This answer finally satisfied Saddam. He released Hamdani’s hand and allowed him to leave. As Hamdani emerged from the office, Saddam’s secretary, Abed, cut him off and asked him to wait in the reception area for a moment.
A few moments later, the secretary came out and said, “Our Uncle thinks that it is better if this conversation stays here, as your analysis could negatively impact morale.”
You have my word, Hamdani responded.
Then he shook Abed’s hand before walking out into the night, slumping into the backseat of his waiting sedan, and beginning the lonely drive home through the deserted late-night streets.
CHAPTER 27
Baghdad, Iraq—2006
One afternoon Saddam looked up at Hutch from a magazine he was reading out in his rec area. The sun bore down on them, as it always did, coaxing beads of sweat from their foreheads.
The Iranians, Saddam began . . .
That’s all Hutch needed to hear to know where Saddam was going with this. He’d made no effort to disguise what was clearly an obsession with threats—both real and imagined—posed by his neighbor to the east, Iran. Saddam jabbed angrily at what he said was a picture of an Iranian leader in the article he was reading.
He told me he would have tea in Baghdad one day, Saddam said, sneering, implying to Hutch that the Iranian had boasted of conquering Iraq. Well, I made sure he never did, Saddam added triumphantly.
The notion that he’d thwarted what he believed to be the Iranians’ nefarious goals brought him pleasure, and he paused, savoring the satisfaction the memory brought him. Regret over the hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians who perished on both sides of the Iran-Iraq War didn’t cast a cloud over his fond recollection.
They want Iraq, Saddam went on, summoning increasing energy as he spoke. They’ve tried to trick our citizens into supporting them for years, he hissed, his rising anger striking to Hutch, who was more familiar with the relaxed Saddam, content to putter around the rec area, water his plants, and feed the birds.
Hutch had a hard time following this diatribe, since the more complicated the topic, the more Saddam struggled with his English. From what he could gather, though, the article contained some favorable references to Iranian leadership—ones suggesting that their ambitions were more peaceful than belligerent.
The former Iraqi president cursed the article, dismissing it as nonsense.
This was a different side of the man. It caused Hutch to consider whether currents of rage always rushed beneath Saddam’s characteristically placid exterior, like a still river whose depths are roiled by turbulence.
He simply nodded in agreement, content to listen passively until Saddam eventually ran out of gas. Clad in his simple dishdasha and sandals, and with unstylish glasses perched on his nose, Saddam appeared much different from—but sometimes acted like—the crotchety old men reading the morning paper at the local Waffle House back in Hutch’s native Georgia, loudly complaining about certain articles to anyone who’d listen. Hell, at least this makes the shift pass by more quickly, Hutch thought, as opposed to the two of them alone with their thoughts and a film of sweat from the midday sun.
Baghdad, Iraq—day 17 of the Dujail trial
Indeed, the Iranians never did drink tea in Baghdad. Saddam had made sure of that, no matter how much it cost. As the Dujail trial resumed, everyone in the courtroom strained to hear Saddam’s voice on an old video recording:
“Anyone who stands in the face of the revolution, even if they are one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, ten thousand, I will cut off their heads without raising a hair or my heart beating for them. I have a heart—and I am not exaggerating—if an ant stops breathing, I feel pain in my heart for it. However, such type of people, by God, no matter how many they are, I feel no compassion in my heart for them.”
After that statement, the video showed people cowering on the ground as Iraqi security officers during the Saddam era beat them with sticks. Saddam could be heard again, saying, “If a person dies in interrogation, he has no value.” The tape played for one minute, but captured the essence of an era.
The defense lawyers objected that the content of the tape had nothing to do with the Dujail case. While they may have been factually correct, Saddam’s sinister words, coupled with the disturbing visuals, mattered in a trial that, as Saddam himself recognized, was being adjudicated not only by five judges in the courtroom but by millions at kebab shops and teahouses across Iraq and the Arab world.
Saddam did his best to hijack the day’s proceedings, making his familiar claims that the trial was illegitimate, and continuing his rant from a previous session in which he blasted “the invaders, criminal dwarfs, and the infidel slaves of foreigners.” This time he complained that the trial had been set up “under the spears of the invaders,” pointing to the “U.S. tanks around this palace” as evidence of the impossibility of a fair process.
Next came poetry. Relishing any opportunity to send the trial careening off the tracks, Saddam proudly announced that he’d composed three lines of poetry for the unamused Judge Rauf, “because I noticed you enjoy listening to poetry.” At this, Rauf determined that he’d heard enough of Saddam’s clownish rambling and cut the mikes.
Eventually Judge Rauf managed to redirect the court’s attention back to the charges being leveled against the former president, focusing on the accusation that 28 juveniles were among the 148 whose death sentences were reportedly endorsed by Saddam. Iraq’s former leader vehemently denied the charge, saying, “I would not order the execution of a young Iraqi, even if you take out my eye.” Informed that the prosecutor had the identification cards of the victims, Saddam simply responded, “I think they are forged.” He added that it wasn’t the responsibility of the head of state to know their ages.
Many trial observers couldn’t help but wonder why so much energy was being poured into prosecuting Saddam for crimes committed in response to Dujail, which, after all, only focused on the fates of 148 people rounded up following a failed assassination attempt, in light of Saddam’s far more egregious crimes against humanity, the most notable being the notorious Anfal campaign in 1987 and 1988, in which at least fifty thousand Iraqi Kurds—and likely closer to a hundred thousand—were reported killed.
Anfal, meaning “spoils” in Arabic, and referencing a battle in 624 A.D. between Muslims and non-Muslims, ostensibly targeted Kurdish militias who’d allied with Iran during the Iran-Iraq War, but was more broadly designed to extinguish Kurdish resistance to Saddam’s rule once and for all. Reportedly, there were chemical weapons attacks and mass executions from which no one, not even women and children, was immune.
Chemical Ali oversaw the massive operation. According to documentary evidence gathered by the FBI and presented in their “Prosecutive Report of Investigation Concerning Saddam Hussein,” Ali ordered Kurds to leave their homes, issuing military orders warning, “The villages shall be regarded as operational zones that are strictly out of bounds to all persons and animals and in which troops can open fire at will, without any restrictions.” Ali ordered “random bombardments, using artillery, helicopters, and aircraft, at all times of the day or night, in order to kill the largest number of persons present in these prohibited zones.” Ali told subordinates he had “no objection to beheading the traitors,” with the caveat that “it would have been preferable to send them to security for interrogation before executing them.”
Witness accounts were chilling. Testimony included an account of three men who were “blindfolded and made to stand on chairs, arms raised above their heads. The chairs were then kicked away, leaving the prisoners’ feet dangling a couple of feet from the ground. Next, guards attached one end of a string to an empty gas container and the other to each prisoner’s scrotum. When the signal was given, the guard would drop the gas cylinder, ripping out the man’s testicles. Within half an hour, all three were dead.”
Another Kurdish witness described “thirty large, windowless trucks arriving
at the camp. We were herded onto the trucks and rode all day with no food and little water. Three children between the ages of six and seven died during the ride. A woman went into labor and was foaming at the mouth from dehydration. . . . When the trucks stopped for the last time I saw pits which had been dug into the ground. Standing behind each pit were two soldiers armed with AK-47s. We were forced out of the truck and fell into the pit where we laid, tired and starving. The soldiers started shooting. I looked around and saw the woman who had gone into labor riddled in bullets.”
Only by playing dead and lying motionless amid the pile of sweaty bodies as they bled out did the witness survive.
Years later, the man Saddam had tapped to oversee the genocidal operation, Chemical Ali, would tell his FBI interrogators: “There are two faces of Saddam, one who went out of his way to share with those in need and was sometimes reduced to tears when stopping to assist a poor person, and the other a lonesome man with no friends, either inside or outside his family, who didn’t even trust his own sons.” This second “face of evil” was “so cruel you couldn’t imagine.”
CHAPTER 28
Baghdad, Iraq—summer of 2006
BOOM! The explosion reverberated through the Rock’s outdoor rec area, shaking the concrete where Saddam sat alongside his interpreter, Joseph. Private James Martin, one of the Super Twelve, sat across from them. For a brief moment the lines of sight of the men converged, then Saddam locked eyes with Martin and simply shook his head, as he always did when gunfire or explosions interrupted an otherwise quiet day. The soldiers sometimes wondered if that look was meant to suggest that all of this could have been avoided if he were still in power. There was also the possibility that he saw the occasional explosions and distant gunfire as evidence his loyalists would eventually try to set him free. His secretary, Abed Hamoud, would defiantly warn CIA interrogators of that eventuality: “This is a wild place, and you will struggle mightily to hold it together. It’s not over yet. You are in control now—you have me in prison. But I can hear the bombs and gunfire outside. We’ll see what happens.”
Years later, the Canadian attorney William Wiley, who was tapped by the State Department’s Regime Crimes Liaison Office to advise Saddam’s defense team, would say, “Saddam had no sense of worry that he was going to be executed—he thought this was a temporary inconvenience, and that he’d again rule Iraq.”
Private Martin, a burly Pennsylvanian who looked like he could be a bouncer back home, would later recall that after the nearby explosions Saddam would express concern and ask, Were your friends nearby? Are they okay? Martin could never tell whether Saddam’s concern was real or feigned. But at least in his and the other soldiers’ presence, the former president rarely, if ever, spoke ill of the U.S. military. He generally acknowledged that they were just doing their job. For the Bushes, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and the Iraqi officials whom he reviled as American “puppets” and “stooges,” though, he had nothing but scorn.
Sometimes Saddam couldn’t resist volunteering advice to the guards on how the Americans could more effectively manage the occupation and pacify the country.
“The people are used to being ruled,” Saddam would say, before offering one of the folksy analogies he liked to use. “You wouldn’t leave the doors to a bank open,” he said, the implication being that only with sufficient force could chaos and lawlessness be avoided. After the soldiers’ talks with Saddam, it was sometimes hard not to wonder, as Adam Rogerson did, if they “were just over there trying to stop something that’s been going on forever.”
Saddam seemed to particularly enjoy the company of Joseph, the Lebanese-American interpreter who by now had spent a year with him, the two having first met when Joseph began his assignment in the summer of 2005. Joseph was a big man in his fifties, and carried himself with a confidence—bordering on cockiness—that belied his status as an interpreter and likely helped him develop a rapport with Saddam. Prior to meeting the dictator for the first time, the interpreter had no doubt that Saddam was a “brutal tyrant who deserved to be wiped out” for his crimes. Over time, though, he grew to enjoy his daily interaction with the former president. He found himself impressed by some of the same things that had struck Doc Ellis and the Super Twelve—for example, the former president’s habit of rising to greet his guest and ceremoniously waving him into his cell. It was as if Saddam was subconsciously trying to convince his visitor, and perhaps even himself, that he was still a head of state, formally welcoming visiting dignitaries into his private quarters.
The closeness that developed between Saddam and Joseph contrasted with the few, if any, meaningful relationships Saddam had over the course of his nearly three-decade rule. As the CIA’s John Maguire later pointed out, “Saddam had no friends. A lot of people had affection for him, but it was not reciprocal. He was alone as a leader.” The one thing, after all, that Saddam could not decree during his reign was genuine human interaction. A victim of his own paranoid personality, he evidently craved the kind of honest conversations that his brutal nature ensured would never happen.
Terrible fates befell senior advisors who dared speak the truth. One minister made the mistake of suggesting to Saddam that he temporarily step down in order to end the war with Iran and secure more favorable postwar terms. The mere suggestion that he relinquish any power—even for a brief time—constituted an impudence that Saddam couldn’t countenance. His overpowering narcissism, which according to psychologists was most likely rooted in deep underlying insecurity, conditioned him to lash out against any perceived challenge. The unfortunate minister was immediately detained by Saddam’s security forces. His wife, alerted to his abduction, pleaded for Saddam to show mercy and send her husband home. Saddam did indeed send him home a few days later—in a black canvas bag, chopped into small pieces.
Joseph never saw this side of Saddam. He knew only an older man who “showed sincerity and love to others,” who was “humble . . . normal . . . like any other.” Joseph was especially impressed when, during one visit, Saddam motioned to him and explained that he had a special gift. It was a book, entitled Zabiba and the King. Saddam explained that he’d written it. He was proud of his work, and in handing it over he insisted that Joseph promise to read it.
Joseph was flattered by Saddam’s attention and assured him he would.
Zabiba and the King was one of a number of books Saddam claimed authorship of. His retreat into the realm of his imagination had begun years earlier, when he was still in power, and as his tenure lengthened he would spend increasingly more time escaping into art, history, and poetry. In fact, toward the end of his rule, he’d grown so detached from the daily administration of his country that Taha Yassin Ramadan, his former vice president, said that even in periods of crisis it could sometimes “take three days to get in touch with him.”
Farouq Palace, Tikrit, Iraq—fall of 1996
General Ra’ad al-Hamdani, then head of the elite Republican Guard in Tikrit, heard his phone ring.
General Hamdani, you’re being summoned to the Farouq Palace, one of Saddam’s aides informed him. The president wants you and the other commanders to join him immediately.
What now? Okay, I’ll be right over, Hamdani said, but it will take a few hours to get the brigade commanders from Mosul, Kirkuk, and Baghdad.
A few hours later, Hamdani and his deputies drove down the long boulevard toward the enormous domed gate to the Farouq Palace compound in Tikrit. It was a beautiful fall day in Iraq, the skies a clear blue. The approach to the palace was fantastically over-the-top. There was a giant arch that towered over a long entrance drive, like a misplaced Champs Élysées rising from flat scrubland. Once the officers were waved in by security, they beheld a different world. Blanketing the palace grounds were date palms and lush manicured lawns, which led down to the Tigris as it flowed languidly south toward the capital.
The assembled military leaders wondered why they were there, imagining that perhaps there’d been an emergency and t
hey’d soon be led to a military operations room. Instead, they were ushered into a large, plushy ballroom. Upon entering, they instinctively jumped to attention at the sight of the president, who was wearing casual civilian clothes and greeted them with a large grin. Scanning the room, Hamdani noticed that Saddam appeared to be presiding over a gathering of artists and poets, some of whom he recognized. The attendees, a Who’s Who of Iraq’s creative community, were assembled on elegant couches facing Saddam, who was seated on a throne-like chair at the room’s front. Next to him was a podium at which the artists would take turns delivering presentations and lectures.
“God salutes the Republican Guards,” Saddam said affably, at once responding to their salute and introducing the military men with a broad smile to the assembled artists. Even though Saddam appeared to be in one of his more carefree and voluble moods, one of Hamdani’s deputies was so struck with fear at the sudden audience with the president that he froze as he saluted, his mouth unable to get out the words to introduce himself.
Saddam simply smiled at the officer’s nervousness, and invited the new arrivals to sit down.
They still had no idea why they were there. Their confusion was not allayed as poets began to take turns at the podium, reading their work to Saddam, who appeared as relaxed and happy as Hamdani could ever recall. He would sometimes interrupt the orations to clap, otherwise sitting back and puffing happily on his cigar. The officers, meanwhile, remained rigid in their seats.
The poets took breaks to nibble on pastries and sip tea and coffee, but the military men felt too out of place to mingle, and so they remained awkwardly fixed in their seats. After nearly two hours of poetry, Saddam took his leave from the assembled artists, who proceeded to retire to an outdoor garden. Hamdani followed the poets outside. Feeling like someone who’d crashed a party, and self-consciously aware of how much he stood out in his military uniform, he approached one of Saddam’s aides and gingerly asked if the officers were still needed by the president. No, the man said, and so they finally left.
The Prisoner in His Palace Page 14