The Prisoner in His Palace Page 5

  The young boy who’d grown up in the rough-and-tumble town of Awja and who’d had to repeatedly learn how to master fear had himself become expert in strategically using it. He’d finally eliminated any possibility that potential rivals would oppose him. Like herds of animals startled into flight, they were driven by an instinct for self-preservation.

  CHAPTER 9

  Baghdad, Iraq—summer of 2006

  Chris Tasker sat watching as the former president of Iraq set down a breakfast tray on his bedside table and gingerly lowered himself to the edge of his bunk. Carefully, Saddam took up knife and fork and prepared to dig into his breakfast: a vegetable omelet, accompanied by some muffins and freshly cut fruit. Tasker observed from just outside the former president’s cell on the Rock, manning the small desk that had been placed there for the guards to use. Though Tasker had an abstract understanding of the violence of which Saddam was capable, he’d never really be able to feel—at that deep, visceral, fight-or-flight level—what it was like for those Baath Party officials summoned to the Al-Khuld Conference Center on that hot July day in 1979. Iraqis under Saddam possessed an intuitive understanding of the physiology of terror. It bound them together in a shared understanding that the American guards could never fully appreciate, no matter how many hours they spent with the deposed ruler.

  As Tasker reflected on his new assignment, he still sometimes couldn’t believe that it had only been a few years ago when he and his fellow recruits had been pulled aside during basic training for an important announcement.

  Tasker had been just days away from graduating basic when his drill sergeant called the recruits into a break room at Fort Leonard Wood. Snow blanketed the sprawling base, spreading a layer of gauze over Missouri’s rolling hills and spurring thoughts of Christmas, which was only a couple of weeks away. The early Christmas present they received, though, was wholly different from anything anticipated. The news announcer on the break room’s TV seemed chirpier than usual: Saddam Hussein had been captured. It was December 13, 2003.

  Tasker and the other recruits had let out a loud cheer. Tasker felt goose bumps ripple across his body. Shit, we got him, he thought. Along with some of the other recruits, he feared that the war would be over before they even had a chance to deploy and put their training to use. Still fueled by the powerful motivation to serve that had led him to enlist after 9/11, he didn’t want to be stuck on the sidelines back in the States when it looked like the action might come to a quick and decisive conclusion in Iraq. Was there a chance of that happening? U.S. secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld had confidently predicted that the war might take “five days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.”

  The expected quick resolution hadn’t materialized, and now, nearly three years later, Tasker was one of about 140,000 troops still deployed to Iraq. He sat watching as Saddam carefully began to eat his breakfast in sections, beginning with the omelet (which he’d reject and send back for a new one if it was “torn” in any way) before moving on to a sugary muffin and finishing up with fresh fruit.

  Tasker noticed that Saddam had a sweet tooth. The young soldier had begun to pick up on the former president’s human idiosyncrasies—some trivial, some more revealing—and he wasn’t quite sure what to make of them. He supposed it made Saddam less intimidating, that he could yield to the siren call of a sugary muffin the way anyone else might.

  Saddam then lit a cigar. The cigar tastes better after the fruit, he announced.

  After enjoying a hearty breakfast, Saddam oriented himself toward a small mark the soldiers had placed on his cell wall to indicate the direction of Mecca, and began his morning prayers. He seemed remarkably content, perhaps because for the first time in decades he was able to rest comfortably without fearing, as one of the Super Twelve put it, that “someone in his security detail would cut his head off in the middle of the night.”

  Chris’s quiet observation of Saddam was interrupted by the arrival of the medic, making his morning rounds. Tasker watched as Saddam, finishing his prayers and clad in his dishdasha—or “man dress,” as the soldiers called it—walked over to his rickety exercise bike.

  Time to ride my pony, he said spiritedly.

  His pony was in fact little more than “a shitty old bike like you’d find at Goodwill,” Paul Sphar recalled.

  Saddam fixed his gaze on Tasker and flashed his devilish grin.

  What now? wondered Tasker.

  Saddam patted one leg, said, “This leg gazelle,” and then patted the other one, saying, “This leg not gazelle.” He paused briefly, still smiling, and concluded, “Once I get stronger, and am a full gazelle, I am going to jump that fence outside and escape.” He then burst out in his trademark deep-throated laugh that reminded Tasker of “that Dracula dude from Sesame Street,” mounted the bike, and began pedaling.

  Saddam rode the bike for about ten minutes so that the medic could check his blood pressure after the moderate exertion. Following the check of his vitals, the former president then retreated to the stack of books and papers on his desk. Though papers were strewn about everywhere, he always seemed to know exactly where everything was.

  Another member of the Super Twelve, Tucker Dawson, would later recall how, following one of these morning rides, Saddam had beckoned to him. Come here, he asked.

  Saddam’s interest was something new. At first Saddam had barely acknowledged the soldiers, though he would occasionally appear to be studying them, almost as if sizing them up. Better be careful, Dawson thought.

  Come here, friend, Saddam repeated, gesturing to the young American.

  I escape from jail before, you know, he said in his broken English, suggesting by his tone that the potential was there for him to do it again. After I try to kill Qasim, I was shot in the leg. He grew more animated as he recalled his failed 1959 assassination attempt on Iraq’s then prime minister, Abd al-Karim Qasim.

  So I got a horse, and ride across desert, but then I need to switch horse for a donkey, so no one knows it was me. Then I swim across river and escape all the way to Syria, he concluded.

  According to former CIA officer Charles Duelfer, the notion that there is a nobility to be found in valiant struggle—even a potentially futile one—resonated with Saddam. He’d enjoyed Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea when he was younger while serving time in prison for conspiring against the government. In the book Santiago, an old fisherman, risks everything to bring home a record marlin, stubbornly persisting in his effort to haul it to shore. Perhaps that doomed quest reminded Saddam of his own fearsome struggles, all of which he’d been able to endure long enough to stave off defeat.

  One of Iraq’s most decorated generals, Ra’ad al-Hamdani, recalls how, following some of the many occasions on which Saddam escaped brushes with death, the president would retreat to his palace in Tikrit, on the banks of the Tigris, don his bathing trunks, and reenact his swim across the river as a young fugitive on the run, desperate to evade authorities after his failed assassination attempt on Prime Minister Qasim. Indeed, the peculiar tradition would become something of a good-luck ritual for the superstitious Saddam. Unsurprisingly, when Saddam needed to escape Baghdad after the U.S. invasion, the “boy of the alleys” would once again flee to the hardscrabble villages along the Tigris that he always considered home.

  PART II

  THE ACE OF SPADES

  He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

  —Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

  CHAPTER 10

  Ad Dawr and Tikrit, Iraq—December 13, 2003

  “My name is Saddam Hussein, I am the president of Iraq, and I am willing to negotiate.”

  It was December 13, 2003, just after 8:00 p.m., when special operators from the Army’s Delta Force dragged the former president from his infamous “spider hole,” a coffin-like hiding place that was roughly five feet deep and just wide enough to lie down in. He was armed with a pistol
but put his hands up in surrender. Less than a year before, his power extended over 170,000 square miles. That domain was now reduced to a dirt hole near the village of Ad Dawr, less than ten miles to the southeast of the mud hut in which he’d grown up.

  He looked frail and dirty, clad in a raggedy black dishdasha. Always one to cultivate a stylish, debonair persona, he would have been horrified by the images of himself, which showed a man bedraggled and confused. He’d briefly resisted before the elite soldiers quickly overpowered him, resulting in a split lip. He hadn’t been physically dominated in decades, and he appeared to lapse into a state of shocked bewilderment in the immediate aftermath of his apprehension. His cowed state wouldn’t last long, though.

  U.S. forces had been hunting for him since the spring. But even before that, for years, he’d inhabited a world populated by enemies, real and imagined. He’d survived numerous assassination attempts, waged three wars, and rarely slept in the same place for more than a few nights. Fleeing Iraq was out of the question. “Saddam would never leave Iraq; in his mind he was Iraq,” says Judith Yaphe, a former Middle East analyst with the CIA. Rumors had abounded as to where he was hiding. There’d been reports of him hiding in plain sight near Tikrit, posing as everything from a taxi driver to a shepherd. “He was everywhere, yet nowhere,” said Lieutenant Colonel Steve Russell, whose 1st Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment, was responsible for the area. Russell’s unit called them Elvis sightings.

  “He’s probably pumping gas in Awja,” they joked.

  Saddam had made his way home to Ad Dawr. His tribal roots there ran deep, and the local population was as fiercely loyal to him as any in Iraq. It remained a poor place, a slice of lush riverfront terrain quickly giving way to arid scrubland, just as removed from Baghdad’s corridors of power as it had been when he fled there more than forty years prior following the failed assassination attempt of then prime minister Qasim.

  The Delta operators were recognizable from their lack of identification—name tags and rank are often missing from their uniforms—and from their beards and cutting-edge communications equipment and weaponry. They loaded Saddam into a waiting helicopter and spirited him to his Tikrit palace complex, which was only a few minutes away and had been converted into a U.S. outpost.

  The palace complex, which consisted of more than ninety buildings occupying two miles of riverfront property, looked like a massive, but defunct, desert resort. It was built into the hills overlooking the Tigris and surrounded by limp palm trees that encircled a man-made lake. This had been Saddam’s favorite home, a sanctuary to which he’d often escape from the stresses of Baghdad. Where he once swam and fished with his family and associates, American soldiers now sometimes water-skied.

  The 4th Infantry Division occupied many of the structures, leaving a once ornate guesthouse as the base of operations for Delta. As the burly special operators led Saddam to a spare room for temporary holding, they passed the gold trim, grandiose foyers, and plush seating that the former president had once proudly showed off to guests. Saddam spent the next two hours locked in the stark overflow room that had once served as a closet or pantry, likely touched only by Saddam’s servants in years past. A medic was assigned to observe him during this span, at one point escorting him down the hall to the bathroom. Saddam was home. It was odd and dreamlike.

  Soon the Delta operators were ready to deliver him to a more secure holding area in Baghdad. As they led him from his palace, Saddam halted at the top step, looking out at the city lights of Tikrit. It was the birthplace of his idol, the legendary warrior Saladin, and had been the center of his universe. Saddam slowly looked right, then left, and took a deep breath, making what appeared to be a conscious effort to soak it all in. It was as if he was taking a mental snapshot to carry with him into the unknown.

  Having finally begun to descend the palace steps, Saddam suddenly stopped again. He objected to the raggedy black dishdasha in which he’d been captured. Look at me, he said. I am Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq. Do you want the world to think that this is how the United States treats heads of state?

  One of the operators ran inside for some other clothes. “We’ll make you look like a rock star,” he said reassuringly.

  As the special operations team loaded Saddam onto a helicopter, they put a mask over his head so that he wouldn’t be able to observe the top-secret technological gear inside the cockpit and fuselage. A number of Delta operators piled in alongside Saddam for the ride. Tex, a burly southerner, wedged his muscular body in next to Saddam. As the chopper made its way south toward Baghdad above the Tigris River valley, Tex felt Saddam gently patting his leg.

  For the wily dictator there was always one more game to play.

  CHAPTER 11

  Omaha, Nebraska—January 10, 2004

  Rod Middleton, a veteran FBI agent, was at home on a freezing Saturday afternoon a little more than a month after Saddam Hussein’s capture. The temperature outside was dipping into the low twenties, and Middleton was thankful to be warm inside, painting the bedroom of his family’s new house yellow—his wife Barbara’s favorite color. After the absurdly expensive cost of living in Washington, DC, where Middleton had been assigned to FBI Headquarters, they were thrilled to now be able to afford a nice house on a golf course. Middleton had spent his first summer in Omaha supervising a Joint Terrorism Task Force, as well as enjoying more free time with his family. He’d even managed to get his golf handicap down to a respectable 12.

  The phone rang, interrupting his painting. It was FBI Headquarters calling with a simple question. Would you like to participate in the interrogation of Saddam Hussein?

  It took Middleton a moment to digest what he’d been asked. He was a marathoner with a competitive streak, and his curiosity was definitely sparked, but he explained that he’d first need to check with his wife. After more than twenty years with the Bureau, including considerable time hopscotching across the globe conducting terrorism investigations, he’d been looking forward to a change of pace with his quieter assignment in Omaha. And his wife had been looking forward to it even more.

  Nonetheless, Barbara Middleton said yes and two weeks later, having read everything he could find on Iraq and Saddam, Middleton found himself on a C-5 headed to Baghdad. He was traveling with George Piro, a Lebanese-American Arabic-speaking agent who would lead the FBI’s interrogation; Tom Neer, an FBI behavioral profiler; two intelligence analysts; and an Arabic linguist.

  Baghdad, Iraq—first few months of 2004

  On the sprawling U.S. base at Baghdad International Airport, Middleton, Piro, and the rest of the interrogation team set up shop in a seagoing cargo container that had been outfitted with secure communications equipment, enabling them to remain in constant contact with their headquarters in DC, as well as other intelligence and law enforcement community personnel stationed around the world.

  After they began settling in, the FBI team was updated on the progress of Saddam’s interrogations thus far. It had been a little over a month since the Iraqi leader had been captured, and by now he’d been questioned by the CIA around twenty-five times. The Agency’s primary focus had been to determine the status of Iraq’s WMD (weapons of mass destruction) program, since U.S. forces had turned up nothing after nearly a year of searching, and leaders in Washington were growing impatient. The interrogators were also interested in gathering sensitive, “real-time” intelligence to assist in capturing high-level former regime figures and to contain an insurgency that seemed to be gaining momentum. In the prior month, forty-eight American soldiers deployed to Iraq had been killed.

  The CIA team had found Saddam to be a frustratingly elusive interrogation subject, though, and the decision was made in Washington to turn the questioning over to the FBI, since they’d be more capable of building a case against Saddam that could eventually be presented before an international or Iraqi tribunal. A decision had not yet been made on how the former Iraqi president would be brought to justice for alleged crimes against huma
nity.

  The FBI team agreed that George Piro would be the lead interrogator, in part due to his proficiency in Arabic. It was a remarkable opportunity for the young FBI agent, who at that time had only been with the Bureau for five years. Joining Piro in questioning Saddam would be Middleton. Despite the fact that both men spoke Arabic, they’d still be accompanied by an FBI linguist who would function as translator. Tom Neer, the FBI’s behavioral analyst, set about developing a strategy to extract information from Saddam based on his psychological profile, which had years before been described by the CIA’s Jerrold Post as that of a “malignant narcissist” with certain psychopathic attributes. The FBI team prepared themselves for someone who would exhibit a combination of extreme grandiosity and paranoia, no constraints of conscience, a lack of empathy, and zero respect for the truth.

  In short, they didn’t expect their job to be easy.

  The interrogation room featured white cinder-block walls and an overhead fluorescent light. It was simple and bare, containing only four folding chairs for Saddam, his two FBI interlocutors, and the linguist. Each day, Saddam would don his dishdasha, sometimes adding his warmer dark jacket if it was cold, pray in his small cell with the Koran he was provided, and meet with his interrogators. His back would be to the far wall, with the interrogators between him and the door.

  As the sessions began, Saddam took a seat and crossed his legs, seemingly perfectly at ease.

  The interrogators’ first challenge was determining how to address him.

  Saddam had been insistent that he remained the lawful president of Iraq, and, sure enough, he introduced himself as such at their first meeting. The men grudgingly went along with it in the belief that immediately challenging him would just trigger a narcissistic rage and be counterproductive. Said one team member: “If we’d instantly created an adversarial situation, we wouldn’t have gotten a conversation at all.”