The Rise To Power -- Like The Fictional Don Corleone, Saddam Hussein Early On Showed A Willingness To Seize The Advantage

The events leading to the war with Iraq are, to say the least, complex. In their book ``Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf,'' authors Judith Miller, a New York Times correspondent, and Laurie Mylroie, a fellow at Harvard University, attempt to give a better understanding of those events and the people in them. The following, the first of two parts, looks at Saddam Hussein and his ascent to tyranny.

Saddam Hussein loves ``The Godfather.'' It is his favorite movie, one he has seen many times. He is especially fascinated by Don Corleone, a poor boy made good, whose respect for family is exceeded only by his passion for power. The iron-willed character of the Don may perhaps be the most telling model for the enigmatic figure that rules Iraq.

There is, however, a difference. Where the Don was a private man, obsessed with secrecy, seeking always to conceal his crimes behind a veil of anonymity, Saddam is a public figure who usurped political power and seizes every opportunity to advertise his might in order to impress upon his countrymen that there is no alternative to his rule.

But perhaps this difference matters not at all. For both the Don and Saddam relish power and seek respect, the more so because each knows what it means to have none. Neither ever forgot any insult, however trivial or imagined; both rest secure in the knowledge that, as Mario Puzo observed of his fictional character, ``in this world there comes a time when the most humble of men, if he keeps his eyes open, can take his revenge on the most powerful.'' And in this likeness there perhaps lies the key to understanding Saddam Hussein's ambition.

Saddam Hussein was born on April 28, 1937, to a miserably poor, landless peasant family in the village of al-Auja, near the town of Takrit, on the Tigris River, a hundred miles north of Baghdad. Takrit lies in the heart of the Sunni Muslim part of Iraq. But in Iraq, the Sunnis are a minority. More than half the country is Shiite, the Sunnis' historical and theological rivals.

Accounts of Saddam's early years are murky. Official hagiographics shed little light. The unsavory aspects of Saddam's harsh and brutal childhood are not something he wants known. It is usually said that Saddam's father, Hussein al-Majid, died either before Saddam's birth or when he was a few months old. But a private secretary of Saddam's, who later broke with him, has suggested that Saddam's father abandoned his wife and young children. Whatever the truth, after her husband was gone, Saddam's mother, Subha, was on her own until she met Ibrahim Hassan, a married man. Eventually she persuaded him to get rid of his wife, and to marry her instead. By Muslim law, Ibrahim was permitted four wives, but Subha insisted on being the only one.

Saddam's stepfather was a crude and illiterate peasant who disliked his stepson and treated him abusively. Years later, Saddam would bitterly recall how his stepfather would drag him out of bed at dawn, barking, ``Get up, you son of a whore, and look after the sheep.'' When Saddam's cousin, Adnan Khayrallah, who would become Iraq's defense minister, started to go to school, Saddam wanted to do the same. But Ibrahim saw no need to educate the boy. He wanted Saddam to stay home and take care of the sheep. Saddam finally won out. In 1947 at the age of 10, he began school.

He went to live with Adnan's father, Khayrallah Tulfah, his mother's brother, a schoolteacher in Baghdad. Several years before, Khayrallah had been cashiered from the Iraqi army for supporting a pro-Nazi coup in 1941, which the British suppressed, instilling in Khayrallah a deep and lasting hatred for Britain and for ``imperialism.'' Whether Saddam's stepfather kicked him out of the house or whether he left at his own initiative for his uncle's home in Baghdad is unclear. What is certain is that Khayrallah Tulfah - who later became mayor of Baghdad - would come to wield considerable influence over Saddam.

Times were unusually turbulent when Saddam was a student in Baghdad. In 1952, Lt. Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser led a coup that toppled Egypt's monarchy. Though there had been considerable sympathy in the United States for the Egyptian officers, Nasser and the West were soon at odds. Nasser's purchase in 1955 of huge amounts of Soviet arms and his nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956 led France, Britain and Israel to attack Egypt that year. Most Egyptians - indeed, most Arabs - believed that Arab nationalism, through Nasser, won a tremendous victory when the invasion was halted, Israel forced to withdraw from the Sinai, and the canal returned to Egyptian control. That the United States was almost single-handedly responsible for that outcome did not reduce the tremendous popular enthusiasm for Nasser among the Arabs.

Saddam soon found himself swept up in a world of political intrigue whose seductions were far more compelling than the tedium of schoolwork. In 1956 Saddam participated in an abortive coup against the Baghdad monarchy. The next year, at the age of 20, he joined the Baath party, one of several radical nationalist organizations that had spread throughout the Arab world.

In 1958 a non-Baathist group of nationalist army officers, led by Gen. Abdul Karim Qassim, succeeded in overthrowing King Faisal II. The fall of the monarchy intensified plotting among Iraq's rival dissident factions. A year after Qassim's coup, the Baath tried to seize power by machine-gunning Qassim's car in broad daylight. Saddam (whose name translates as ``the one who confronts'') was a member of the hit team. He had already proven his mettle by murdering a Communist supporter of Qassim in Takrit. The Communists were the Baath's fierce rivals - in fact, the man Saddam killed was his brother-in-law. There had been a dispute in the family over politics, and his uncle Khayrallah had incited Saddam to murder him. Although Saddam and Khayrallah were arrested, they were soon released.

Iraqi sources present at the time insist that Saddam's role in the failed assassination attempt was minor, that he was only lightly wounded, and that the wound was inadvertently inflicted by his own comrades.

From Syria (which is where Saddam fled after the failed attempt), Saddam went to Cairo, where he would spend the next four years. The stay in Egypt was to be his only extended experience in another country. Supported by an Egyptian government stipend, he resumed his political activities, finally finishing high school at the age of 24.

Saddam entered Cairo University's Faculty of Law in 1961. He eventually received his law degree not in Cairo, but in Baghdad in 1970, after he became the No. 2 man in the regime. It was an honorary degree.

While in Cairo, Saddam married his uncle Khayrallah's daughter, Sajida, in 1963. His studies in Egypt ended abruptly in February when Baathist army officers and a group of Arab nationalist officers together succeeded in ousting and killing Gen. Qassim, a figure of considerable popularity, particularly among the poor of Iraq.

Saddam was elated. He hurried back to Baghdad to assume his part in the revolution. He was 26 years old.

Saddam quickly found his place in the new regime. He became an interrogator and torturer in the Qasr-al-Nihayyah, or ``Palace of the End,'' so-called because it was where King Faisal and his family were gunned down in 1958. Under the Baath the palace was used as a torture chamber.

Few in the West are aware of Saddam's activities there. But an Iraqi arrested and accused of plotting against the Baath has told of his own torture at the palace by Saddam himself: ``My arms and legs were bound by rope. I was hung on the rope to a hook on the ceiling and I was repeatedly beaten with rubber hoses filled with stones.'' He managed to survive his ordeal; others were not so lucky. When the Baath, riven by internal splits, was ousted nine months later in November 1963 by the army, a grisly discovery was made. ``In the cellars of al-Nihayyah Palace,'' according to Hanna Batatu, whose account is based on official government sources, ``were found all sorts of loathsome instruments of torture, including electric wires with pincers, pointed iron stakes on which prisoners were made to sit, and a machine which still bore braces of chopped-off fingers.''

During the party split in 1963, Saddam had supported Michel Aflaq, a French-educated Syrian, the party's leading ideologue and co-founder of the party. Saddam was rewarded the next year when Aflaq sponsored him for a position in the Baath regional command, the party's highest decision-making body in Iraq. With this appointment, Saddam began his rapid ascent within the party.

During the period of his initial rise in the party, Saddam spent a brief interlude in prison, from October 1964 to his escape from jail sometime in 1966. There, as Saddam later recounted, in the idleness of prison life he reflected on the mistakes that had led to the party's split and its fall from power. Divisions within the party, which had fewer than 1,000 full members at that time, had to end. Unity was essential for power, even if it had to be purchased by purge and blood. He determined to build a security force within the party, to create cells of loyalty that answered to no one but himself, to ensure that victory once won would be kept.

Upon his escape from prison, Saddam quickly set about building the party's internal security apparatus, the Jihaz Haneen, or ``instrument of yearning.'' Those deemed ``enemies of the party'' were killed; unfriendly factions were intimidated. Saddam's reputation as an architect of terror grew.

Two years later, on July 30, 1968, Saddam and his Baathist comrades succeeded in seizing and holding state power. His older cousin Gen. Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr became president and commander in chief in addition to his duties as secretary-general of the Baath party and the chairman of its Revolutionary Command Council. Saddam was made deputy chairman of the council, in charge of internal security. He quickly moved to strengthen control and expand his base within the party.

Saddam was 31. His penchant for asserting his authority by title - today he holds six - was evident even then. He insisted on being called ``Mr. Deputy.'' No one else in Iraq was Mr. Deputy. It was Saddam's title, his alone.

The hallmarks of the new regime soon became apparent. Barely three months after the coup, the regime announced on Oct. 9, 1968, that it had smashed a major Zionist spy ring. Fifth columnists were denounced before crowds of tens of thousands. On Jan. 5, 1969, 17 ``spies'' went on trial. Fourteen were hanged, 11 of whom were Jewish, their bodies left to dangle before crowds of hundreds of thousands in Baghdad's Liberation Square. The Jews had been but a stepping stone to the regime's real target, its political rivals. The Baath began their rule with an inauguration of blood.

Far from the public image of asceticism in the service of nationalism which it was the party's official duty to project, Saddam and his closest colleagues became better known for their vulgarity. Mafia-like stories of their extreme clannishness and brutality are legion inside Iraq. But rarely have they been told beyond its borders. Here is one:

A passion for social respectability, its intensity betraying an awareness of its absence, was apparently one reason Saddam took a second wife from an old distinguished Baghdad merchant family. The tall and blond Samira Shahbandar was already married to Nurredin al-Fafi, an Iraqi Airways official, when she was first introduced to Saddam. Safi prudently stepped aside so that Saddam could marry her. He was later promoted to director of the airline company.

After the marriage, a member of the Shahbandar clan named Farouk told his wife in what he thought was the intimacy of their bedroom that Samira was not a real Shahbandar. Her father, he explained, had simply taken the family name. Farouk was unaware that the bedroom was bugged. He and his wife were arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment. They are still in jail.

Iraq is run as a private preserve of Saddam and his inner clique. He distributes wealth, assigning sectors to his family and other close associates to control and to milk. His cousin and son-in-law Hussein Kamel al-Majid is responsible for military purchases. Arab sources report that on a 1987 purchase of 120 Chinese Scud missiles, Hussein Kamel pocketed a ``personal commission'' of $60 million. Saddam's uncle, Khayrallah Tulfah, makes his money on land. Saddam's first wife, Sajida, makes hers on trade. His eldest son, Uday, now 26, has free rein over local business ventures and has built up an extensive commercial empire, including Super Chicken, a food-processing chain.

Uday's talents as a businessman are perhaps matched only by his capacity for violence. His murder of his father's valet is a case in point. He was well known for his hot temper. Now it was the valet's turn to feel his wrath. Over the years, Kamal Hana Gegeo had performed many favors for Saddam, including acting as go-between for Saddam and the woman who was to be his second wife. Uday feared that their union might mean that he would not inherit his father's position. In October 1988, Uday decided to take his revenge at a party in honor of Suzy Mubarak, the wife of Egypt's president. Although the party's host, Iraqi Vice President Taha Mohyiden Maruf, had learned of Uday's intentions, he was powerless to stop Saddam's reckless son, who arrived at the party with his bodyguards. Pushing Maruf aside, he bludgeoned Gegeo with a heavy club. When Saddam learned what had happened, it is said that he became so enraged, his first wife Sajida had to call upon her brother Adnan Khayrallah, the defense minister, to stop Saddam from killing Uday himself.

The incident jolted the family, and tensions grew. When a high-ranking Kuwaiti delegation went to Baghdad in February 1989, four months after the feud, Adnan confided to the Kuwaitis that he was in personal danger. He was no longer involved in military purchases, he said, or in military intelligence, and he had lost his authority over the Republican Guards, the elite military units. The next month The Sunday Times of London reported rumors that Adnan would be dismissed. Two months later he died in a helicopter crash.

It is instructive to recall that Adnan was Saddam's cousin, the son of his uncle and foster father Khayrallah Tulfah, a companion since boyhood, and, of course, his brother-in-law. Saddam trusts no one.

Saddam Hussein has come a long way. A weaker character, with less ambition and intelligence, might have ended up no more than a scoundrel and a petty thief. But Saddam never lost confidence in his own destiny. As his power has expanded, his dreams and pretensions have grown. Saddam's reluctance to confess his rough-hewn peasant origins has prompted him to claim the noblest lineage. He has presented a family tree to the Iraqi public. It traces his roots to the prophet Mohammed. Saddam Hussein has said: ``The glory of the Arabs stems from the glory of Iraq. Throughout history, whenever Iraq became mighty and flourished, so did the Arab nation. This is why we are striving to make Iraq mighty, formidable, able and developed.''

(From ``Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf'' by Judith Miller and Laurie Mylroie. Copyright, 1990, Judith Miller and Laurie Mylroie. Reprinted by arrangement with Times Books, a division of Random House Inc.)