Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

The daughter of a wealthy, aristocratic Baghdad family, Samira had never lost her taste for the good life. During their marriage, Saddam had showered her with gifts, including two palaces.

The Israelis knew that across the border in Iraq, U.S. Special Forces were roaming up and down the border looking for Saddam. Other Israeli agents on the Syrian side of the border had heard radio chatter between the units—known as U.S. Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force 121—as they also set about trying to track down Saddam. The force comprised members of Delta Force, the U.S. Rangers, Britain’s SAS and Special Boat Service, and the Australian SAS. “For political reasons, we had not been formally invited to join the party,” a source close to Meir Dagan said to the author.

Mossad—not for the first time—decided to keep to itself the information it was gleaning from the surveillance of Samira.

Then, on Thursday, December 11, 2003, the yaholomin team picked up a conversation between Samira and the man they were now certain was Saddam. He told her he would meet her close to the Syrian border. Details of the meeting were enough to prompt the Israelis finally to alert Washington. As Samira prepared to drive to her assignation, she received a second call. The meeting had been canceled. The call did not come from Saddam.

By then, it later emerged, he was inside his eight-foot-deep hole on the outskirts of Tikrit, his birthplace in Iraq. Samira and Ali heard the news of his capture on the radio. She burst into tears. Ali’s reaction is not known.

In Tel Aviv, Mossad analysts—like those of all the major intelligence services—were poring over the video footage that showed the likeness of Saddam the world had never seen before. And as part of their work, the Mossad analysts began to ask intriguing questions. Who were the two unidentified men armed with AK-47 rifles who stood guard over the hole? Were they there to protect Saddam—or kill him if he tried to escape? Why did Saddam not use his pistol to commit suicide—and become the martyr he had long boasted he would be? Was it cowardice that stopped him—or was he expecting to make a deal? Would he reveal the truth not only about weapons of mass destruction, but also about his deal with Russia and China, whose secret support had encouraged him to continue to confront the United States?

His hiding hole had only one opening. It was blocked. He could not have escaped from the hole. Was it in effect a prison? Was he being held there as part of a trade? What use was to be made of the $750,000 in $100 bills found on him? Was that intended for Samira? Or was it a payment for someone who would help him escape? Why did he have no communications equipment? Not even a cell phone was found on him. Did all this indicate that the remnants of his own followers had come to regard him as a spent force, and that they were ready to trade him in for their own freedom? That may explain why he was so talkative and cooperative when his captors dug him out, bringing to an end his thirty-five-year reign of terror in such a dramatic manner.

The answers to those questions formed part of the interrogation that Saddam Hussein was about to undergo.

Hours after he emerged from his hole, Saddam came under the combined scrutiny of U.S. and British intelligence service psychiatrists, psychologists, behavioral scientists, and psychoanalysts. They are known as “the specialists.” They studied the video footage of Saddam’s medical examination. The search inside his mouth was not only to obtain a DNA swab, but to see if Saddam had a suicide tablet secreted in a back tooth. None was found.

This, the specialists concluded, was further proof that Saddam was not a suicide risk. Nevertheless, he was dressed in a one-piece orange suit. It had fiber buttons that would dissolve if he tried to swallow them. The suit cloth was too strong for tearing to form a makeshift noose to hang himself. His feet were encased in soft fiber shoes that could not be broken.

His cell was constantly monitored by cameras and guards. His every move was noted and used to assess his ability to withstand the interrogation he now faced. In the esoteric language of the specialists, Saddam had not “allowed the loss of his personal boundary to effect his collective ego.”

Saddam was no longer the man on the video showing his capture: then he had been bowed down with despair, suddenly aged beyond his sixty-six years, a haunted look in his eyes. The specialists concluded he then felt “stupid” at being caught. That would explain his “compulsive talking” to his soldier captors. It was to disguise his near-paralyzing fear at being dragged out of his hole. “He may well have expected to be shot on the spot,” the specialists have told the interrogators.

Subsequently, he had undergone a marked psychological shift. His arrogance returned. His eyes were no longer dull or his lips slack from confinement in his hole. There was a swagger about him. All this had helped his interrogators plan how to break him. His interrogation center was rocketproof and guarded by elite U.S. Special Forces. It had a medical facility with doctors constantly on duty.

In the hope of triggering some response, Tariq Aziz, the former deputy Iraqi prime minister, was taken to see Saddam. Aziz was in a prison camp outside Baghdad airport. He was flown by helicopter to confront Saddam and urge him to talk. Instead, Saddam exploded, calling Aziz a traitor.

By the time interrogators began to question Saddam, his links with the outside world had been totally severed. He had no idea of time or date. There was no such thing as day or night in his world. The normal patterns of waking and sleeping and mealtimes were deliberately disrupted. There would be no physical torture. But he began to receive what was called “the full coercive treatment.” The interrogators did not underestimate their challenge.

“Saddam presents a unique challenge. He is a man who saw himself as morally, spiritually, and intellectually superior to the Western world. Coercive treatment would include sitting for hours with a hood over his head to increase his isolation. All the time, the questions would be designed to increase anger in his mind about being betrayed. For someone like Saddam, betrayal would be hard to cope with. Being confronted with Tariq Aziz was part of that. The interrogators would have told Saddam that Aziz was looking out for number one. Saddam could do the same by revealing what he knew—which is a great deal,” said Michael Koubi, the interrogator who for years Mossad had used.

“Nothing will rattle Saddam more than knowing facts he believed over years were no longer valid. It will assault his sense of importance and he will think more about lying because he could be caught out,” Koubi said to the author. “Part of the interrogation will be to see how Saddam answers in his own language. In Arabic certain words can have very different meanings. If he chooses to use one that is not correct, his interrogators will show they know the right meaning,” added Koubi.

After each interrogation—which could last for many hours, with the questions coming and going—Saddam would be assessed by the specialists. They were looking to see how he responded to certain questions. Was he lying? Covering up? Did those eye blinks caught on camera indicate sudden fear? Or was it arrogance or even indifference?

Koubi lives today in Ashkelon, near the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. He knew exactly how the interrogators and their support team of specialists were working on Saddam.

“The first thing the interrogators did was to establish their superiority over Saddam. To remove his belief in his self-control. At every stage, they were looking for his weak points. Those would include playing on Saddam’s loss of power and the indifference to his family’s fate. The interrogators would lie to him. They would force him to keep eye contact as they pressed their questions. When he would try to look away, as he was bound to do, they would continue to stare at him silently. Saddam would not be used to this. It would be unnerving for him to experience such treatment,” said Koubi.