This is not something you would realise if you just read his biographies of Saddam, Arafat, and Nasser, or even his memoirs of the St George’s Hotel Bar in Beirut. To get this, you need to read a novel he published in 1990, called “One Day I Will Tell You.” Once you’ve read it, things fall into place. For instance, his elaborate account of having acted as an agent for Saddam’s arms purchases in the West, which occupies about 20 pages in his biography of Saddam. His years as Beirut correspondent for RFE/RL. Things like that. Because “One Day I Will Tell You” is a novel, which means that what its narrator says is deniable, the truth comes out. The narrator is quite simply a CIA agent. For a Palestinian Arab, getting out of CIA is not as easy as getting in, because he is not an officer but merely an agent. It’s not like Bob Baer, who gets to co-write “Syriana”. It’s more like going back into the jungle you came from and learning to live on your wits, knowing that major US publishers will never come near you, though a few minor English publishers will. Of course, this might just be a jeu d’esprit. Aburish is very fond of quoting the remark Time Magazine’s Wilton Wynn made about Miles Copeland:
Miles is the only man who ever used the CIA for cover.
Reading this book has momentarily kicked my mind into a higher gear than usual. I would like to raise the following possibility: as we all know, Iran has a certain amount of difficulty in obtaining various sorts of weapons and weapon systems, both offensive and defensive. I think we are familiar with the idea that Syria could sometimes help Iran to acquire such things, but I wonder whether it might just be possible that Col Gaddafi was in the process of finalising a major deal of this sort, covertly on Iran’s behalf, when the decision was made to undermine his international legitimacy by means of the current insurrection. He could, for instance, have been in the advanced stages of organising some major deal with a European arms company on behalf of Iran, without the company concerned necessarily knowing that the end user would be Iran. This would perhaps explain the rather sudden nature of his delegitimation. Just a speculation on my part. If it were true, then certainly no one told Caroline Glick about it. She is upset that the US is using its mighty armour to topple Gaddafi when she feels it would be better employed toppling Assad. Maybe this is because she thinks Israel has a good covert connection to the Jordanian Islamists, who are a big part of the Syrian rebellion. But Arab factions are so complex that I no longer even pretend to guess which ones are sponsored by whom.
Niqnaq 
21 Comments
Thanks for the book reference. Said Aburish is liberally referred to in Phillip Agee’s “Dirty Work.” Agee certainly held him in high regard.
Really? How does Agee refer to him, as a nice fellow or as a CIA agent?
I just looked the Agee book up on amazon: it’s Phillip Agee & Louis Wolf, “Dirty Work: CIA in Western Europe, vol 1” (1981). I don’t think there was ever a Vol 2.
Dirty Work 2: The CIA in Africa
http://www.roape.org/019/14.html
Ha. I ought to read these. I read Agee’s original “CIA Diary” years ago. I remember it as being as dull as a laundry list, because at that time I didn’t have any personal context for any of it .
Actually Agee refers to him as an independent source if you must know. But then you could have just checked yourself.
On the removal of my previous post,
It seems that any barbarity carried out by the glorious rebels in Libya is to be removed from this site. Even though barbarity allegedly carried out by Gadaffi or Assad is just fine.
I personally do not care if you want to ignore it or not, it is somewhat revealing though.
Agee’s account of the “lie detector” test he got trying to enter the CIA is priceless and still pretty representative: it’s a platform for modern, grown-up, job-threatening fake-outs, not a real scientific mind-reading device.
Al, I don’t know what you’re talking about, I haven’t removed anything, afaik. As for referring to Agee’s books, I don’t have any of them.
I got the impression somewhere in Aburish’s Nasser book that there may have been a brief period in the 1960s when the Republic of Syria was pro-US and the Republic of Iraq was pro-USSR, but I can’t find the reference. I doubt if this is what you meant when you raised this previously; I think you meant that at some point Saddam was closer to the USSR than Assad. However I do not really see this. A long article here gives no indication of close military relations at any point:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2501/is_4_23/ai_80966042/
whereas Syria had a very close and explicit military relationship with the USSR, which I think goes back to the 1950s, but definitely at least goes back to the 70s:
http://countrystudies.us/syria/68.htm
Said Aburish mentions in another of his books (Cry Palestine) that he also wrote a novel called Between Mossad and Mohamad, but I can’t see any sign that this was ever published, and with a title like that, I’m not surprised
😎
I often get the feeling from reading Aburish that Arabs of Sunni origin are given to grandiosity, whereas those of Shi’ite origin are the opposite, they are secretive. One can even see why this should be; Sunnis have only relatively recently had their delusions of global grandeur punctured by modernity, whereas Shi’ites have been living under the heel of oppression for most of the last 1300 years, so they have few illusions to lose. Perhaps this explains why it was so easy to build up Saddam, at different points in his career, as everything bad, including a Soviet cat’s-paw: he lent himself to it by inflating himself to monster bogey-man proportions. And dispossessed Sunni Arabs loved this, especially Palestinians, unfortunately for them. I think Aburish liked Nasser so much because Nasser was uncharacteristically free of this vice of grandiosity. Here is a piece of a genuine interview with an ordinary man in the West Bank in 1990 from Cry Palestine which illustrates this:
This background on Aburish is very interesting. I’ve got his bio of Arafat. I identified his as the one worth reading, by some process I’ve forgotten, so it’s useful to have an idea of where he’s coming from for when I get round to it.
Yes. The Nasser book is definitely his magnum opus. It is the last one, it took the greatest amount of research, it has more of his own personal feelings in it, and it was clearly the hardest to write.
In the conversation I gave in the previous comment, he was interviewing someone else, not being interviewed. If he had said all those things about Islam it would have been quite uncharacteristic, since he is basically what we would call ‘nominal’ in his religion.
It’s impossible to be certain what is fact and what is fiction in One Day I Will Tell You, ultimately, but almost every detail turns out to be based on fact. For instance, in real life, Said Aburish’s younger brother Munif was a member of the PFLP for what Said describes as “eight years of totally mysterious activity.” Munif had previously been deported from the US for trying to organise an agreement between the PLO and the Black Panthers, but he eventually gave up politics to get a Ph D in economics from the Sorbonne and subsequently become the head of a Saudi corporation of some sort. In the novel, the narrator’s younger brother Raouf is a member of the PFLP, and (perhaps this is a family joke) reports in a postscript that he has executed the narrator, presumably for treason to the Arab cause.
Yet further info, from yet another Said Aburish book, Children of Bethany. He’s very coy about his own career in this book, which is about his family and the village of Bethany, now a Jerusalem suburb. He mentions that he worked ‘as an adviser to two Middle Eastern governments,’ and also that he ran the Mars Chocolate account for the Ted Bates Ad Agency, which makes him responsible for the slogan “melts in your mouth, not in your hand.” This reminds me of Salman Rushdie, who was reputed to have been responsible for the slogan “naughty but nice.”
I have one more Aburish book remaining to read, which is called The Pay-Off: Wheeling and Dealing in the Arab World. I shall report on this in due course.
Great stuff, thanks.
Nasser in the 1950s had the same sort of significance for Arabs that Malcolm X had for US Blacks in the 1960s. It’s just that little bit too long ago for us baby boomers to remember it. Aburish is in his seventies now, so he remembers it clearly.
Oh, and Nasser was loved by the Egyptian people in a way never accomplished by Sadat or Mubarak. And he, along with Sukarno and Tito, were the heros of the Non-Aligned Movement. My uncle was one of the official pilots of the Pakistan Air Force who got to ferry heads of state around the country. When he mentioned (in passing) he was engaged to an Indonesian, Nasser invited him to come along to the Bandung conference in his plane as his personal guest.
Nasser was a great man.
Ah, well, returning to earth with a thump, I got The Pay-Off, and it is full of sordid humour about the indispensable ‘intermediaries’ or fixers who set up deals in the Arab world:
He says that around 1975, he had to make an agreement with the PFLP (them again) that they would supply him with personal protection, because a colonel in the Iraqi army who was running a protection racket of his own was threatening him. I don’t know what this implies about the reach of the PFLP, but I do get a general impression that unless you have six senses and more lives than a cat, you should stay out of mid-East business ventures.
In relation to the question I was interested in discussing with Al, about Iraq’s historical record of Soviet orientation, the answer appears to be that Iraq stopped trusting the USSR to supply it with top quality military aircraft in 1975 (Saddam being vice-pres at that time but effective power behind the throne). Iraq turned at that point to France, which was prepared to offer continuing guarantees regarding spare parts to maintain the new planes, which Britain, who had been Iraq’s first choice, refused to match. On this occasion Said Aburish admits to having liaised with the CIA, who obviously had an overriding interest in making Iraq independent of Soviet suppliers. Said Aburish appears to have done all this in pursuit of fees from Iraq for acting as intermediary and general troubleshooter, not as the direct employee of any government.
Here is how he sums up the Soviet factor, looking back in 1985:
I have known adman, businessman and writer Saïd Aburish for 35 years, London, NY and France. This morning we saw the last of him. RIP.
Email just in:
This is Amer Abu Rish writing from Bethany-Jerusalem, with great sorrow I have to inform you that our beloved uncle Said K. Abu Rish has passed away early this morning August 29th. His funeral will be about 4pm this day, the last look will be between 2:30-3:30pm, due to Islamic arrangements he will be prepared and held on shoulders to Al Ozair mosque in Bethany for the last pray and then to the cemetery of Bethany. May Allah bless his soul.
Indeed, a great man. Unique, at least in the english-language field. It’s impossible for a non-Arabic-reader to assess what may be written in untranslated sources.
My original fan post about him was this one:
Here I mentioned his (officially unspecified) religion:
Here is Aburish on Nuri Said:
Said Abu Rish , died today 29th of August 2012 .. His legend will stay for generations to come. We didn’t lose a DEAR friend by his work he became immortal, his picture is shining in all his writings .. RIP