That was years ago. I returned from Baghdad and published an interview with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Iraq was mired in a difficult battle, and the man’s name was a provocation to his opponents.
The phone rang, and the caller asked me: “How can Ghassan Charbel have the right to tour Baghdad, but I have no right to visit my country?”
I replied teasingly: “Maybe because I was not a commander of the National Guard at the time of ‘Al-Baath’, and I did not target with my warplane the stronghold of Abdel-Karim Kassem, and after that the office of President Abdel-Salam Aref in the palace. Moreover, I have nothing to do with the horrors of Qasr al-Nihaya and the killing of communists and others.”
The man fell silent. Then he said: “The story in the end is not with al-Maliki. The one who prevents me from visiting Baghdad is, in fact, [Iranian General] Qassem Soleimani, because I am included in the de-Baathification measures that aim, in part, to change the historical features of Iraq.”
He felt that I was trying to lure him into revealing his story. But he moved away from the subject.
My relationship with the man began years ago. One day, I published a long interview with Hazim Jawad, who led the ‘Baath Party’ to power in 1963, and since that date, he has maintained complete silence in order to avoid Saddam’s bullets, which were searching for ‘dissidents’ in their capitals of refuge.
The phone rang. I requested to know the identity of the caller.
He replied: “You will know in a little while. First, I want to ask you, how did you convince Hazim to break his chronic silence?” I responded that he was exhausted, and the process of persuasion took about ten sessions.
He said: “I read an article, in which you talk about my cruel friends, and you mean those whose names were associated with bloody scenes and military or intelligence operations. Your friends are less cruel than mine.”
I asked him about his friends, and he answered: “They are: Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, Saddam Hussein, Nazim Kazar, Saleh Mahdi Ammash, Hardan al-Tikriti, Hazim Jawad, Ali Saleh al-Saadi, and you can add to them Amin al-Hafez and Hafez al-Assad.”
I felt like I was speaking with a big catch.
I invited the man who resides in Spain to meet over coffee.
“I am a military and outspoken man,” he said. “I made a double decision: the first is to contact you, and the second is not to meet you. Please understand that, as I follow your work, and I appreciate your journalistic effort. But the meeting may draw me into a conversation that will cause people to die, and harm men who worked with me.”
He sensed that I was disturbed, so he added: “We can talk over the phone whenever you like. Consider me an adviser on Iraqi affairs; but accept my apologies for not meeting with you.”
The man and I had a telephone relationship that lasted more than a decade. One day, he called me and asked about my whereabouts. I said that I was on a trip and far from London, so he laughed: “I thought I would break my decision and shake hands even once, but without talking. I am in London and will leave in two days.”
The man passed away and we did not meet, and I still blame myself for letting him “take my secrets with me to the grave, and he will most likely be outside Iraq.”
He is Munther Al-Wandawi, and he has a thorny name in the history of the Iraqi ‘Baath’. One day I published a conversation with an Arab leader, so Al-Wandawi called me: “Since you are talking to the decision-makers, why do you insist on searching for those who are named terrorists, wanted persons, or the intelligence black box? This world provokes feelings of pain and disappointment, and awakens the memory of the families of the victims.”
My response was that “journalism is fond of exploring obscure areas, and that those man add a drop of excitement in a profession that is delighted in the fields, not in the offices.”
A conversation between men of secrets involves an undeniable cruelty. It may awaken a reader’s wounds as it reveals to him the killer and the circumstances of his father’s murderers.
An entity, team or institution may be embarrassed. But in boisterous countries, the truth is usually painful. Journalism is originally a story of distress and passion.
I recalled Al-Wandawi’s words when I woke up early in a far-away hotel, soon after I saw cruel images and scenes of men who were shot to death, in line with decisions taken outside usual courts. I spent days in the jungle of Iraqi intelligence secrets, through a dialogue that reveals highly-dangerous facts and sheds light on the cruelty of the period the man was talking about.
