THE UNDERGROUND: As a Fugitive, Hussein Stayed Close to Home

December 21, 2003
By JOHN F. BURNS and ERIC SCHMITT

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
An American soldier took a photograph Friday of the bedroom used by Saddam Hussein in the Iraqi village of Ad Dwar, where Mr. Hussein hid, protected by relatives and loyalists until his capture on Dec. 13.

AD DWAR, Iraq, Dec. 18 — Before his capture in a coffinlike bunker outside this desolate Tigris River town, Saddam Hussein spent months moving furtively among 20 or 30 nondescript safe houses in the Sunni Muslim heartland, where a tightknit network of family and clan sheltered him and brought him news from across American-dominated Iraq, American military officials say.

In turn, he used a word-of-mouth system of couriers to carry his instructions back to a cluster of Baathist cells that helped him guide the anticoalition insurgency, according to American officers who led the painstaking intelligence effort that culminated in the raid that captured Mr. Hussein.

To avoid detection, the 66-year-old Mr. Hussein traveled on foot, by small boat along the Tigris River, and along back roads in an ever-changing mix of cars, taxis and pickup trucks, often at night, rarely with more than two or three loyal followers to avoid notice.

Accustomed to mosaic-domed palaces, he let his hair and beard grow, survived on chocolate bars, honey and canned fruit, and shed the uniforms and Italian-tailored suits he favored in Baghdad for traditional Iraqi dress, a dishdasha robe and a checkered headdress.

In an ironic twist, he came back, in the end, to a place he wove into his political legend: the site on the Tigris where, in October 1959, as a 22-year-old fleeing Baghdad and his part in the failed assassination of the Iraqi military ruler, Abdul Karim Kassem, he claimed to have swum the river to escape pursuing troops. The farmhouse where he was seized last Saturday lies a few hundred yards from the riverbank where he came each year to mark the anniversary with a choreographed swim.

Before two of Mr. Hussein's sons, Uday and Qusay, merciless enforcers of his terror in the years of power, were killed by American forces in a shootout in the northern city of Mosul on July 22, American intelligence officers say, they almost certainly met their father periodically at the safe houses, plotting stratagems before separating to avoid standing out. Their deaths further isolated Mr. Hussein from the top officials of his government, many of whom were being hunted down from an American most wanted list of 55 men, some of them offering tantalizing clues as to where Mr. Hussein might be tracked down.

Lt. Col. Todd Megill, intelligence officer for the Fourth Infantry Division at Tikrit, which carried out the raid that seized Mr. Hussein outside the nearby town of Ad Dwar on Dec. 13, said meetings among the three would have been an operational necessity, as well as a family comfort. "They probably met on a regular basis just because they were the only other people they could talk to," he said. Mosul, where Uday and Qusay were killed, is 150 miles north of Tikrit.

Much of Mr. Hussein's life as a fugitive remains a mystery. But before his capture and since, American intelligence officers and commanders in Iraq have worked to piece together a sketch of his life eluding American troops. They have based their conclusions on interviews with relatives, interrogations of captured Baath Party officials and other Hussein loyalists, satellite telephone intercepts, seized documents, a knowledge of Mr. Hussein's past habits and some assumptions by military officials about what it must have taken to avoid the manhunt.

The officers said they believed that Mr. Hussein fled north within days of the fall of Baghdad, the cocksure defiance of his last days in power shattered by the speed of the American takeover and of his government's implosion. A tyrant who built a totalitarian state on a web of betrayals, he broke one last vow, to stand and fight beside his followers, made as he stood atop a battered Volkswagen Passat outside the Abu Hanifa mosque, one of the Sunni Muslims' most sacred shrines in Iraq, on April 9, the day of the city's fall. As he spoke, in the district of Adhamiya, the closest American tanks were less than a mile away.

Until the raid that captured him, Mr. Hussein's desperate forays about Baghdad in the days just before and after the city fell were the last public sightings of him. Putting together accounts by one of Mr. Hussein's bodyguards and other witness accounts, American intelligence documents paint a picture of the dictator, with his son Qusay, careering about the city in an armored Mercedes, then jumping into a Nissan sedan, trying frantically to stop Iraqi soldiers from joining the mass defections that began as American tanks headed for the city center.

After appearing at the Adhamiya mosque, Mr. Hussein and Qusay ran into heavy American gunfire as they tried to cross the Tigris back to the district of Khadamiya, where gangs of Saddam Fedayeen, a private militia controlled by his son Uday, were patrolling the streets. Turning back, the Husseins went to Adhamiya, which was raided that night by American forces, the first of many failed attempts to nab Mr. Hussein in the months that followed.

A Sheltering Network

Not long after, Mr. Hussein and his two sons disappeared, heading north out of Baghdad to their tribal homeland.

In Salahuddin Province, a sprawling region of more than three million people that includes Mr. Hussein's hometown, Tikrit, he went into hiding. There, he fell in among family and tribal members who associated with him before his rise to power and profited handsomely after it.

Mostly people of village origin, picked from a web of five key tribal families with close blood links to Mr. Hussein, those men were far from the Western-educated rocket scientists and nuclear physicists whom Mr. Hussein had used in his ambitions to make Iraq the Arab superpower.

But their value lay in their village contacts, their intimate knowledge of the area around Tikrit and their cunning in outwitting an enemy with spy satellites that can intercept telephone conversations, imaging technology that can detect men moving at night and computer databases that listed identities, biographies and habits of thousands of Mr. Hussein's followers. "These are people who held senior positions in the security services, the Special Republican Guard, the Special Security Organization and the military," Colonel Megill said of the men who supported Mr. Hussein during his fugitive months. "These are guys who have been with him for years, who have done his dirty deeds and who are just as dirty as he is."

The crucial man for Mr. Hussein was a 300-pound, middle-aged veteran of the Special Security Organization, one of the most feared organizations in Mr. Hussein's terror apparatus. It was this man's capture in Baghdad, a week ago on Friday night, that provided the breakthrough that trapped Mr. Hussein. He was caught after a dozen failed raids by American troops in Tikrit, Samarra and Baiji, Sunni Muslim towns in the Upper Tigris River Valley.

The American command has not publicly identified the informant, citing the risk to continuing military operations. But Maj. Stan Murphy, intelligence officer for the Fourth Infantry Division's First Brigade, the unit responsible for the night raid that brought in Mr. Hussein, described him as one of five top lieutenants trusted with essential tasks for Mr. Hussein. The captured informant acted as a chief of staff and appears to have been one of the only followers who knew of Mr. Hussein's whereabouts at any one time.

As for Mr. Hussein, the American officers said that while he reverted to "a fugitive's life," something he knew well from his experience as he fled Iraq to sanctuary in Egypt in 1959, his moves on the run were mostly improvised, not part of a master plan. "I think he had a plan and actualized it, but I also think it was very haphazard," Colonel Megill said.

American investigators are examining Mr. Hussein's movements and contacts during the eight months of the manhunt, hoping to learn much that will help them unwind the insurgency that has taken the lives of more than 200 American soldiers since President Bush declared an end of major combat operations on May 1.

For the Americans, probing Mr. Hussein's movements and contacts during the eight months of the manhunt is crucial. The Americans say they need to know the extent to which the ambushes, roadside explosions and suicide bombings have been aimed at Mr. Hussein's restoration, and how closely the former dictator was directing the attacks. Part of the answer, the American officers said, lies in the documents seized along with Mr. Hussein, which have, they said, provided evidence that he had at least a guiding and inspiring role, if not an operational one, in directing the attacks.

Colonel Megill says he is convinced that Mr. Hussein's role was crucial. "I don't think he goes out there and plans operations," the colonel said. "I think he gives more general guidance to his subordinates like `Focus on this or focus on that. In this area, recruit. In that area, make trouble.' " Major Murphy, the First Brigade officer, said much the same. "He would give very general guidance like, `Hey, I'd like to see more attacks,' " he said.

Mr. Hussein, described by American officers as nervous and cooperative at the time of his capture, is said to have reverted in detention to truculence and mockery of his interrogators, denying any wrongdoing, and defending pogroms during an uprising in 1991 in which tens of thousands of Shiite Muslims were shot and dumped in mass graves.

Still, the documents have provided a breakthrough in the American understanding of the cell structure underpinning the insurgency, one American official said. The leaders of three cells identified in the documents have already been detained, that official said, and four others identified in the papers and a man believed to have acted as a courier were being tracked down.

The guerrilla leaders' capture, the official said, has led to the names of many others believed to be fighting against the Americans. Those men, too, are now on an American wanted list of more than 9,000 people. One guerrilla leader was found this week preparing passports for himself and his family, suggesting that he was about to flee Iraq, the Americans said.

A Basic Distrust

If blood ties were basic to Mr. Hussein's survival, so too was his distrust of all those around him, born in his youthful days as a conspirator. That distrust led him, American officers said, to organize his life on the run around a web of underground cells, none aware of the others, using a model he studied in books about the Bolshevik underground in Russia and the man he took as his model, Stalin.

Written communications by Mr. Hussein were rare, as were telephone calls. American intelligence somehow penetrated Mr. Hussein's inner entourage before the war, finding one of his security aides who used a Thuraya satellite telephone, of the kind that American commanders favored. According to accounts circulating in Baghdad, Mr. Hussein personally executed the security man after the second of two pinpoint bombing strikes that nearly killed him, on March 20 and April 7, and after that the use of satellite telephones by his entourage virtually stopped. That, too, prompted a reversion to village habits.

"Traditional Arab society operates by word of mouth," Colonel Megill said.

In the end, the American officers said, a group of 20 to 25 people made up Mr. Hussein's innermost circle. They represented the brutish tribal bands that were the bedrock of his security in Baghdad, men with secure positions on his extended family tree: money men doling out some of the millions of dollars Mr. Hussein carried with him from looted banks and secret palace vaults when he fled Baghdad, logistics men who plotted his movements and prepared the way and a retinue of cooks, drivers and bodyguards.

All shared a bond of blood and trust, dating from Mr. Hussein's rise to power four decades ago, the American officers said. An assassin once himself, the former dictator understood how to construct the inner rings of his security from people of village origins, tied tightly to him, aware of the torture-chamber fate that awaited those inclined to betray him, and with few ambitions but to retain the dictator's favor and their privileged lives.

Mr. Hussein tried to keep his hideaways and movements secret by giving lavish cash gifts to those who harbored him, often after only a knock on the door in the middle of the night and a plea to help an anonymous family member in need. Most of the safe houses appear to have been owned by men favored by Mr. Hussein with gifts of land and jobs, often bestowed years before.

To bind those people and distract them from the lure of the $25 million reward posted by the American military command, Mr. Hussein carried large amounts of cash. He was caught with $750,000 in American $100 bills that the United States authorities are now tracing, but American officers believe that his options were narrowing as his cash drained away, along with his access to whatever foreign bank accounts that escaped being frozen, and other assets like jewelry from the extravagant collection of his first wife, Sajida, the mother of Uday and Qusay.

"You can show up unaccounted for and they'll offer you hospitality, but you've got to pay for it," said Colonel Megill. "Family ties get very, very thin after a while if they're not rewarded."

In a kind of Iraqi underground railroad, Mr. Hussein was passed from one lieutenant to another, from one safe house to the next, always one step ahead of the Americans. There were close calls. Before the mission on Saturday, the First Brigade believed it had hard enough information on Mr. Hussein's location 11 times in the past several months to conduct a raid. Until last Saturday, each attempt fell short, by only eight hours in one case. "My guess would be he had probably 20 to 30 of these around the country as he moved around," Maj. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the Fourth Division commander, said of Mr. Hussein's hide-outs. "I believe he moved every three to four hours on short notice." Major Murphy, the First Brigade's intelligence officer, agreed that the fallen dictator had moved often but said that he appeared to have remained as long as a week in any one place if it seemed safe.

If so, it would follow a pattern familiar to American intelligence from the Persian Gulf war in 1991 and the 21-day war that overthrew Mr. Hussein this spring, of the Iraqi strongman rarely sleeping in the same place two nights running, abandoning his motorcades and elaborate multilayered rings of security for clattering taxis and a solitary guard or two with pistols in their waistbands, and employing a team of doubles.

The safe houses were a mix: modest homes in middle-class suburban neighborhoods, or mundane outbuildings on sprawling properties owned by his henchmen, or disheveled rural farmhouses like the one where he was finally caught in Ad Dwar. Some had false walls built into them. Others had cramped underground chambers camouflaged at ground level. All were in areas where Mr. Hussein was surrounded by Sunni Muslims loath to betray him, as the latest in the long line of Sunni minority leaders of Iraq.

The Final Hide-Out

It was one such man, Qais Namaq, a former guard at one of Mr. Hussein's palaces in Baghdad, who with two younger brothers took Mr. Hussein in at a farmhouse beside the river at Ad Dwar. They were arrested during the raid. A sister of Mr. Namaq told reporters at another family home in Ad Dwar this week that it was the three brothers who dug the hole and poured the concrete for the cramped, dank underground bunker in the farmhouse courtyard where Mr. Hussein was found.

The trail to Mr. Namaq's farmhouse opened up in June, when the First Brigade made a perceptional breakthrough, said Col. James B. Hickey, the armored cavalry officer from Chicago who led the raid. Army intelligence realized that the key to Mr. Hussein's security — and, ultimately, to his whereabouts — lay in the five tribal families that had provided his bodyguards, said Colonel Hickey, 43.

At its headquarters, the infantry division put up a color-coded chart showing Mr. Hussein in the center, in a yellow bull's-eye, with family and tribal links radiating outward and the names of those killed or captured in red. Along with Mr. Hussein, the key man on the chart is the "man with the 42-inch waistband," as Colonel Hickey described him, Mr. Hussein's effective chief of staff. It was his capture in Baghdad a week ago on Friday that led the Americans to Mr. Hussein.

American officers said they had mounted sweeps of Ad Dwar dozens of times, but one crucial clue eluded them: the link between the town and Mr. Hussein's swim in 1959. So crucial was this to the townsmen that they had a nickname for the farming area just northwest of the town, Al Aboor, meaning crossing in Arabic. Whenever Mr. Hussein came for the annual commemoration, he handed out plots of land and jobs, cementing the loyalties that kept him in power. In 1991, one of the men who got a job in Baghdad, as a palace guard, was Mr. Namaq, the man whose farmhouse provided Mr. Hussein with his last redoubt.

Now, the question that presses on the angry men of Tikrit and Ad Dwar is why their fallen idol failed to fight it out with his captors, leaving a pistol and a Kalashnikov rifle lying on the bunker floor as he emerged, hands raised, into the night.

"It was a mistake to hide in such a disgusting place, a dishonor for Saddam but also for Iraq," said Hatim Jassem, 35, a theology professor. "People saw him on television and said: `This is pathetic. He has disappointed us. He has let Iraq down.' "

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company