Sada, Georges with Black, Jim Nelson, Saddam’s Secrets, How An Iraqi General Defied And Survived Saddam Hussein, Thomas Nelson, 2006
Georges Sada was an Assyrian Christian who rose to the top echelons of the Iraqi Air Force under Saddam Hussein. After the 2003 invasion he became an advisor to the Iraqi government. He co-wrote Saddam’s Secrets, How An Iraqi General Defied And Survived Saddam Hussein to tell his story. Unfortunately he tried to include two sensational stories to sell books in the West and one about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) is pure fiction.
His first headline grabbing story was that in 1990 Saddam ordered a 90 jet chemical attack upon Israel. There would be two waves one flying through Jordan and the other through Syria. Sada objected twice to Saddam saying that Israel would wipe the planes out before they even reached the country but the Iraqi leader insisted. He believed it would be a huge symbolic assault that would cement his place as the leader of the Arab world because no one else had attempted such a feat. The start of the Gulf War and the destruction of some of the planes that were to be included led Saddam to call off the operation. Sada used this as an example of how ruthless Saddam was. He was willing to sacrifice his best jets and pilots for a symbolic attack which was doomed to failure. The author believed this showed that Saddam only thought about himself and not Iraq nor its people. No one else has ever mentioned this plan. The U.S. captured thousands of Baathist documents after 2003 and carried out an interview program with Iraqi generals but they never talked about this either. That leads to questions about Sada’s authenticity. Did this really happen or was he just looking for tantalizing stories that would get people to buy and read his book in the West? That question seemed to be answered with his next tale.
Sada wrote that Iraq continued to work on its WMD and nuclear programs right up to the 2003 invasion. According to the author when the U.N. inspectors returned in 2002 Baghdad hid all of its programs. That same year there was a natural disaster in Syria and Saddam took that opportunity to ship WMD there to hide it. Sada claimed to have talked to an Iraqi Airlines pilot who was involved in the shipments. The problem with this story is that UN inspectors dismantled Iraq’s nuclear program in 1992 and Baghdad destroyed all its stocks of WMD in the mid-1990s. After the 2003 invasion this was proven to be true. Moving WMD to Syria was also investigated by the Americans after the invasion and found to be false. This whole story appears to have been made up to sell books. Why weren’t WMD found after the 2003 invasion? Sada knows the secret. The fact that the book was published in 2006 after all the investigations were published adds to the problems with the story.
He wasn’t done there however. He writes that in 2003 Abu Musab al-Zarqawi planned a chemical attack in Jordan but failed. He implied that the only place the terrorist could get WMD was from Iraq. This built off Bush administration claims that Zarqawi was a member of Al Qaeda who worked with Iraq before the 2003 invasion. Not only was there no WMD to give Zarqawi but he did not join Al Qaeda until after the overthrow of Saddam so this is another false tale.
Most of Saddam’s Secrets is not that bad and focuses upon Sada’s life in the Air Force. He writes about how he became an accomplished pilot going for training in both the United Sates and USSR. There’s also plenty on his displeasure with the Baath Party who he felt destroyed the country by putting loyalists ahead of competent people to run Iraq and the cruelty of Saddam as a ruler who ruined his nation. That’s not what Sada’s work is going to be remembered for however because of his more fanciful stories.
General Sada was a harsh critic of Saddam and supporter of his overthrow in 2003. I think that and his desire to sell books was his motivation to make up stores about Iraq’s WMD and ties to the terrorist Zarqawi. They undermine his entire book because it leads the reader to question everything else he wrote.
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