April Glaspie was the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq in the run-up to the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. She ran an embassy in Baghdad of roughly four officers — ambassador, deputy ambassador, defense attaché and a consular officer — on the reasoning that nothing ever happened there and the United States had no national interests at stake; Iraq was not an enemy, and Saddam Hussein was holding the Iranians back, which was what Washington wanted.[1][2] She lived in the ambassador’s residence with her mother, then in her eighties, and was her caregiver. In very late July 1990 — John Kiriakou puts it at the 30th or 31st — the two of them were due to fly home for a six-week vacation.[1]
The cable
The initiative to see Saddam was Glaspie’s own. With Iraqi forces massing, she wrote to Secretary of State James Baker arguing that the matter had to be raised directly with Saddam and the American position stated to his face.[2]
Baker’s answer came back as a NODIS cable — no dissemination — running directly from the Secretary of State to the ambassador, with the CIA as the only other recipient. Such a cable was restricted enough that it could be printed only in the CIA operations center; an analyst could go up to the seventh floor, read it and take notes, but could not quote it or copy it.[3][4] Baker said a good deal in it, but the operative instruction was to tell Saddam that the United States government does not take a position on Arab-Arab border disputes.[5][6][7]
That phrasing rested on an analytic disagreement between the two buildings. The CIA’s line was that this was not a border dispute at all but an impending invasion; the State Department disagreed with the analysis and held that it was only about the Rumaila oil field.[5][8] The expectation across the government, including at the CIA, was that Iraqi troops would cross the border and take the narrow strip on the Kuwaiti side containing the southern tip of the Rumaila field — the Kuwaitis were drilling horizontally under the Iraqi border and stealing Iraqi oil, which everyone knew and which had been in the papers.[9][10] Within twenty-four hours the Iraqis had taken the entire country.[10]
The meeting, and the night in the operations center
Glaspie delivered the talking points as written. Ten or twelve analysts, Kiriakou among them, stood waiting in the CIA operations center for her meeting to end so she could drive back to the embassy and file a NODIS cable reporting what Saddam had said in response.[11]
He said nothing. Glaspie reported that Saddam simply sat and stared, listened to the talking points and got up — a normal meeting with him, in her account. She also described a small power ritual: on shaking hands he would hold his own hand low, so that the visitor had to reach down and bow slightly.[12][13] Kiriakou has given the count of her audiences with Saddam two ways — three times across her whole tenure in one telling, twice in another, the first of those being the presentation of her credentials. Both versions carry the same point: “Saddam didn’t meet with anybody, really.”[12][14]
The green light
The green-light reading — that Washington had told Saddam it would not intervene — is, in Kiriakou’s account, an after-the-fact press construction rather than the content of Glaspie’s instructions. “No, that’s not true. I was there that night. She got a bum rap on that.”[15][6][16] His own test of the claim is the absence of any Iraqi record of it: “If I were Saddam Hussein, I would have told Izzat Ibrahim or Tariq Aziz or whomever the Americans just gave me the green light — and in fact we didn’t.”[8] Pressed on whether Saddam had gone in intending only the Rumaila field and enlarged the plan on hearing the message, Kiriakou allows it as possible while noting that it would not account for the scale of the military movements already under way.[11]
What Glaspie herself believed is stated flatly: she certainly did not believe she was giving him a green light — though Kiriakou concedes he can see how Saddam may have believed he had one, an interpretation he says he would have called insane at the time.[17][18]