Intelligence

Mr President, I think we've caught Saddam

Mr President, I think we've caught Saddam - Sunday Times - Times Online

Paul Bremer, former US supremo in Iraq, reveals the extraordinary chain of events that followed the seizure of America’s most wanted dictator
The phone beside my bed jolted me awake at 1.30am on Sunday, December 14, 2003. I had barely got to sleep after another 18-hour day.

“Sorry to wake you, sir.” It was my assistant military aide, Major Pat Carroll. He said that General John Abizaid, head of US central command, needed to talk to me right away on a secure line.

The clunky red STU-III scrambler phone in my house didn’t work so I started throwing on my clothes to go to my office in Saddam Hussein’s old palace. Abizaid and I spoke almost daily but it was very unusual for him to call in the middle of the night. And on a secure line. This must be either very good or very bad news, I thought.

Fifteen minutes later I arrived in my dimly lit office. My new deputy, Dick Jones, was there with a man from the CIA station. I asked Dick what was up. Turning to the intel officer, Dick said: “I don’t want to steal your thunder.”

The agency man said: “We think we’ve caught Saddam.” I picked up the red phone and was put through to Abizaid at his headquarters in Qatar. “John, what’s this about Saddam?” “We think we’ve got him,” he replied. “Special ops guys found a dirty, bearded man at the bottom of an unguarded spider hole just outside Tikrit.”

“How do you know it’s Saddam?” I asked.

“When our guys pulled him out of the hole, he said, ‘I am Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq’,” John said. “They looked him over and he has the scars and a tattoo we know Saddam has.”

Abizaid and I also knew that for years Saddam had used doubles to confound his enemies. So I asked what more we could do to confirm that we had really captured Saddam.

“We’ve brought him down to Baghdad,” John said. “We’ll clean him up and show him to some of the other top regime leaders we’ve detained. We’re also going to rush a DNA sample to Germany for verification. We’ve got a C-17 standing by.”

“John, we’ve got to be 100% positive,” I emphasised. “We’ll be the laughing stock of the world if the news gets out and it’s one of his damn doubles. How long will the DNA check take?” “My guys tell me it’ll be 24 to 36 hours.”

I went back to bed but I couldn’t sleep. For many months after liberation we had been chasing every stray rumour or fragmentary report about Saddam’s whereabouts. At one point we had a report from a “usually reliable source” that he was riding around Baghdad in the back seat of a taxi, wearing a long white beard and a red hat. “Sort of like Santa Claus,” as one sceptical analyst put it.

We had switched strategies after concluding that Saddam had separated from the high-level people soon after liberation, knowing we’d be looking for them. Instead we started going after low-level “facilitators”. Servants, gardeners and chauffeurs who had worked for Saddam might provide a better path to the fugitive dictator. So military intelligence and the CIA had built a database of gofers and their contacts. Had we now finally caught that son of a bitch?

After about two hours of fitful sleep, I rose for a hectic day. Brigadier General Barbara Fast, the coalition J-2 (senior intelligence officer), arrived with Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of all coalition forces in Iraq. Rick looked even more sleep-deprived than I did.

Fast provided details of Saddam’s capture. Late Saturday morning, coalition special operators had picked up a suspected “contact” outside Tikrit, the home of Saddam’s clan. During his interrogation the man said that he could lead them to someone “much more important” — but stubbornly refused to divulge who this might be.

On being unearthed from the hole on a small farm, Saddam told his captors in accented English: “I am Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq. I want to negotiate.”

Searching the narrow sleeping compartment dug out of the sandy dirt below, the troops found a pistol and a briefcase of “interesting” documents. Later that night the team discovered two more of Saddam’s facilitators, armed with AK-47s, who had sacks containing $750,000 in $100 bills.

A special ops helicopter transported Saddam to a military intelligence detention centre at Baghdad airport. General Fast explained that the intelligence team had next brought four “high value prisoners” who had been close to Saddam to the facility to identify him. They included Tariq Aziz, the former vice-president. Each prisoner had verified that the wizened man was Saddam Hussein.

The intel people had recorded the prisoner’s conversation with his fellow Ba’athists and were running the tape through digital “voice analysis” to compare speech patterns with archived recordings of Saddam.

“The Department of Defence’s plan for Saddam’s capture,” Rick said, “calls for him to be transferred to an American navy ship in the Gulf for safety’s sake.”

“We can’t do that,” I replied.

If Saddam Hussein were a coalition prisoner of war, the Geneva convention prevented us from showing him in captivity. But if we spirited him out of the country and didn’t release photos of the former dictator as our prisoner, many in Iraq — among the world’s most conspiracy-minded nations — would refuse to believe that we’d captured him. “The people are going to need proof that we have him,” I told the two generals.

They understood. For months the souks had been rife with rumours that we’d actually caught Saddam and had made a deal with him. The resettled Saddam now lived in comfort on “a farm in Florida”.

“Look,” I said. “I understand it’s important for the MI (military intelligence) folks to exploit Saddam for whatever intel we can get. But it’s vital that we find a way, Geneva convention or not, to persuade Iraqis we finally have him.”

I told the group that the best way to do this would be to get a small delegation from the governing council — Iraq’s interim government — to visit Saddam. They could then confirm publicly that they had seen the prisoner.

Just after 9am in Baghdad or 1am in Washington, I decided to wake up Condi Rice, the president’s national security adviser, with the news. The White House SitRoom immediately put me through to her.

“There can be no doubt, Condi,” I told her. “It’s Saddam Hussein.”

“I’ll wake the president,” she said. “He wants to know.”

Reports came in that the Iraqi news media were broadcasting stories or hawking extra editions that we’d captured Saddam. Obviously the news had leaked among Sunni villagers around Tikrit and almost immediately to the capital. Some accounts claimed that Saddam had escaped or that he’d been killed.

The media and the Iraqis were clamouring for confirmation. That afternoon we held a press conference. It was packed.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” I said, indulging in a dramatic pause. “We got him!”

The three words had been suggested to me by my Arabic-speaking British press aide, Charles Heatley, just before I went on stage. They were easy to translate. “You need something short, a good soundbite,” Charles had said. The effect was immediate. Iraqi journalists were cheering wildly, as were several western reporters, but it was the expressions of undisguised joy among the Iraqis that were most moving. Some even sobbed.

Afterwards, four council members travelled with me to meet Saddam at a secret location near the airport. It was near sunset on the cool, clear afternoon when our Black Hawks landed near a nondescript building surrounded by barbed-wire fences. General Sanchez and a guard led us down a dim corridor painted in drab military yellow and stopped at the end before a blank metal door on the left. This opened to reveal a brightly lit, oddly shaped room, about eight feet wide and probably twice that long.

Just left of the entrance was the coalition’s “55 Most Wanted” poster with a number of faces crossed off. Saddam’s ace of spades image was almost hidden beneath thick strokes of a red marker.

To the right of the door, slouched on an army cot, wearing white Arab pyjamas and a blue winter parka over his shoulders, sat Saddam. He had on cheap plastic sandals and I noticed that his toenails were dirty and split, as if he’d been walking in the dust for weeks. Beside one foot stood a carton of juice with a pink straw.

Taped on the wall behind Saddam’s head were the official Pentagon photos of (Defence) Secretary (Donald) Rumsfeld and President Bush. I liked that touch and silently congratulated the soldier who had thought it up.

Saddam was sitting quite still, watching us from beneath hooded eyelids. An Arabic-speaking American soldier stood protectively at Saddam’s right shoulder, no doubt under orders to intervene if any of the council members lunged for the prisoner. “He just woke up, sir,” the guard said to Sanchez.

The four council members arrayed themselves on a low platform at the end of the room so that they could look down on Saddam. One of them, Dr Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a normally urbane, British-trained Shi’ite neurologist, glowered at the prisoner. “Saddam Hussein,” he shouted. “You are cursed by God!”

I knew from my Arabic lessons that this was a serious insult. Saddam raised his face. “Who are you to curse me, you traitor who has come with the Americans?” He then turned to the acting president of the governing council, Adnan Pachachi, a former foreign minister whom Saddam had sent into exile with a price on his head decades earlier.

“My friend Dr Adnan,” Saddam said, his tone softening. “Why have you come with these traitors? You are not one of them. You are one of us.” As if to emphasise “us”, Saddam curved both hands inward and touched his fingertips to the centre of his chest. Saddam was trying to divide this Iraqi delegation almost from the moment he encountered them.

When Pachachi ignored the snare, Saddam made a show of scanning the other faces. “Who will introduce me to these great leaders of the new Iraq?” he asked contemptuously.

Adel Mahdi of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri) pierced Saddam’s sarcasm. “How can you explain the Anfal operation and Halabja?” he asked, referring to the brutal campaign of repression and use of chemical weapons against the Kurds. “Why did you give the orders?” “They were traitors and Iranians,” Saddam muttered, waving his left hand, as if announcing the necessary extermination of rabid dogs.

Now all four council members on the platform were shouting questions, well laced with insults, at Saddam. For a moment he looked stunned. For decades no one had spoken to him in this way and lived to talk about it. Then Saddam pursed his lips and raised his chin in an expression of hauteur. He would listen to these inferiors but reply only if he saw fit. “Why didn’t you have the courage to fight or at least die trying?” Rubaie shouted.

Saddam turned to Sanchez. “If you had been in my place,” he asked the American commander, “would you have tried to resist?” He then turned back to Rubaie and asked scornfully: “And what do you know of combat anyway?”

Rubaie was not intimidated: “At least your sons fought before they were killed.”

I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed that Saddam winced.

Now Adel Mahdi rose behind the table and levelled both arms, hands open — a rude gesture that got Saddam’s attention. “What do you say now about the mass graves, about the tens of thousands you had executed and buried in them?”

Saddam lifted his chin disdainfully. “Executed?” He shook his head. “Did any of you ask their relatives who those criminals were? Thieves and traitors . . . Iranians.”

Rubaie asked him about several prominent Ba’athists whom Saddam had ordered to be killed in the early 1980s. “Why did you do it?”

“That’s just street talk,” he replied coldly. “And what business is that to you? They were Ba’athists.” It was as if these men had been his property to dispose of as he pleased.

Adnan Pachachi leaned forward. “And why did you invade Kuwait? That began Iraq’s slide into disaster.”

Saddam almost smirked. “When I get something in my head, I act,” he responded casually. “That’s just the way I am.”

His words were slurred and his hands shook. I suddenly thought of Hitler in his bunker in April 1945, living in a dreamland, ordering non-existent armies to destroy the Soviet juggernaut encircling Berlin. As the members of the council left, Rubaie repeated: “Saddam Hussein, you are cursed by God. How will you meet your creator?”

If the words had any emotional impact, Saddam hid it well. “I will meet him with a clear conscience and as a believer,” he responded.

© L Paul Bremer III 2006

Extracted from My Year in Iraq by Ambassador L Paul Bremer III with Malcolm McConnell to be published by Simon & Schuster on February 6 at £18.99. Copies can be ordered for £17.19 with free delivery from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585

January 15, 2006 at 04:03 PM in Iraq | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home