Deputy loved all things American

A fluent English speaker educated at the University of Baghdad, he was the only Christian among the senior leaders of the Baath Party. One rumour had him defecting last month as the Bush administration gathered forces for war, but Aziz popped up two days later on television to publicise his continued loyalty.

Aziz, born Mikhail Yuhanna in 1936 near Mosul, left behind a riverfront home full of personal effects that shed light on the grandeur of his everyday life.

Aziz’s study has shelves heaving with writings by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and former president George H.W. Bush, as well as dozens of volumes of works attributed to Saddam. He owns several histories of the Iran-Iraq war and a collection of works on the CIA, including Bob Woodward’s Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987.

He also owns Judith Miller’s God Has Ninety-Nine Names: Reporting From a Militant Middle East, and Daniel Yergin’s The Prize, about the politics of oil.

True to his role as a former foreign minister, Aziz owns two major works by former secretary of state Henry A. Kissinger: Diplomacy and White House Years. And tucked away on the top of one shelf is The Greatest Threat, by Richard Butler, who led a UN weapons inspection team in Iraq in the 1990s. His collection also includes an autobiography of Moshe Dayan, an Israeli general and statesman, and several works on Zionism. He has Saddam’s War, an account of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, written by John Bulloch and Harvey Morris, and Hitler’s War, by David Irving, about the German dictator to whom the Iraqi leader has been compared.

Alongside his books are Vanity Fair magazines and a cabinet overflowing with more than 50 American movies on DVD, including The Godfather, Sleepless in Seattle and action films, such as Dragon, the story of martial arts expert Bruce Lee. As for Aziz’s official reading, US Marines blew open safes when they arrived at the house Wednesday night and removed reams of documents, which will be analysed by experts. (LAT-WP)