THE MAN WHO SAID "NO" TO SADDAM HUSSEIN, AND OTHER TALES FROM HIS SECRET LIFE AS A COLD WAR HERO
Alfonso Cosentino told Saddam Hussein "No" when the deadly Iraqi dictator offered him lavish riches to equip his military with night vision and other sophisticated electronic equipment in the early 1980s. If that was the only thing he did, that would be more than enough to make him a folk legend. But Cosentino did much more. He even trained Apollo astronauts how to land on the moon.
The following is from my memoir in progress HIDDEN WORLDS THAT SHINE: My Odyssey from Killer to Journalist, from Rikers Island to the Whitehouse and the Outlaws I Met Along the Way.
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My grandfather slept with a loaded gun under his pillow after he said "no" to the deadly Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
I know because I found the gun one day when I was 12 or so.
Alfonso Cosentino lived with his mother in the two-apartment house he grew up in on 243d street in the Bronx. His father built the house, with dress-making money he made during the Depression from rich Park Avenue socialites. He lived on the first floor in a big one bedroom apartment. His mother, Mary, lived above him in a separate apartment on the top floor. Al parked his 1969 Dodge Challenger on the street in front of the house. I'd visit them on Sundays for supper in the early 1980s. We'd have the thick, homemade tomato sauce chock full of sausage and ground beef Italian-Americans call "gravy" served over pasta at Mary's kitchen table.
One day, while I was visiting, my grandfather left me alone in his apartment while he ran an errand.
My grandfather's apartment fascinated me. It was totally different from any other place I'd ever been.
Al's living room was filled with free-weights, a flight suit, a pilot's helmet, an oxygen mask and four or five detailed maps of the moon. They were three-dimensional, black-and-white, molded plastic contour maps with color-coded dots and lines marking places American astronauts visited on the lunar surface. The maps were stacked on a tall desk, like a stand-up desk but wider. It was the kind of table generals stand around and make war plans. There was also a rack of hunting rifles and shotguns. Strewn about were boxes of wires, capacitors, tubes, circuit boards and all sorts of primitive electronic components. There were soldering irons and rolls of electrical blueprints leaning against the wall in one corner. There were old TV sets and radios.
There was something else too: a pile of press credentials.
As boys do, I grew curious about the things I had seen in his house. Things, without a man in my life, I had never seen before. I had thoroughly explored his apartment during previous visits except for one place: his bedroom. That day I went straight into his bedroom as soon as he drove away. I figured the high-powered Challenger's sport exhaust would warn me before Al returned.
His bedroom smelled musty, almost musky. Rolls of rubber-banded $100 bills and change and wallets and keys and ties and pill bottles covered a dresser top. There was an Omega watch, like ones Apollo astronauts wore on their missions to the moon and back. His furniture was dark wood, beautiful and ancient. I pulled open a drawer and fished my hand around. My fingers found something that felt different from anything else. I picked up a small, gray stone without even knowing what it was. It wasn't until I shared my memory of it with my grandmother, Faye, years later that I found out what it was.
It was a moonrock.
One of his Apollo astronaut friends gifted him with the extraordinary, extraterrestrial souvenir when he returned from the moon, Faye said. I put the moonrock back where I found it and carefully replaced everything exactly the way I found it. Then I went over to his bed. That's when one of Al's pillows started talking to me, in a weird way. The pillow seemed to summon me. I was supposed to touch it. Something wanted me to. I didn't really understand it but I didn't seem to have a choice either. There was something beneath it I had to discover. It almost pulled my hand to it like a magnet pulls metal. I lifted up the pillow and that's where I found it.
It was a military-issue Colt M1911 .45 caliber automatic.
I stared down at the gun. The gun seemed to stare back at me as much as I stared at it. It seemed almost like it was a living thing with a voice. It wasn't the pillow speaking to me after all. It was the gun beneath it. I didn't have to look to know it was loaded. That's the first thing the gun told me. Then it dared me, is the only way I can describe the way it felt. That gun dared me to pick it up. It dared me to prove my faith, in my lone self and my self alone.
I knew a little bit about guns from magazines, TV, Boy Scout camp and summers in Maine with my grandmother's family.
I reached down and s-l-o-w-l-y closed my right fist around the ancient wooden grip of my grandfather's Colt-carefully keeping my fingers away from the trigger. A shock of static electricity snapped and shot through my hand the second I touched it. Once I got a good grip on the gun, I examined it closely. Its hammer was cocked back. The safety was locked in place. I gently lifted the loaded gun from the bed. A shaft of light shone through the thick drapes covering one of Al's bedroom windows. I walked over to it so that the shaft of light shined directly on the gun I held in my hand.
Thunder from a high-powered racing engine suddenly rang in my ears. It was Al's Challenger; he was back. Quickly but carefully I put the gun back beneath the pillow and left Al's bedroom exactly as I found it.
Colt M1911 .45 caliber Government-issue .45 automatic. Photo Credit: Smithsonian National Museum of American HIstory.
Al went "overseas" for a little while soon after that.
Al was always going "overseas," I remember. I never knew where he went or what he did "overseas." I didn't find out until 2022. That's when I finally viewed a two-decade-old VHS tape recording of my grandfather revealing the once-secret things he did for the United States of America. I'd been given my grandfather's video testimonial in 2003 after his 2002 death but never watched it because I didn't have a VHS player. Lame I know. Still, I saved it and finally had it transferred to mp4 last year. After hearing Al’s truth for the first time, I realized why my grandfather slept with a loaded .45 automatic under his pillow.
It was because he said "no" to Saddam Hussein, to his face, inside one of the deadly dictator's own presidential palaces.
If that was the only thing Al did, that would be more than enough to make my grandfather a legend, but he did much more.
The olive-skinned, Sicilian boy who couldn't speak English overcame discrimination and grew up to teach America's Apollo astronauts how to land a spacecraft on the moon without crashing-with a flight simulator he designed. He also fought Fascists during World War II; invented the electronic device CBS used to broadcast the 1960 Rome summer Olympics; designed camera arrays that flew aboard the first American spy satellites; designed key parts of the world-famous F-14 fighter plane's avionics (and flew it); designed and patented a low-light color camera lens; survived being wounded by shrapnel from a white supremacist bomb while working as a journalist at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta; and, when he did finally die, from natural causes, at the ripe, old age of 82, he was buried next to civil rights leader Malcolm X.
Here's this Bronx hero's story, told for the first time.
Al's Sicilian family immigrated to Manhattan at the dawn of the 20th Century. When the Great Depression started in 1929, many Americans went hungry. Al's family didn't. That's because Al's father designed clothes for wealthy folk.
"Mostly evening gowns and cocktail dresses and that type thing," Al recalled in the video.
Al's father did well. He did so well he built a house for his family in what was then the suburbs: 243rd Street in the Bronx. Al's grandparents lived with them. Italian was spoken exclusively in the Cosentino residence.
"I couldn't speak English," Al said. "When I was about 5 years old I'd be out with the kids playing and they wouldn't play with me because I couldn't speak the language."
School was also a problem.
"I went to school and my teacher sent me home. She said 'This child doesn't speak English,'" Al admitted. "I had a real, you know, problem trying to make it."
He learned English but lost "a whole year" in school. "I made up for it, eventually."
One of the ways he "made up for it" was short-wave radio broadcasts: "I built a HAM station and I was on the air with it when I was about 12."
He was also fascinated by popular science fiction.
"They had science fiction pulp magazines. To me it was very intriguing," Al explained. "I was reading science fiction about interspace travel. I loved that."
He graduated Evander Child high school then obtained a two-year degree in electronics from RCA Institute: "They had a fantastic two-year course in electronics and televisions that no college had."
It was intense: 9-to-4pm every day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year, 100 weeks total, two years.
"We had no summer vacation. We had more hours than any engineering college," Al remembered.
My Maine-born grandmother (l) Faye Ruth Cosentino (born Austin) holding my mother Sharon surrounded by her husband Alfonso’s extended Sicilian family in their Bronx home in 1947 or so. My grandfather is not in the photograph because he’s taking the photograph. Photo Credit: Alfonso Cosentino.
When World War II started, Al was making electronic equipment for a defense contractor. His work, he said, was "essential" to the war effort. Al was offered a deferral from an otherwise mandatory military draft.
"I turned the deferment down. I said 'I don't want to be deferred. I want to go and fight,'" he proudly recalled.
First Al joined the Merchant Marine then the Army. He saw combat in North Africa. "I fought Rommel, the Desert Fox."
Back in America after the war, Al married my grandmother, Faye, had my mother, Sharon, won entry to Cooper Union and earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. His first big job was working for CBS. CBS won the bid to broadcast the 1960 Summer Olympics from Rome. After it won the bid, CBS realized it had a big problem. Olympic events would be captured by Italian TV cameras. The Italian TV cameras broadcast a signal that was not compatible with American TV sets.
"They didn't realize it. They realized it after they got the contract. Then they said 'How do we do this?,'" Al revealed.
CBS needed a converter. None existed. Al was tasked with inventing one.
"I was given a whole year to do the project. It took me a whole year," Al explained. "I invented a converter and we went to Rome and by means of the converter we were able to convert the Italian broadcast format into our format."
Alfonso Cosentino with his daughter Sharon, 1947 or soon after. Photo Credit: Faye R. Cosentino.
Al's triumph in Rome earned him a fulltime job at CBS Laboratories.
CBS Laboratories was basically a camera technology skunkworks. Its work was so good it also developed technology for the military. One special secret project was camera equipment for America's first spy satellites. The military had the rocket technology to launch satellites into orbit but it lacked the expertise to develop the highly-specialized photo-electronic equipment required. It turned to Eastman Kodak. Eastman Kodak, in turn, turned to CBS Laboratories. Al worked on the secret project for four years. It was called SAMOS-Satellite and Missile Observation System. SAMOS took high-resolution images from space and radio transmitted those images to earth. It gave America what the intelligence community called "near real-time" capability.
"It was an Air Force job," Al said. "I designed all the airborne equipment. That was my basic design." It "orbited the earth and took pictures of wherever we wanted it to take pictures of."
Photo Credit: Estate of Alfonso Cosentino.
Meanwhile, John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960. He challenged the American people to repurpose our Nation's military-industrial complex.
“I believe that this Nation should commit itself, to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon, and returning him safely to the earth," President Kennedy famously said May 21, 1961. Critics pounced. They called Kennedy's plan a "moondoggle." Kennedy defended it 16 months later at Rice University. It came to be called the "We Choose to Go to the Moon" speech. It is one of Kennedy's most quoted, most famous speeches.
The critics, President Kennedy roared back, had it all wrong: "They may well ask why climb the highest mountain?"
America should go to the moon not because it would be "easy," but because it would be "hard." We should do it because "new hopes for knowledge and peace are there." We should do it because it "will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills." We should do it because it is a challenge "we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win."
"As we set sail," Kennedy concluded, "we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked."
The Nation rallied in response to Kennedy's call to action.
Congress essentially gave a blank check to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA called its plan to beat the Soviets to the moon the Apollo program-after one of the most powerful mythological Greek gods. Apollo was and remains the largest, most ambitious engineering project in human history. Its mission was to invent, design and build the technology necessary to land a spaceship on the moon-a relatively small, moving target almost 220,000 miles away. Then bring the spaceship and its pilots, called astronauts, safely back to earth. All told, an army of about 400,000 scientists, engineers and technicians was recruited to get the job done-before the end of the decade.
As the Space Race was taking shape, NASA opened the Marshall Space Flight Center in 1960. NASA named Wernher Von Braun Marshall's director. That made building the moon rocket von Braun's job. Von Braun was a former Nazi saved by the American military after World War II for his singular rocket-building genius. And also to keep him out of Soviet hands. NASA awarded contracts to build the rocket Von Braun designed to a consortium of defense contractors. Meanwhile, NASA awarded Grumman Aerospace, Long Island, New York, the contract to build the small spacecraft that Von Braun's rocket would carry to the moon.
That small spacecraft was called the Lunar Excursion Module, or LEM.
While the spaceships were being built, another NASA group mapped the lunar surface in a search for potential landing sites. Here is where my grandfather returns to the picture, so to speak. Al designed the satellite that photographed the lunar surface. These photographs were needed to create a map of the lunar surface and identify potential landing sites. They were also needed to create a flight simulator for astronauts to practice piloting the LEM to a lunar landing before they attempted it in real life.
"I designed the Lunar Orbiter which mapped the lunar terrain for future lunar landings," Al said in the video.
"It was not originally designed to map the moon. It was designed as a 'Spy in the Sky' for the United States," Al explained. Then, later, when Kennedy and Congress launched the Apollo program, "that 'Spy in the Sky' was called 'Lunar Orbiter' and we orbited the moon to photograph the landing sites of the future Apollo program."
"That's in a museum now," Al added.
Lunar Orbiter. Photo Credit: Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum.
SAMOS to the Moon is a 2001 report by the National Reconnaissance Office. It confirms Al's claim, made in 1999, that spy satellite technology was repurposed to map the moon:
Having acquired, launched, and then terminated work on a near real time imaging satellite, however, NRO officials at that time agreed to consign the SAMOS imaging system to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for use in its deep space exploration program. The surreptitious transfer of this technology, a fact just recently declassified, has remained unknown to many in the NRO and NASA because of the compartmented security measures then in place.
The report also confirms that photoelectric equipment created by Al's employer-the "Columbia Broadcasting System"-was used in NASA's Lunar Orbiter.
The spy equipment itself was "a scaled-down version of the Eastman Kodak system used by USAF," according to a NASA report, DESTINATION MOON: A History of the Lunar Orbiter Program. Every component of the camera subsystem was "tightly housed in an aluminum 'bath tub' a little larger than a large round watermelon." It had two lenses that took pictures simultaneously-one high-resolution, the other medium.
Besides providing different views, the two lenses backed-up each other. If one broke, the other might still function. Low-speed film less susceptible to damage from solar radiation unspooled from a supply reel and passed through an electronic shutter box. Once past the shutter, the film was married to a semi-dry chemical developer and wound into a storage chamber. Developed negatives were extracted by signal for scanning and transmission by radio to Earth.
It was all "put together with the precision of a Swiss watch," the NASA report says.
NASA's Lunar Orbiter worked even better after it received an equipment tweak based on lessons learned during its first flight. The improved orbiters worked so well on their second and third flights that the program completed its primary mission of mapping potential lunar landing sites in three missions instead of the planned five.
"Each one obtained valuable photographic data that subsequently aided the Apollo Program in site selection for the manned lunar landings ... and later missions," according to the report.
Orbiter 2 took an oblique photograph of the moon's Copernicus crater in 1966 that the New York Times published. The broadsheet published the photograph on its front-page, above the fold, with the headline: "Orbiter 2 Transmits Spectacular Photographic Close-up of Moon." The report called it one of the greatest pictures of the 20th Century. Today, a print made by an Eastman Kodak engineer sits in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Copernicus crater, moon. Photo Credit: NASA via Metropolitan Museum of Art.
By 1967 NASA had a rocket capable of safely flying to the moon and back as well as accurate maps of the lunar surface. Still it was not ready to make an actual attempt because the risk of crashing during landing on the moon was too great. Landing on the moon was one of the-if not the-most dangerous parts of the entire Apollo mission. That's because the moon's surface is pockmarked with giant holes of varying size, shape and steepness called "craters." Landing in a hole on the moon would likely be lethal. To land safely, astronauts had to avoid craters. In order for the risk to be reduced to an acceptable level, landing had to be practiced and perfected on a flight simulator like those used to train ordinary airplane pilots.
Like everything else in the Apollo program, the lunar landing simulator had to be designed and built.
Al was working for Grumman Aerospace when NASA realized its lunar landing simulator sucked. Grumman sent Al to Cape Canaveral to "un-suck" the sucky simulator and get the Apollo program back on track. Until Al fixed the simulator, no one was going anywhere. Forget the moon, they would be lucky to make it to the local bar on Friday night.
"They could not go to the moon until I, let me put it this way," Al explained, "they were not able to make the trip to the moon unless the simulator had this capability."
The problem with the simulator, Al said, was that "It was very, very crude." It was not able to reproduce a "proper lunar terrain map." The astronauts, Al explained, "were not able to see those craters with the TV system before. They didn't have enough resolution to make a safe landing." The spacecraft could land in a crater and "pitch over."
"I redesigned the whole system that could see the craters and make successful landings," Al said.
"I created resolutions so far beyond what they were looking for," he added. "It showed lunar details from well above the height that the lunar module would be at for them to recognize craters."
Fixing the simulator was "a monumental design effort."
Once he got the simulator working, NASA tasked him with training the astronauts how to land on the moon, without crashing.
"I worked with each of the astronauts of all the flights," Al recalled. "Every single manned flight I worked."
"Every one of the Apollo launches. Starting from the unmanned launches. Apollo one, two, three, four up to 17. One through 17," Al said, proudly. When manned flights started, he trained the Apollo astronauts using the simulator 8 to 12 hours everyday for three months. They trained "very, very rigorously. We trained everyday," he said.
As my grandfather speaks in the video, a poster-sized photograph Al took in 1972 hangs on the wood-paneled wall behind him. It captured Apollo 17 blasting off at night on the last Apollo mission to the moon. It was the first and last, the one and only, nighttime Apollo launch.
Photo Credit: Alfonso Cosentino.
Apollo 11 was the first Apollo mission to successfully land on the moon and return to earth safely. CBS News' live coverage of the history-making flight from the Kennedy Space Center, started at 8:00 am EST, July 16, 1969.
"The dawn of this day heralded the dawning of a new age," legendary telejournalist Walter Cronkite reported on CBS. "It's a time of exhilaration, hope, fulfillment, as a centuries' old dream starts toward reality."
"10, 9, ignition sequence starts. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Zero. We have a liftoff," NASA mission control voice Jack Riley announced to the world at 1:32pm as American astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin and Michael Collins rocketed into the clear, blue sky above Launch Complex 39, Pad A. They were "eight miles downrange, 12 miles high, 4,000 feet per second" 120 seconds later, in Riley's words. Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon four days after. Collins orbited above in the command module waiting to take them home-or attempt a risky rescue if something went wrong.
Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon.
"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," he said. (Armstrong insisted at a press conference back on earth that he'd actually said "for a man" but that it must have got lost in the long-range radio transmission.)
Apollo 11 was gone from Earth eight days before the command capsule splashed down safely in the Pacific ocean with the three astronauts alive inside. When it did, an electronic banner flashed to life on the big board at the front of NASA's mission control center. It was a quote from President Kennedy's 1961 speech that challenged the Nation to go to the moon and back before the end of the decade. Opposite Kennedy's epigram was another electronic banner with just two big words: "Task Accomplished."
"And the flags are waving. And the cigars are being lit," is how one reporter described the scene in the control room.
Not surprisingly, Al and the astronauts he trained became friends.
"We used to go out together at night and go out drinking and eating. They were friends. They were my friends," he said.
Among his astronaut friends, Apollo 12 commander Charles "Pete" Conrad stood out.
"He was very interested in doing automobile racing," Al recalled. “Fast bikes, fast cars and anything that moves” is how Conrad later described his likes to the Los Angeles Times. Alan Bean, one of the other two Apollo 12 astronauts, recalled Conrad had a personal motto: "If you can't be good, be colorful."
Conrad was both, Bean said. Conrad was so colorful he almost got kicked out of the Apollo program.
While Conrad was training with Al for the Apollo 12 mission "he decided to participate in a race in Daytona. Daytona was doing the 500 and there was other races and so he entered one of the races under a pseudonym," Al recalled. NASA found out.
"They almost fired him," Al said. "They said 'Don't go out racing endangering your life.'"
Al thought it was funny when he retold the story. He quipped: "And here they are sending him to the moon!"
Conrad was the third man to walk on the moon, four months after Apollo 11's historic first landing. Apollo 12 made it to the moon notwithstanding launching during a thunderstorm. Their Saturn V rocket was hit by multiple lightning strikes. One knocked out a computer. A backup took over to keep the rocket flying.
"I never expected that they would launch, but they did launch in spite of the electrical storm," Al recalled.
When the 5'6"-inch tall Conrad stepped from the LEM onto the surface of the moon he joked "Whoopee! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me."
Conrad was killed at 69 in a motorcycle accident in the mountains outside Los Angeles in 1999.
Grumman's LEM remains the only manned spacecraft to ever operate solely in the airless vacuum of space. It also remains the only manned spacecraft to land on another celestial body.
CBS Laboratories was closed in 1986.
Al continued working for Grumman after the last Apollo mission in 1972. Grumman had a long history of designing successful fighter planes. It was developing a new, jet fighter plane for the Navy at the time: the F-14. The F-14 would be used by the American military from 1974 until 2006. It's iconic. It's the fighter plane actor Tom Cruise flew in the wildly popular "Top Gun" movies. Al designed its avionics, including its targeting cameras. He also designed its flight simulator.
"I designed a lot of the electronics, including the low-light level TV camera in the F-14," Al said. "I learned how to fly that plane because I worked on it and had to evaluate the various electronic equipment, TV cameras what have you, in flight."
The formal name for the F-14's TV camera system was Television Camera Set. The TCS was integrated into the F-14's weapons and radar systems. Pilots called the entire array "Tomcat Eyes." Tomcat Eyes allowed pilots to see enemy aircraft at far greater range than human eyes alone: up to 10 miles on a clear day. The ability to see first also gave pilots the ability to shoot-and-kill first. America's airborne adversaries lacked this power. The F-14's unique lethality was a key contributor to American air superiority around the world for decades.
Tomcat Eyes "were highly effective combat enhancers," observed the anonymous Navy commander-turned-blogger Navy Matters. "As the Soviet pilots of the era knew well, the eyes of the Tomcat were always on them."
The F-14's replacement, the F/A-18 Hornet, lacked Tomcat Eyes. "Why the Navy abandoned these sensors when the Hornet was developed is baffling," opined Naval Matters.
We need to remember the capabilities we had decades ago and begin designing actual combat aircraft again that can at least match what we once had. What passes for a combat aircraft today is a sad reflection of what once was.
After Al helped make Grumman's F-14 a fierce combat aircraft feared around the world, he sometimes worked for other countries allied with the U.S. as a security consultant. Frequently he flew to these jobs in American military aircraft. Sometimes he flew in F-14s. Here’s a clip from Topgun 2 of the F-14 in action that highlights its maneuverability at :58 with split throttles.
Al also continued to work to improve low-light camera technology. He even patented a low-light, color camera in 1992.
Al also designed low-light television cameras for an American company that sold them to Iraq in the early 1980s. Iraq was in the first years of a bloody eight-year war with neighboring Iran. Iran was America's nemesis in the region, making Iraq an American ally. President Ronald Regan authorized Iraq to receive American military equipment and expertise. The cameras were part of a general security upgrade. But they did not work the way they were supposed to work. Al was dispatched to get them working correctly.
The cameras, Al said flatly, were "in a palace inhabited by the president of Iraq Saddam Hussein. I was not involved in the installation. But problems came up and I was called as a consultant to find out what could be done to correct the problems."
First his "passport had to be cleared through Washington, DC, in order to go there," Al said. "I was allowed to go there by the United States." Once in Iraq, Al "spent a lot of time working out the problems," he said. Working out the problems meant, he stressed, "Solving them. To the satisfaction of Hussein."
Al "was there for many months." He visited "several" of Hussein's palaces. He worked on each installations' security system, including its security cameras and other measures.
"They had a heavily guarded operation. He had his famous Republican Guards. And military people with automatic weapons all over the palaces. Every place you walked, on stair landings, on the roofs," Al revealed.
Al was "treated very, very well" by Hussein. He visited "several times."
Something remarkable happened to Al in Iraq. Saddam Hussein befriended him.
"I got to know him quite well. We became quite friendly," Al disclosed. "And I was asked to stay and live there."
Hussein was Iraq's much-fear military dictator. He allegedly directed systemic torture, murder, arbitrary arrest, unlawful detention, enforced disappearance and various forms of violence to control the Iraqi people. As many as 500,000 people are estimated to have been killed by Hussein's regime, ABC News reported.
Al described Hussein's offer, delivered by one of Hussein's top lieutenants: "They had said 'We need your technology and we would like you to help us put together a good electronic facility which you would head up."
Hussein's people also told Al they wanted him "'to spend time in the university teaching our engineering students.'"
The Iraqis promised rich rewards. "I was given a very interesting proposition, I might add, but I turned it down. They said you could bring your family over here. We'll take 'good care' of you and so on."
At the end of his assignment in Iraq, Al was again asked to stay. This time Hussein himself asked Al to stay: "I was asked by Hussein if I would stay for an extra couple of months at their expense so I could lecture his military engineers on low light lever technology and other electronic issues."
Again, Al told Hussein no.
War clouds gathered over the Middle East again after Iraq invaded neighboring Kuwait in 1990. Iraq borrowed billions of dollars from (fellow Sunni muslim) Kuwait to fund its defense against (Shite Muslim) Iran's invasion. Hussein thought Kuwait should forgive the debt because Iraq, in effect, protected its (fellow Sunni Muslim) neighbor during the war as well. Kuwait refused. Kuwait was also overproducing oil in violation of OPEC quotas, driving the price of oil-per-barrel down. That deprived Iraq of billions in oil revenue, impinging Iraq's ability to pay off its war-debt.
Trapped in a Catch-22, Al's old pal Saddam decided to invade Kuwait August 2. Iraqi forces looted a billion from Kuwaiti banks right off the bat.
President George H.W. Bush and Congress sent an American-led military force to defend Saudi Arabia-which many feared was next on Hussein's list. (Like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia lent billions to Iraq for the war, refused to forgive the debt and was right next door.) That operation was called "Desert Shield." Desert Shield effectively became Desert Storm the second Hussein declared Kuwait an Iraqi province August 8.
That's when the CIA snatched Al up and "disappeared" him for a few months.
"In 1991, Desert Storm, I was asked to go," Al said in the 1999 interview. "Well before Desert Storm, the CIA ... "
Al refused to detail more: "I shouldn't discuss this. Sorry. It's out. No I can't. No."
Al did not disclose what happened in his 1999 video, but I had heard all about it from Faye. Al told her all about it sitting on the benches outside the courtroom during breaks in my June 1991 murder trial. The trial brought them back together, one last time.
The CIA didn't call Al and ask him to come into one of its offices. The CIA showed up at Al's house and took him. Basically they arrested him without handcuffs. An agent sat with him in the back seat while they rode to wherever they rode to. The CIA wanted to know exactly what Al had seen in Iraq while he was there fixing Saddam's cameras. If it was smart, the CIA also would have wanted to make sure Al didn't end up back in Iraq-either by choice or kidnapping by Iraqi agents. Of course Al told the CIA everything he had seen. He was the CIA's "guest" for several weeks as he recounted his odyssey through Hussein's network of "palaces."
No doubt the CIA transformed at least some of those details into targeting coordinates.
With the United Nations' blessing, President George H.W. Bush and American allies blasted Iraq out of Kuwait and decimated its military but stopped short of shooting its way all the way to Baghdad. H.W. Bush's son, George W. Bush, did not stop short after 9/11. His administration convinced Congress to invade Iraq in 2003, overthrow Hussein and established a new, democratic government. For ordering the killing of 148 Shiite men and boys after a 1982 assassination attempt, the Iraqi Special Tribunal sentenced Hussein to death by hanging in 2006. He refused to be hooded during his execution on December 30.
“I am a militant and I have no fear for myself. I have spent my life in jihad and fighting aggression. Anyone who takes this route should not be afraid,” he proclaimed as he was being led to the scaffold, the New York Times reported.
His last words were the shahada, the Muslim declaration of faith: "There is no God but Allah and Muhammad ..."
To Hussein's Shite executioners, it was a taunt. They didn't allow Sunni Hussein to finish. They triggered the scaffold's trap-door, snapping his neck instantly, once and for all.
After all the fun and games with the CIA in 1990-91 was over, Al returned to his life as a quiet camera genius.
Turns out, the kind of technical TV signal problems Al first fixed for CBS for the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome bedeviled international TV broadcasts perpetually. So when NBC covered the 2006 Summer Olympics in Atlanta it hired Al to keep its signal converters running. NBC had a mobile headquarters there. It was directly across from the "town square" of the Olympics: Centennial Park.
Al was working late. He left his Olympic NBC office "a little" after 1:00 am. A multi-racial, rhythm & blues band from Los Angeles named "Jack Mack and the Heart Attack" was playing on the park stage. The park was packed: some 40,000 people were taking in the show. Al decided to join them.
"Suddenly there was a big explosion. A lot of chaos," Al reluctantly remembered.
He didn't realize immediately, but Al was one of the 111 people hit by shrapnel from a bomb. Two died. Alice Hawthorn was killed by a flying nail. Turkish photojournalist Melih Uzunyol, 40, was killed by a heart attack. Uzunyol, sadly, covered and survived wars in Azerbaijan, Bosnia and the Persian Gulf-only to die in Atlanta, covering not war but the Olympics.
"I was hit in my abdomen area," Al said. "I was taken care of. I was OK in a couple of days. Not a big deal."
Notwithstanding being hit by shrapnel from a bomb, Al said, overall, he had a good time in Atlanta. "It was OK."
Eric Rudolph pleaded guilty to the Centennial Park bombing. He also admitted bombing two abortion clinics and a lesbian bar. His motive, he said in a statement provided to the press, was hatred of socialism, multinational corporations and laws allowing abortion on demand. The former Army Airborne soldier was sentenced to four consecutive life terms.
Eight years after the first Iraq war, Al was still involved in activities in the "area," he said in 1999. When pressed for details he demurred, "because, that's like, last week."
With a light-hearted laugh he added, "I'm not saying anything. You guys are gonna get me killed."
Then Al looked back and summed up what he learned about living during his long, full life.
"The most important thing in life is to achieve what you feel in your heart. And it can't be measured in terms of money," he said.
Al found “a lot of self-satisfaction in knowing that you accomplished some very outstanding things that were necessary for the advancement of science," he said. "And also for the country. For the safety of the country."
"I fought a war," he added. "I'm still presently involved in sensitive things. And I think that's fulfilling."
His interviewers had one last question for the 79-year old: is there anything you didn't do that you wish you did?
"Yeah," Al answered, "I wanted to be a great jazz trumpet player, and I didn't do it. I'm a big jazz devotee and I always have been."
Al died in January 2002. He was cremated and his ashes interred at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, a tony suburb of New York City. I was still in prison. Faye, my grandmother, visited and told me about it.
"It's next Malcolm X's grave," she said.
WATCH the full interview of Cosentino describing Iraq and Saddam Hussein on my Instagram, thehouseofnick.
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