The Strange Conspiracy

"With the help of God," said Iraq's Premier Abdul Karim Kassem on the radio one day last week, "we have discovered a serious plot . . . the work of some corrupt elements helped by foreigners from outside Iraq." The plot, said Kassem, was to have swung into action next morning. The arms, the money and the "perpetrators" had all been captured, he declared. The arrested would be tried by the People's Court for treason.

Kassem ordered Baghdad into a state of alert, and two Iraqi air force jet squadrons flew over the capital in a show of strength. Taking no chances, the U.S. and British embassies ordered their nationals off the streets (and thus had little inkling of what was going on). Kassem's soldiers searched all cars for arms and ammunition. To add to the drama, Staff Major Salim Alfakhri, Iraq's director of broadcasting, went on Iraqi TV to display sporting guns, pistols, knives and brass knuckles that, he said, were to have been used in the plot. Communist-line Baghdad newspapers quickly labeled U.S. Assistant Secretary of State William Rountree "a messenger of evil," and preposterously linked his prospective visit with the plot.

But General Kassem himself, by week's end, had not announced the name of a single plotter, had not identified the "foreigners" allegedly involved. In such a silence, the suspicion grew that perhaps the plot had been invented, to cover up the arrest of men whom Kassem's cops wanted out of the way.

In the absence of facts, rumors had a heyday in the bazaars: 375 had been arrested, the security chief had been replaced by a proCommunist. Gradually, one pattern became clearer. Most of those arrested were right-wing nationalists, Al Baath socialists, and other supporters of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser.

The arrests of Nasser's supporters would strengthen one group more than any other in Iraq: the Communists, who have intrigued their way into key positions in Kassem's regime. Increasingly dependent on the Reds, relying on the Soviets for trade deals as well as for planes and guns, Karim Kassem, a politically inexperienced soldier, was furthering a real conspiracy against his regime while persuading himself that he had foiled a different one.

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