The Prisoner in His Palace Read online

  He’d been a “screamer” on previous deployments at detention facilities. The job of the screamer was to let detainees know on their arrival that no guff from them would be tolerated. As Hutch explained it: “You give them that initial shock, where you stand in front of ’em, probably about an inch from their face, and scream out the rules and regulations of the camp. . . . Your job is to establish that the guard has ultimate control of the guard-detainee relationship.”

  Though Hutch had vowed to treat this as just another mission, as he sat observing Saddam late that night he felt smaller than he ever remembered feeling. He wondered if he was the right person for this unique duty. His mind wandered back to the first Gulf War, when as a young kid he’d written to soldiers deployed to Iraq and sometimes received notes back that included Iraqi dinar—Saddam’s face staring from them—as a souvenir. The man he’d always imagined as a larger-than-life demon was now snoring in front of him.

  The soldiers had been instructed to maintain visual contact with Saddam at all times to ensure he wasn’t able to harm himself, or be hurt by others. In the wake of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, the United States was acutely aware of the public relations disaster that would result from allegations of mistreatment. Hutch was joined during this eight-hour overnight shift by two additional guards. An NCO was assigned to observe Saddam remotely via a closed-circuit TV camera, while a “roving” guard patrolled the area and was on call for any additional tasks that might pop up. Not long ago, the assignment would have been unimaginable to some of the younger soldiers who at basic training had performed similar roving guard duty armed with fake “rubber duck” rifles.

  The IHT was a massive facility consisting of several floors that included the courtroom and an “amphitheater-like” room resembling “mission control in Houston” in which security personnel monitored a large bank of TV screens showing the underground cells.

  “You could sit in mission control and watch the prisoners taking a dump if you were so inclined,” wryly recalls William Wiley, a Canadian lawyer who was assigned to assist with Saddam’s defense.

  Having settled into his uncomfortable chair just outside Saddam’s cell, Hutch began anxiously leafing through a graphic novel, Resident Evil: Code: Veronica, to pass the time. Over the course of this deployment he’d eventually work his way completely through the Harry Potter books and the Hunger Games series, ostensibly so that he had something to discuss with his daughter when he called home.

  Suddenly, the silence was shattered. “Chemical” Ali Hassan al-Majid, one of Saddam’s top lieutenants, had begun praying in a nearby cell. Ali was accused of having helped mastermind a genocidal campaign that used both chemical and conventional weapons to try to exterminate Iraqi Kurds, who were considered a threat to Saddam’s rule. According to Baath Party records, the man who’d suddenly risen from his cot to pray aloud had once signed orders instructing the Iraqi military to “carry out random bombardments using artillery, helicopters, and aircraft at all times of day or night to kill the largest number of persons present in those prohibited zones.” The orders instructed northern field commanders that “all persons captured in those villages shall be detained and interrogated by the security services and those between the ages of fifteen and seventy shall be executed after any useful information has been obtained from them.”

  All told, Ali Hassan al-Majid may have been responsible for the deaths of more than a hundred thousand human beings.

  Saddam, who’d been snoring, was abruptly awakened by Ali’s prayers, and began to tiredly mumble prayers of his own, all the while remaining prone in bed. He seemed to be going through the motions, without much feeling, as if he were trying to get it over with as quickly as possible. Though the Baath Party that Saddam had led was in theory secular, he’d launched a “faith campaign” in the 1990s designed to push Iraq in a more devout direction. He’d even donated blood at regular intervals so that a copy of the Koran could be written entirely in the dark red liquid. The extent to which Saddam’s religious faith was sincere was a much debated topic. Hutch, though, wasn’t expending mental energy wondering if Saddam’s halfhearted prayer was genuine or not. Instead, his mind was troubled by thoughts that only a week prior would have seemed far-fetched, such as that Sunni insurgents might somehow break into the heavily fortified Green Zone in an effort to free their deposed leader.

  Hutch chided himself for letting his imagination run wild. Still, there was something spooky about being down in these shadowy underground corridors late at night, surrounded by men with so much blood on their hands. The man who’d been sleeping just a few feet away had, after all, once said, “I wish America would bring its Army and occupy Iraq. I wish they would do it so we can kill all Americans. We will roast them and eat them.” Hutch couldn’t help but equate Saddam with Hannibal Lecter, the iconic serial killer in The Silence of the Lambs: diabolically manipulative, “the greatest devil on the planet—someone who could kill you instantly.”

  More nervous than he’d expected to be, Hutch resolved to remain vigilant and not let down his guard in Saddam’s presence. In addition to the possibility that insurgents would somehow launch a mission to free Saddam, he’d also been cautioned to watch out for an unbalanced soldier trying to harm the former president, either as an act of vigilante justice or to become famous.

  It was then that he heard a noise coming from the shadows down the hall. While he didn’t want to leave his post, he needed to determine what it was, so he crept forward in the direction of the sound, heart racing. It would be just my luck that something crazy happens on my first night, he thought. Inching closer to the source of the commotion, fearing the worst, he was startled by a cat that suddenly leapt out of the shadows and darted past him. You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, thought Hutch. Relief quickly turned to embarrassment as he recognized his own jitteriness.

  The rest of the night passed without event. Saddam fell back asleep, and from that point forward offered only an occasional snore to break the silence. Hutch returned to his graphic novel, finally able to throttle his imagination down to a manageable level.

  Private Sphar, who pulled similar nighttime shifts, later reflected that during times like these when Saddam slumbered he was like a lion at the zoo. “He looked majestic and peaceful, but if you removed the glass, you’d see a different animal.” Over the many days and nights that the Super Twelve would interact with the former Iraqi ruler and see his different sides, many would wonder about his origins. Dr. Jerrold Post, founder of the CIA’s psychological profiling unit, simply referred to him as “the most traumatized leader I have ever studied.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Al-Awja, Iraq—late 1930s

  Awja means “the turning,” and the town is named after a sharp bend in the Tigris River, on which it sits. Elites in Baghdad sometimes refer to the region as a Hamptons socialite might describe a blue-collar bumpkin from a rural hamlet in West Virginia. Awja was, by all accounts, a frightening backwater, a place that achieved notoriety for its violence even within a larger society in which bloody feuds were common. It was rife with bandits who found its location ideal; passing barges, en route from Mosul to Baghdad, proved especially vulnerable to low-level piracy, as they had to slow down to carefully navigate the twist in the Tigris as they floated past.

  Awja was desperately poor, a sinister place inhabited by locals who spoke in a rough unrefined dialect and were famously prone to resolve disputes with violence. Even the natives of Tikrit, just a few miles upriver on the Tigris, reportedly shuttered their market stalls when rough men from Awja strode into town, too aware of the potential for thievery and violent confrontation. The region resembled “the badlands in a western movie,” and the local Albu Nasir tribe was known as “a difficult lot of people, cunning and secretive.”

  A Middle East scholar, Amatzia Baram, tells the story of a Jewish family in the 1930s—the Vilkhas, from Tikrit. Merchants, the Vilkhas were well-to-do by local standards, and had gotten to know a
pregnant woman named Subha from nearby Awja. The Vilkhas had heard that Subha’s twelve-year-old son was extremely sick with headaches and vomiting. Recognizing that mother and son needed to get to the hospital in Baghdad, the Jewish family offered to deliver them there in their black sedan, since the Vilkhas had a sister in Baghdad who lived across the street from the hospital.

  They rushed to the hospital, where they leveraged family connections to make sure Subha’s son was quickly seen by a doctor. But it was too late. The boy died on the operating table, perhaps of a brain tumor, and Subha fell into hysterics. She’d always been an odd one, Subha, different from the other villagers—she fancied herself as something of a clairvoyant—and her son’s death seems to have magnified her eccentricities and instability. Despairing that she no longer had a husband—he’d disappeared months before—and that her son had died, she supposedly tried to smash her pregnant stomach against the door on the way out of the hospital, hoping to crush the life out of her eight-month-old fetus. She then tried to launch herself under a bus.

  The Vilkhas returned the distraught Subha back to her home in Awja, where one of the Vilkha women alleged that Subha would scream, “I’m carrying Satan in my belly—this fetus has already killed his father and his brother and wants to be the only man in the family.” Despite Subha’s mental instability, she eventually gave birth to “a beautiful, intelligent, sweet, somewhat naughty and mischievous young boy.” She named him Saddam, meaning “one who confronts.”

  Saddam likely grew up in a cramped one-room mudbrick dwelling without electricity or running water, and with only a dirt floor to sleep on. He was subjected to cruel taunts from the village boys for not having a father, who was rumored to have been killed in an act of banditry, and he was bereft of his older brother, who might have helped shield him from abuse. Forced to navigate the dusty alleyways of the desolate riverside town alone, he reportedly took to wielding an iron bar to fend off attacks. He quickly learned what it took to survive in this predatory world, becoming what Arabs called a “son of the alleys.”

  Saddam hardly had a childhood. As a young boy he’d cower as his stepfather, a brutish man known locally as “Hassan the Liar,” lunged toward him with a large pipe, soaked in boiling tar, swinging wildly. The man cursed at the boy, calling him the “son of a dog,” and laughed menacingly as he tried to duck the blows. A former CIA analyst began a story about him by saying, “When Saddam was a child,” before catching herself. She continued, “If he ever was a child.” Saddam was forced to survive on his wits and strength from the very beginning.

  Awja was and is a deeply patriarchal society. Tribal codes in Iraq are more dominant in rural towns like Awja than in more diverse cities. Local strongmen—sheikhs—dominate their fiefdoms like mafia dons, employing both carrot and stick to remain on top and ensure that their tribe remains strong relative to rivals.

  Observing early in life the brutal and unforgiving Awja brand of governance, Saddam would go on to become one of its most skilled practitioners.

  CHAPTER 6

  The forbidding backwater that spawned Saddam Hussein couldn’t have been more different from the idyllic backyards of Amherst, Ohio, where young Chris Tasker and his childhood friends reenacted Civil War battles, clutching toy muskets and pretending to be the officers and generals they’d read about in history books. The boys would converge after school, eagerly don mismatched scraps of Civil War–era regalia—Tasker’s family didn’t have enough money to buy him a proper uniform—and practice military formations. His buddy even located a recipe for hardtack, a dietary staple of Civil War infantrymen, and would cook it up for them to snack on as they pretended to set up camp.

  Amherst hadn’t changed much since those childhood days. The big difference was that when Tasker was home between deployments, instead of marching around in an ill-fitting Union or Confederate uniform, he and his grown-up friends spent their free time bar crawling, visiting the Captain’s Club, Pour House, and Ziggy’s on downtown’s Park Avenue. It was a city of slightly more than twelve thousand where Lenten fish fries at the local VFW Post 1662 were still popular on Friday nights in the spring—an overtly patriotic spot on the Ohio map that was often draped in American flags, the kind of place celebrated in Bruce Springsteen’s elegies for the Rust Belt working class.

  While hitting the bars back home prior to his deployment to Iraq, Tasker always kept pretty quiet about his time in Afghanistan. He’d politely answer questions if asked, but he didn’t go overboard volunteering stories. He didn’t want to be one of those guys who get ridiculed as “hometown heroes”; the type who serve as supply clerks while deployed, but return with stories that are full of blood and guts.

  Tasker also tried to savor every moment with his girlfriend, Amanda, since he knew from experience what it would be like to go for a year without female companionship. She was the sister of a childhood friend and Tasker had always known her, but it wasn’t until he went to a birthday party for her while on leave from basic training that he began falling for her. During his subsequent deployment to Afghanistan, their virtual relationship picked up steam.

  When he got back to the States, their relationship was still long-distance, but not so long: she was at Ohio State and he at Fort Campbell. He tried to make the six-hour drive up to visit her as often as he could. Sometimes, when he prowled the campus with Amanda and her friends, it occurred to him how exotic he must seem, having done things in Afghanistan that were beyond the comprehension of most students whose lives were defined by Buckeye football and fraternity parties. In those moments, he felt both proud and a little wistful. It must be nice for your chief worry to be the next big paper that’s due.

  Now stationed in Iraq, Tasker did his best to keep in touch with his family in Ohio. He remembered how much his mother had worried about him when he’d been in Afghanistan, and he knew it was important to reassure her he was okay. For American troops, the ability to remain in such close contact with home was one of the unique features of twenty-first-century war. The ease of communication was generally considered a good thing—though, of course, there was always the chance that being just an email away might thrust a soldier back into a festering problem.

  As Tasker logged on to one of the shared computers that the Super Twelve used to contact friends and family, he was careful not to repeat a recent mistake. In emailing his dad to tell him that his convoy had been hit by an IED, he’d begun with the words “Don’t tell Mom.” He hadn’t realized that his parents shared their email passwords, and that his mom had read the message first, with a predictable effect on her anxiety level. In truth, her worries weren’t without cause. At this point in 2006, America’s cable news networks were busy beaming grisly footage of Baghdad’s violent streets and reporting on the nearly one hundred Iraqis who were losing their lives every day.

  When Tasker opened his email inbox he found a message from his mom. She’d written to let him know that he’d received a letter from the Ohio Public Safety Department. He needed to pay a two-hundred-dollar fine for a speeding ticket. After finishing the email, Tasker exhaled. He was relieved that it wasn’t worse.

  Shortly before his most recent deployment he and his buddy Adam Rogerson had done something stupid. Like most things young men do, it didn’t seem stupid at the time—or, at least, as fully stupid as it obviously was.

  Seat-belted in Tasker’s powerful silver Mustang, the two soldiers had hoped to make the nine-hour drive between Fort Campbell, on the Tennessee-Kentucky border, and Tasker’s hometown of Amherst, Ohio, in seven or eight hours. The two MPs lived only a few exits apart, and they were looking forward to making the most of one of their last weekends of freedom. They were still in uniform, which was technically against the rules, but they’d wanted to hit the road as soon as they got off duty. The top was down, and the heat of the long southern day slowly gave way to a cooler night. There was nothing in either direction, and, after a long week of being barked at by NCOs and uptight officers, the young men reveled i
n the freedom of the open road. Rapidly, the needle on their speedometer crept up.

  Suddenly they saw the blur of a police car passing in the opposite direction. A few long seconds elapsed as they held their breath, hoping its siren wouldn’t soon shatter the soft Kentucky twilight. Then they saw the police car’s brake lights flash.

  Shit, he must be turning around to bust us, was their simultaneous thought.

  “Gun it,” said Rogerson, who, ironically, had wanted to be a cop when he got out of the Army; “we can take him.” Thinking back on it later, he’d say, “I don’t know what we were thinking. Two young MPs looking for that last thrill, I guess.”

  The Mustang responded to Tasker’s foot, thundering down the highway, the speedometer rocketing well past 100 miles per hour before they saw blue lights flashing in their rearview mirror. With no real options, Tasker reluctantly decelerated and brought the Mustang to a stop on the shoulder.

  As the Kentucky state trooper approached, it dawned on both soldiers how ridiculous they must have appeared. Large Military Police brassards visible on their arms, and laying rubber on the road like they were in a scene from that old car chase movie Smokey and the Bandit. The cop eyed them quizzically.

  “You’re lucky you’re wearing this uniform or you’d be facedown on the cement and on your way to jail,” he said.

  “Well, I’m glad I’m wearing this uniform, too, then,” Tasker replied coolly, despite the adrenaline coursing through his body.

  By now another cop had pulled up and exited his car—more blue lights lighting up the Kentucky dusk. “Good thing you pulled over,” the second cop said. “I was sitting at the next exit with a spike strip across the road. We also had a helicopter en route,” he said.