Jew Credits Hussein for His Prison Release : Iraq: The Baghdad street vendor from whom Naim Twaina bought cigarettes later came to power and ordered him freed.

JERUSALEM —  For several months in 1959, Naim Twaina, a successful Jewish businessman in Baghdad, bought his cigarettes from a street vendor who stood on his daily route, always addressing the young man politely and leaving him the change.

Twelve years later, as Twaina tells it, that same street vendor, now in uniform and grown plump, entered the harshly lit cell where Twaina was being held on charges of Zionism. The man stuck his burning cigarette into the eye of another political prisoner.

“Oy, vavoy, “ Twaina recalls thinking. “If he sticks a cigarette into the eye of a member of the Baath Party, what will he do with me, a Jew?”

But the former vendor took mercy on his old customer.

“This is a good man,” he said. “I know him. Take your things and go.”

It was not until months later, Twaina said, that he realized that the vendor and the merciful officer had been the same man--Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Now an editor for Israeli Radio’s Arabic broadcasts, Twaina, 66, has largely kept quiet about his tale of kindness repaid, refusing to appear on television and shunning publicity except for rare interviews.

But Israeli experts on Iraq say there is no reason to doubt Twaina, long a prominent member of the Iraqi community in Israel and known as an underground hero of the exodus of more than 100,000 Iraqi Jews in the early 1950s.

“Funnily enough, it rings true,” Amatzia Baram, one of Israel’s most prominent academic authorities on Hussein, said of Twaina’s story. The dates and descriptions of Hussein appear to fit with what is already known about the Iraqi leader’s life, Baram said.

Mordechai Ben-Porat, a former Parliament member and now chairman of the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center near Tel Aviv, called Twaina “a reliable man.” He said this account was not the first report of Hussein and his family showing personal kindness to Jews, despite his violent anti-Zionist stance in public.

“Saddam Hussein is a monster,” Ben-Porat said, but “we have information about several cases when he helped Jews.”

Twaina’s tale, told in his Arabic-accented Hebrew in the hushed, seductive tones of Middle Eastern storytelling, begins when he was 12 years old. The son of a well-to-do family, he decided to commit his life to the idea of the state of Israel.

He was first arrested in 1951, he said, and had several narrow escapes during his years in the Jewish underground. Photos in an album on Iraqi Jewry show Twaina as a dapper, brilliant-eyed young man.

With a degree in economics, Twaina rose in the business world of Baghdad, serving as head of the Baghdad electric company from 1952 to 1958.

One of only four Jews in the upper echelons of the Iraqi government, he hobnobbed with high officials, even becoming friendly with Abdul Karim Kassim, the general whose group of officers overthrew the Iraqi king in 1958.

But Kassim’s interior minister unleashed a vicious purge against the Jews of Iraq, and Twaina was forced out of his electric company job and exiled to a remote village, only to be granted the directorship of a Baghdad knitting factory nine months later.

It was as head of the knitting factory in 1959 that Twaina encountered Hussein in what he now believes was a disguise that the young radical used for reconnoitering Kassim’s daily routes in preparation for an assassination attempt by the nationalist Arab Baath Socialist Party.

The official biography of the Iraqi leader plays up his role in the failed Baath attempt, saying he was wounded in the leg and cut the bullet out of his own flesh. Hussein then fled to Syria and Egypt, returning to Iraq only after Kassim was assassinated in 1963 to begin his ruthless rise to power.

“He (Hussein) liquidated everyone” but remained in the shadows for years, Twaina said. “Everyone heard his name but nobody knew who Saddam was, only that he killed people who were against the party.”

In 1972, Twaina was arrested for the fifth and final time.

“They put me in with political prisoners,” he said. “There were 50 people of the Baath with me. One night he (Hussein) entered--12 years had passed since I bought cigarettes from him--he was fat, big, and I didn’t recognize him, I didn’t know who he was.

“He came in, took a cigarette and put it in the eye of one of the Baath men,” who fainted from the pain.

Twaina thought his end had come.

But, “He got to me and said, ‘Who’s this? It’s not a Baath member.’ They said, ‘No sir, it’s a Jew, a Zionist.’ He said, ‘No. He’s a good man. I know him. Take your things and go.’

“So I left after 42 days in prison.”

Twaina finagled permission to leave the country by saying he needed to buy knitting equipment. He went to Lebanon, never to return to Iraq.

In Lebanon, he came across the 12th article in a newspaper series, “The Strong Hand of the Baath Party,” and went to the paper’s offices for the other installments. In the second article, he saw photos of the young Hussein: “Then I remembered and said, ‘Oy , vavoy, the man who saved me was Saddam and I didn’t recognize him?’ ”

Twaina has no good explanation for Hussein’s good deed.

“It was an hour of mercy,” he said. “Maybe it was because I was good with him--I would buy from him all the time.”

Thirty-three other Jews were arrested as Zionists in the same period, he said, “and until this day, no one knows where they were killed, where their graves are.”

But Hussein has also reportedly helped the estimated 150 remaining Iraqi Jews, allowing many to leave the country.

“He’s against Zionists, he’s not against the Jews of Iraq,” Twaina said.

Twaina came to Israel in 1976 after four years in London. He specializes in Iraqi music and folklore, writing articles and organizing programs for Israeli Radio.

A small I-knew-Saddam-Hussein industry appears to be growing in Israel, from the man who claimed to have studied with a rather stupid Hussein to the woman from Baghdad who says she took in his distraught mother when she was pregnant with him.

Twaina discounts most of the tales.

“No one knows what Saddam Hussein is,” he said.