennebunkport, where like other WASPs they embraced the double hell of spartan domestic arrangements and cold outdoor sports.
Nicknamed Skin for his skinniness and Poppy after his grandfather Pop Walker, Bush followed his father to Yale and into the posh Skull and Bones drinking society, then married an indomitable daughter of a successful publisher, Barbara Pierce, descended from one of the first Massachusetts settlers. Soon after his marriage, George joined the air force and survived being shot down by the Japanese in 1944. Moving to Houston, he made money in oil while he and Barbara had six children. Heartbroken by losing a daughter to leukaemia, they indulged their eldest son, George W. – known as W – who grew up as a raffish cross between booted Texas princeling and Yalie Bonesman. It was he who got the bin Ladens to back his business.
George senior had followed his father into politics, and Nixon rewarded his loyalty with the ambassadorship in Beijing; Ford made him CIA director. More networker than meteor, Bush wrote thank-you notes to every person he met. Now he was ready to run for president. Meanwhile W was making money in oil and had invested in the Texas Rangers baseball team, but he was drinking heavily, and was arrested for Drinking under the Influence. W’s marriage to Laura Welch, a virtuous librarian, led him to change his life: he gave up alcohol and embraced God, sobriety and politics. Not only was Laura ‘elegant and beautiful, [she was] willing to put up with my rough edges’, he said. ‘And I must confess she’s smoothed them off.’ W moved from the Episcopalians to Laura’s evangelical United Methodists.