The Prisoner in His Palace Read online

  The team believed that by establishing a rapport with Saddam they could get him talking, which might eventually result in his volunteering more information than he might have otherwise. Indeed, at one point in the CIA’s sessions Saddam began coughing and was hacking up phlegm. His interrogators provided him with cups of tea.

  The FBI’s behavioral profiler didn’t even like to refer to the sessions as an interrogation, preferring the more innocuous term “a conversation with a purpose.” The men found Saddam to be an eager talker in response to softball questions that allowed him to embellish his accomplishments. He would point out to Piro and Middleton that it wasn’t important what people thought of him now, but rather what they’d think in five hundred or a thousand years.

  People will love me more after I’m gone than they do now, he said, steepling his hands together. He assiduously maintained an upright posture, never slouching.

  Though never betraying angst, he was always wary. If presented with a string of three or four easy questions followed by one that probed a thornier topic, he never took the bait. He either clammed up, changed the subject, or grew defiant. In response to a question about his use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq War, he responded, “I will discuss everything unless it hurts my people, my friends, or the Army,” thereby, with one declaratory sentence, establishing as off-limits just about everything that would be of value to the Americans.

  At one point he expressed his displeasure at a line of questions by saying, “I thought this was a historical discussion and not an interrogation.”

  “He really was a genius in an interpersonal setting,” says Jeff Green, one of the agents who worked on the interrogation. He explained that Saddam “was in complete control of himself and always maneuvering—little micro-maneuvers—to remain in control of the situation.”

  Saddam was in no way constrained by the truth. He’d deny complicity in alleged war crimes during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, despite the existence of Baath Party archival footage showing him threatening his deputies with firing if they didn’t brutally crush Kuwaiti resistance. In one recorded Revolutionary Command Council meeting, Saddam growls in his guttural Tikriti dialect, “If I hear that you did not cut the tongue of talking there in Kuwait deep from the esophagus, I will replace you all, including the Republican Guard Commander. You tell the Kuwaitis, ‘You are Iraqi now,’ and if anyone opens his mouth, you need to empty all your bullets in his throat.”

  At no point did Saddam express any remorse or regret. With Middleton’s concurrence, Piro decided to show Saddam excerpts from a BBC documentary that highlighted the human cost of his decision to drain the marshes south of Baghdad, which he thought was a sanctuary for Shia rebels. The decision essentially exterminated a way of life for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi “Marsh Arabs” who were driven from their homeland. Piro and Middleton were curious to gauge the deposed president’s reaction to the displays of human suffering that directly resulted from his policies.

  Wait, this is not a neutral film, interrupted Saddam as the film began to play. It was prepared in the West and aired in America, he said, as if that fact alone proved it to be hopelessly biased.

  Piro and Middleton let it play on. Scene after scene of Marsh Arab suffering unfolded. One clip showed footage of Marsh Arabs fleeing north in rags, left with nothing more from their previous lives than what they could carry. Saddam watched intently, before observing, “They do not look scared, they look happy.”

  Twenty-three minutes into the film, Saddam had had enough. It is exercise and prayer time, he announced.

  We can postpone that, said Piro, trying to exert his authority over the prisoner.

  No, I think this has been enough, said Saddam, adding breezily, we can watch it another day, why rush?

  CHAPTER 12

  Baghdad, Iraq—first few months of 2004

  Two years before the Super Twelve would meet him, the American who most often saw the former president at his least guarded and most candid—other than his interpreter—was medic Robert “Doc” Ellis.

  “Act confident, don’t be afraid,” Ellis was told the first day he approached the dictator’s cell. “This guy is good at picking up nonverbal cues.” Ellis’s assignment was to examine Saddam daily while he was being interrogated at Camp Cropper. Leaving no doubt as to Ellis’s mission, a colonel had pulled the medic aside and emphatically explained, “Saddam Hussein cannot die in U.S. custody. That would be a huge embarrassment to the president and the United States of America. Do whatever you have to do to keep him alive.”

  Ellis, an African-American master sergeant in his early fifties, with a medium build, round face, and mustache, had grown up “around thieves, robbers, and murderers” in the notorious Pruitt-Igoe projects in St. Louis, one of the closest American approximations to the violent village from which Saddam came. According to Ellis, “I had to fight all the time. I was robbed and beat up more than once, shot at, and saw people being killed.” So right away there was the possibility of a special rapport between the medic and the now infamous “son of the alleys.”

  “He was once a street fighter like I was when I was a kid,” Ellis later recalled. “I was fighting thugs and bullies in the projects, he was fighting gangs in Tikrit.”

  When the two men met, Saddam was always clad in one of his two dishdashas (one white, one gray, which he carefully hand-cleaned and let air dry under the Baghdad sun in his outdoor rec area each day) and usually finishing a vegetable omelet for breakfast, which he enjoyed with mushrooms, onions, and tomatoes. Occasionally, he’d already finished eating, and Ellis would stand by patiently as he said his morning prayers.

  Like many of the Americans who dealt with the imprisoned Saddam, Ellis was initially struck by how, despite being “locked up and in isolation,” he nonetheless “carried on like a man in charge.” Saddam would refer to Ellis as “Doc,” echoing the respectful honorific that U.S. troops have long assigned to combat medics. Ellis elected to address the aging prisoner simply as Saddam, as opposed to the more formal “Mr. President.” He asked Saddam how he felt, before going on to check his blood pressure and body temperature. Aside from high blood pressure, Saddam seemed reasonably healthy.

  In the evenings, Ellis would usually make the trek over to Saddam’s cell alone. He didn’t need an interpreter, as he recognized that Saddam’s English was better than he let on. When Ellis arrived, the cell sometimes smelled of Lysol, which Saddam often used to clean up in the afternoon. The former president was always well groomed and made sure that his cell—while cluttered with books and papers—was free of dirt and dust. It would gradually become clear that Saddam had begun to see these daily medical checks as more than a simple formality to which he needed to submit. One night, Ellis had retrieved Saddam’s daily blood pressure medication and was about to hand it to the former president when Saddam suddenly interrupted, saying “No” and waving the medication away. Saddam was sitting at his desk writing on a yellow legal pad—something that he seemed to spend a lot of time doing.

  Looking up from his composition, Saddam said, “I know you can’t understand, but I like to read this to you.” He picked up the pad and began reading what he’d written in Arabic. The rhythm and cadence suggested it was a poem. After a few minutes, Saddam finished, looking up from his creation with satisfaction, and said, “Now, we do medicine.”

  That, Ellis later observed, “was the beginning of our relationship.”

  The same scenario would be repeated in the weeks and months to come. Ellis recalls, “Saddam would read and I’d sit and listen, and then he’d try to explain to me. Basically, he wanted to socialize, and we did.” Ellis viewed this social interaction as part of “treating the whole person, and not just their aches and pains.” In his mind he was carrying out the colonel’s broadly defined order to make sure Saddam remained healthy under his watch.

  On a few occasions Saddam tried to convince Ellis that cigars and coffee helped with blood pressure. Ellis knew that argument didn�
��t hold much water, but he figured, if it helps Saddam relax it may be worth a shot. Thus it was that Ellis found himself in the peculiar position of helping to requisition some of Saddam’s favored Cohiba cigars. Saddam would be visibly thrilled when Ellis, sometimes accompanied by the camp doctor, arrived, modest gift in hand. He stood to greet them, exclaiming, “My friends, three Cohibas,” waving the men from his small cell down the hall and outside to an open-air rec area. He moved a few of the plastic chairs out there, inviting them to sit and join him for a cigar in the Baghdad twilight. In contrast to his vigilant and cautious comportment in the interrogation cell, Saddam appeared enlivened by these encounters.

  As they sat outside, the conversation could often be mistaken for the sort of happy-hour barroom banter that men around the world—who may not know each other particularly well but are feeling relaxed and in the mood to socialize—might engage in to pass the time. Saddam’s interrogators had adopted a remarkably convivial approach, and with his trial still in the distant horizon, the former president appeared untroubled and relaxed.

  Predictably, during these evening cigar sessions, the conversation would sometimes turn to women (though there were few around to receive any of the men’s attention). When it did, Saddam would alternate back and forth between the persona of a somewhat lecherous older man and that of a more caring and devoted husband. Though the Americans were sometimes confused as to which of his multiple wives he was referring, it was generally believed that he harbored the most affection for his second wife, Samira.

  As the men sat and enjoyed their cigars under Baghdad’s clear skies, Saddam sometimes tried his hand at a ribald joke. He particularly liked the story of how “one man from our village had a wife without much passion, so he went to his tribal elder, who found him a younger wife who had enough passion for an entire tribe.” At that point he let out one of his deep “a ha ha ha” laughs.

  Saddam’s lustier side was evidenced on another occasion when he visited a clinic for a minor medical procedure and was treated by an attractive female Army nurse. When the nurse asked Saddam if she could roll up his sleeve to take a blood sample, he replied in Arabic, “You may begin with the sleeves and continue as far as you want.” Saddam poured on what he regarded as his charm, relishing her attention. The story goes that after the visit, Saddam, still bewitched by the nurse’s spell, resolved to grow a beard, not in an effort to appeal to Islamic extremists, as CNN pundits later speculated, but rather because he thought it looked better.

  During one of Ellis’s morning visits, Saddam revealed a softer, more romantic side. He asked Ellis if he had a family, to which Ellis answered that he had two sons and had recently been married for a second time. Saddam seemed genuinely curious to learn more about Ellis’s family, and so Ellis resolved to retrieve some pictures of them from his room to show Saddam the next time he made his evening rounds.

  When Ellis returned the next night, he handed the pictures to Saddam, who slowly started leafing through them, pointing to some of the people and asking who they were. He seemed to take a particular interest in Ellis’s brother-in-law, Lionel, who was an entertainer in Las Vegas and was clad in a flamboyant suit and sunglasses. Saddam kept returning to the picture, finally pointing at Lionel, sitting back, and letting out a hearty laugh. When Saddam got to a picture of Ellis’s wife, Rita, he looked it over, paused, seemed to consider something for a minute, and then volunteered, “I will write a nice story for her.”

  Sure enough, when Ellis returned the next day, Saddam proudly handed him one of his loose sheets of yellow legal paper, on which he’d written in Arabic:

  The night is defeated at the end of life

  The stars are getting lost and the dawn is of joy with you

  My heart has risen after winning his dream

  Comfort is settling and hardship has gone away

  My soul has flourished and his flower has matured

  And God has blessed us for the remainder of our lives.

  Ellis was amazed that the former dictator had taken the time to compose something for his wife, and that he’d been so happy to present it to him. But that was Saddam, a man of extreme contradictions. The man who in an effort to extinguish threats posed by Shia militias had ordered the systematic draining of the Mesopotamian marshes—forcing the migration of hundreds of thousands of people—would now hover over his weeds as a doting parent would his child. The man who, prior to his capture, had struck terror in the hearts of millions of Iraqis, would save bread crumbs from his meals and carry them outside, where he’d feed them to visiting birds. Eventually they grew to expect these daily snacks from the old man and would sunbathe on the barbed wire. Saddam would greet them enthusiastically, proudly gesturing to Ellis and saying, “Look, they come!” One day the birds didn’t arrive as expected, and Saddam seemed deflated. He lamented to Ellis, “They must have eaten earlier.”

  Ellis spent one especially long day helping to fill sandbags that were intended to protect against mortar attacks. After he finished, he remembered that the day before, Saddam had requested some sanitizing wet wipes. Saddam was a notorious germaphobe and was constantly trying to clean and disinfect. So that evening Ellis arrived at Saddam’s cell with wet wipes in hand. Handing the box to the former Iraqi leader, Ellis was surprised not to receive his customary gratitude. Saddam, Ellis recalls, “looked at the box skeptically and pulled out one wipe, holding it between his index finger and thumb.” After staring at it for a few long seconds, he said, “These are kind of . . . dainty.”

  Ellis couldn’t believe that the man who sometimes feigned an inability to speak English had just used such an unusual word. Struggling to keep a straight face, Ellis dutifully promised to snoop around for some larger ones—“man-sized,” he joked to Saddam. It just so happened that Ellis’s wife, Rita, had recently included a box of large wet wipes in a care package she’d mailed, so the next day Ellis returned to Saddam’s cell and, with not a little pride, presented them. This time he was greeted with the familiar smile of appreciation. Saddam chuckled to himself, looked at Ellis approvingly, and said, “Papa Noel.”

  Ellis would sometimes wonder if he was falling prey to the same desire to please Saddam that was ubiquitous among Saddam’s deputies when he was in power. Having grown up observing the worst humans were capable of in his tough neighborhood in St. Louis, Ellis wasn’t naive. He was well aware that Saddam was guilty of atrocious acts. And he recognized that the former president’s apparent charm and graciousness could very well be an effort to manipulate him. Watch your back, Ellis, he told himself. Don’t let him get to you.

  Puzzlingly, the items for which Saddam was most grateful were often nothing special. If his behavior was simply a manipulative act, all he really had to show for it was an almost pathetic assortment of worthless scraps, such as his plastic chair with crude rubber armrests, large wet wipes, an old antenna radio that he was forever struggling to adjust to pick up a signal, an exercise bike that wouldn’t be out of place in a 1980s YMCA, and perhaps his most extravagant indulgence, his beloved Cohiba cigars. One day Ellis couldn’t help but just ask Saddam, flat-out, how he seemed so content with so little, having gone from “silk sheets to an Army cot.” Aside from the old exercise bike, it would be possible to shove what remained of Saddam’s worldly belongings into a shopping cart. Yet the man who’d lost nearly everything remained unbothered. He responded to Ellis’s question simply, saying, “I remember how I grew up. I was a poor farmer.”

  Dr. Ala Bashir, Saddam’s personal physician for nearly twenty years, recalled about his former patient, “He actually lived a simple life. I saw him many times sleeping on a mattress on the ground. He would eat like any other Iraqi—I saw him frequently cook for his guards. He lived in ordinary houses and rarely stayed in those palaces he built. I have no doubt that Saddam genuinely didn’t like the luxurious life.”

  There may have been other reasons for his surprising contentment. For the first time in decades, the dictator was essentially sa
fe for the near term, as the mechanics of his eventual trial were still being worked out. On a daily basis, he was as secure as he’d ever been. Dating all the way back to when he was dodging the blows of an abusive stepfather, he’d known no extended periods of peace and security. For a man who’d narrowly escaped multiple assassination attempts, and spent much of his adult life engaged in cataclysmic foreign wars, ruthless internal power squabbles, and a desperate flight from capture, the secure simplicity of life in a cell may have seemed like a relief—at least for a short time.

  Ellis was relaxing in his room late one night when he heard a knock on the door. He’d been watching a goofy comedy on his computer and sighed at being pulled back into reality. Unexpected late-night visits were never good. Reluctantly, he dragged himself from his cot and shuffled over to open the door. It was one of Saddam’s American guards telling the medic that the dictator had asked for him. Shaking the cobwebs from his head, Ellis made the short moonlit walk to Saddam’s cell and asked his patient what was wrong. Saddam told him his stomach hurt. Ordinarily, Ellis would have been annoyed if a detainee had interrupted his limited off time with what appeared to be such a mundane problem, but he decided to cut Saddam some slack since he rarely complained of any discomfort.

  Ellis provided Saddam with a few over-the-counter options to lessen the pain, and the Iraqi selected some Tums. Upon taking them, Saddam seemed lost in thought for a few moments. Then, emerging from his reverie, he mentioned that he’d given the same chewable wafers to his daughter when she had a stomachache as a young girl. He reassured Ellis, “I break them in half for her.”

  Consecutive bursts of bad news issuing from back home in St. Louis would soon pull Ellis from Saddam’s universe and interrupt his efforts to make sense of the Iraqi’s psychology. Ellis received a flurry of increasingly troubling emails from Rita, reporting that his mother was gravely ill and wanted to see him. Taking a short break from his frantic efforts to arrange for an emergency leave trip home, Ellis called the hospital where his mother was being treated and heard the words that no son—much less one who is thousands of miles away in a war zone—wants to hear: “I’m so sorry, Mr. Ellis, I’m so sorry.”