Hussein Kamel
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Hussein Kamel al-Majid was Saddam Hussein's son-in-law and Iraq's Minister of Industry and Military Industrialization. He and his brother Saddam Kamel, head of the Special Republican Guard, married to Saddam's other daughter, defected to Jordan in January 1993 out of fear of Uday Hussein, whom both saw as a fatal threat once Saddam left the scene.

CIA interview in Amman

King Hussein of Jordan invited a CIA delegation to interview the brothers. John Kiriakou was among them. "One of the things that struck me immediately was they were wearing sidearms. ... You're a guest of the king, you're asking for refuge in a royal palace, and you're carrying a sidearm, like, who do you think you are?"

Hussein Kamel opened with a demand: weapons, tanks, air cover, secure communications, i.e., U.S. backing for an overthrow of Saddam. Kiriakou's boss: "Whoa whoa whoa whoa, we're not here to help you overthrow Saddam Hussein, we would never do that. We're here for you to tell us where the WMD is." Kamel refused: "I'm not telling you where the WMD is, you're going to help me overthrow Saddam Hussein." He did not deny possessing it. Per Kiriakou: "I'm confident they had WMD in 1993", definitely chemical weapons, "because they had used chemical weapons against the Kurds and the Iranians," and possibly biological.

The CIA leak that burned him

When the U.S. would not commit to overthrowing Saddam, the agency leaked a false story to the Arab press claiming that a secret CIA delegation had met the Kamel brothers in Amman and that the brothers had told the Americans everything. Per Kiriakou, Saddam saw the article and destroyed the chemical-weapons stockpile. "That was successful, that's a good leak. The only remnants of chemical weapons we were [finding later] ..."

A second account of the Amman meeting

Kiriakou has given the Amman episode more than once, and the versions do not agree on the central point. In a 2026 keynote he identifies the brothers as married to Saddam's two daughters, Raghad and Rana, and says they fled in the middle of the night in a panic that Uday Hussein was about to kill them. A CIA team flew to Amman, where King Hussein had given them refuge in a palace. Kamel opened the meeting before Kiriakou's boss could speak, with a list of demands: overhead imagery of Saddam's palaces, air cover, secure communications, weapons. The answer was "Oh, wait a minute. We didn't come here to make you president of Iraq. We came here for you to tell us where the weapons of mass destruction are."

In this telling Kamel did not withhold the answer, he gave one, and it was a denial: "There are no weapons of mass destruction." Kiriakou's own gloss is that the United States had frightened the Iraqis so badly in 1989 that they destroyed the stockpile and buried the ruined missiles in the desert, which he offers as the reason the United Nations never found any and neither did the Americans. That account sits against his earlier one, in which Kamel refused to disclose the locations while conspicuously not denying that the weapons existed.

The return, and the border

The brothers were given nothing. After roughly six months in exile they sent word to Baghdad that they wanted to beg forgiveness and come home. They were met at the Iraqi,Jordanian border by Saddam Hussein's two sons, who executed them both. "They never even made it a foot inside Iraq."

See also

- Saddam Hussein
- Uday Hussein
- John Kiriakou
