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By December 13, 2003, I had been in Iraq for eight weeks. The weather was gorgeous during the day—about seventy to seventy-five degrees—but at night it became frigid and often would rain. It was not unusual to wake up and find a few feet of standing water outside your trailer in the Green Zone. Our military guards finally put down wooden boards as bridges to dry land, creating a walkway to *********** the building in the CIA compound where we did our classified work and where our computers were.
I was an analyst in the CIA Baghdad station. My job was to help CIA case officers and Army Special Forces target individuals for capture so we could interrogate them for useful intelligence. In the search for Saddam, the most important information came from detainees who might have had access to the Iraqi leader or to his aides. It was painstaking work that entailed keeping in constant contact with the military and our own case officers, running down as many leads as possible, and answering questions from Washington—and from the civilian and military leadership in Baghdad—on our progress in the hunt for High Value Target No. 1, or HVT-1: Saddam Hussein.
The United States had been denied access to Iraq since the Gulf War in 1991. In 2003, I believed the United States had invaded Iraq for the right reasons: to find and destroy WMD (weapons of mass destruction) and liberate the country from a brutal dictator. I believed the WMD threat. Experts throughout government and academia, who had much greater experience than I had, were convinced that Saddam either possessed weapons of mass destruction or was trying to acquire them, a conclusion supported by every piece of intelligence I saw.
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As usual, I began the day with the nine-thirty a.m. meeting of the “fusion cell,” a group of CIA and military analysts who swapped information and reviewed overnight cable traffic. The ten to fifteen analysts paid special attention to reports that Saddam might have been spotted—we called these “Elvis sightings”—and discussed where new leads might be found. We also made suggestions about who should be detained next in the ongoing effort to pick up Saddam’s trail.
We met most days in the annex building **************** where analysts from CENTCOM (U.S. Central Command, a combatant command whose theater of operations includes the Middle East) were housed. That morning, we were told by members of the Special Forces that they had a good lead on some key bodyguards we had identified as being close to Saddam. While this sounded encouraging, it was not all that different from a thousand other tips we had chased down over the past several weeks.
After the fusion cell meeting, I read e-mails and intelligence reports and answered queries from Langley on the search for Saddam. Around noon, I went with a fellow analyst, Randy, to Baghdad International Airport to mail some items home. The airport was just outside the Green Zone and was one of the few places where analysts could go without a security escort. It had a post office and a PX where you could buy toothpaste, razors, and other personal effects.
An added attraction was the Burger King restaurant. It was the only place in Baghdad where you could get a taste of home. After the lightning success of the invasion in March, Burger King opened a franchise at the airport to meet the demand of young servicemen and -women who would give anything for a Whopper. In no time, the Baghdad franchise became the busiest Burger King in the world.
Like other service personnel, CIA officers made special trips to the airport, braving the gauntlet of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) for a Whopper and fries. On December 12, after weeks of bland institutional fare, I was desperate for a burger. But when we got to Burger King, it was closed for lack of food. We had risked life and limb for a Whopper, only to be denied.
On the way back, Airport Road was closed because an IED had been found near its shoulder. Randy and I were diverted from the main road to streets that led us into parts of Baghdad where we had never been before. We had no radio, we were driving an unarmored car, and we were soon very lost. We suddenly found ourselves in a Shia neighborhood as Friday prayers were letting out. The street was a mob scene. Our relatively new vehicle stuck out amid the patchwork-colored cars built from spare body parts. Our flak vests were visible over our clothing, we were both foreigners in a sea of Arabs, and we had no cell phone (I had one of the few functioning cell phones in the station and had left it in my hooch) to call for help if anything went wrong. At one point, I thought we were going to have to ditch the vehicle and swim for it across the Tigris River. But as we drove around, I began to see landmarks that told me we were close to the Green Zone. By the time we finally got back, I was never so happy to see the U.S. military. If this had happened six months later, I doubt we would have been so lucky.
As we got out of the car, I ran into my friend Mike, a National Security Agency analyst on loan to CENTCOM in the fusion cell who was able to tap into sources in the military that were inaccessible to me. He confided that Special Forces troops had captured Muhammad Ibrahim Umar al-Muslit the previous evening. Muhammad Ibrahim, who was head bodyguard for Saddam when he was on the run, broke early and easily. At first he tried to say he was not aware of Saddam’s whereabouts. But the lure of the $25 million bounty on Saddam proved stronger than personal loyalty, and he soon led the Special Forces to the former dictator.* (It turned out that Saddam had replaced many of his bodyguards shortly before the fall of the regime. This was a wise move because intelligence agencies all over the world had been studying his security and trying to find ways to pierce it. Saddam was always very careful about his security and usually delegated this responsibility to trusted aides, who were often family members. He was counting on his new praetorians to keep him safe until he could find a way back to power.)
Muhammad Ibrahim took the Special Forces to the very farm where Saddam hid in 1959 after he had taken part in the bungled attempt to assassinate Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim, who had led the coup that resulted in the murder of King Faisal II and the end of the thirty-seven-year Hashemite monarchy. We knew Saddam had been involved in the Qasim plot four decades earlier, but we hadn’t known that he had fled to a farm, so hadn’t looked there in the nine months he’d been in hiding.
In hopes of finding out more, Mike and I walked to a nearby shed where our special-ops colleagues hung out. But they had suddenly come down with a case of zipped lips. It was clear that the effort to find and capture Saddam was now about who would get the credit. This was something I would have to deal with every time I went to Iraq. The military would go to the CIA for its intelligence expertise and then cut off contact with the Agency when closing in on a target. I called this the “Heisman treatment,” based on the Heisman Trophy pose: a football player with his arm outstretched to fend off opposing tacklers.
It was ironic that the military clammed up on Muhammad Ibrahim Umar al-Muslit, because CIA analysts were the first and foremost proponents of focusing on bodyguards to find Saddam. During the early months after the fall of Baghdad, our colleagues in military intelligence concentrated on questioning the “deck of cards,” senior regime figures who were prominent in Saddam’s government. Only after it became clear that none of Saddam’s senior officials knew where he was did the military go after his bodyguards. The special-ops officers were great guys, and Saddam probably would not have been caught without their heroic work. They attended our fusion cell meetings every morning, were eager to hear our thoughts, and often filled us in on the raids that had taken place the previous night. But now they wouldn’t talk about the upcoming round of raids and who was on the target list.
After I left Mike and the special-ops guys, I walked back into the CIA station and felt a buzz of excitement and anticipation that I had not experienced since arriving in Baghdad. Around seven p.m. we received definitive word that the Special Forces were going on a raid they believed would snare HVT-1. Before Thanksgiving, I didn’t think we would ever catch Saddam. Finding one man in a country of twenty-six million was hard enough, and it was made doubly difficult by the fact that Iraq was in a state of collapse. Communications technology—such as a functioning telephone system—was pretty much nonexistent. Cell phones were few and far between, and functioning cell phone towers in Baghdad in 2003 were also practically nonexistent. Satellite phones were more plentiful, but not all our counterparts on the U.S. side had them. Internet connectivity was spotty, to say the least, making it difficult to communicate with our colleagues in uniform or our civilian counterparts at the Coalition Provisional Authority, the transitional government created by the United States and its allies after Saddam’s fall.
I had spent two months trying to figure out what Saddam might be doing, where he might be traveling, or who he might be meeting with, and I had the sinking feeling that he was a wraith who would forever escape our grasp. I thought how happy I’d be if proved wrong.
That evening, I was at my computer on the second floor of ******** when Andrew, the chief of the CIA analytic staff, said I was wanted in the chief of station’s office. The chief of station was not in the country, so I ended up meeting with his deputy, Gordon, and the CIA’s executive director, Buzzy Krongard, who happened to be in Baghdad. Andrew, Steve (who was head of the Detainee Exploitation Cell), and several other CIA officers were also in the room, which was furnished with a large wooden desk and several leather sofas; it was reminiscent of a college dorm, providing a modicum of comfort and showing the wear and tear of hard use. Krongard, a stickler for proper dress, was wearing a blue jacket and a blue sweater. I was outfitted in cargo pants and a hooded Georgetown University sweatshirt. The other men were wearing fleece jackets and jeans.
“If you were going to identify Saddam, how would you do it?” Gordon asked abruptly. “What would you look for?” I said I would begin by looking for tribal tattoo markings identifying him as a member of the Al-Bu Nasir tribe. One was on the back of his right hand between his forefinger and thumb; the other was on the inside of his right wrist. The markings themselves were just a series of dots, some in a straight line and some in a triangular shape, and something that looked like a crescent moon.
While this may seem anachronistic to Westerners, tattoos were essential in Arab countries such as Iraq. Public record keeping was haphazard, and tattoos were a way for tribes to keep track of members. They were a valuable tool for identifying individuals and resolving local conflicts and grievances. For example, if an Iraqi was thinking of taking action against another individual, it was prudent to know his affiliation so as not to risk a wider tribal conflict.
I also mentioned that Saddam had a scar on his left leg from a wound suffered during the attempt to assassinate President Qasim in 1959, and that his lower lip tended to droop to one side, perhaps from a lifetime of smoking cigars—something I picked up from years of studying videotape of Saddam. We were always on the lookout for new footage of him and for signs he might be in ill health. In 1999, I saw video of him in which it was clear he had lost a good deal of weight. This was around the time of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez’s visit to Baghdad. I began poring over recent videos and photographs with CIA doctors. We figured Saddam was simply on a health kick. We were right, but it did not include giving up cigars.
Krongard interrupted me, saying, “We need to make sure this is Saddam and not one of those body doubles.” He was not going to tell Washington and the world that we had captured Saddam until we were absolutely sure the man wasn’t a body double. I wanted to yell, “For fuck’s sake, there are no body doubles!” But I decided that silence was the better part of valor.
The “body double” notion was the most persistent of the myths about Saddam and was a source of mild disagreement and some humor within the circle of Saddam watchers. Saddam supposedly had men who looked like him and could be used to stand in for him at public gatherings, as well as confuse Western intelligence agencies that might be thinking of assassinating him. This rumor began because, to Western eyes, many of the men who guarded Saddam bore a resemblance to the Iraqi dictator. That much was true. Perhaps it was because many of Saddam’s bodyguards were members of his extended family and shared some physical traits. I don’t know how many memos were written during the Clinton and George W. Bush presidencies knocking down the idea. But it still cropped up in the memoirs of people like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and my former boss, George Tenet, director of the CIA from 1996 to 2004.
(Weeks later, during our formal debriefing of Saddam, we asked him if he had ever used a body double. He laughed and said to us, “How do you know you are not talking to one right now? Maybe I am the body double and the real Saddam is hiding.” He then threw his head back and laughed heartily. “No,” he said, “there is only one Saddam Hussein!”)
Gordon told me to be ready in case I was needed to help make the identification. I hurried back upstairs to my computer terminal. Steve caught up with me and told me to come up with a list of questions that only Saddam could answer. Then he said something that would change my career. “We want you to go out and make sure that the guy they picked up tonight is Saddam Hussein.” I had been up for twenty-seven hours and was flat-out exhausted, but his words sent jolts of adrenaline through me the likes of which I had never experienced before. I was suddenly the guy who would check off on an announcement that would rocket around the world. I hunched over my computer terminal for the next forty minutes or so, formulating questions for the dictator who had prompted the United States to go to war.
I was told that the military was flying the putative Saddam to the airport that night and we’d make the identification there. A senior CIA officer said we’d meet at the bar before going to the airport. The bar for CIA hands was one of the first things the Agency got up and running in the compound. It was in a trailer and had several TVs, Christmas lights galore, and plenty of cold beer. I used to tell people that if we ran Iraq as well as we ran the bar, Iraq would be the Switzerland of the Middle East. When I got to the bar, senior CIA men were already toasting themselves on Saddam’s capture. I waited there for what seemed like forever until I was told that the convoy was at the entrance to the CIA station. I hightailed it back there and hopped into a *********.
We drove out on Airport Road shortly before midnight. This was the road that the U.S. media soon dubbed “the most dangerous road on the planet.” At night it had become a no-go zone. Just a few weeks before, the *********** carrying David Kay, the head of the Iraq Survey Group—the entity established by the CIA at the president’s direction to find Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction—was ambushed by insurgents on the road. Kay was not killed, but the attack underlined the risks. I wore body armor and carried a weapon. In the ******** with me were our translator, a man of Lebanese extraction named George; and Bruce, a polygrapher who had a gift for putting people at ease and getting them to talk. (At no time was Saddam given a lie detector test. It was assumed by the CIA station leadership, correctly in my view, that it would insult him and cut off any chance of gaining his cooperation.)
Our drivers were outfitted with night-vision goggles, and we had a small arsenal in the car. We drove with the lights off at upward of one hundred miles an hour, and the driver got us to the airport in record time. GIs with guns drawn stopped us on a side road leading to the Battlefield Interrogation Facility (BIF). After what felt like an eternity, a soldier lifted the crude makeshift gate and we drove down a narrow, unlit path to a series of low-slung blockhouses.
The BIF was a former station for the Special Republican Guard, an elite force of Saddam’s most trusted military units, and was located in the first blockhouse. It was pandemonium inside, with GIs rushing everywhere. Standing by a desk were some soldiers armed to the teeth. They checked our IDs and told us to grab seats in an adjacent waiting room, which was outfitted with a large-screen TV, a refrigerator filled with soft drinks, and several sofas. Someone had been watching a DVD of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and had put it on pause, so a single frame from the movie radiated from the screen.
We ended up cooling our heels for several hours, which I spent refining the questions I would ask Saddam. (I would find out later that the Army had already shown Saddam to presidential secretary Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti and one of Saddam’s closest advisers, former foreign minister Tariq Aziz. When Abid saw Saddam, he broke into a grin, presumably because he saw that his boss had been unable to evade the dragnet looking for him, and said, “Yeah, that’s him.” Saddam, however, did not know he was being watched, because Abid was viewing him through a one-way mirror.) As we waited, a GI walked by with a basin, the kind used for shaving. Someone said the Army had just shaved the Iraqi dictator. At this point, one of our security guys left the room and started following the man with the basin. When he came back, he showed me a zip-lock bag with what appeared to be whiskers in it. He had gotten some of Saddam’s facial hair as a souvenir. I thought to myself, “We have got to get this show on the road before more silliness occurs.” Finally, a GI poked his head in the room and said, “OK, guys. You’re up.”
I could feel my heart pounding as we walked down a long, dimly lit corridor. At the end of the hall was a large shower room where Saddam was being held. We stood outside the door for several minutes as military interrogators finished their questions.
Suddenly the door opened and I immediately found myself sucking in air. There he was, sitting on a metal folding chair, wearing a white dishdasha (a long, robelike garment) and a blue quilted windbreaker (it was a cold December night). I had looked at videos and pictures of him for years, and thought to myself, “Holy shit, it’s Saddam!” But I realized I had to confirm my gut impression by checking for his telltale markings and asking him questions with, I hoped, revealing answers.
We walked in and took up positions facing him. The place was packed. In addition to our four-man team (me, translator George, Bruce, and Charlie from the Detainee Exploitation Cell), there were six or seven members of uniformed military in the room. Because I was responsible for verifying that U.S. Special Forces had picked up the right guy, I spoke first (through a translator). “I have some questions I’d like to ask you, and you are to answer them truthfully. Do you understand?” Saddam listened to the translation and nodded in agreement. I first asked him, “When was the last time you saw your sons alive?” Saddam listened and got a wry smile on his face. He then turned back to me and said, “Who are you guys? Are you military intelligence, Mukhabarat [civilian intelligence officers]? Answer me. Identify yourselves!”
I expected Saddam to be defiant, but I was a little taken aback at the aggressiveness of his reply. Before I could answer him, one of our group interjected, “We are not here to answer your questions. You are here to answer ours!” Saddam assented, and we continued with the interrogation. Saddam appeared nonchalant as he listened to our questions. It struck me how quickly he was able to acclimate himself to his new surroundings and his new status as a prisoner. He acted as if he came here every Saturday night and this was a regular part of his routine.
I noticed at once that he had a tribal tattoo on the back side of his right hand, between his thumb and forefinger, and another one on the underside of his right wrist. His mouth drooped as we had seen in photographs and videos. We were well along to a 100 percent confirmation. Now I needed to see the 1959 bullet wound and hear how he answered my questions.
Saddam answered most of the questions truthfully, at least the ones he chose to answer. He would not say anything about how he had gotten out of Baghdad or who had helped him. He professed not to understand why I was asking him the questions I did. “Why don’t you ask me about politics? You could learn a lot from me.” I told him I thought that was true, but that I had to ask certain questions first. Normally, I would not conduct an interrogation this way. Anytime a person comes in with a list of questions, you can be certain that the interrogation will go nowhere. A list of questions makes it impossible to establish rapport with a detainee, and the detainee quickly figures out that by saying nothing he can quickly exhaust your questions. However, this was an identification exercise, not a formal debriefing, so I wasn’t after expansive answers.
Both the CIA and the military had their own interpreters. I noticed that the military interpreter, a young man wearing fatigues and a khaki T-shirt, would interrupt George (our interpreter) with his own comments. This continued for some time. A question would be asked, or sometimes an answer given, and the military interpreter would say in an authoritative voice, “No, that’s not what he said!” or “You have interpreted that incorrectly.” We were rapidly approaching a major blowup that would queer the whole debriefing. Saddam watched these exchanges as if he were at a tennis match, his eyes moving from side to side. Soon I saw a little smile appear on his face. He was enjoying this. Saddam began to feign annoyance with our questions and leaned over to the Army interpreter and shook his head. Amazingly, the Army interpreter would often reciprocate. This went on for more than an hour. The tension continued to build, and Saddam just sat back, enjoying the fact that the Americans were not getting along well, which encouraged him to be more smart-alecky. It was fascinating to watch how Saddam could find a small opening and cause friction between people who were ostensibly on the same side. In many ways, the incident was a metaphor for how he ruled his country.
At one point, I asked Saddam if he had anything that he would like to say to us. He said he did, and launched into a diatribe about the rough treatment he had received from the Special Forces unit that captured him. “Is this any way to treat the president of a country? If your President Bush was in the same situation and at the hands of Iraqis, would he be treated the same way? I can tell [you] he would not.”
I looked at Saddam with utter incredulity. Here was a man who didn’t think twice about killing his own people, yet he was complaining about a couple of cuts and scratches. I told him his complaint would be duly noted. It was true that he had been manhandled by the special operations troops. I remember hearing that someone had punched him and said, “That’s for 9/11!”
He began pointing to various cuts and bruises, and lifted his dishdasha to show the damage to his left leg. I saw an old scar and innocently asked if this was the celebrated bullet wound suffered during the attempt to kill Qasim. He assented with a grunt. That was the final piece of proof. We had the right man. We had indeed captured Saddam Hussein.
Someone then asked him a question about WMD. Saddam looked at his questioner and curtly responded, “You found me. Why don’t you go find these weapons of mass destruction?” Then Saddam began to warm to the subject of President Bush’s fruitless search for Iraqi WMD. Saddam said the Americans were a bunch of ignorant hooligans who did not understand Iraq and were intent on its destruction in the belief that there were weapons when in fact they did not exist. Saddam then got a sheepish look on his face, apparently concerned that he was being rude to his “guests.” “I am not speaking about you guys. You seem to be all right. It is your government that I was talking about!”
Finally, someone from our group asked me if I had any further questions. This was my chance to ask the question that I had been thinking about since I saw Saddam’s statue being pulled down by U.S. forces in Firdos Square the previous April. “Saddam, I know that you have spent your life building a spot in Iraqi history and that you have tried your best to commemorate your rule with monuments to mark your reign. How does it feel now that all of these statues have been torn down?”
Saddam gave a little laugh. He put up his index finger and said, “I want you to listen to me. I never asked anyone to put up a statue of me. Oftentimes, members of the Revolutionary Command Council would say to me, ‘Saddam, we want to put your picture up somewhere or we want to put up a statue of you.’ I would tell them no. But the command would overrule me. Who am I to overrule the command?” Again, my jaw dropped because I knew he wouldn’t defer to subordinates. As we prepared to leave, I said to him, “Saddam, you mentioned that I could learn a lot from you about politics. I hope we get to have some time to talk politics.” Saddam grunted his assent, and we filed out of the room.
We went back to the CIA station as the sun was coming up. Walking back to my trailer, I began to meet people who were just waking up and wanted to know what had happened. One by one, they congratulated me as if I had pulled Saddam from the hole myself. It was very gratifying, but I had been up for thirty hours and all I wanted to do was get some sleep.
Now that Saddam was safely in the hands of the U.S. military, I began to settle into what I thought would be a quiet four weeks until my scheduled return to the States. How wrong I was. A few days later, Rumsfeld said on CNN that the CIA would be the first to interrogate Saddam. My work in Baghdad was only beginning.