Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

On July 4, Karpinski hit back. She publicly announced that among the interrogators at Abu Ghraib had been Mossad interrogators. Fluent Arab speakers, they had been given free access to the high-value prisoners.

Karpinski’s claim had political implications that extended far beyond the walls of the prison. The Arab media used her claim to inflame further Muslim opinion. There were allegations that the Mossad interrogators had been responsible for the interrogation of Palestinian detainees in Iraq. Israel vehemently denied this. There was no way of independently confirming the claims. There may never be.

But soon there was an even more compelling moment to focus world attention. It was the appearance of Saddam Hussein in court in Baghdad in July to face an indictment for war crimes including genocide. Gone was the man who had emerged from a hole in the ground. His old arrogance had returned. He refused to recognize the court. He treated the prosecuting judge with indifference and at times, contempt. It was a chilling reminder of who Saddam had once been: a despot, a tyrant who held the fate of his people in his hands. It will be two years before his trial gets under way. In that time Saddam will, away from his court appearances, live the same daily routine.

Every morning at 4:30—an hour the many millions of Iraqis terrorized for years by Saddam Hussein call “the true dawn”—he will awaken. In the distance he will hear the call of the muezzins to prayer. But Saddam is only a lip-service follower. He will not prostrate himself toward Mecca—even though an arrow on the wall of his bedroom indicates the direction. Next door is his dayroom. The floor is covered with a carpet from his palace. It is the only visible reminder of his past.

For a moment he will blink owlishly in the bright wire-covered bedroom ceiling lights. Above the door, out of reach, is a security camera that provides a wide-angle view of the fifteen-by-fifteen foot room. It has a chair over which is draped the Arab robe he has taken to wearing. In a nearby control room, a bank of monitor screens and computers record his every movement, his occasional mumblings, his angry glares at the camera. Sometimes he shouts for the lights to be turned off. They never are.

Saddam is treated with the same vicelike grip that exists for any inmate on death row in America. Officially now under the legal authority of the new Iraqi interim government, he is in reality still a prisoner of the United States. But he has already won one tonsorial battle. His captors wanted to shave off his beard.

“Saddam convinced them his beard is a sign of mourning for his two sons. Tradition demands he must go unshaven for at least a year. Yasser Arafat, an old friend of Saddam’s, maintains a close beard out of mourning for the Palestinian people,” said Alice Baya’a, an expert on Saddam’s life.

But they will control his every movement outside the time he meets with his defense team for his appearances in court. They will watch over him until the moment he is sentenced. But that would be at least two years away (it would finally open in 2006). Saddam also plans to delay matters by calling as witnesses presidents and prime ministers. The names of George Bush, Tony Blair, and Vladimir Putin appear on the list he has given his Iraqi prosecutors.

By July 2004, six hundred lawyers had already offered to defend him. For them it was a golden opportunity to showcase their talents. Twenty were selected by his family. None have been allowed to visit him in captivity—let alone enter his monastic quarters.

His iron bed is bolted to the floor. The bedding is standard U.S. military prison issue, a long way from the years Saddam slept between silk sheets purchased from Harrods of London. His pillows then were filled with the finest of feathers from rare birds shot by his guards in the marshlands of southern Iraq.

Saddam’s quarters are in a storeroom. Once his retinue of servants used it to keep vats of fragrant oils for perfuming Saddam’s bathwater. Other vats were reserved for masseuses to knead his body. Now his toiletries consist of a weekly bar of supermarket soap, a sponge, and a tube of toothpaste. But he has returned to the days of his childhood for his oral hygiene. He brushes his teeth in the Arab fashion with a stick of miswak, a hardwood.

In an alcove in his bathroom is a ceiling shower and a European-style toilet bolted across the original hole over which his servants once squatted. A metal washbasin and two towels complete the facilities. Like any cheap hotel, the towels are changed once a week. The toilet paper is the kind sold in any Baghdad marketplace.

When his breakfast arrives—his staple diet is yogurt, toast, and weak tea served on the same cheap plates his guards eat off—the guards treat him with respect. They call him “President Saddam,” the only title he will respond to. While he uses airline-style plastic cutlery to eat with, they stand watch at the door. The guards are unarmed—a precaution in the unlikely event Saddam would attempt to grab a weapon. A high-ranking British intelligence officer who has firsthand knowledge of Saddam’s conditions said (to the author): “The psychiatrists have ruled out that Saddam has suicidal tendencies. But he can be highly temperamental and abusive. And he can be very confrontational if his demands are not met.”

Those demands have included international law books. There were growing signs that Saddam, like Slobadan Milosovich, plans to star in his own defense.

“He is consumed by the idea he can cause huge damage to President Bush and Tony Blair. When he talks about them, his eyes mist over and he hates them with a passion which is awesome,” said the British intelligence officer.

Each day follows the same pattern. Saddam has a noonday lunch—Arab-style food cooked by an Iraqi specially recruited by the Coalition. There is a food taster who samples every dish before it is brought to Saddam. Drinking water comes from sealed bottles—part of consignments flown in from the United States for its troops.

Twice a day, after lunch and late afternoon, Saddam is taken out to a small courtyard to exercise. He often wears a T-shirt and a pair of military shorts—far from the days he had customized underwear of the finest Egyptian cotton. Those were bought by the box load from a New York store. In a corner of the yard is a water tap. The first thing Saddam does is to turn on the tap. The sound of flowing water has always been a reminder for him that, in a land parched by nature, he could always command water. In his palaces there were magnificent tumbling waterfalls and the sound of water was pumped into his office. As he paces the courtyard, the water is a mere trickle. When his exercise time is up, the tap is turned off.

As the sky darkens into deep ebony, Saddam prepares for his night. His dinner will be fruit—dates and olives are a must on his menu—along with soup, possibly chicken and rice. The diet has led to Saddam shedding his potbelly. His shaggy salt-and-pepper beard is trimmed once a week, enhancing his sharp, penetrating eyes. After supper he will return to his law books, trying to fashion a defense for what the world thinks was indefensible. When his trial opened in January 2006, Saddam made good use of his studies, ranting at the trial judge and challenging court rulings.

Like his predecessors, Meir Dagan had come to accept the reality that intelligence is only occasionally successful and that the agency’s best work is ignored, never makes it to the public domain. Coupled with this was the daily routine of giving unwelcome news to Mossad’s political masters.

Increasingly, the sheer volume of intelligence reports meant politicians often had little time to digest what was being said. Dagan continued the system whereby only a few people—usually senior members of Sharon’s cabinet—had access to all the intelligence information. It was not unique to Mossad; the CIA, Germany’s BND, and even the two services Dagan most admired, MI6 and MI5, were careful about what they allowed to go beyond their own closed doors. All too often, the inquisitive media had increasingly ensured that no significant facts or operations could be kept totally secret for long.