The Fist of God

Among the clients for these guns was a certain Saddam Hussein of Iraq. It was these cannon that broke the human waves of Iranian fanatics in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, finally defeating them in the Fao marshes. But Saddam Hussein had added a new twist, especially at the battle of Fao. He had put poison gas in the shells.

Bull then worked for Spain and Yugoslavia, converting the old Yugoslav Army’s Soviet-made 130-mm.

artillery to the new 155-mm. cannon with the extended-range shells. Though he would never live to see it, these were the guns, inherited by the Serbs on the collapse of Yugoslavia, that were to pulverize the cities of the Croats and Muslims in the civil war. And in 1987 he learned that the United States would, after all, research the payloads-into-space cannon—but with Gerry Bull firmly cut out of the deal.

That winter he received a strange phone call from the Iraqi embassy in Bonn: Would Dr. Bull like to visit Baghdad as Iraq’s guest?

What he did not know was that in the mid-1980s, Iraq had witnessed Operation Staunch, a concerted American effort to shut off all sources of weapons imports destined for Iran. This followed the carnage among American Marines in Beirut when Iranian-backed Hezbollah fanatics attacked their barracks.

Iraq’s reaction, although they benefited in their war with Iran from Operation Staunch, was: If the Americans can do that to Iran, they can do it to us. From then on, Iraq determined to import not the arms but wherever possible the technology to make their own. Bull was first and foremost a designer; he interested them.

The mission to recruit him went to Amer Saadi, who was number two at the Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization, known as MIMI. When Bull arrived in Baghdad in January 1988, Amer Saadi, a smooth, cosmopolitan diplomat/scientist speaking English, French, and German as well as Arabic, played him beautifully.

The Iraqis, he said, wanted Bull’s help with their dream of putting peaceful satellites into space. To do this, they had to design a rocket that could put the payload up there. Their Egyptian and Brazilian scientists had suggested that the first step would be to tie together five Scud missiles, of which Iraq had bought nine hundred from the Soviet Union. But there were technical problems, many problems. They needed access to a supercomputer. Could Bull help them?

Bull loved problems—they were his raison d’être. He did not have access to a supercomputer, but on two legs he himself was the nearest thing. Besides, he told Amer Saadi, if Iraq really wanted to be the first Arab nation to put satellites into space, there was another way—cheaper, simpler, faster than rockets s

tarting from scratch. Tell me all, said the Iraqi. So Bull did.

For just three million dollars, he said, he could produce a giant gun that would do the job. It would be a five-year program. He could beat the Americans at Livermore to the punch. It would be an Arab triumph. Dr. Saadi glowed with admiration. He would put the idea to his government and recommend it strongly. In the meantime, would Dr. Bull look at the Iraqi artillery?

By the end of his one-week visit, Bull had agreed to crack the problems of tying five Scuds together to form the first stage of a rocket of intercontinental or space-reaching performance; to design two new artillery pieces for the Army; and to put a formal proposal for his payload-into-orbit Supergun.

As with South Africa, he was able to block his mind to the nature of the regime he was about to serve.

Friends had told him of Saddam Hussein’s record as the man with the bloodiest hands in the Middle East. But in 1988 there were thousands of respectable companies and dozens of governments clamoring to do business with big-spending Iraq.

For Bull, the bait was his gun, his beloved gun, his life’s dream, at last with a backer who was prepared to help him bring it to fulfillment and join the pantheon of scientists.

In March 1988, Amer Saadi sent a diplomat to Brussels to talk to Bull. Yes, said the gun designer, he had made progress on the technical problems of the first stage of the Iraqi rocket. He would be glad to hand them over on signature of a contract with his company, once again the Space Research Corporation. The deal was done. The Iraqis realized that his offer of a gun for only three million dollars was silly; they raised it to ten million but asked for more speed.

When Bull worked fast, he worked amazingly fast. In one month he put together a team of the best available free-lancers he could find. Heading the Supergun team in Iraq was a British projects engineer called Christopher Cowley. Bull himself christened the rocket program, based at Saad 16 in northern Iraq, Project Bird. The Supergun task was named Project Babylon.

By May, the exact specifications of Babylon had been worked out. It would be an incredible machine.

One meter of bore; a barrel 156 meters long and weighing 1,665 tons—the height of the Washington Monument.

Bull had already made plain to Baghdad that he would have to make a smaller prototype, a Mini-Babylon, with a 350-mm. bore weighing only 113 tons. But in this he could test nose cones that would also be useful for the rocket project. The Iraqis liked this—they needed nose-cone technology as well.

The full significance of the insatiable Iraqi appetite for nose-cone technology seems to have escaped Gerry Bull at the time. Maybe, in his limitless enthusiasm to see his life’s dream realized at last, he just suppressed it. Nose cones of very advanced design are needed to prevent a payload from burning up from friction heat as it reenters earth’s atmosphere. But orbiting payloads in space do not return; they stay up there.

By late May 1988, Christopher Cowley was placing his first orders with Walter Somers of Birmingham for the tube sections that would make up the barrel of Mini-Babylon. The sections for full-scale Babylons 1, 2, 3, and 4 would come later. Other strange steel orders were placed all around Europe.

The pace at which Bull was working was awesome. Within two months he covered ground that would have taken a government enterprise two years. By the end of 1988, he had designed for Iraq two new guns—self-propelled guns, as opposed to the towed machines supplied by South Africa. Both pieces would be so powerful, they could crush the guns of the surrounding nations of Iran, Turkey, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, who purchased theirs from NATO and America.

Bull also managed to crack the problems of tying the five Scuds together to form the first stage of the Bird rocket, to be called Al-Abeid, “the Believer.” He had discovered that the Iraqis and Brazilians at Saad 16 were working on faulty data, produced by a wind tunnel that was itself malfunctioning. After that, he handed over his fresh calculations and left the Brazilians to get on with it.

In May 1989 most of the world’s armaments industry and press, along with government observers and intelligence officers, attended a great weapons exhibition in Baghdad. Considerable interest was shown in the mock-up prototypes of the two great guns. In December, the Al-Abeid was test-fired to great media hoopla, seriously jolting Western analysts.

Heavily covered by Iraqi TV cameras, the great three-stage rocket roared off from the Al-Anbar Space Research Base, climbed away from the earth, and disappeared. Three days later, Washington admitted that the rocket did indeed appear capable of putting a satellite into space.

But the analysts worked out more. If Al-Abeid could do that, it could also be an intercontinental ballistic missile. Suddenly, Western intelligence agencies were jerked out of their assumption that Saddam Hussein was no real danger, years away from being a serious threat.

The three main intelligence agencies, the CIA in America, the Secret Intelligence Service—SIS—in Britain, and the Mossad in Israel, came to the view that of the two systems, the Babylon gun was an amusing toy and the Bird rocket a real threat. All three got it wrong. It was the Al-Abeid that did not work.

Bull knew why, and he told the Israelis what had happened. The Al-Abeid had soared to twelve thousand meters and been lost to view. The second stage had refused to separate from the first. The third stage had not existed. It had been a dummy. He knew because he had been charged with trying to persuade China to provide a third stage and would be going to Beijing in February.

He did indeed go, and the Chinese turned him down flat. While he was there, he met and talked at length with his old friend George Wong. Something had gone wrong with the Iraqi business, something that was worrying the hell out of Gerry Bull, and it was not the Israelis. Several times he insisted he wanted out of Iraq, and in a hurry. Something had happened inside his own head, and he wanted out of Iraq. In this decision he was entirely right, but too late.