The Prisoner in His Palace Read online

  Feelings of guilt consumed him.

  His sadness was compounded by his increasingly conflicted feelings toward this bizarre mission in Iraq. He had trouble accepting that he was ostensibly serving his country by providing medical care to a man accused of war crimes, who could end up dead anyway, while being unable to help his mother.

  CHAPTER 13

  Baghdad, Iraq—April 2004

  The secure phone rang on FBI agent Rod Middleton’s desk in the small shipping container in which he spent much of his time, diligently typing up summaries of Saddam’s interrogations that had amounted to little more than a revisionist history of his rule. March had rolled into April, and Saddam’s questioning still appeared to be yielding little of real value.

  It was FBI Headquarters.

  You think we should make a change? his supervisor asked, referring indirectly to Piro’s leadership of the interrogation. Folks here aren’t happy, the man continued, and you can imagine the pressure they’re under to get something out of this guy.

  Middleton could understand. An entire war had been launched in part on the premise that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, and now, nearly a year after the invasion, they were no closer to finding anything than they’d been on day one. Further, there was an insurgency that seemed to be gathering strength. Still, Middleton thought Piro deserved more of a chance. Plus, changing the role of lead questioner would disrupt the team, and could even suggest to Saddam that they were desperate.

  No, leave him in place, Middleton said. Give him some more time.

  Tom Neer, the FBI’s profiler, and some others on the team had suggested a phased approach. In it, Piro’s rapport-building first phase would eventually lead to a “reckoning” phase that would feature subtle efforts to wound Saddam’s pride and cause him to begin to doubt his legacy. That would be followed by a final “bartering” phase in which he’d be provided an opportunity to rehabilitate his image in exchange for cooperation. Neer’s perception was that “the only reason Saddam got out of bed each day was to manage his legacy.”

  Piro remained wedded to the first phase, though. One team member recalled that he seemed “obsessed with his personal relationship with Saddam.” This, of course, invites the question: Who was working whom? Was Piro cleverly developing what seemed to be a genuine relationship with Saddam to extract information, or was Saddam, in fact, co-opting the young agent?

  • • •

  “Eventually you have to change the tone,” Middleton would later say about the Piro-led interrogation. “You can’t just sit there and be all ‘happy happy joy joy,’ marching through history and drinking tea.”

  Middleton didn’t remain to see whether Piro’s approach would ever yield dividends, since it was eventually time for him to go home. He’d promised his wife, Barbara, that he’d only stay three months. His last day in the country found him nearing the completion of a four-and-a-half-hour interview with the notorious “Chemical” Ali. It was a warm day, about ninety degrees, but not oppressive. Middleton was wearing his standard cargo pants and untucked button-down safari-style shirt. Suddenly, incoming mortar fire rocked the camp, shaking the trailer in which they were meeting. As this was not entirely uncommon, Middleton and Ali paused, and then continued their discussion. Middleton tried to expeditiously wrap up what he considered to have been a successful session. Majid had provided valuable details on Saddam’s gas attacks that could be used as evidence during an eventual trial. Eager to finally begin his long journey home, Middleton typed up his report, attached it to a secure email addressed to FBI Headquarters, and hit send.

  After dodging incoming mortar fire as he raced across the base in his Toyota Hilux, Middleton caught the next C-130 out to Jordan.

  He arrived at the Sheraton in Amman in the middle of the night and headed straight for the refrigerator, where he grabbed a bottle of vodka and took a deep breath, attempting to exhale the last three months of stress and frustration. He picked up the phone and dialed.

  Across the world, Barbara was preparing dinner for their two children. Suddenly, the phone rang. Baby, I’m out, she heard her husband’s voice say.

  Middleton didn’t know what else to say. The events of the past twenty-four hours had been too surreal to distill into anything that would make sense to a woman cooking dinner for her kids in Omaha, Nebraska. After the call ended, he flipped on the hotel’s TV and tried to muster interest in its coverage of the Masters golf tournament, but he still felt deracinated, unable to grab hold of “real life.”

  The next day, as he trekked through various airports, completing the last legs of his journey home, he struggled to reconcile the sight of throngs of business travelers frequenting Cartier and Hermès with the heat, dirt, and violence he’d left behind. The brightly lit concourses he walked down were an overwhelming pastiche of perfection, shininess, and noise. Middleton’s mind raced: Something is wrong—things are too nice.

  At Omaha’s Eppley Airfield he finally met Barbara, and they drove together to pick up the kids at school. When they pulled up to their home Middleton was amazed to see all his neighbors and their children gathered in his driveway, where they’d hung red, white, and blue decorations and posted cardboard “Welcome Home” signs. It was unexpected and overwhelming.

  “It may have been the best feeling I’ve ever had in my life,” he says.

  Their gratitude had a purity that had been absent from the previous three months, during which he’d been exploring the darkest recesses of human nature. He was at once proud of what he felt had been a successful interrogation of Chemical Ali and frustrated by the nagging sense that Saddam had bested them. As much as anything, though, he was glad to be “out of that craphole with shells dropping on me.”

  The next day Middleton was standing on his back deck, overlooking the golf course. Staring out at it, he was overwhelmed by the bright green—such a departure from the barren Iraqi moonscape to which he’d grown accustomed. He broke down crying.

  Later that month, Barbara died unexpectedly. Her heart had quit at the age of thirty-seven from idiopathic spontaneous ventricular fibrillation. The doctors couldn’t explain why. Middleton, it turned out, had spent just about every day of what would turn out to be the last three months of his wife’s life listening to Saddam Hussein pontificate, and now he was left to care for their two children, fourteen and twelve. The proud Air Force veteran, former SWAT team member, and terrorism investigator was crushed. Plans had already begun to be made for Middleton to return to Baghdad in July. This time, though, he wouldn’t be going.

  CHAPTER 14

  Baghdad, Iraq—spring of 2004

  Back at Camp Cropper, having buried his mother, Robert Ellis found Saddam seated on his small cot, his back against the wall, writing feverishly on his yellow legal pad. With each passing day, he appeared to be growing more fixated on getting his thoughts on paper. He’d always had an obsessive preoccupation with his legacy, and he must have recognized that this could be a final opportunity to ensure his reflections were captured for posterity.

  There were a few evenings when Saddam seemed especially eager to unburden himself of issues that must have been weighing on him. Perhaps the afternoon interrogations had touched a nerve and he was still stewing. On this night, clearly agitated, he protested to Ellis what he claimed were the unfair accusations the Bush administration had leveled against him to justify the invasion.

  “Why soldiers come?” he asked, appearing genuinely confused as he mimicked soldiers firing rifles. “They didn’t find anything.” He was referring, of course, to the search for WMD that had been the pretext for the invasion.

  Ellis usually did the best he could to avoid getting too drawn into these discussions. He’d been instructed not to discuss controversial topics. Plus, he didn’t really have good answers to Saddam’s rhetorical questions. Still, he couldn’t always extricate himself from conversations that wandered into fraught areas. Once, Saddam had asked how things were going with the American missi
on in Iraq. Sometimes he heard explosions and gunfire from his outdoor rec area, so it was no mystery to him that the Americans had been encountering resistance in their efforts to establish security. That time, Saddam took Ellis down memory lane, recalling how under President Reagan his relations with America had been smooth. He made a gliding motion with his hand to underscore this point. Finally, he asked, What does America have to gain from this? He appeared puzzled.

  Ellis was silent.

  Then Saddam added, portentously, “They’ll wish they had me back.”

  Late one morning, as he was enjoying a cigar with Saddam, Ellis got an urgent call over his two-way radio to report to his headquarters. Hustling over, he was given two notes, one of which told him to call his wife immediately, and the other to call the Red Cross. Ellis took a deep breath. He knew this drill, and it wasn’t a good one. First he called Rita. She told him that his brother Larry was in the hospital in critical condition, with a blood pressure of 80 over 20 and bleeding from the esophagus. Ellis didn’t need to hear much more to know that his brother was dying. Larry was only fifty-two, and the news dizzied Ellis. He fought to steady himself.

  While the news came as a surprise, Ellis had long known that Larry had been traveling a dangerous and self-destructive road, mixed up with drugs, alcohol, and petty crime. After Ellis had taken a few minutes to collect himself, he hurriedly packed his bags and began what would be another marathon journey home.

  That afternoon, sitting in Baghdad Airport’s passenger terminal, coated in sweat and surrounded by an assortment of other soldiers heading home on leave, Ellis felt his mind wander. Moments like these, in which a person is suddenly yanked from the desensitizing daily grind, can sometimes engender brief epiphanies. He realized that it had been six months to the day since his mother had died.

  Later, strapped into the seat of a C-130, Ellis felt red-hot anger boiling up. He was angry to once again be marooned overseas during turmoil at home, and angry at his brother for having made so many resolutions over the years to reform his ways, only to again succumb to temptation. Besides the deep ache of what he knew would likely be his brother’s death, Ellis recognized that something else was nagging him; something he’d just experienced and couldn’t make sense of.

  Before he’d left for the airfield, Ellis had a made an impromptu visit to Saddam to let him know about his brother, and that he’d be going home and wouldn’t be checking on him for a week or so. Ellis didn’t want Saddam to wonder where he’d gone. The medic shared the truth partly out of a sense of duty, since he was responsible for Saddam’s well-being, but also because, as much as he may have hated to admit it, he found himself not wanting Saddam to be upset. As it turned out, the feeling may have been mutual. After Ellis was done explaining that he was losing his brother and would be gone for a while, Saddam stood up, hugged him, and said, “I will be your brother.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Baghdad, Iraq—late June 2004

  Rod Middleton had already been home in Omaha for a few months—his life upended by the sudden loss of his wife—when George Piro finally got Saddam to admit that he’d abandoned his program to develop weapons of mass destruction and had never had a substantive relationship with Al Qaeda. When finally pressed by Piro, Saddam denied any contact with Osama bin Laden—the same denial he’d later volunteer to the Super Twelve. He explained to Piro, “I am a believer but not a zealot,” before adding, “religion and government should not mix.” To his CIA questioners he’d voiced similar concern about the danger of religious leaders infiltrating government, remarking that the “turbans” must never be allowed to wield power.

  It had taken more than six months, and countless hours of listening to Saddam pontificate, but Piro considered this admission a success.

  Just before Piro was to head to the airfield to board a plane back to the States, he went to see Saddam one last time. As they smoked a cigar, Saddam smiled. You know what, the former dictator said, maybe if I get off, we can start a consulting firm together.

  Piro joined in on the joke. Sure, if you can shake these charges, I’ll think about it, he said.

  Saddam then embraced him, kissing him on the cheek three times. If the dictator felt that he’d been bested by the interrogator, it didn’t show.

  As Piro boarded his flight out of Iraq, he was full of pride. He felt his plan had worked—that his patient efforts to develop a relationship with Saddam had succeeded in eliciting valuable information. Others, including many on his own team, disagreed. After all, many in the intelligence community had been convinced for some time that Saddam no longer retained WMD, and few seriously entertained the notion that he ever allied with Al Qaeda in a meaningful way. Beyond those two admissions—if Saddam was even to be believed—what really had been accomplished?

  The CIA’s John Maguire later put it this way: “Saddam did win. We miscalculated who we were dealing with—he was all about framing history and his place in Iraq. For us to think we could befriend him, build rapport, and get him to tell all was naive in the extreme.”

  Conservative pundit Tom Joscelyn would be the most unsparing in his criticism, writing: “The truth is that the [interrogation] memos are almost completely worthless from an intelligence perspective. Saddam turned the FBI into his own personal stenographer.”

  Despite the fact that the interrogation had ended with the former president volunteering little of intelligence value, the FBI would go on to gather more than enough evidence from interviews with Saddam’s codefendants, former government officials, and the testimony of victims—as well as from a large trove of archived Baath Party material—to build a solid case for Saddam to be tried for crimes against humanity.

  The new question was, could Saddam be as effective in steering his trial as he was in steering his interrogators?

  PART III

  CONDEMNED

  He lay as one who lies and dreams

  In a pleasant meadow-land,

  The watchers watched him as he slept,

  And could not understand

  How one could sleep so sweet a sleep

  With a hangman close at hand.

  —Oscar Wilde, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”

  CHAPTER 16

  Amman, Jordan—fall of 2005

  Dr. Najeeb al-Nuaimi, a former justice minister in Qatar, was packing up and preparing to leave a human rights conference in Amman, Jordan, when a female Lebanese lawyer approached. Confronting him, she said: Raghad Hussein, Saddam’s daughter, would like to meet with you. She’d like you to join her father’s defense team. She lives here in Amman.

  Saddam’s trial for crimes against humanity had recently begun at the Iraqi High Tribunal (IHT) in Baghdad, and Raghad was looking for more legal firepower to help defend her father from the charge of ordering a crackdown in Dujail following the failed 1982 assassination attempt that resulted in the alleged killing of 148 Shiites.

  Dr. al-Nuaimi had been no supporter of Saddam’s regime.

  No, no, he immediately responded to the woman’s overture. This trial is a farce, and my presence would only give it legitimacy.

  Please, the woman went on, undeterred. Raghad really wants to meet you.

  After more entreaties and demurrals, Nuaimi finally relented, grudgingly. Despite his disapproval of Saddam’s rule, he did believe that everyone deserved a fair trial. His commitment to this principle had previously led him to represent more than seventy suspected terrorists held at Guantánamo Bay.

  • • •

  Raghad had lived in Amman since fleeing Baghdad not long after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was the second time she’d sought protective asylum in Jordan, the first time being 1995, when she and her sister, along with their husbands and families, had fled following a feud with her unhinged brother Uday.

  Raghad’s Lebanese emissary arranged to have Nuaimi—a bear of a man with a forceful personality—picked up and delivered to Raghad’s villa. Upon seeing Nuaimi enter, Raghad crossed the room to greet him. Her h
ome had morphed into a shrine to her father, its walls blanketed with photos of Saddam and other mementos celebrating his time in power.

  Thank you for agreeing to represent the president, she began, amiably enough.

  She still carried herself as the daughter of a president, having inherited a charisma and presence that were familiar to those who’d known her father.

  Nuaimi possessed his own gravitas, though, and wouldn’t allow himself to be charmed by Raghad. I didn’t agree to anything, Nuaimi politely corrected her.

  Oh, I see, Raghad responded, thrown a bit off balance by this deviation from her script. It was clear to the former justice minister that she was a person accustomed to getting her way. Let me get you some tea, she said, trying to create an atmosphere of relaxed affability.

  Thank you, Nuaimi replied, and gave a curious look around as the tea was delivered.

  He commented on the nice furnishings, for which Raghad apologized, explaining that much of the furniture was actually made in America.

  Nuaimi chuckled, and said that the Americans were also capable of producing nice furniture.

  Raghad asked a few other women in the room to please excuse themselves, and they obediently followed her instructions. A moment later she asked, Why are you refusing to represent the president? You’re a human rights advocate, and he’s an Arab leader who is specifically requesting you.