THE SURRENDER: U.S. Officers Display the 'Rat Hole' Where Hussein Hid

December 16, 2003
By JOHN F. BURNS

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Almost hidden behind a fence and beneath palms in Ad Dwar, Iraq, is the boxy shed where Saddam Hussein was found hiding in a narrow hole. The small gate, center, off the dirt road was the only entrance.

AD DWAR, Iraq, Dec. 15 — After the gilded palaces and the tyrant's life of luxury, it came down to this for Saddam Hussein: a final hiding place beneath a scrappy peasant farmer's courtyard that was as small and dark and dank as a coffin, and a trembling decision to surrender that saved him from an almost certain death at the hands of American troops.

The 43-year-old Chicago-born officer who led the raid, Col. James B. Hickey of the Army's Fourth Infantry Division, stood near what he called "the rathole" on Monday. He described to reporters how soldiers peering down into the shaft with weapons and bright lights, with orders to kill Mr. Hussein if he put up a fight, held back when they saw he carried no body belt bomb or gun and appeared to be pleading for his life.

Then they hauled the man they had sought relentlessly for eight months into the chilly night air, restrained him with white plastic handcuffs that held his hands behind his back and placed a plastic hood over his head, just as they have done with thousands of other Iraqi detainees.

One of the surprises of a visit to the site of Mr. Hussein's capture was the size of the underground hiding place where he was found.

It was more cramped and airless than it appeared in photographs released by the Army on Sunday. Its concrete entrance at ground level was barely large enough for a burly man like Mr. Hussein, who is close to 6 feet tall and was believed to have weighed about 200 pounds before he went on the run, to squeeze through.

A reporter of about the former Iraqi ruler's size went down into the hole and discovered that Mr. Hussein would have had to lower himself awkwardly down the shaft of what amounted to an inverted T. He then would have had to twist and slide until he was lying flat in the cramped concrete-walled, wood beam-roofed tunnel. It was about 8 feet long, 30 inches high and 30 inches wide. It was there that he was lying when the American raid broke over him.

Even a few minutes in the tunnel, in daylight, was enough to foster claustrophobia.

Those who built it — possibly the two men captured along with Mr. Hussein, whom the Army has not identified — had installed a small, six-inch-high ventilation fan above where Mr. Hussein appeared to have placed his feet, a jutting steel pipe for further ventilation and a small light that appeared not to work.

The only traces of its former inhabitant that remained after an American military sweep were several used cotton swabs and an empty black plastic bag.

From this last miserable redoubt, at 8.26 p.m. on Saturday, Iraq time, the man who sent hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to their deaths at the battlefront and the torture chambers and the gallows made a decisive choice for life, his own.

From the bottom of the shoulder-wide shaft, the 66-year-old former dictator thrust both hands skyward, signaling to Special Operations forces soldiers that he would offer no resistance.

Colonel Hickey said the Americans learned from an interrogation of one of Mr. Hussein's relatives barely three hours earlier that he could be found in the area near the peasant's house, among flat, silted lands along the Tigris River rich with citrus orchards and palm groves.

But to preserve secrecy, and perhaps to keep the 600 American soldiers on the raid as cool-headed as possible, they avoided using the former Iraqi ruler's name. They referred to him in the jargon of the raid as "HVT One," meaning High-Value Target No. 1.

Mr. Hussein, straggly bearded, unkempt and, Colonel Hickey said, "nervous" and "disoriented" after months on the run, did not try to hide his identity.

As he emerged from the shaft, he addressed the Special Operations forces soldiers with a directness, and at least a hint of delusion about his altered status, that could stand as a epigram for a man so used to dictating terms that he thought, even at the end, that he could haggle over conditions for his surrender.

"I am Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq, and I am willing to negotiate," he said, in halting English, as recounted by Colonel Hickey on the basis of what he was told later by the Special Operations forces. The Army has declined to identify the soldiers beyond saying that they were members of Task Force 121, a Special Operations unit that includes Central Intelligence Agency officers.

The Americans, Colonel Hickey said, were ready with an ironic riposte of their own that may still have Mr. Hussein puzzling in the unidentified "high security detention facility," probably near Baghdad, to which he was moved by helicopter some time on Sunday.

"President Bush sends his regards," they said.

Colonel Hickey said that none of the procedures used in handling Mr. Hussein differed in any way from those applied to the lowliest of his followers, and that they included an authorization to "kill or capture" Mr. Hussein as judged necessary.

Asked if the Special Operations troops had been standing over the bunker with unpinned hand grenades, ready to stop anybody in the shaft from attacking his would-be captors, Colonel Hickey smiled.

"He was wise not to waste much time," the colonel said.

In a similar vein, when asked how American troops confirmed Mr. Hussein's identity, the colonel replied, "The fact that he announced himself as Saddam Hussein helped."

A similarly understated, even laconic, quality characterized the radio exchanges between the American soldiers who raided the house and commanders who held back with the surrounding force of Humvees, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and a dozen patrolling helicopters.

Within moments of Mr. Hussein stepping out of the bunker, Colonel Hickey said, the troops at the house radioed to say they believed they had captured "HVT One."

"You mean you have Saddam?" he asked. "Yes, Saddam," the men at the house replied. "That's great," Colonel Hickey said, concluding the exchange.

With confirmation that Mr. Hussein had been captured, Colonel Hickey radioed the news to Maj. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the Fourth Infantry division commander, a former linebacker for the Army football team, who started the news on the way up the chain of command to the White House.

"I said, `General Odierno, we've captured HVT One,' " Colonel Hickey said.

"And the general said, `Really?' And I said, `Yes, sir.' "

The scene on Monday near Mr. Hussein's hiding place provided further clues of the dismally austere life that was the former dictator's, at least in the last hours or days before his capture. Just how long he stayed here was not clear.

Inside a concrete hut, belongings that could have been his — two pairs of cheap, unworn Iraqi-made black shoes, three pairs of large men's white boxer shorts and two T-shirts still in their plastic wrappings, several well-thumbed books of Arabic poetry, and, in a food shelf and a small refrigerator, a jar of honey, some tinned pears and a packet of coconut chocolate Bounty bars — were strewn about a single, unmade bed.

The unworn clothing and shoes suggested provisions for somebody who arrived without baggage, and needed emergency supplies.

American intelligence officers have said that repeated tip-offs on the whereabouts of Mr. Hussein, none of them decisive until Sunday, had shown a pattern of his moving rapidly from place to place, often in the Tikrit area, since his overthrow by the American invasion in April.

Colonel Hickey said his troops had mounted 12 such operations in pursuit of Mr. Hussein in the First Brigade's area of operations, the upper Tigris River valley, since April.

How close the latest raid may have come to failure was suggested in Colonel Hickey's account of how Mr. Hussein was discovered.

He said troops mounting the raid on Saturday had pounced on two other houses in a target area about half a mile wide and a mile and a half deep on the Tigris's eastern bank, about 10 miles southeast of Tikrit and less than a mile to the northwest of Ad Dwar.

The area was well known to Mr. Hussein, who was born in a poor village a few miles away beside the Tigris, to a family that had supported itself, in part, by piracy against boats carrying goods down the river to Baghdad.

Nor was it the first time that he had found refuge in the area. As a 22-year-old wanted for his part in a failed assassination attempt on Iraq's then ruler, Gen. Abdul Karim Kassem, in 1959, he passed through the area on his way to sanctuary in Egypt. Then, according to the legend he fostered later, he dressed as a woman and hid for days in a village well.

Ad Dwar, a dour cluster of concrete-walled homes and shops about a mile from the house where Mr. Hussein hid, is closely associated with Izzat Ibrahim, Mr. Hussein's widely feared, ginger-haired vice president and No. 2 man.

Mr. Ibrahim is believed by American commanders to be directing at least part of the insurgency against coalition forces, and remains, after Mr. Hussein's arrest, the highest-ranking Iraqi still at large on the high-priority target list of 55 names that American officials issued in April.

After an initial sweep had found nothing at the first two houses, code-named Wolverine One and Wolverine Two by the Americans, Colonel Hickey said, the American troops moved northwest and checked the house where Mr. Hussein was eventually found.

On the first sweep, the troops found nothing.

But after the troops involved in the Saturday raid cordoned off the area and conducted a more detailed search, one of the Special Operations soldiers noticed an edge of a fabric-backed rubber mat peeking through soil edging the concrete floor in the home's courtyard, tugged on it and swept the earth away to find a rectangular foam plug about 20 inches high and perhaps 3 feet long, topped with two looped ropes as handles.

Lifting it, he found the hiding space. Soon after, Mr. Hussein rose in an appeal for the soldiers not to kill him.

American troops here were not inclined to triumphalism on Monday. They know they face a continuing insurgency.

"This is business," Colonel Hickey said. But he added a hopeful note, that insurgent strikes might intensify in retaliation for the arrest of Mr. Hussein, but would probably fall away later as the demoralizing effect of the capture sinks in.

"From a military point of view, if you lop the head off a snake, the snake's not going to be so viable after that," he said.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company