IRAQ: The Dissembler

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The Snake Charmer. The man who stands between Iraq and all-out Communism is a lean, hard-muscled and ascetic professional soldier with a fixed, snaggle-toothed smile. His name Abdul Karim Kassem. On the face of it, Karim Kassem, 44, seems a weak reed on which to rest the free world's hopes. Modest in deportment, moderate in conversation, Kassem is nonetheless inordinately and naively suspicious. (He recently asserted that one section of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad lured Iraqis in with stories that automobiles can be bought there—and then filled them with anti-Kassem talk.) Cursed by shyness and a weak, high-pitched voice, he is sadly lacking in the rabble-rousing skills on which most successful Arab politicians rely. Most serious of all, he is totally inexperienced in affairs of state. Says one Western diplomat who has dealt with Kassem: "Things like treaties and international agreements are quite beyond him."

For all that, Kassem is a man so convinced that he has been chosen by destiny to be a leader that he early ruled out marriage for fear that it would interfere with his dreams. Born in Baghdad, the son of a lower-middle-class family, Kassem graduated from the Royal Military College in 1934, fought with distinction in the Palestine war, and over the years won regular promotions. At senior officers' school at Devizes in southwestern England, his classmates nicknamed him "the snake charmer" because of his ability to argue them into undertaking improbable courses of action in field problems. (He once got the members of his team to send hypothetical tanks off to the left flank, though everyone knew that this routed them through a deep swamp.) A British officer-instructor, less impressed with Kassem, marked him "sincere, hardworking, completely unbalanced."

The Chance to Strike. Up to the day when the riddled body of King Feisal slumped down before Baghdad's royal palace, Kassem had the reputation of being the King's most loyal soldier. But in fact he had been quietly nursing plans of revolution for 24 years, had skillfully used his official position to recruit younger officers—notably, mercurial Abdul Salam Aref, who became his closest "brother in revolt" and took to proclaiming, "I am Kassem's son." In 1956, at a meeting in his bachelor house on the outskirts of Baghdad, Kassem merged his network with another military conspiracy, became supreme leader of Iraq's "free officers."