H20-Diplo Article15 Review

H-Diplo Article Review Editors: Thomas Maddux and H-Diplo Diane Labrosse

H-Diplo Article Reviews Web and Production Editor: George Fujii

No. 532 Commissioned for H-Diplo by Thomas Maddux Published on 12 June 2015

Joseph Sassoon. “The East German Ministry for State Security and Iraq, 1968-1989.” Journal of Cold War Studies 16:1 (Winter 2014): 4-23. DOI: 10.1162/JCWS_a_00429. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/JCWS_a_00429

URL: http://tiny.cc/AR532

Reviewed by Massimiliano Trentin, University of Bologna

he article explores the relationship between the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and Iraq during the decades of the 1970s and 1980s, a period which proved Tdecisive for the rise and demise of the two countries. The author, who has already undertaken extensive and in-depth research into the contemporary history of Iraq and the patterns of Baathist rule over that country,1 now focuses his attention on the intelligence cooperation between the GDR Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staastsicherheit, MfS), widely known for its acronym ‘Stasi,’ and its counterpart in Iraq.

The archival evidence and the reconstruction provided by Joseph Sassoon returns the relations between the two countries to the kind of ‘normal’ patterns of state-to-state interaction, based on the contingencies of the convergence and divergence of interests, visions of international relations, and the practice of domestic rule. As such, the article might well mark a decisive point in the debate, which has often been politically charged, over state-building and authoritarianism in the Middle East and their international connections2.

The author makes a convincing distinction between the first decade of Baathist rule in Iraq, from 1968 to 1976, and the second one, which ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

1 Joseph Sassoon, Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime (New York, Cambridge University Press), 2012.

2 Another excellent work on the international politics of contemporary Iraq is Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq: the failure of nation building and a history denied (New York, Columbia University Press, 2005).

1 | Page H-Diplo Article Review

The first period was marked by the active support of the GDR for the regime led by the Baath Party in alliance with other Arab nationalists and socialist parties, the powerful Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) included. The 1970s represented the “Golden Age” (4) of Iraq both for its domestic development and international standing: the rulers in Baghdad enjoyed the massive influx of revenue from the export of energy to foreign markets and invested in extensive programmes of development at home; the Baathist regime tried to profit from the geopolitical shifts of Anwar Sadat’s Egypt to claim the banner of Arab nationalism and third-worldism in the Middle East. Iraq had the human, cultural, financial, and military capabilities to play a leading role in the Arab, if not the entire, Middle East. All foreign countries, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, knew also that Iraq paid in cash for its massive imports, and thus engaged in a struggle to retain or increase their influence in the country. GDR officials were amazed when Baathists in Baghdad decided to grant diplomatic recognition to East Germany in May 1969 (6), sparking the wave of most of the other Arab countries: Berlin knew that this bold step by Baghdad was intended to attract the support of the USSR and the socialist camp during the concomitant crisis with the Shah of Iran over the Iran-Iraq common border; and Baghdad knew well that it would not face much retaliation from the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), whose Hallstein Doctrine (the policy of containment of East Germany's efforts to get diplomatic recognition as a full sovereign state) was already on decline.3 Nevertheless, this was a success and signalled a major point of departure for state-to-state co-operation. Among the socialist countries, Iraqi rulers called on the GDR to restructure their intelligence apparatus by training officers and providing technical devices to establish a pervasive system of monitoring and surveillance of foreigners and, most important, Iraqi citizens (7).

The author points out the “obsession” in Baghdad with the control of Iraqi expatriates (namely their intimidation, arrest and forced transfer to Iraq) and, despite the initial reluctance of Stasi, aid was accorded in 1969 in the form of training (7). Though such an aspect might seem to be not that relevant in the overall picture of a blossoming partnership, this point had wide-range implications and repercussions, as forcefully argued by the author. (8-9, 19). In fact, most Iraqi intelligence was increasingly directed against the allies/competitors of the Iraqi Communist Party. The ICP was the largest communist party in the Arab world and enjoyed better ideological consistency and organizational structure than the ruling Baath Party; both ‘progressive’ forces had already allied and then fought each other to death between 1958 and 1963. Based on the principles of International Proletarianism, the GDR officially hosted and helped Iraqi Communists since the 1950s whereas it established formal contacts with Iraqi Baathists only after their coup d’état in 1968. Similar considerations could apply to Kurdish forces as well. Eventually, the MfS trained those services which would then harass and liquidate their own ‘comrades.’

3 See William G. Gray, Germany’s Cold War. The Global Campaign to Isolate East Germany, 1949- 1969 ( Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 212-2019

2 | Page H-Diplo Article Review

The author points out how GDR intelligence and officials “failed to anticipate the ascendance of the future leader Saddam Hussein” who, among other things, was one of the staunchest anti-communist figures in the Iraqi Baath Party: quite legitimately, he feared the ICP could profit politically from the massive investment the regime was making in the formation of Iraqi youth because communism still retained attractiveness, whereas Arabism and Baathism still lacked a coherent worldview (9). Not surprisingly, as soon as Saddam Hussein took over the reins of the Baath Party and the Iraqi state in 1978, he unleashed an unprecedented wave of repression against the ICP, killing thousands of its militants and sympathizers, and eventually liquidating its structures in the Arab country.4 Iraqi communists and regime opponents who resided abroad were the targets of abduction and killings during the following decade (10), which infringed the rules of cooperation with the socialist states as well as the strict adherence to sovereignty that was so dear to Berlin.

The GDR interpreted the persecution against Iraqi Communists as an easy, preliminary step to enhance Baghdad’s credentials towards the Arab conservative regimes and the Western countries, as had already occurred during the United Arab Republic led by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1958-1961. Tensions with the USSR, failed attempts by Iraqi secret services to kill opponents of the Baathist regime who resided in the GDR, and the fatal decision taken in Baghdad to attack Iran all pointed to the overall re-evaluation of the GDR-Iraq partnership since 1980: Saddam Hussein was then accused of “increasing duplicity” in terms of his relations with the socialist states if not “open contradiction” as far as foreign policy was concerned (12). This time, Berlin was right in arguing that neither side of the Iran-Iraq war had “the potential to lead a decisive strike,” and thus fruitlessly rallied with Moscow in calling to end hostilities (14).

According to the author, requests for military supplies by Iraqi officials were not met, while intelligence cooperation was reduced to a minimum: the MfS “did not reject formal collaboration but did not launch any initiatives,” (17) and “delaying tactics” (18) were adopted. Stasi officials feared that Iraq might deliver its assets to West Germany given the parallel rise in contacts and cooperation between Baghdad and Bonn after1984. Along with the shift towards Arab conservative regimes and Western countries (notably France, the FRG and later the U.S.), the state of the Iraqi economy raised concerns in Berlin. In fact, the war against Iran and the concomitant decline of oil prices were driving Baghdad out of its natural resources, to the point that the partnership with the Arab country might become ‘a burden’ for socialist states, which would have to adapt to Iraq’s demands for loans and clearing agreements instead of payments in hard currency. This was quite a dramatic shift for Iraq, which was once a fully solvent partner, and its relations with the

4 See Johan Franzén, Red Star over Iraq. Iraqi Communism before Saddam Hussein (London, Hurst&Co., 2011).

3 | Page H-Diplo Article Review

socialist states, which already faced huge financial problems5. Mistrust soon characterized both side of the relationship as long as Iraq tilted toward the West, and the U.S. in particular, to regain grounds in the war against Iranian forces.

Given this problematic partnership, the extent of the GDR support for the development of the Iraqi chemical warfare capability is far from clear: one production site was built by the Army-related Engineering-Technical Foreign Trade agency and GDR Army personnel trained Iraqi counterparts in chemical services, though for short periods. The author notes that GDR documents do not show any evidence for the military use of the production site. However, given the dual-use of such structures and the massive use of chemical warfare by Baghdad against the Iranians and the Kurds, the topic deserves further attention in order to shed light on the international connections of this dramatic history. Analysis of the related documents held in the SAPMO archives6 in Berlin would perhaps have offered fuller coverage of the subject.

The author concludes the article by mentioning the 1989 Baghdad International Exhibition for military-related products, where the Western countries had the lion’s share of space whereas the socialist camp was almost absent (21). Of course, the time was ripe for the collapse of the GDR and the retreat of the USSR from world affairs. But the confidence of GDR officials in their capacity to export technological products, confronted with the actual absence of these products on the ground, was indicative of both the current state of bilateral relations and the auto-referential features of the GDR decision- making process. The 1989 Baghdad International Exhibition also confirms another relevant feature of the Baghdad-West relations. Given the political and symbolic nature of such events, the courtship by Western countries to the regime which would invade Kuwait only one year later and engage into a long-term confrontation against the US and the Europeans might confirm the mutual lack of knowledge and understanding of respective priorities and strategies.

As noted above, Joseph Sassoon’s article is highly welcome since it engages in a very ’hot’ issue where political arguments more than historical evidence tend to prevail: this research moves the discussion one step forward. The author’s access to the Baathist regime archives, which are partially held in the United States7, is a major asset that the

5 See Glen Rangwala, “The Finances of War: Iraq, credit and conflict, September 1980 - August 1990”, in Ashton, Nigel J. and Gibson, Bryan, (eds.) The Iran-Iraq War: New International Perspectives. London, Cold War history (Routledge, 2012), 92-106.

6 Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR im Bundesarchiv (SAPMO), the archives in Belin where most of the GDR ministries, parties and organisations are located.

7 The archives of the Hoover Institution in Stanford, CA, held in collaboration with the Iraq Memory Foundation, the Stanford University and the Iraqi Ministry of Culture and the Cabinet of the Prime Minister's office; the records of the National Defense University, in Washington DC.

4 | Page H-Diplo Article Review

author combines fruitfully with the literature and archival sources on the German Democratic Republic. His focus on the intelligence cooperation is highly remarkable, although further research would have placed it within the larger picture of bilateral, state- to-state relations. Full access to the GDR archives allows scholars to analyse the files of the ruling Socialist party (Partei der Sozialistische Einheit Deutschland, SED) as well as those of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs (Ministerium für Auswärtige Angelegenheiten, MfAA): powerful as it was, the Stasi too answered to the Party leadership as far as international relations were concerned. The funds of the International Department of the SED contain full reports over the debates between Baathists and GDR officials, where one can test the ideological as well as strategic interactions of the two countries. While SED leaders liked the pragmatism of the Syrian President, the Baathist Hafiz al Assad, they were outraged at Saddam Hussein’s teachings over what socialism “really meant.”8 Here, the stance of the diplomatic officials appears essentially only in reference to the oral interviews made by the author with former ambassadors: these were highly influential as far as the GDR presence in the Arab world was concerned, but their memories should be confronted with their practice at the time, as exposed at the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Berlin. Again, further research might focus on the works of the GDR technical, cultural and political personnel deployed in Iraq: their full-scale reports show both the complexity of the host country, as well as the efforts of harmonizing their beliefs on Internationalism with the ‘praxis’ of realpolitik. The author mentions the efforts at gathering information through the networks of Party and front organisations that established contacts in Iraq (13), but a full-scale analysis is still to be undertaken. The GDR experts who had been sent abroad had to write extensive reports on their activities, and these reports expose the details of the GDR international cooperation system. If such a practice occurred at the Ministerium für Staastsicherheit, as well, I would have expected more insights on the actual working of the intelligence experts who had been sent in mission to the Arab country.

In the overall context of this excellent work, a couple of points stand out for debate. The author mentions that during the 1980s, the GDR and socialist countries moved to a stricter selection of their Third-World partners, deploying major efforts to those regimes with the strongest socialist credentials (23), but the literature on the relations between the socialist camp and the postcolonial world has highlighted how this shift had already occurred in the 1970s, after the defeats and disillusion experienced in the late 1960s, particularly in the Middle East.9 In his conclusions the author refers to the influence that Soviet Communist Party leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s reformist policies in the 1980s had

8 SAPMO-BArchiv, DC20 16888, Ministerrat DDR, Aufzeichnung. Die Beziehungen mit Irak, 21 may 1975.

9 Cfr. Galia Golan, “The Vanguard Party”, Soviet Studies, 39, n. 4, 1987, 599–609; Williams D. Graf, “The Theory of the Non-Capitalist Road, in The Soviet Bloc and the Third World, Brigitte Schulz and William Hansen (eds.), (Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1989), 27–52; Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War. Third World Intervention and the Making of our Times (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005), 250.

5 | Page H-Diplo Article Review

on GDR-Iraq relations, supposedly in the sense of their downscaling (23). However, he does not elaborate on the subject and perhaps does not take into account the resistance and scepticism Gorbachev encountered in the GDR, and the margins of autonomy held by the foreign policy experts and leaders in the GDR towards Moscow as far as the postcolonial world was concerned. As was often the case with patrons and clients, masters and subjects, the ‘praxis’ of power relations was not as linear as one might expect.

Massimiliano Trentin is an Assistant Professor of History and IR of the Middle East, University of Bologna, Italy. He has published Engineers of Modern Development: East German Experts in Ba'thist Syria, 1965-1972, (Padova, CLEUP, 2010), “Modernization as State-Building. The Two Germanys in Syria, 1963-1972”, Diplomatic History, vol.33, n.3, 2009, 487-505, and co-edited the volume The Middle East and the Cold War. Between Security and Development, in collaboration with Matteo Gerlini eds. (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012). His research interests cover the international history of the Modern Middle East with a particular focus on economic and institutional development.

© 2015 The Author.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.

6 | Page