How Hashemite King Sought to Sell Weapons to Saddam
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

WASHINGTON – Lawyers for Ahmad Chalabi are prepared to prove in an American court that Jordan’s King Abdullah attempted to sell arms to Saddam Hussein in 1992 when he was only a prince and not heir to the throne.
A handwritten letter to Saddam from his late son Uday, dated February 9, 1992, lists prices for old Soviet military equipment and says that then-Prince Abdullah recommended Uday contact an intermediary identified as “Jack al-Khayyat,” who could arrange the sale. The letter says the proposal was made to Iraqi sources in Jordan through Mr. al-Khayyat. Prince Abdullah sought to import the equipment and then sell it to Iraq for cash payments. On offer were T-72 tanks for $50,000 a piece; MIG-29 fighter jets for $1,000,000 a piece; transport planes for between $200,000 and $300,000 apiece as well as troop carriers fitted with 100 mm cannons, and helicopters. Saddam declined the sale, saying that his treasury was depleted, in a three-line note written at the end of the document.
A spokeswoman for Jordan’s embassy in Washington told The New York Sun that the embassy believes the letter is a fake.
“There is nothing to indicate its authenticity. We have no knowledge of such transactions,” the spokeswoman said. As a rule, the Jordanian embassy does not allow the spokeswoman to be named in news articles.
The New York Sun obtained the letter and an accompanying photograph of Uday and Abdullah from Duane Clarridge, the founder of the CIA’s counterterrorism center. Mr. Clarridge advised Mr. Chalabi in the late 1990s on a military strategy to spark a rebellion in Iraq after the CIA cut off funding for the coalition of rebel groups.
The spokeswoman confirmed that the photograph was likely real, but noted the embassy deduced it was taken before the first Gulf War based on the military insignia on Prince Abdullah’s uniform. “The picture is from the 1980s, the ranking on the king’s military attire indicates this is from the 1980s. It was very normal for a son of a head of state to meet with a son of another head of state,” the spokeswoman said.
Mr. Clarridge told the Sun: “Given my relationship with Chalabi and other members of the Iraqi National Congress, I simply don’t believe they would hand me anything that was fabricated. It is not worth it to screw me over.”
Mr. Chalabi’s attorney, John Markham, told the Sun this week that he was preparing depositions from two former Iraqi intelligence officers to verify the handwriting on the document Mr. Markham says was found in Iraqi mukhbarat headquarters by Mr. Chalabi’s people. Mr. Markham says he is prepared to present the letter as part of the pre-trial discovery process that he expects will begin in 60 to 90 days.
The case is being brought by Mr. Chalabi in the U.S. district court in the District of Columbia under charges that the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan has deliberately tried to defame and in some cases physically harm Mr. Chalabi and his family since a Jordanian court seized Petra Bank, which Mr. Chalabi ran, in 1989.
Mr. Chalabi has been in a war with the Jordanian royal family since he lost the bank and was sentenced in absentia by a military court to 22 years of hard labor. Mr. Chalabi’s legal complaint filed in August says King Abdullah in May of this year delivered personally to President Bush “a file containing the false accusation that Chalabi had informed the Iranian government that the United States had broken its encryption code and thus could intercept its secret communications.” That charge led the White House to abort a $340,000-a-month program to fund information collection activities from the Iraqi National Congress, the program that likely enabled Mr. Chalabi to get his hands on the 1992 letter.
If the court finds the letter is genuine, it could be a devastating blow for the royal family, already under fire for new disclosures in a public CIA report for allowing its country’s businessmen to funnel military technology to Saddam’s Iraq when the regime was under strict U.N. sanctions. Jordan is a rare Arab state that has good relations with both America and at least on an intelligence level with Israel. In March 2003, Jordan closed its border with Iraq, in anticipation of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and allowed American special forces to secretly infiltrate Iraq in the run-up to the war.
The report released last week by chief weapons inspector Charles Duelfer paints a very different picture of Jordan in the years that preceded Saddam’s toppling.
“Jordanian companies performed a variety of essential roles from 1991 through 1999 that aided and abetted Iraq’s procurement mechanism: transportation hub, financial haven, one of several illicit revenue sources, and overall illicit trade facilitator,” it says. What’s more, the report says that Iraqi companies had attempted to buy, through Jordan, gyroscopes, high technology communications equipment, and jamming devices right up to February of 2003-a month before the war.
Furthermore, the CIA analysis says that prior to 1996, the year the U.N. created the oil-for-food program, 95% of Iraq’s official banking was performed in Jordanian government-run banks. This was in part because Jordan obtained a broad exemption from the initial sanctions issued in 1991. But after 1996, the report says that the Iraqi Military Industrial Corporation, the government entity Saddam used to procure illicit military items, did its banking through the Jordanian National Bank. In 2000, Jordanian authorities kicked out auditors from the Lloyd’s Registry at the Port of Aqaba, a move the report says contributed to Iraq’s illicit trade.
A spokeswoman for Jordan’s embassy in Washington said yesterday, “All of the trade that took place between Iraq and Jordan was all legal and all in sync with the oil-for-food program and was strictly adhering to U.N. Security Council resolutions.” But the report quotes an anonymous Iraqi businessman with extensive contacts in the regime as saying that all items that passed through Jordan were approved by the government, adding that in some cases they were photographed.
This account conforms to what three former CIA officials with extensive knowledge of American policy toward Iraq in the sanctions years told the Sun. According to the sources, the CIA was not only aware of the robust trade between Jordan and Iraq in the years between the wars, but in some cases it encouraged it.
“There was a specific exception set up for Jordan,” a former CIA Iraq analyst told the Sun. “The Jordanians were allowed to do what they wanted to. Noone wanted to destabilize Jordan in going after Saddam.”
According to a former CIA officer who worked on the Iraq issue, the agency attempted to turn the Iraq-Jordan trade to its advantage by modifying equipment that made its way into Iraq. This source said that in some cases this meant making military equipment unusable, but often this meant placing a “satellite badge,” or “tagging” missiles or smaller arms that could be used in a war, so American satellites would know their precise locations. The agency also installed bugs, according the sources, on cell phones and other communications equipment going into Iraq. Indeed, Secretary of State Powell in his February 2003 presentation to the U.N. referenced intercepted military communications that he claimed showed an Iraqi effort to conceal weapons of mass destruction from the inspectors.
Another former CIA officer who worked in northern Iraq in the mid-1990s, Bob Baer, said, “It would be standard practice if you found weapons going to Saddam, if you could just tap into a channel, a weapons pipeline, to try to modify and make these weapons inert and easily destroyable. You can put tracers on it and destroy it in times of war,” he said.
None of these sources would say whether they knew if King Abdullah, a graduate of the American prep school Deerfield Academy and Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, was working for the CIA when he allegedly attempted to sell the arms to Saddam.
However, Uday raised this as a possibility in the letter.
“It could be, my father, an attempt by the Americans to empty the Soviet Union of weapons or weaken the Russian state and their need for hard currency to stay in power and that explains them asking for receiving the money in cash and it seems that the benefit of Prince Abdullah and his friend,” Saddam’s eldest son writes.
Mr. Clarridge believes that the proposed arms deal was not a CIA sting.
“I believe Abdullah was carrying out the wishes of his father and the Jordanian establishment which was benefiting financially and other wise from cooperation with Saddam over the last 20 years,” he said. “Yes, tagging has been used to follow where military equipment goes. But you don’t need to do that with MIG-29s and T-72 tanks because they are too obvious. You might tag a missile which could be easily concealed, especially one that could reach certain countries in the Middle East from Iraq. Most of the items listed in the letter don’t need to be tagged. T-72 is not going to fire from Iraq to Tel Aviv; there is no point in tagging it.”