Marie Colvin - On the Front Line

Shadow of evil

IRAQ

22 January 1995

Latif Yahia spat in the mirror when he saw himself for the first time after being forced to undergo plastic surgery. But it was too late. He now looked exactly like Uday Hussein, the eldest son of the Iraqi president.

He spent the next four years as Uday’s double, a time he now refers to as ‘years of blood’. He was trapped at the heart of one of the most secretive, paranoid and brutal regimes on earth, learning its secrets while treading a tightrope between the pampered privileges of the inner circle and the terror of knowing that he could be shot at any moment.

Yahia has now spoken for the first time about how he was tortured into taking on the role, how he was turned physically and mentally into a terrible imitation of Saddam’s murderous and licentious son, how he eventually escaped, and how he is now trying to exorcise the evil persona that entered him.

He has also revealed that Saddam, like Stalin and Churchill, has his own series of doubles, who are forced to undertake potentially dangerous public appearances. The present ‘Saddam’ replaced one who was assassinated in an attempt on the dictator’s life.

Yahia attended public parties and football matches in his assumed role and posed with soldiers at the Kuwaiti front so that Uday would face no danger but the Iraqi people would believe Saddam had sent his son to serve in the Mother of all Battles. Yahia survived nine assassination attempts.

Only once did he give thanks for his hated new identity. When Yahia finally fled Iraq, soldiers manning checkpoints leaped out of the way and saluted as he sped north in his Oldsmobile, also a double for one of Uday’s cars.

He came to think of himself as a monster. The man he had to impersonate is feared as much as his father in Iraq. He is a spoilt, brutal playboy who flies into uncontrollable rages when crossed and whose violent excesses are covered up by the security forces.

Uday even fell out with his father when he beat to death Saddam’s favourite retainer in a drunken rage in 1988 and was briefly exiled to Geneva. Father and son now appear to be reconciled; last year, Iraqi exiles reported that Saddam had executed three senior military officers after they suggested Uday was not up to the job of defence minister that his father wanted to give him.

Since the Gulf War, Uday has tried to make his image more serious by founding Babil newspaper and a radio and television station that broadcasts popular western entertainment. But Yahia witnessed the sinister private activities of Saddam’s son, which he said included earning millions of pounds from black-market deals in whisky, cigarettes and food while normal Iraqis suffered under international sanctions, and entertaining friends with torture videos shot in his father’s prisons.

Yahia’s story is fascinating, not just as the tale of a man pushed to unbelievable psychological limits, but also because it gives a remarkable insight into the most secretive of worlds, the life of Saddam Hussein and his family.

Now in Vienna as a political exile, the 30-year-old refugee is trying to recover his lost identity. It is disconcerting to meet him. He still looks exactly like Uday, still dresses in the same sharp European suits the dictator’s son favours, sports the same heavy gold jewellery and black Ray-Ban sunglasses. He smokes a Cuban cigar with the same motions and has the same beard that distinguishes Uday from other Iraqis, who have only moustaches.

He is soft-spoken and polite, but old habits die hard. Taking out a cigar, he holds it until somebody lights it, even though the retainers that swarmed around him in his old role as Uday are long gone. He has, however, stopped beating his wife: the violent streak he picked up from his double now sickens him.

Yahia wants to destroy Uday, but he has not changed his appearance because he has no other identity, a dilemma that would have fascinated Sigmund Freud, who lived in the same Vienna street where Yahia’s hideout is.

Yahia’s case is like none Freud ever came across. He grew up in Baghdad, the son of a wealthy Kurdish merchant, and attended the exclusive Baghdad High School for Boys. Uday was in the same class and the two boys resembled each other. ‘But I did not welcome looking similar,’ he said. ‘Uday had very bad manners with people even then.’

After graduating from Baghdad University in 1986 with a law degree, he went off to fight in the Iran–Iraq war, like most young Iraqi males. He was a first lieutenant serving in a forward reconnaissance unit in September 1987 when he received a presidential order to report to Baghdad.

Uday welcomed him in an ornate salon in the presidential palace. There was chit-chat about their schooldays and polite questions about his family before Uday came to the point. ‘Do you want to be a son of Saddam?’ he asked. Wary, Yahia answered: ‘We are all sons of Saddam.’

‘Well, I would like you to be a real son of Saddam, working with me. I don’t want you as protection but as my double.’

Yahia recalled: ‘I was afraid. I knew this was a government of criminals. So I asked him what would happen if I agreed, and what would happen if I refused. Uday told me that if I agreed, “all that you dream will happen”. He said I would have money, servants, houses, women. If I refused, he said, “We will remain friends”.’

Uday left him alone, desperately trying to think up an excuse. When he returned, Yahia had formulated what he thought was a diplomatic way out. ‘All Iraqis want to serve the president,’ he said. ‘I am serving my president as a soldier and I would not like to be more than that.’

Uday’s eyes reddened in rage; he tore the military epaulettes from Yahia’s shoulders and called in security officers. Yahia was blindfolded, driven for an hour in a car (later he would realise he had only been driven around the presidential grounds), and imprisoned in a tiny cell that was painted entirely blood-red.

‘I suffered every kind of torture,’ Yahia recalled. He said he was beaten with a cable, hanged from the ceiling by his hands, fed only bread or rice and water at different times of day so that he would become disorientated. He was told that if he continued to refuse, he would spend the rest of his life in the cell. After a week, he cracked.

Four days later he signed papers promising he would act as Uday’s double and reveal nothing about his activities. The contract ended with a warning: any violation and the penalty was death by hanging. Two weeks later, surgery began at the Ibn Sina hospital in the palace complex. Dentists removed his front teeth and replaced them with teeth like Uday’s; doctors cut a cleft into his chin.

‘I hated myself,’ he said. ‘All my family and friends hated Saddam; so looking like his son, I was disgusted with myself.’

He began his ‘special education’: 16 hours a day watching videos of Uday walk, dance, drive, talk, get in and out of cars, light cigars, drink Scotch. A trainer would then take him through each movement over and over 20, 30, 40 times, day after day until he got it right.

‘I never drank before, or smoked, or danced. I was very correct with people,’ Yahia said. ‘I had to learn to drink Dimple (Uday’s brand of whisky), smoke cigars and talk differently. And I had to learn to be rude with people, like him.’ He also learned intelligence and sabotage techniques, and was taught to check under cars before getting into them.

After six months of intensive training, Yahia made his first public appearance as his double at a football match at the People’s Stadium, where he was surrounded by people who knew the president’s son. With a trainer by his elbow every moment, even driving the black Mercedes 500SL that was Uday’s favourite car, Yahia passed muster. He remembers thinking when he arrived back at the sumptuous villa Uday had given him: ‘Latif Yahia doesn’t exist any more.’