Steve Quayle News Alerts

September 6, 2002
by Gordon Thomas

This morning, as the creeping grey ends and another day begins – the moment Saddam Hussein’s mother had taught him was the “first dawn” – an Iraqi air force transport plane will taxi to a halt near one of his twenty-four palaces in which the country’s self-appointed President-For-Life will have spent another secure night.

Saddam never sleeps in the same palace two nights running. Each palace operates on the premise that he is going to turn up.

The one certainty is that during the night he will have spent time pondering his next moves in the deadly game of chess he is playing with President Bush and Prime Minister Blair. Saddam expects there to be more players set against him soon.

The over-riding question he faces is whether to strike first. He knows he has the power: the biological and chemical weapons. He knows he has the courage of his skewed convictions! He has no moral problems if his own people are killed in their untold thousands in retaliation.

He fears nothing and no one. And that is the most terrifying part of his mindset. He is like some antediluvian creature. The monster who rose from the sands.

But how does he live? Work? Rule?

A clue lies in the arrival of that transport plane.

On board the aircraft will be containers of live lobsters, fresh shrimps and recently slaughtered sides of lamb and beef; all fat will have been trimmed from the meat.

In addition there will be a variety of dairy products which would grace any delicatessen: yogurts, cheeses and, a special favourite of Saddam Hussein’s, olives picked from the Golan Heights.

He likes to spit out the pips – “the way I will one day spit out the Israelis from their land”, he once said to his former chief of intelligence, General Wafic Samarai.

Later, when he fell out of favour, the spymaster had fled for his life, walking for forty hours to escape through the north of Iraq into Turkey. Samarai was lucky. Most of those who cross Saddam Hussein are killed by methods which surpass the torture chambers of ancient times.

While the 65-year-old Saddam still sleeps, perhaps in the arms of another young girl selected by his Republican Guards to satisfy his voracious sexual needs, a truck will drive the food to the palace.

“In each palace are stationed scientists from the country’s nuclear arms programme”, explained Wafic Samarai.

They work in a restricted area in the basement of a palace. Access to it is only through swipe cards, their codes change every day.

In the basement is a suite that has a powerful hospital-style X-ray machine. The scientists X-ray each item of food. “They are looking for any sign of whether the food has been poisoned or exposed to previous radiation”, said Wafic Samarai.

When nothing suspicious is detected, the food passes on to further checks.

In the suite is a modern kitchen. It is staffed by European chefs; they are paid large salaries and, off duty, live comfortably.

After the food has passed its X-ray examination, the chefs take a small portion: a morsel of lobster or fish, a sliver of meat, a nibble of cheese, a small spoonful of dairy product.

The food that needs cooking is prepared. Then all the items are presented on plates. Tastefully arranged, it would surely satisfy the palates of any gourmet.

But the plates have a very different purpose. Their contents will be the last meal to be eaten by the food tasters. They have been selected from some of the untold legions of prisoners in Iraq’s jails.

Watched by members of al Himaya, Saddam’s personal bodyguards, each prisoner swallows and displays his open mouth to the bodyguards. The tasters are then observed for an hour to ensure they have not been poisoned.

Next they are taken to a lab to have blood drawn. This is tested to make sure there is no trace of radiation in what they have digested.

The bizarre process over, the prisoners are then taken to a courtyard in the palace and shot – usually with a single bullet to the back of the head.

The gunshots are a signal for Saddam Hussein that his breakfast, and the other meals he will eat during the day, are safe to consume.

This bizarre ritual is one of many which governs his life.

Saddam’s psycho-profiles in the files of Mossad, the CIA and European intelligence services, suggest he is now often bordering on the clinically psychotic. That he suffers from a condition called manic-depression.

CIA psychiatrics write of his behaviour “falling into two distinct stages.

“In the manic stage he is extremely excited. His mind races; he talks volubly and at times incoherently. During the depressive stage all his thoughts and emotions are the exact opposite. He is in the depths of melancholia; he scarcely speaks; ignores food. Then, once more the mood change sets in. His thoughts and speech can become almost uncoordinated and he has little or no contact with reality. That is when he is at his most dangerous”.

A Mossad psychologist describes “clinical evidence of a disturbance in his feelings, but that none of this affects his personality. It remains entirely unimpaired”.

I witnessed a small example of Saddam’s behaviour during the Iran-Iraq War. After what turned out to be a decisive tank battle outside Basra, I was among correspondents invited to visit the site to hear Saddam – “Field Marshal of all Our Armies” – congratulate his troops.

Afterwards one of my “minders” took me over to meet Saddam. He shook my hand. Through the “minder” I asked Saddam how did he compare the just-ended tank battle with those of World War Two.

“This one was far more important,” he pronounced.

“Not one of those battles effected the outcome of the war. What happened here ended our glorious struggle against our enemies”.

There was a grandiose delusion about his words. In our brief exchanges, he told me that he studied all the great tactical battles of World War Two – “and found them wanting”.

Looking back on notes of that moment, I see I had asked Saddam how he rated Hitler as a tactician.

Saddam, I recall, stared at me for a long moment. The minder looked uneasy. Suddenly, Saddam’s moustache began to twitch. What began as a smile became a full-blown laugh.

“Hitler was too soft”, he said. “My enemies will never say that of me”.

Then he was gone, striding across the sands of south Iraq. Later I have come to see his words as a small hint of what was to come.

Today, Saddam is not the man I met on the sands outside Basra. Attempts on his life have strengthened his conviction he has been “chosen to do what I must: remove the Jewish state from the face of this earth”.

It is not religious fervour that drives him on to try and achieve this. It is that he has come from a background where tribal and patriarchal loyalties mean shedding blood.

But to give him the religious cloak that is essential to win the hearts of Islam’s extremists, he has ordered Iraq’s genealogists to create a family line that links him to Fatima, the daughter of the prophet Mohammed. It is as if George Bush had tried to trace his lineage back to the Virgin Mary.

Yet nowadays, Saddam sees Mohammed less as the bearer of divine intervention.

As Britain’s Tony Blair joins America’s George Bush in the clearest indications that war is only a matter of weeks away, foreign diplomatic sources I have spoken to in Baghdad in the past forty-eight hours suggest Saddam sees his self-created link to Fatima as a precursor he is indeed the “Descendant of the Prophet”, chosen to unify the Arab peoples and lead them to an unprecedented victory.

In Baghdad today people queue to see a 600-page copy of the Koran that was written with Saddam’s own blood. He donated it, a half-litre at a time, over three years.

From all over Iraq people come to state at the relic on display in a Baghdad museum. They file past, silent, heads bowed.

For the blood he has given is also a symbol of the other blood he has ordered spilled – the blood of all those who have opposed him. The few left in Iraq maintain a careful silence. Saddam’s secret service has agents everywhere.

This morning his routine inside the secure palace, in which he has elected to stay, will follow a preordained order.

Whichever woman has shared his bed will be dismissed. Her fate, like so many other young, nubile women who have been forced to sleep with him, will be a matter of conjecture. The intelligence analysts in Washington and London have suggested they are killed because Saddam is fearful the may have talked in his sleep and revealed some secret.

Equally possible is that he simply prefers to have a new conquest every night. Certainly his bodyguards constantly roam the streets of Baghdad looking for suitable women for their master.

Alone, Saddam will make his way to his private swimming pool. For him a number of laps – his crawl is slow but steady – is an important exercise to strengthen his spinal cord. Some years ago he underwent surgery for a slipped disc.

He swims naked, watched only by his bodyguards. From them there are no secrets about his physical infirmities. He has a limp; in public he will only walk a few steps before pausing. For a man so muscular in uniform, he has a belt of fatty tissue around his lower abdomen. His penis is reported to be small.

Saddam’s swim over, there is another essential ritual to the start of his day. His barber, who travels everywhere with him, arrives.

For the next thirty minutes, the barber trims Saddam’s moustache and touches up the black dye in his hair.

The chemicals used in the process came from Paris; each bottle has been tested to ensure it contains no lethal agent.

Saddam has an abiding fear that Mossad, or some other Western intelligence agency, would be able to tamper with the dye so that a nerve agent could penetrate his scalp and paralyse or even kill him.

His hair uniformly tinted to hide any trace of grey, his nails are then buffed and manicured with a colourless polish.

His personal dresser then takes over. Of late Saddam has started to wear only battle dress. But his shoes have a soft sole to ease the first twinges of arthritis.

Saddam’s uniform is custom-made, cut to emphasise the muscle-culture of his body. His biceps and strong thighs are the result of those early teenage years when he went camel racing.

His jacket is tailored to disguise the spreading waistline he has failed to halt by periods of strict dieting.

These vanities are in a man who is irritated by the way his wife of forty years, Sajida, has allowed her hennaed hair nowadays to be less than perfect and whose body is matronly.

To try and stall his own ageing process – and to further pander to his vanity – Saddam avoids using reading glasses in public. Every time he stands at a podium to address people, his speech is printed out in large letters.

His physical vanities attended to, Saddam Hussein is ready for another long day. For years now his fear of assassinations have meant that a fixed routine in public is a luxury he has had to forgo.

No one can deny his capacity for work. A twelve to fourteen hour day of meetings is not unusual. At the end of each session he will take a small nap in a room adjoining the office. Thirty minutes later he can be back at the top of a conference table ready to plunge himself into a new round of discussions.

Each meeting begins the same way. Saddam studies an executive summary of the reports which have been prepared. Sometimes he will ask to see the full report for closer examination.

No one around the table knows which report will be chosen for scrutiny. If the summary does not match that of a full report, he will close question the writers of both.

He then displays a harsh, inquisitorial manner. He is a natural bully.

But every few hours – wherever he is – his closest aides know they must arrange for the man who styles himself as the Great Uncle of his people to be near water: a fountain, an indoor waterfall, a flowing stream.

Water is a symbol of wealth and power in the desert land of Iraq. In his personal ethnology – his social relations, the customs and culture in which he was raised – water is a prerequisite.

A MI6 psycho-profile says that for Saddam “to be out of reach of all that water symbolises for him, creates an anxiety that is highly dangerous”.

In all his personal offices – no one knows how many there are scattered around Baghdad and beyond – there is always the sound of the cascade of water on a background disc.

Then, according to Wafic Samarai, Saddam can be at his most pleasant. He will sit behind his high-backed leather chair, hands on the desk and, “it is almost relaxing to be with him. If the matter is a serious one, like the attitudes of America or Israel, he will listen intently, then suddenly become tense. At that stage it is important to decide ‘is he trying to intimidate me?’ or should I continue? To make a mistake can be fatal. An officer who has misjudged what he was expected to say has been waved out of the office. An hour later he will find himself in a torture chamber. If he is lucky he will be shot before the torture lasts too long”.

It is Saddam’s obsession with violence which is the most terrifying side to his multi-faceted personality.

He has become obsessed with the dynamics of creating pain. He has spent countless hours reviewing the videos of those he has had tortured and then executed.

Iraqi methods of killing range from a victim being buried alive, to a speciality Saddam learned from the Taliban. A long nail is driven through a victim’s ear into his brain.

His torture chambers are reputed to contain effigies made of wood and iron in which a victim is confined. The hollow effigies contain spikes positioned as to penetrate the victim’s body.

Strangulation and buried alive in the desert are fates reserved for those for whom he has decided hanging is deemed to be too quick.

Saddam’s fixation with torture was passed on to his sons when they were still in their pre-teens. Uday and Qusay were both taken on weekly visits to witness torture and executions in Baghdad prisons.

Their father has stated publicly, “it is important for our children to be hard to face the difficult road along which we must lead them”.

Yet despite the carapace of hardness that surrounds him, Saddam has also been known to weep openly having condemned a friend, a relative, even his two sons-in-law to death.

During the 1979 purge of the Baath party which gave him power, he stood at the lectern and wept openly as he condemned party members.

As each man was grabbed by his guards and taken to their deaths, the conference hall echoed with his amplified sobbing, picked up by the microphones on the podium.

It was a macabre piece of theatre.

In a country ruled by fear, details of the fates awaiting anybody who dares to betray Saddam are nowadays whispered in the souks – spread by the agents of al Mimaya.

Saddam himself has been known to witness executions. Last year there were persistent reports that a number of Saddam’s army officers had been suspected of helping the Kurds in the north of Iraq.

No evidence was offered against them. The officers were simply led out of their cells into a courtyard. Waiting there were their wives and children – held in check by guards.

A multiple gallows had been set up in the centre of the yard. In a window watched an impassive-faced Saddam Hussein.

He listened as the prisoners begged, tears on their cheeks, to at least have their families not present as they went to their deaths.

In batches of three the officers were hanged. Their bodies were then taken away – never to be seen again.

Only then did Saddam emerge into the courtyard. With him were Uday and Qusay. Together they walked over to the now fearful relatives.

Saddam reached out and patted the heads of children and murmured they must grow up to be good loyal citizens. To the adults he said they must understand that he could not tolerate what their husbands had done. Then he began to weep. His sons comforted him. Still sobbing, they led him away.

This deadly dark side of Saddam has to be set against other personality traits. To better understand them is to grasp his fundamental belief that in the coming war with the United States – “if not today, then very soon” – he has repeatedly told his closest aides he will triumph; that no matter what they think of him, his Arab neighbours, even Iran, will support Iraq.

He will cite as an example, how Winston Churchill called upon the British Empire to come to the aid of the Motherland in 1939.

In one of those revelations with which Saddam never fails to surprise, he has claimed the “Churchill is an great hero of mine”.

He said it long before Donald Rumsfeld, America’s Secretary of State, used Churchillian rhetoric to try and drum up support for the Bush Administration’s determination to go to war with Iraq.

Saddam has often boasted he has the complete literary works of Churchill in each of his palaces – and will re-read them at every opportunity. True or not, it is another glimpse into the complex personality who holds the balance of peace in the Middle East in his manicured hands.

This fascination with Churchill’s talents as a writer has led Saddam to display his own literary aspirations.

So far he has published to romantic fables; Zabibah and The King and The Fortified Castle.

Both remained at the top of the Iraqi bestseller lists for months. In Langley, CIA analysts have pored over every word. In a report to director George Tenet an analyst wrote, “the books are the work of many hands – none of them very talented. This is one step up from supermarket trash magazines”.

More certain is that in Iraq no one dared to criticise them.

In recent weeks the CIA believe that Saddam is about to launch on to the market yet another novel – again guaranteed to hit the Iraqi Top Ten within hours of publication.

Of more interest to Western intelligence services are the work of ghost-writers Saddam employs to give a polish to his thoughts on history and philosophy. In them they hope to find clues as whether Saddam might launch his own attack before missiles rain down on Baghdad.

In whichever palace he has chosen to spend the night, the television sets are not only tuned to the Iraqi stations he controls, but also to CNN. But for Saddam the most important station is the Discovery Channel. It airs all those newsreel compilation documentaries of World War Two and the Gulf War.

“The tactics used in those battles truly fascinate Saddam Hussein”, said his former intelligence chief Wafic Samarai.

Later, as the night deepens, Saddam will re-run his favourite movies. “Enemy of the State”, “The Conversation” and “The Old Man of The Sea”.

But two have become obsessional viewing. One is “The Day of The Jackal”. The other is “The Godfather” series.

Samarai is not alone in saying that in the latter Saddam sees himself as the godfather to his people. But in the Frederick Forsyth story of an assassin who nearly killed General Charles de Gaul, Saddam Hussein fears his own nemesis.

Already the assassination’s bullet has come close to his family. In 1996 Uday was hit by eight bullets and is now paralysed from the waist down.

The assassins were linked to members of an Iraqi army family. Its head, General Omar al-Hazza, had his tongue cut out when he refused to talk. Then he and his son were slowly strangled to death by piano wires. Saddam watched the entire process, said a CIA report.

Tonight, as on any other, Saddam is likely to emerge from whatever palace he is staying in. He will be sat in the back of his Mercedes, staring out behind the curtains at the world outside.

The car will be escorted by others carrying his bodyguards. All will be dressed in their distinctive dark-green uniforms, black berets and zippered boots of reddish-brown leather. Many will sport similar moustaches to Saddam. It is their badge of office.

Also it serves a more practical purpose. In the event of an attempt on the Great Uncle’s life, in the dark the bodyguards could just be mistaken for Saddam himself. Like the Secret Service who guard President Bush, the al Himaya are pledged to give their lives for Saddam.

They may turn out to be the only ones who, in the coming weeks, will be willing to do so.

In Iraq, Saddam is now universally hated. In the public his cruelty alone has ensured that. But their hatred alone might not be enough to dislodge him.

He is still a player in the world of Middle East politics. He has shown that before with consummate skill.

In 1980, with the blessing of the Gulf oil-producing states, Saddam declared war on revolutionary Iran.

Though himself once the head of a secularist party, the Baath, he mobilised the forces of religion in Iraq in order to keep them out of Khomeini’s control. Teheran retaliated with terrorism, taking Western hostages through the Hezbollah in Lebanon and disrupting the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Teheran now sees the tactical error it made – one, that if he had been in the mullah’s slippers Saddam would not have done.

He continues to support al-Quaeda. He has judged well the mood of Islamic radicalism by his sustained verbal attacks on Israel.

Not all of it is wild talk. Saddam has the resources to strike hard against the Israelis. That they will retaliate with equal, and perhaps greater force, is not a concern for him.

The Iraqi army is still with him. But how far that loyalty will go when the war starts is difficult to assess. And, for all their fear and hatred of Saddam Hussein, there are many Iraqis who also resent the bellicosity of the United States.

“Saddam knows this – and plays on it. For his part he will never surrender. The only way to overthrow him is quite simply to kill him,” said a CIA source.

Again that is not going to be easy. No one knows where he will sleep tomorrow night. Or all the nights which follow. He is like a phantom of the night. His shadow is everywhere. And that is what makes him so dangerous – and hard to remove.

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