The shameless, outrageous, covert military support which the US . . . and Britain . . . gave to Saddam for more than a decade remains the one terrible story which presidents and prime ministers do not want the world to remember. And now Saddam, who knew the full extent of that western support . . . given to him while he was perpetrating some of the worst atrocities since WWII . . .is dead.

Gone now is the man who personally received the CIA's help in destroying the Iraqi communist party. After Saddam seized power, America's intelligence men gave his minions the home addresses of communists in Baghdad and other cities in an effort to destroy the Soviet Union's influence in Iraq.

Saddam's Muhabarrat visited every one of those addresses, arrested their occupants and their families, and butchered the lot. Public hanging was for plotters. The communists, their wives and children, were given special treatment: extreme torture before execution at the Abu Ghraib prison.

There is growing evidence across the Arab world that Saddam held a series of meetings with senior American officials prior to his invasion of Iran in 1980 . . . both he and president Ronald Reagan believed that the Islamic republic would collapse if Saddam sent his legions across the border . . .and the Pentagon was instructed to assist Iraq's military machine by providing intelligence on the Iranian order of battle.

I know about this secret assistance to Saddam because, on a cold and frosty day in 1987, not far from Cologne, I met the German arms dealer who initiated those first direct contacts between Washington and Baghdad . . . at America's request. I still have my notes of my meeting.

''Mr Fisk, I will tell you this . . . at the very beginning of the war, in September of 1980, I was invited to go to the Pentagon, '' he said. "And there I was handed the very latest US satellite photographs of the Iranian front lines. You could see everything on the pictures.

There were the Iranian gun emplacements in Abadan and behind Khorramshahr, the lines of trenches on the eastern side of the Karun river, the tank revetments . . . thousands of them . . . all the way up the Iranian side of the border towards Kurdistan. No army could want more than this.

And I travelled with these maps from Washington by air to Frankfurt and from Frankfurt on Iraqi Airways straight to Baghdad. The Iraqis were very grateful . . . very grateful!'' I was with Saddam's forward commandos at the time and I remember, under Iranian shellfire, noting how the Iraqi forces aligned their artillery positions far back from the battle front with detailed maps of the Iranian lines.

Their time-on-target attacks against Iran outside Basra allowed the first Iraqi tanks to cross the Karun within a week.

I was to meet the commander of that tank unit, who cheerfully refused to tell me how he had managed to choose the one river crossing undefended by Iranian armour. Two years ago, I met this same officer again after he had commanded the insurgents of Fallujah in the second major battle against US forces in the city. We met in Amman and his junior officers called him "general'' . . . the rank he won from Saddam after his successful tank attack east of Basra, courtesy of Washington's intelligence information.

Iran's official history of the eight-year IraqiIran war states that Saddam first used chemical weapons against its combatants on 13 January 1981, a combination of gas and other components with which Iraq was drenching the Iranian lines by 1985. Mohamed Salaam, AP's correspondent in Baghdad, was one of the first outside witnesses to this war crime. He and a Yugoslav colleague were taken to see the scene of an Iraqi military victory east of Basra. They began counting the dead. "We started counting . . . we walked miles and miles, just counting. We got to 700 and got muddled and had to start counting again. All the dead Iranians had blood on their mouths and beards, and their pants below the waist were all wet. They had all urinated in their pants. The Iraqis had used, for the first time, a combination of nerve gas and mustard gas. The nerve gas would paralyse their bodies so they would all piss in their pants and the mustard gas would drown them in their own lungs. That's why they spat blood.'' At the time, the Iranians claimed this terrible cocktail had been given to Saddam by the US.

Washington denied this. But the Iranians were right. The lengthy negotiations which led to America's complicity in this atrocity remain secret . . . Donald Rumsfeld was one of Reagan's point-men at this period . . . although Saddam undoubtedly knew every detail of the deal. We only know of America's role through a dry and largely unreported document prepared for a US Senate committee in 1994. The paper entitled US Chemical and Biological Warfare-related Dual-use exports to Iraq and their possible impact on the Health Consequences of the Persian Gulf War, stated that prior to 1985 and afterwards, US companies had sent government-approved shipments of biological agents to Iraq.

These included Bacillus anthracis, Clostridium botulinum, Histoplasma capsulatum, Brucella melitensis, Clostridium perfringens and Escherichia coli (e-coli). The Senate report concluded that: "The United States provided the government of Iraq with 'dual use' licensed materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological and missile-systems programs, including. . . chemical warfare agent production facility plant and technical drawings, chemical warfare filling equipment.

Nor was the Pentagon unaware of the extent of Iraqi use of chemical weapons."

Coughing blood from their lungs In 1988, for example, Saddam gave his personal permission for Lt Col Rick Francona, a US defence intelligence officer . . . one of 60 who were secretly providing members of the Iraqi general staff with detailed information on Iranian deployments, tactical planning and bomb damage assessments . . . visited the Fao peninsula after Iraqi forces had recaptured the town from the Iranians. He reported back to Washington that the Iraqis had used chemical weapons to achieve their victory.

The senior defence intelligence officer at the time, Col Walter Lang, later said that: "The use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern.'' I saw the results, however. On a long military hospital train back to Tehran from the battle front, I found hundreds of Iranian soldiers coughing blood and mucus from their lungs . . . the very carriages stank so much of gas that I had to open the windows . . . and their arms and faces were covered with boils. Later, in Tehran hospitals, I saw them again. New bubbles of skin had appeared on top of their original boils. Many were fearfully burned. These same gases, of course, were later used on the Kurds of Halabja. No wonder that Saddam was primarily tried in Baghdad for the slaughter of Shi'ite villagers . . . not for his war crimes against Iran. No evidence was to be heard about this . . . or his secrets would have been made public. At the time of the Halabja gassing, the CIA told its embassy employees in the Middle East that they were to suggest that the Iranians . . .not the Iraqis . . . were responsible. One can see why.

We still don't know . . . and with Saddam's execution we will probably never know . . . the extent of US agricultural credits to Iraq, which commenced in 1982. The initial tranche, the sum of which was spent on the purchase of US weapons from Jordan and Kuwait, came to $300m. By 1987, Saddam was being promised $1bn in credit. By 1990, just before the invasion of Kuwait, annual trade between Iraq and the US had grown to $3.5bn a year. Pressed by foreign minister Tariq Aziz to continue US credits, James Baker . . . then secretary of state, but the same James Baker who has just produced a report intended to drag George W Bush from the catastrophe of present-day Iraq . . . pushed for new guarantees worth $1bn from the United States.

In 1989, Britain, which had been giving its own covert military assistance to Saddam . . . guaranteed £250m to Iraq shortly after the arrest of Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft in Baghdad. Bazoft, who had been investigating an explosion at a factory at Hilla which was utilising the very chemical components sent by the US, was later hanged. British minister William Waldgrave was noting a month after Bazoft's arrest that "I doubt if there is any future market of such a scale anywhere where the UK is potentially so well placed if we play our diplomatic hand correctly. . . a few more Bazofts or another bout of internal oppression would make it more difficult." Even more repulsive were the remarks of deputy PM Geoffrey Howe when he decided to relax controls on arms sales. He kept this secret, he wrote, because "it would look very cynical if so soon after expressing outrage about the treatment of the Kurds, we adopt a more flexible approach to arms sales'.'

The old man is silenced forever But the secrets of Saddam's sources of chemical weapons and his trade credits and military assistance and intelligence from the west will now remain forever hidden. The Americans had banned any mention of these subjects during Saddam's trial. The secrets that could have been revealed were ended in the Baghdad execution chamber yesterday. Many are those in Washington and London who must have sighed with relief that the old man had been silenced forever.