Circle of Fear: A Renegade's Journey from the Mossad to the Iraqi Secret Service

Dean F. Oliver teaches history at York University.

Hatred for his abusive father, a senior Iraqi diplomat, led Sumaida into
a series of anti-government entanglements culminating in his employment
by Israel’s Mossad in 1984. After a bungled attempt to infiltrate an
Iraqi embassy, he was forced into a partial confession of his crimes and
escaped execution only through Saddam Hussein’s personal intervention
and enlistment in the Mukhabarat, Iraq’s dreaded party intelligence
service. Sumaida’s experiences as a reluctant agent-in-training and
his subsequent escape occupy the latter two-thirds of the book.

It is not a pleasant read. Political violence, paranoia, and moral
degeneracy are the norms in a world hideously deformed by a hydralike
state security apparatus at once primitive and brutally efficient—a
world, in fact, not far removed from some Western caricatures drawn
during the recent Gulf War. Sumaida sees Middle East society as an
emotional quagmire whose “deep capacity for murderous hatred”
provides a compelling lesson for Western policy-makers: either develop a
far more sophisticated understanding of the region’s social and
cultural dynamics or pack up and go home.

There are startling revelations aplenty here. Sumaida claims that
Iraq’s May 1987 attack on the USS Stark was an unequivocal,
premeditated action designed to provoke American involvement in the
peace process, not an unfortunate accident as officially claimed. He
documents Iraq’s use of the diplomatic mails to repatriate kidnapped
dissidents and argues that his country’s nuclear program seeks nothing
less than a first-strike capability against Israel. Readers can pick and
choose among such eye-poppers at their leisure. Most, while
unsubstantiated, are not at present implausible. Sumaida’s use of
quotation marks in situations when it is obvious no notes could possibly
have been kept reveals either an astonishing memory or an extremely
liberal interpretation of scholarly requirements, and his status as a
minor functionary throughout his adventures should also caution against
blanket acceptance of his more extravagant claims.

Circle of Fear is not a scholarly work. At root, it is the chronicle of
one man’s intensely personal struggle against the dehumanizing effects
of an almost unbelievably oppressive regime. Nonetheless, its specific
reminiscences and challenging generalizations make it worthy of a
scholarly audience.