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  More Praise for The Prisoner in His Palace

  “Bardenwerper’s examination of how soldiers, trained to focus on the inhumanity of the enemy, struggle to frame and reframe that inhumanity is the focus of The Prisoner in His Palace. The book’s action will pull you along like any great military adventure, but bubbling underneath is an absorbing and sometimes heartbreaking survey of young men grappling with a moral certitude that begins to shift below the desert sands they’re standing on.”

  —Tim Townsend, author of Mission at Nuremberg

  “In the American imagination, Saddam Hussein functions as nothing more than a two-dimensional despot, a monster who terrorized and gassed and desecrated his own people. He was. He did. Will Bardenwerper’s The Prisoner in His Palace reveals something else about Saddam, though, something less simple than that known caricature and certainly more troubling: he was a human being, a human like all of us, a human being with hopes and dreams and regrets that woke him in the dead of night. Saddam wrote poetry and longed for his family and treated the American soldiers tasked with guarding him during his trial with kindness and generosity of spirit. This is a brave and piercing book.”

  —Matt Gallagher, author of the novel Youngblood and Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War

  “The Prisoner in His Palace finds humanity in a singularly inhuman figure, Saddam Hussein. Through meticulous reporting and beautiful storytelling, Will Bardenwerper has crafted a portrait that is both deeply moving and deeply disturbing. This book challenges the tired constructs of ‘good versus evil’ that have led us into so many ill-conceived wars.”

  —Elliot Ackerman, author of Green on Blue

  “An astonishing, riveting story that brings the reader face-to-face with the specter of Saddam Hussein in captivity. As twelve young American guards spend their days in the same room with this brutal gangster-killer, a chilling, Shakespearean portrait emerges. Intriguingly, we meet a man who, while sometimes manipulative and petty, is also avuncular, joking, charming, wistful, and physically affectionate. There is even a scene of the Beast of Baghdad hugging an American soldier in a moment of tenderness. This is an unforgettable, essential read.”

  —William Doyle, author of A Soldier’s Dream: Captain Travis Patriquin and the Awakening of Iraq and PT 109: An American Epic of War, Survival, and the Destiny of John F. Kennedy

  “A moving and perception-altering book that exposes how wrong we are in so much of what we assume about war. In the fifteen years that America has been at war we’ve imprisoned, injured, and killed thousands of foreign citizens. It’s time we got to know some of them. Will Bardenwerper introduces us to a name we know well, but a story about which we know little. Saddam Hussein’s execution was not just about the death of a tyrant. It’s about the Americans who were tasked with guarding him, interrogating him, and preparing him for his death. . . . Mr. Bardenwerper forces us to turn our gaze not only on those we have killed but on those who were there to see the task done.”

  —Eric Fair, Pushcart Prize–winning essayist and author of the memoir Consequence

  “What an astonishing story. Through meticulous research and a keen eye for detail, Bardenwerper does the near impossible: convinces the reader to empathize with Saddam Hussein during his sad final days. The Prisoner in His Palace is a deeply human book, and though we all know the ending, I couldn’t put it down.”

  —Brian Castner, author of The Long Walk and All the Ways We Kill and Die

  “Will Bardenwerper has written a bracing account of Saddam Hussein’s final months through the eyes of those who guarded and interrogated him—eyes that are uncomfortably opened to the complexity of evil. Reminiscent of twentieth-century Nazi character portraits such as Gitta Sereny’s Into That Darkness, Bardenwerper’s The Prisoner in His Palace will be many things to many people. To this writer and combat veteran, it is an exhilarating, extraordinary, and damning look in the mirror.”

  —Adrian Bonenberger, author of Afghan Post

  “The Prisoner in His Palace is an important contribution to the literature from America’s 9/11 wars. Will Bardenwerper has written a concise and engrossing account of the final days of Saddam Hussein. The stories of the American soldiers who guarded the Iraqi leader serve as a sharp reminder of war’s complexities, contradictions, and costs.”

  —J. Kael Weston, author of The Mirror Test: America at War in Iraq and Afghanistan

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  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Characters

  Timeline

  Introduction

  Part I: The Super Twelve

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part II: The Ace of Spades

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part III: Condemned

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Conclusion

  Chapter 37

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Sources

  Notes

  Index

  This book is dedicated to my parents, Walter and Patricia.

  That afternoon there was a party of tourists at the Terrace and looking down in the water among the empty beer cans and dead barracudas a woman saw a great long white spine with a huge tail at the end that lifted and swung with the tide while the east wind blew a heavy steady sea outside the entrance to the harbor.

  “What’s that?” she asked a waiter and pointed to the long backbone of the great fish that was now just garbage waiting to go out with the tide.

  —Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The American soldiers who guarded Saddam Hussein in his last days, the self-dubbed “Super Twelve,” were forbidden from keeping a journal, or from even mentioning their mission in communications with loved ones back home, so there’s no documentary evidence to confirm the exact date of some of the episodes recounted here. The soldiers were, however, later interviewed by Army historians as part of the Army’s oral history program. I was provided these interviews by Michael Gordon in 2010 as I assisted him with research for his book The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama. Consequently, in constructing this book’s chronology, I began with the recollections the soldiers shared in these oral histories before conducting nearly sixty hours of my own interviews with some of the soldiers. (Those interviews are among
the nearly one hundred I conducted with government officials—both U.S. and Arab—as well as scholars, spies, lawyers, and others with unique insights.)

  If a passage is enclosed in quotation marks, it means that I obtained it from an interview or material published elsewhere.

  Much of the dialogue in this book wasn’t recorded as it happened, and in these instances the speaker’s words aren’t in quotation marks. The remarks do, however, faithfully represent the recollections of people involved in the conversations and, in the case of Saddam’s interrogation, declassified FBI accounts.

  Throughout the book, in referencing source material, I’ve made some grammatical changes for the sake of clarity and minor edits for brevity.

  Though this book is a work of nonfiction, I have taken certain storytelling liberties, particularly having to do with the order and arrangement of scenes. In so doing, I’m confident that I’ve accurately captured the essence of what happened.

  I researched and wrote about the events recounted in this book as a journalist. Though I was serving as an infantry officer in Anbar Province, Iraq, when Saddam was executed, I did not participate in or have firsthand knowledge of the events in this account. Furthermore, none of the material in this book was derived from my subsequent time working as a civilian in the Department of Defense.

  One last thing: All the characters in this book are real. To protect privacy in certain cases, though, I have used the following pseudonyms: Andre Jackson, Luke Quarles, Tom Flanagan, Chris Battaglia, Art Perkins, Jeff Price, James Martin, Tucker Dawson, Joseph, Amanda.

  CHARACTERS

  The Super Twelve

  First Lieutenant Andre Jackson

  Staff Sergeant Luke Quarles

  Sergeant Chris Battaglia

  Sergeant Tom Flanagan

  Specialist Steve “Hutch” Hutchinson

  Specialist Art “Old Man” Perkins

  Specialist Adam Rogerson

  Specialist Chris Tasker

  Private First Class Tucker Dawson

  Private First Class James Martin

  Private First Class Jeff Price

  Private First Class Paul Sphar

  Other Key Players

  Ramsey Clark—Former U.S. attorney general who assisted with Saddam’s defense

  Robert “Doc” Ellis—Master sergeant who provided medical care to Saddam

  Raghad Hussein—Saddam’s eldest daughter

  Rod Middleton—FBI agent who interrogated Saddam

  Jaafar al-Moussawi—Chief prosecutor in the trial

  Dr. Najeeb al-Nuaimi—Former Qatari minister of justice brought onto Saddam’s defense team by the dictator’s daughter

  Rauf Abd al-Rahman—Took over as judge in Saddam’s trial and saw the proceedings to a verdict

  TIMELINE

  April 28, 1937: Saddam is born in Awja, Iraq.

  October 7, 1959: Twenty-two-year-old Saddam participates in a failed assassination attempt on then Iraqi prime minister Abd al-Karim Qasim.

  July 17, 1968: The Baath Party seizes power in a bloodless coup led by Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, who assumes the presidency with Saddam serving as a deputy.

  July 16, 1979: Saddam forces Bakr’s resignation and officially seizes the presidency.

  August 2, 1990: Iraq occupies Kuwait.

  August 2, 1990–February 28, 1991: The United States leads a coalition of thirty-four countries against Iraq.

  September 11, 2001: Al Qaeda attacks the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, inspiring many of the Super Twelve to join the military.

  March 20, 2003: The United States initiates a bombing campaign that begins the Iraq War.

  December 13, 2003: Saddam is captured by U.S. forces.

  December 2003–June 2004: Saddam is interrogated.

  October 19, 2005: The trial of Saddam for crimes against humanity begins.

  August 2006: The Super Twelve begin their deployment.

  November 5, 2006: Saddam is found guilty by the Iraqi High Tribunal and sentenced to death by hanging.

  December 30, 2006: Saddam is executed.

  INTRODUCTION

  Baghdad, Iraq—December 30, 2006

  It was time.

  The old man slipped into his black peacoat, then deliberately placed a dark fur hat on his head to protect against the predawn chill.

  This December night was one of the coldest the American soldiers had experienced in Iraq. Six of them stood outside the bombed-out palace that had been converted to hold the prisoner. They could see their breath in the night air. They were dressed in “full battle rattle,” clunky in their Kevlar vests and helmets with mounted night-vision goggles. They each carried a full combat load of hundreds of rounds of ammunition. As they scanned their surroundings for anything out of the ordinary, six more soldiers led the prisoner outside into an idling Humvee for the short ride to the landing zone.

  The silver-bearded old man moved deliberately, almost proudly, working to maintain an upright posture despite the bad back he often complained of. His arms swung freely at his sides. Nearby, two Black Hawks waited, rotors already a blur, violently kicking up clouds of loose sand and gravel. The greenish glow of the soldiers’ night-vision goggles added to the disorienting maelstrom of sound, temperature, and light. It was always a shock for the young men to emerge from the cocoon-like warmth of the cell area and approach a waiting helicopter, its furious power ready to provide vertical lift and whisk away the man they’d come for.

  The six MPs who clustered around the old man led him into one of the Black Hawks, ducking under the swirling rotors and gingerly climbing aboard so as not to trip—their night-vision goggles impaired depth perception. One of the soldiers was especially vigilant, having been instructed to keep a close watch on the prisoner for “anything froggy.” The soldiers were joined by two medics and an interpreter, who lent welcome body heat to the cramped fuselage. Once the first group had piled on board, the other six soldiers quickly filed onto the second Black Hawk.

  The choppers lurched skyward, beginning their short flight to an Iraqi installation in Baghdad’s Shiite Kadhimiya district. A brief look of fear flashed across the old man’s face when the chopper bounced a bit in some rough air. He’d always been a nervous flier. Otherwise he was silent and stoic.

  As soon as the choppers landed, the soldiers ushered him to a waiting “Rhino,” a massive armored bus. The American soldiers piled in alongside, as did the Lebanese-American interpreter, who always had a tough time wedging his large frame into the vehicle.

  It was eerily quiet as the thirteen-ton Rhino began rumbling across the compound in the chilly predawn hours. There was none of the casual banter that usually accompanied missions; none of the familiar jokes volleyed between buddies who’d grown to know each other’s idiosyncrasies. Just silence.

  After a short ride, it was time to turn the man over. He rose from his seat near the back of the Rhino and carefully straightened his black peacoat, making sure it wasn’t rumpled from the brief ride. One of the soldiers had carefully applied a lint roller to it before they’d left his cell. The man then began to walk slowly from his seat near the back toward the front door. As he made his way to the front of the dimly lit armored vehicle, he stopped to grasp each of the twelve young Americans and, in a few cases, to whisper final private words.

  Some of the soldiers now had tears in their eyes.

  When the old man reached the front, he turned to them one last time and said, “May God be with you.” With that, he bowed slightly, and turned toward the door.

  PART I

  THE SUPER TWELVE

  Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do?

  —Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

  CHAPTER 1

  Ocala, Florida—September 11, 2001

  The phone rang, waking Steve Hutchinson from an uncomfortable sleep. His head was pounding, his mouth sandpaper. He was staying at his cousin’s house, and his large frame was draped across the couch. It felt like it had only been a few h
ours since he’d passed out there after getting home from a long night working security at the Midnight Rodeo, a rough honky-tonk bar in the central Florida town of Ocala. He blamed the nasty headache on the beers he’d torn through after his shift ended around 4:00 a.m. Though he tried to ignore it, his phone kept ringing, each series of tones sending searing pain through his hungover skull. Too sapped of energy to hold the phone to his ear, he put it on speaker and clumsily dropped it to the floor.

  “Turn on the TV,” a voice urged. It was his cousin’s wife, calling from work, and she sounded panicked.

  “Which channel?” he asked.

  “Any of them,” she replied.

  It was just after 9:00 a.m. on September 11, 2001. Hutchinson turned on the television just in time to see United Airlines Flight 175 strike the South Tower of the World Trade Center, not quite twenty minutes after American Airlines Flight 11 had slammed into the North Tower.

  Until that morning he’d been on an uncertain career path. A muscular former Georgia high school football and baseball standout, he’d been working for the county road department during the day and doing some bouncing at the Rodeo at night, but the images of a smoldering lower Manhattan decided something in him. “I wasn’t getting over there fast enough,” he’d later say, referring to his decision to join the Army and go overseas.

  Baghdad, Iraq—August 2006

  Five years later, Steve Hutchinson, known as Hutch to his buddies, was doing the “duffel bag drag” across the steamy tarmac of Baghdad International Airport, often referred to as BIAP. He’d arrived as part of the 551st Military Police Company based out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and he knew the drill. Like many who joined the military in the wake of the September 11 attacks, he’d found himself thrust into an exhausting operational tempo. By 2006, he’d already spent a year deployed to Iraq during the initial invasion in 2003, and another in Afghanistan. He was one of the more tenured members of his squad of eleven other American military policemen, mostly in their twenties, who’d just arrived “downrange.” The youngest, Private Tucker Dawson, wasn’t yet twenty-one; the oldest, Specialist Art Perkins, was in his mid-thirties. With the “War on Terror” already nearly five years old, about half had deployed previously while the other half had spilled from the Air Force C-130 into a combat zone for the first time. The lieutenant to whom they reported, Andre Jackson, was a recent ROTC graduate. The junior enlisted soldiers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs) under his command came from all over the United States, though a disproportionate number hailed from working-class communities scattered across the Rust Belt.