Peter Beaumont and Shyam Bhatia
Who is . . . Saddam Hussein?
Saddam Hussein doesn’t take chances. Two weeks ago when the United States first threatened to rain bombs on Baghdad, he moved the young thugs of the amn al’rais, the presidential security force that always accompanies him, out of their barracks and into quarters in private homes.
Cruise missiles and stealth bombers may flatten his military installations, but he is determined that when the bombing stops, his personal bodyguard should crawl out of the ruins to protect him.
Saddam – in the words of his opponents – is coup-proof; the cast-iron dictator. He needs to be. Conservative estimates suggest upwards of 20 plots to depose him in his 30 years in power. And the answer to the question “Why doesn’t someone bump him off?” can be read in the architecture of Saddam’s repressive state.
At its heart is the headquarters of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, the mukhabarat, in the Mansour district of Baghdad. It is headed by Rafi’ Dahham Al Tikriti, Iraq’s former ambassador to Turkey.
The directorates are separately located, including D3 and D4, which spy on every aspect of the Iraqi state and infiltrate government departments and the ruling Ba’ath Party, and D9, which does sabotage and assassinations.
Then there is the amn al khass – the special security organisation – under the leadership of Saddam’s son Qusay, whose bodyguard detail has its base near the Baghdad clock and its shooting club in the same building as Qusay’s private swimming pool.
They are supported – and spied on – by the general security organisation, the military security organisation and even the Ba’ath Party’s own special organisation.
“They are all controlled by Qusay and his father,” says Salah Omar Ali, a former Iraqi representative at the UN.
“All the guys are very loyal. They are selected at the age of 20. They have more power than government ministers. They live well. They drive Mercedes Benzes and people are scared of them.”
Saddam’s spies have infiltrated every nook and cranny of his paranoid state – from roadside kiosks to taxis.
Every day the cooks and housekeepers in his 10 palaces around Baghdad are ordered to prepare rooms and food for their dictator. Then Saddam will travel to a house in Samara or Tikrit.
“He will never let anyone touch him,” says Ali. “First they are strip-searched, then offered a change of clothes before being allowed to come close.”
Saddam – like the Roman emperors – will not eat any food not tasted by a “volunteer” from a corps of tasters.
Ahmed Chalabi, president of the Iraqi National Congress opposition group based in London, calls Saddam a “master of deception”.
“One day he arrived at the headquar-ters of military intelligence in Baghdad driving an ordinary pick-up and wearing Arabic headdress. During the Gulf War he was spotted walking in Baghdad apparently unarmed with an escort in civilian clothes watching him from a discreet
distance.
“He rarely sleeps in the same bed two nights running. He also invites himself to a private home and when he leaves the next day, a generous cash gift is left behind on the kitchen table.”
Wafik Sammurai, former head of Iraqi military intelligence, also believes there has been no shortage of attempts to kill “the brother president”, but the precautions he takes are “outstanding”.
“When he travels between Baghdad and his home district of Tikrit, for example, he travels in a convoy of 100 identical Mercedes Benzes. Along the way he will change his car three or four or five times.
“If any would-be assassin spots him in, say, car 10 and decides to target him further along the way, it’s more than likely that Saddam will have changed to car five.
“This is exactly what happened in 1982 when Saddam was visiting the town of Al Dujail. An opposition group opened fire on car 10, but by then he was in car three.”
Sammurai says that Saddam always wears a bulletproof vest and makes sure the cars he travels in are also armour-plated. “In 1991 two soldiers opened fire on him as he drove into the presidential palace in Baghdad but the armour-plating saved him.”
Saddam is aggressively protective about his movements and merciless to those who reveal his travel plans.
In 1995 a businessman friend, Abdel Latif at-Buniya, arrived at the presidential office and asked to see Saddam. The officer in charge told him the president was away in Tikrit. Buniya caught up with him there.
Saddam asked how he had found him, and after Buniya explained, the hapless officer was executed. Buniya himself died a few months later in an unexplained car accident.
Saddam’s taste for revenge is also legendary. When his convoy was fired on in 1983 near the village of Jizan al-Chol, Saddam sent in helicopters, tanks and bulldozers to flatten the village.
The women were spared, only to be turned into prostitutes for his forces at a special desert camp.