'Don't shoot,' the bearded, submissive man said to the soldiers. He was Saddam Hussein, hiding in a hole, the man the Pentagon called 'High Value Target Number One.' The story of his capture--and what's next.
Gary Knight / VII for Newsweek
'We got him': Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez (at podium), the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, and coalition administrator L. Paul Bremer (far right) made the official announcement of Saddam's capture
By Evan Thomas and Rod Nordland
Newsweek
Dec. 22 Issue - In a part of the world where pride and dignity mean everything, the images were clearly intended to shame. A nameless doctor or medical technician, wearing rubber gloves, was seen closely examining the man's hair, perhaps looking for vermin. Prodded with a tongue depressor, the man opened his mouth; the doctor peered at the pink flesh of his throat and scraped off a few cells for DNA identification. Then the world saw the man's face. Haggard, defeated, slightly disgusted and unquestionably Saddam Hussein, tyrant and terrorist, sadist and murderer, object of one of the greatest manhunts in history.
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The commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, told reporters that Saddam had been found hiding in a mudhole. Gone were the fleets of Mercedeses, the battalions of secret police, the gold-encrusted palaces. Saddam did not put up a fight; he did not try to take his own life (though he had a pistol). He was "talkative" and "cooperative," resigned, cowering, meek and weak. The Glorious Leader, Direct Descendant of the Prophet, the Lion of Babylon, the Father of the Two Lion Cubs, the Anointed One, the Successor of Nebuchadnezzar, the Modern Saladin of Islam had been brought low, forced to bow down, whisked away to an "undisclosed location" to contemplate his fate while waiting to stand trial for his vast crimes against humanity.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, we got him!" declared a beaming, triumphant Paul Bremer, the American proconsul in Baghdad. In the Iraqi capital, a hush had fallen over the city. Rumors of Saddam's capture had been flying through the streets. Almost everyone, it seemed, had gathered around a TV set or radio to await the formal word. When Bremer spoke, at about 3:15 Sunday afternoon Baghdad time (7:15 a.m. in Washington), the city erupted in celebratory gunfire. Shop owners began closing up, fearing that the revelers might get carried away. (When Saddam's sons, Uday and Qusay, were captured and killed last summer, at least a half dozen people were killed by the rain of falling bullets.) Cameras caught American soldiers puffing on cigars.
Efrem Lukatsky / AP
When they captured Saddam outside Tikrit, 4th Infantry soldiers also found $750,000 of the Iraqi leader's stashed cash
The insurrection will go on, and more American soldiers and Iraqis will die. But the capture of Saddam was undoubtedly an enormous breakthrough in the liberation of Iraq. Many Iraqis could never quite believe that Saddam was gone, that he would not reappear like some bad dream. By showing the images of Saddam in captivity and not just captured but poked, prodded and shorn, the Americans were sending a clear message to the Iraqi people that their tormentor of decades was gone forever.
Now comes the Mother of All War Crimes Trials. The mountain of evidence of Saddam's grotesqueries--the gassing of whole villages, the torture of political prisoners, the wholesale slaughter of his enemies--will be presented and dissected. The trial could be a security nightmare, of course, a target for terrorists. Some U.S. intelligence officials on Sunday morning speculated to NEWSWEEK that the capture of Saddam might actually bring an increase in attacks on American troops and their Iraqi allies--a last real spasm of violence. But Saddam's arrest may also be a chance for reconciliation, a step toward bringing together a nation divided by sect and tribe and, for too long, by fear.
The hunt for Saddam had been a vexing preoccupation of the military and the Bush administration. His capture was a happy ending to a maddening and sometimes embarrassingly fruitless hunt for a marked man with a $25 million bounty on his head. When Saddam vanished as Baghdad fell, American intelligence officials were reasonably confident that he had not fled the country and guessed that he was holed up somewhere near his old hometown of Tikrit, north of the Iraqi capital. But where? Saddam was said to have a number of body doubles and to have undergone plastic surgery to radically alter his features. The rumor mill ground away. In June, a Baghdad newspaper reported that the former president had been sighted driving a Pajero taxi around Baghdad, while wearing a beard, glasses and an ankle-length traditional Arab robe.
Special Forces (Delta, Navy SEALs, CIA paramilitary) scoured the countryside. A supersecret military team known as Grey Fox sleuthed about, listening for telltale radio or telephone transmissions. But Saddam was not likely to use the phone, and the greatest hope was always that he would be betrayed by his countrymen. One by one, the Americans picked up the top Baathist leaders, ranked in order of importance and identified on playing cards by U.S. intelligence. After 249 days, 41 of the 55 were in custody, but there was no Ace of Spades.
The Americans received numerous tips from Iraqis interested in the $25 million reward, but none of them panned out. So the military began to squeeze. About six weeks ago, soldiers of the Fourth Infantry Division strung barbed wire around the small farm village of Awja, where Saddam had lived as a boy, about 5 to 10 kilometers south of Tikrit--and, as it turned out, some 5 kilometers from the farm where he was finally captured. The town was a Saddamite fishbowl. About 60 percent of the village's thousand or so men were arrested and questioned. "We had number 6's father, Saddam's first cousin, quite a cast of characters that are town elders," Lt. Col. Steve Russell of the Fourth I.D. told NEWSWEEK.
By the time Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld arrived in Baghdad in early December, top CENTCOM officials were beginning to feel that they were finally closing in. A top aide to Rumsfeld told NEWSWEEK that intelligence was working up the food chain toward Saddam, arresting and interrogating sources who were getting close to the fugitive himself. One top official told Rumsfeld that U.S. forces were "on the heels" of Saddam. British sources told NEWSWEEK that Saddam had been driving around in a battered old cab, a clue for aerial surveillance. The pace of raids seemed to quicken last week: a series of quick hits on hideouts that revealed what one commander called a "Fedayeen candy shop," Pepsi cans rigged with explosives and bombs rigged with doorbell ringers. And more traces of Saddam.
At about 10:50 a.m. Baghdad time on Saturday, Dec. 13, military intelligence got the tip it was looking for. Saddam was hiding at one of two farms in the little town of Ad Dawr, according to the tipster. (The choice of Ad Dawr showed a certain lack of imagination, or perhaps desperation, by Saddam. In 1959, when Saddam tried unsuccessfully to assassinate the prime minister of Iraq, Abdul Karim Qassim, Saddam had fled to the same village and hid on a family friend's farm, later swimming across the Tigris River to exile in Syria, one of the only times he ever left his country.)
Quickly, the Fourth I.D. mounted Operation Red Dawn: about 600 troopers--cavalry, engineers, artillery, Special Forces--to descend on the two farms, code-named Wolverine 1 and Wolverine 2. As evening fell, the soldiers surrounded the farms, cutting off all roads for about four or five kilometers around. Special Forces slipped in--and found nothing.
According to U.S. officials, the Americans had an informant working with them, a family member "close to Saddam." The tipster said, in effect, "He's there. Trust me. Keep looking." A more thorough search of every building and field commenced, and at 8:26 p.m., a soldier noticed a crack in the earth under a lean-to adjoining a mud hut on a small sheep farm. The last hiding spot of the Lion of Babylon, the Butcher of Baghdad and what the Pentagon referred to as "High Value Target Number One" was unprepossessing in the extreme. A single beat-up orange and white Iraqi taxi was parked next to the sheep pen. The crack revealed a hidden door. The soldiers carefully shoved aside some bricks and dirt and opened up a Styrofoam hatch covered with a rug.
