the Ba'ath Party had fewer than 1,000 members. Saddam's role in the failed assassination became a crucial part of his public image for decades. Kanan Makiya recounts: The man and the myth merge in this episode. His biography—and Iraqi television, which stages the story ad nauseam—tells of his familiarity with guns from the age of ten; his fearlessness and loyalty to the party during the 1959 operation; his bravery in saving his comrades by commandeering a car at gunpoint; the bullet that was gouged out of his flesh under his direction in hiding; the iron discipline that led him to draw a gun on weaker comrades who would have dropped off a seriously wounded member of the hit team at a hospital; the calculating shrewdness that helped him save himself minutes before the police broke in leaving his wounded comrades behind; and finally the long trek of a wounded man from house to house, city to town, across the desert to refuge in Syria. Some of the plotters (including Saddam) quickly managed to leave the country for Syria, the spiritual home of Ba'athist ideology. There Saddam was given full membership in the party by Michel Aflaq. Some members of the operation were arrested and taken into custody by the Iraqi government. At the show trial, six of the defendants were given death sentences; for unknown reasons the sentences were not carried out. Aflaq, the leader of the Ba'athist movement, organized the expulsion of leading Iraqi Ba'athist members, such as Fuad al-Rikabi, on the grounds that the party should not have initiated the attempt on Qasim's life. At the same time, Aflaq secured seats in the Iraqi Ba'ath leadership for his supporters, one of them being Saddam. Saddam moved from Syria to Egypt itself in February 1960, and he continued to live there until 1963, graduating from high school in 1961 and unsuccessfully pursuing a law degree at Cairo Law School (1962–1963). Army officers with ties to the Ba'ath Party overthrew Qasim in the Ramadan Revolution coup of February 1963. Ba'athist leaders were appointed to the cabinet and Abdul Salam Arif became president. Arif dismissed and arrested the Ba'athist leaders later that year in the November 1963 Iraqi coup d'état. Being exiled in Egypt at the time, Saddam played no role in the 1963 coup or the brutal anti-communist purge that followed; although he returned to Iraq after the coup, Saddam