The team had been working hard. In a secret base in the centre of Baghdad 16 computer and intelligence experts attached to a dedicated American military intelligence unit had been spending 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for six months building one of the most sophisticated computer models ever used in a manhunt. Their labour paid off. Amid 62,500 connections logged by the team, there was one of crucial importance. It led directly to Saddam.
The programme, known as ‘The Mongo Link’, charts the personal associations of nearly 9 000 people who are, or rather were, seen as crucial in the hunt for the ex-dictator. It was started with four names. Since then analysts, using data from Iraqi informants, military patrols, electronic intercepts and a range of other sources, turned the chart into a ‘living, breathing document’ revealing, the complex family, tribal and state dynamics that allowed Saddam to stay in power, and then to survive after being ousted.
But late in November one man in particular began to catch the eye of the Americans: a balding, paunchy, middle-aged veteran of Saddam’s most secret personal guards. Early this month, raids in Tikrit, Saddam’s birthplace and a hotbed of resistance to the US-led occupation, failed to find him. A second set of operations in Samarra, 40km south, was fruitless too. On 12 December, the man was seized in Baghdad. Less than 36 hours later, Saddam had been located in a fetid underground chamber in a ramshackle farm.
This weekend, Saddam is in custody, almost certainly held in the cell prepared for him in the massively fortified US base at Baghdad Airport. The humiliating lack of resistance the ‘Lion of Babylon’ showed to his captors and the ecstatic response of much of the Iraqi population provided a welcome boost for the increasingly troubled coalition in Iraq and its political masters.
Although initial interrogations produced little, documents found with Saddam have revealed the names of Iraqis who also passed on information to insurgent cells about US troop movements. The US military used them to put together details of up to 14 cells. They also showed Saddam had recently had direct contact with several key resistance suspects around Mosul. Three former Iraqi generals were soon arrested.
But the questions remain. Last week was one of the most violent since President Bush declared ‘mission accomplished’ on 1 May. A series of suicide bomb attacks and drive-by shootings claimed at least 40 Iraqi lives in the four days after Saddam’s capture. Yesterday, three Iraqi policemen were killed by US soldiers in error and a former Baathist mayor was shot dead. The next US soldier to die will be the two hundredth since Bush’s declaration. Will Saddam be tried, and by whom and where? Will he face the death penalty? And, most pressing of all, will his capture weaken the growing resistance?
In Samarra, Al-Alawi, who runs a restaurant in the centre of town, said Saddam had let everyone down.
‘Why could he not have killed himself, like Hitler, or died shooting, like his sons?’ Al-Alawi told The Observer. ‘For all those years, we thought he was a bad man, but a real man. Now, he is not even that. Now, there are some people protesting that he is arrested, some people gleeful that he is arrested, and the killing is worse than ever.’
Samarra lies in the heart of the Sunni triangle, the area of land west and north-west of Baghdad where resistance is fiercest. Cities such as Samarra, along with Tikrit, Bayji, Falluja and Ramadi, have become battle zones where US soldiers have died and hundreds more have been wounded. The Sunni tribes who live in the region benefited most from Saddam’s reign. Now, stripped of the privileges and power that the Baathist regime brought them, they are fighting hard.
The reason, Al-Alawi said, was simple. ‘If there is one thing worse than Saddam, it is being invaded by the foreigners. Especially American foreigners.’
Columns of tanks now prowl the ‘liberated’ city 24 hours a day, kicking up the dust, scattering children. Roads are randomly closed and rolls of barbed wire laid by the Fourth Infantry Division, the unit that captured Saddam. Local Iraqi police paramilitaries screen all cars, wearing balaclavas to hide their features. One local doctor, Aisar Al-Samarrai, complained that his clinic was regularly hit by gunfire.
According to Sheikh Adnan Thabit, who sits on the town’s religious council, ‘there is a now a full stand-off between the resistance and the Americans’.
Humvee-mounted patrols comb the sand-coloured residential areas street by street, house by house. Every dawn there are raids. Some 120 suspects were arrested last week. The resistance mounts daily attacks, gaining in sophistication. Once it was small-arms fire, now it is mines and bombs. Earlier this month a convoy delivering new ‘Saddam-free’ currency to a bank was ambushed. The Americans claim they killed between 40 and 58 resistance fighters. Locals say the dead were mostly innocent civilians and some Iranian pilgrims.
Graffiti all over the city make the sentiments clear. ‘Spies: hide your faces now … Tomorrow we will show who you are,’ says one. Some slogans, ‘American soldiers: Our armed struggle continues without end endlessly’ are in English. Another, similar, message scrawled across a school wall, was promptly demolished by a tank.
The resistance in Samarra is not hard to find. In a side street is ‘Hasni’, with regulation leather jacket and machine gun. He told The Observer why he had taken up arms. ‘This is not Tikrit. This is not a Baath Party city. We in Samarra are the oldest tribe of Iraq, and Saddam was afraid to come here. We are fighting a foreigner, not for Saddam, not for Islam, but for Samarra and Iraq.’
‘Hasni’ stressed it would be unfair to ‘criticise the Americans for everything they do’. ‘When they do good, we must say so. But they are making a big mistake to put back into power all the corrupt people and treat us as slaves and try to steal our economy. While they try this, we have lost our wealth and have many young men without work.’
Hasni’s comrade, Mahmoud, adds: ‘Each time they kill a civilian, they make a fighter in that person’s family. Day after day, they are creating more resistance.’
The Americans still know little about their enemy. There are former Baathists, Islamic militants, mercenary criminals and nationalists. ‘The Mongo Link’ is a powerful weapon against individuals but has limited use against a fragmented and varied resistance. ‘We still only have a sketchy idea of who we are up against on the ground,’ one US intelligence source said.
It is this intelligence deficit the Americans hope Saddam’s interrogation will fill. They have built up a huge ‘playbook’ on Saddam. The playbook — the file of questions, timelines, psychological profiles and analysis that an interrogation team can use against a subject — is thick. It is not even being used yet. A team of experts from the CIA — which will head up Saddam’s interrogation — are still updating it.
So far the interrogation has been basic and the ex-dictator’s mood has been defiant, intelligence officials said. At first questioners wanted to know any details of planned attacks on US troops. Saddam said he knew nothing and was believed.
Now the interrogation has settled into the start of a process of detailed questioning that will probably take several months. So far, the tone has been set by Saddam’s first words when he emerged from his hiding hole and said: ‘I am Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq, and I am willing to negotiate.’
‘That was a fairly delusional statement and also fit in well with his huge ego,’ said Mike Ritz, a former US military interrogator. ‘But it also showed he was willing to talk because you can’t negotiate without talking.’
Former members of the SAS told The Observer their training involved learning what knowledge to reveal when – rather than how to avoid revealing anything at all. ‘Everyone will break eventually,’ one said. ‘It’s a case of doing as little damage as possible when you do.’
The priority for soldiers, the ex-SAS men said, was to avoid giving away information of current or imminent operations. ‘To be of tactical use, information has to be obtained within 24 or 48 hours. It looks like Saddam has held out long enough to avoid compromising people,’ he said.
Leaked transcripts from the initial questioning of Saddam at a holding cell at Baghdad Airport show his defiance. When one official asked: ‘How are you?’ Saddam replied: ‘I am sad because my people are in bondage.’ Saddam has told his questioners he is still President and that he would win any election, and he has repeated his denials over weapons of mass destruction.
Jerrold Post, a former CIA psychologist who drew up the agency’s profile of Saddam, defined him as a ‘malignant narcissist’. ‘Underneath that defiant facade there is a really hollow inner man.’
American experts have tried several textbook tricks to try to break therough that facade. When they brought in four members of the Iraqi governing council to speak to Saddam, it was not only for identification purposes. Though he was rude and aggressive to the men, calling them ‘collaborators’ and ‘rubbish’, the move also spelled out the new reversal of power to Saddam. The Americans have also been showing him videos of anti-Saddam celebrations, the digging up of mass graves and ‘torture movies’ made by his secret police to be sent to the families of victims. Saddam has dismissed his victims as ‘criminals’ and ‘thugs’ who deserved what they got. He claims he was a ‘fair and just’ ruler.
As the main interrogation gets under way and the playbook comes into use Saddam will face questions about aspects of his rule from torture to weapons of mass destruction. It is likely his questioners will employ teams of polygraphers, body language experts and voice specialists. Every session will be filmed so it can be studied again later. Although the CIA will lead the interrogation, members of the Pentagon-based unit the Defence Intelligence Agency and the FBI will also be involved.
A ‘good cop, bad cop’ tactic will be used. Other possibili ties include trying to anger him by having a woman or a junior officer interrogate him. Or trying to flatter him by having a higher ranking officer talk to him.
Saddam’s cell is windowless and his interrogations are lengthy. Although no physical techniques, such as sleep deprivation, have been used on him, officials say he is probably disorientated. ‘He ends up being sleep-deprived anyway,’ said one intelligence source.
Quite how much any disclosure by Saddam will help — at least in the short run — is unclear. So far, it appears he played little or no role in directing the attacks. He was instead a figurehead who received reports on some of the attacks as he moved from one hiding place to another.
One key factor in the interrogation is the fact that Saddam is likely to face trial within a year. The most likely option is a trial in Baghdad by the Iraqi war crimes tribunal established this month, most likely taking place next summer after a new transitional government comes into being. Judges and prosecutors would be Iraqis, possibly including exiles. They would almost certainly have the power to impose the death penalty, which President Bush would welcome. There is, however, room for compromise if human rights organisations can exert sufficient pressure. The key element will be to make the trial appear authentic in the eyes of Iraqis. No one expects a swift resolution of Iraq’s problems, or a sudden end to resentment of the occupiers.
‘The Americans have these countries in the region like Kuwait which they control like a television remote. Switch on: speak. Switch off: shut up,’ said Ali Al-Alawi in Samarra. ‘They think that now they have Saddam, Iraq will be subject to remote control. But they are wrong.’ – Guardian Unlimited Â