newsguy
December 14th, 2003, 07:53 PM
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Several weeks ago a team of military intelligence and CIA analysts operating out of a secure building in Baghdad agreed on a new strategy to find Saddam Hussein.
They decided to identify anyone who might have current knowledge of where Hussein was, including former bodyguards, and then to go after them with a vengence, rounding up their families and friends -- women, children, grandparents, everyone.
Day after day, the officials said, interrogations produced promising leads. Most of those interviewed insisted they did not know where Hussein was hiding, but some gave names of Iraqis who they said might know.
Some of the interrogations took place in Tikrit. In other instances promising witnesses were brought to Baghdad for more thorough debriefings.
"In recent weeks the noose was getting tighter in terms of our getting a better fix on where he might be," said an administration official familiar with the operation. "In recent days we conducted some raids against not just family members but Baath party remnants, his most trusted inner circle, tribal folks. The first question was always 'Where is Saddam?'"
"It's a coil that keeps getting smaller, and smaller, and smaller," said one senior Defense official.
But while they felt they were getting closer, there was no sense that success was imminent, another official said.
"It wasn't as if we were in the crescendo building up to the final capture," the official said.
But their perseverance paid off. A recent raid, said one senior administration official, produced intelligence pointing to a Hussein loyalist who reportedly was a bodyguard. The loyalist was seized about 24 hours before Hussein.
The loyalist "didn't provide any information willingly," the official said. Nevertheless, he eventually gave interrogators "actionable intelligence" -- information with practical value that could immediately be acted on. The hunters were told where Hussein was hiding or likely to be in several hours: a small mud farmhouse a few miles south of Tikrit.
The area around Tikrit had been the focus of the search from the beginning, and the soldiers hunting Hussein had been down that specific road before to no avail. But Maj. Gen. Ray Odierno, who briefed reporters in Tikrit Sunday, said he believed Hussein had 20 to 30 such hideouts, and moved every three to four hours.
Odierno's 4th Infantry Division, based in Tikrit, had been on many raids looking for what the military calls an "HVT" -- high-value target. But this time their quary was "HVT Number One."
"The tip was all developed about Saddam Hussein, not some other dude, not just some guy with a beard," a Pentagon official said.
That was at 10:50 Saturday morning local time.
Six hours later the order came to move in. Some 600 U.S. troops -- including cavalry, reconnaissance, special forces, artillery, aviation - had formed a cordon around an area roughly a mile square. After 8 p.m. they assaulted the little mud farmhouse. Two men fled and were soon apprehended.
At first it appeared there was no one left inside. There were just two rooms, a primitive kitchen with running water but little else, and a bedroom with a chair and a bed. It was cluttered with clothes, including a pair of sandals and some new T-shirts and socks, Odierno said.
It took half an hour for someone to pull aside a rug, and notice something unusual in the spare surroundings. In the smooth dirt floor was an insert made of styrofoam covering a deep, narrow hole. In it was a bearded, disheveled, disoriented man, someone who looked as if he had been living for months on the streets of New York.
"He was just very much bewildered," Odierno said. "He didn't say hardly anything at all as he first was taken in."
He had a pistol, but no shots were fired by Hussein or the troops. To the surprise of many Iraqis, the great tyrant went meekly, neither defending nor killing himself, as many had expected.
"I think the pressure had become so tight on him he knew he couldn't travel in large entourages, so he didn't really have any men with him," Odierno said. "It was him and just a couple other people with him. So he didn't really have much of a security force."
It was clear that Hussein knew he was finished.
"He knew -- he was in the bottom of a hole, so there was no way he could fight back. So he was just caught like a rat," Odierno said.
Odierno took great satisfaction from the fact that Saddam was caught just across the mighty Tigris River from one of his many extravagant palaces.
He said it's "very interesting that, in fact, you just about see some of these palace complexes from there. And I think it's rather ironic that he was in a hole in the ground across the river from these great palaces that he's built, where he robbed all the money from the Iraqi people."
By 9:15 p.m., 10 hours and 25 minutes from the time the crucial information was teased out of the bodyguard, the former all-powerful ruler of Iraq was on his way to an undisclosed location and what President George W. Bush described as "justice."
Several weeks ago a team of military intelligence and CIA analysts operating out of a secure building in Baghdad agreed on a new strategy to find Saddam Hussein.
They decided to identify anyone who might have current knowledge of where Hussein was, including former bodyguards, and then to go after them with a vengence, rounding up their families and friends -- women, children, grandparents, everyone.
Day after day, the officials said, interrogations produced promising leads. Most of those interviewed insisted they did not know where Hussein was hiding, but some gave names of Iraqis who they said might know.
Some of the interrogations took place in Tikrit. In other instances promising witnesses were brought to Baghdad for more thorough debriefings.
"In recent weeks the noose was getting tighter in terms of our getting a better fix on where he might be," said an administration official familiar with the operation. "In recent days we conducted some raids against not just family members but Baath party remnants, his most trusted inner circle, tribal folks. The first question was always 'Where is Saddam?'"
"It's a coil that keeps getting smaller, and smaller, and smaller," said one senior Defense official.
But while they felt they were getting closer, there was no sense that success was imminent, another official said.
"It wasn't as if we were in the crescendo building up to the final capture," the official said.
But their perseverance paid off. A recent raid, said one senior administration official, produced intelligence pointing to a Hussein loyalist who reportedly was a bodyguard. The loyalist was seized about 24 hours before Hussein.
The loyalist "didn't provide any information willingly," the official said. Nevertheless, he eventually gave interrogators "actionable intelligence" -- information with practical value that could immediately be acted on. The hunters were told where Hussein was hiding or likely to be in several hours: a small mud farmhouse a few miles south of Tikrit.
The area around Tikrit had been the focus of the search from the beginning, and the soldiers hunting Hussein had been down that specific road before to no avail. But Maj. Gen. Ray Odierno, who briefed reporters in Tikrit Sunday, said he believed Hussein had 20 to 30 such hideouts, and moved every three to four hours.
Odierno's 4th Infantry Division, based in Tikrit, had been on many raids looking for what the military calls an "HVT" -- high-value target. But this time their quary was "HVT Number One."
"The tip was all developed about Saddam Hussein, not some other dude, not just some guy with a beard," a Pentagon official said.
That was at 10:50 Saturday morning local time.
Six hours later the order came to move in. Some 600 U.S. troops -- including cavalry, reconnaissance, special forces, artillery, aviation - had formed a cordon around an area roughly a mile square. After 8 p.m. they assaulted the little mud farmhouse. Two men fled and were soon apprehended.
At first it appeared there was no one left inside. There were just two rooms, a primitive kitchen with running water but little else, and a bedroom with a chair and a bed. It was cluttered with clothes, including a pair of sandals and some new T-shirts and socks, Odierno said.
It took half an hour for someone to pull aside a rug, and notice something unusual in the spare surroundings. In the smooth dirt floor was an insert made of styrofoam covering a deep, narrow hole. In it was a bearded, disheveled, disoriented man, someone who looked as if he had been living for months on the streets of New York.
"He was just very much bewildered," Odierno said. "He didn't say hardly anything at all as he first was taken in."
He had a pistol, but no shots were fired by Hussein or the troops. To the surprise of many Iraqis, the great tyrant went meekly, neither defending nor killing himself, as many had expected.
"I think the pressure had become so tight on him he knew he couldn't travel in large entourages, so he didn't really have any men with him," Odierno said. "It was him and just a couple other people with him. So he didn't really have much of a security force."
It was clear that Hussein knew he was finished.
"He knew -- he was in the bottom of a hole, so there was no way he could fight back. So he was just caught like a rat," Odierno said.
Odierno took great satisfaction from the fact that Saddam was caught just across the mighty Tigris River from one of his many extravagant palaces.
He said it's "very interesting that, in fact, you just about see some of these palace complexes from there. And I think it's rather ironic that he was in a hole in the ground across the river from these great palaces that he's built, where he robbed all the money from the Iraqi people."
By 9:15 p.m., 10 hours and 25 minutes from the time the crucial information was teased out of the bodyguard, the former all-powerful ruler of Iraq was on his way to an undisclosed location and what President George W. Bush described as "justice."