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Saddam Hussein is reliably
reported to be a fan of the “Godfather” movies. He can easily identify: he
runs Iraq the way a mafia don uses his family to control a criminal enterprise.
“Think of Iraq as Chicago and Saddam as a mob boss,” says one U.S.
intelligence source, “only with chemical and biological weapons.”
AS THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION prepares to try to take Saddam
out, U.S. war planners and spymasters are intensely interested in the Iraqi
strongman’s family ties. If Saddam is killed or somehow cut off, power would
most likely pass to his sons, Uday and Qusay. It is hard to imagine how, but
Saddam’s male offspring, say a wide variety of sources, could be worse than
the father. Their life stories, as pieced together largely from the accounts of
defectors, are Gothic in their monstrosity.
If Saddam is Don Corleone, then Uday is
Sonny, the reckless, violent, oversexed heir apparent. And Qusay is Michael, the
younger brother who is calmer, colder and ultimately more dangerous. A cornered
Uday would not hesitate to lash out with chemical and biological weapons. But
Qusay is the greater risk to actually control the weapons and find a way to use
them against U.S. forces or the American people.
OUTLANDISH DEPRAVITY
The stories told about Saddam’s sons,
related to NEWSWEEK by several Iraqi exiles, seem almost too grotesque to be
true. Some are probably exaggerated, but not by much, according to a senior
administration official who has access to CIA files on Saddam’s sons. More is
known about Uday, but only because he was outlandish in his depravity. Qusay is
“in the shadows,” says this source. “We don’t know much.” But U.S.
intelligence believes that Qusay is Saddam’s true heir apparent, for the
simple reason that he controls the security that keeps his father in power and
alive. Given their family history, it is remarkable that his two sons have not
killed each other (though they may have tried).
Both men (Uday is 38, Qusay 36) were
born and bred to violence of the most lurid kind. As infants, they were
supposedly given disarmed grenades as toys. More reliably, they were said to
accompany their father on outings to the torture chamber. What did they see? The
methods used by the ruling Baath Party have never been subtle. When the Army
briefly drove out the Baathists in the early 1960s, it discovered a chamber of
horrors where Saddam worked as an officer. In the cellars of Qasr-al—Nihayyah
(“the Palace of the End,” so-called because King Faisal II was murdered
there in 1958), the Army found “electric wires with pincers, pointed iron
stakes on which prisoners were made to sit, and a machine which still bore
traces of chopped-off fingers,” according to one account based on official
sources.
Saddam has always believed in the
symbolic power of mutilation. “Under torture, the high and mighty are quite
literally exposed as being made of the same stuff as everyone else,” writes
Kanan Makiya in his study of Saddam’s Iraq, “Republic of Fear.” As Iraqi
ruler, Saddam delivered the broken bodies of his victims to their families. He
was aiming at the creation of “a new man” in Iraq, just as Hitler and Stalin
had tried to do in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. He may well have made his
sons into psychopaths.
SINGLED OUT
Uday has used his position as No. 1 son
to try to compensate for his physical shortcomings. Since childhood, his
protruding front teeth have made him speak with a lisp. Though married three to
five times (accounts differ), he has yet to produce an heir. He has sought to
show his virility in other ways. There are numerous stories of his singling out
a pretty face on the street, then sending his guards to pick up the unfortunate
woman and deposit her at a nightclub, to be sexually abused by Uday, sometimes
before an audience. In an interview with NEWSWEEK, Latif Yahia, an Iraqi exile
who claims that he was for several years pressed into service as a body double
for Uday, described this sordid encounter:
Strolling through a park, Uday
spotted a young couple. He called out to the young woman, but the pair walked
on, pretending not to notice. Affronted, Uday grabbed the woman by the arm and
declared, “You’re much too good for this simple man.” (Her companion was
wearing the uniform of an Army captain.) The woman stammered that she had been
married only the day before. Uday’s guards promptly dragged her to a hotel
room, where Uday raped her as the guards watched from the next room. Latif, who
says he witnessed this scene, says he heard the woman scream. He went to the
balcony and saw her half-naked figure lying in front of the hotel entrance six
floors below. Her husband, who cursed Uday, was executed for “defamation of
the president.” It is impossible to confirm Latif’s story, but Iraqi media
reported the execution of the husband, Saad Abd al-Razzek.
Uday incurred his father’s
displeasure as a young man, when he killed one of Saddam’s favorite bodyguards
in a drunken rage. There are various versions of this story, but it appears that
Kamel Hanna Jojo, whose palace duties included tasting Saddam’s food, gave too
boisterous a party on an island in the Tigris River one night in 1988. The
revelry included firing AK-47s into the air, a not-uncommon practice among the
Iraqi elite, but the noise apparently irked Uday, who was holding his own party
in a garden next door. (Uday, who favors his mother, was also said to be angry
at Jojo for acting as a go-between for Saddam and one of his mistresses.) Uday
burst into Jojo’s party and stabbed the host in the throat with an electric
rose cutter. Then he shot him in the face.
THE OLYMPIC COMMITTEE’S PRISON
Saddam punished his temperamental son by
sending him to Switzerland for all of 40 days. He allowed Uday to keep his perks
and his position as head of the Iraqi Olympic Committee. (The Baghdad Olympic
Committee headquarters may be the only one in the world, notes British
journalist Patrick Cockburn, to be protected by medieval-style watchtowers with
machine gunners.) Uday runs his own prison at Olympic Committee headquarters,
where he has been known to beat Iraqi soccer players who miss a scoring chance.
Saddam has long allowed his son to run the import-export ministries, extremely
lucrative in a regime that has lived under international sanctions since the
1991 gulf war. “Uday showed a real talent for grand larceny, extortion and
bribery,” said “Ahmed,” a former colonel in Saddam’s security service
who fled Iraq and now lives in London, where he was interviewed by NEWSWEEK.
Uday has been able to rake off many millions of dollars from smugglers of liquor
and tobacco, according to U.S. intelligence officials.
Uday was still living high when he
ran into journalist Cockburn at the el-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad in 1994. Swilling
from his own bottle of cognac, he told Cockburn that he had missed out on his
chance to go to America to study at MIT because of the Iran-Iraq War in the
’80s. “I did my SATs. I did well. Passed with high marks,” Uday boasted.
(His intended major: nuclear science.) At the table, “neatly dressed and
flushed with shyness, speaking quietly about Mesopotamian culture,” was
younger brother Qusay. Uday smiled indulgently as he introduced Qusay: “Not
such a baby now. He runs the security services.”
Perhaps without meaning to, Uday had
revealed that little brother Qusay was in fact more powerful and enjoyed a far
greater measure of his father’s trust. Qusay today runs the Special Security
Organization, the tip of Saddam’s security network of informants and thugs.
The SSO guards Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, his chemical and
biological arsenal. Qusay is also commander of the Special Republican Guard, the
15,000 or so troops who are most loyal to Saddam. According to U.S. intelligence
sources, Saddam personally controls several score of bodyguards, drawn from his
hometown clan in the city of Tikrit. But he relies on younger son Qusay to mind
the rest of his security apparatus.
ASSASSINATION MYSTERY
Not much happens in Iraq’s police state
without either Saddam’s or Qusay’s knowing about it. Which is why the Dec.
12, 1996, assassination attempt on Uday remains such an intriguing mystery. On
that night Uday was driving his champagne-colored Porsche past an ice-cream
parlor in Baghdad’s al-Mansour district, an upper-class enclave, when he was
ambushed by two gunmen. Uday was shot eight times, in the arm, stomach and leg.
Amazingly, he lived, but his recovery was difficult and humiliating. He had to
import surgeons to replace his shin, say U.S. intelligence sources, and he still
walks with the utmost difficulty. According to Ahmed, the former
security-service colonel now in exile in London, “One of the first things Uday
did in the hospital was tell his bodyguards to go out and find him a woman,”
to test his manhood. Uday was ashamed to be seen in a wheelchair.
Indeed, U.S. intelligence sources
wonder if Uday was intentionally maimed, not killed. “The Byzantines would
disfigure their victims, slitting tongues and taking out eyeballs,” observes
one intelligence official. But by whom? The shooting took place just a block
from the feared Muhabarat, the secret police, which brother Qusay headed at the
time. Uday went on TV to claim that he had been shot by Iranians—but no one
was ever tried or executed. Some speculated that his uncle Watban hired some hit
men out of revenge. In another drunken fit in 1995, Uday had shot Watban several
times in the leg at a party. Supposedly, the two men were arguing over the
favors of a Gypsy dancer. (Greed as well as sex may have been involved: that
same night, two of Uday’s brothers-in-law defected to Jordan after family
feuds over divvying up smuggling proceeds.) But it’s doubtful that Watban
could have gotten away with anything unless Qusay—or Saddam himself—had
looked the other way.
Could Saddam or Qusay have tried to
eliminate Uday? Entirely possible. “Everyone in the country hates Uday, but
his family hates him more,” says “Yusuf,” a former bodyguard on Saddam’s
staff who was interviewed by NEWSWEEK in Jordan. “Saddam encouraged Uday’s
cousins to kill him,” says Yusuf. His account cannot be independently
verified, but when he fled Iraq in 1999 Yu-suf was a captain on Uday’s own
bodyguard detail. Saddam chastised Uday as he lay in his recovery bed in 1997.
In a tape recording that Saddam probably allowed to be smuggled out of Iraq, the
family patriarch can be heard scolding, “Your behavior, Uday, is bad, and
there can —be no worse than yours... We want to know what kind of person you
are. Are you a politician, a trader, a people’s leader or a playboy? You must
know that you have done nothing for this homeland or this people. The opposite
is true.” Intriguingly, Saddam also had briefer, but pointed, criticism for
Qusay. He called his younger son “two-faced.”
ON A SHORT LEASH
U.S. intelligence officials say that Saddam
has been reluctant to openly turn on his older son in part for tribal reasons:
it would be an admission of failure as a father. But he keeps him on a short
leash. Uday is allowed to run a newspaper full of ethnic rants and to head a
commando militia, known as Saddam’s Fadayeen. But he has to apply for an
appointment to see his father, and has to leave his bodyguards behind. Qusay, on
the other hand, has free and daily access to his father.
Qusay is “very cool,” says an Arab intelligence
official who has known him for 15 years. “He tries to show the attitude of a
sphinx. He wants to have the image of someone who is very cold, although he has
to work at that; it doesn’t come naturally.” He is just as ruthless as his
brother. “Really, they are both the same,” Ahmed told NEWSWEEK. “They
really like to see blood; they like to see people tortured. The difference is
that Qusay does everything quietly; he has never been in the open like Uday.”
Left to their own devices, Saddam and his two sons could wind up like scorpions
in a bottle, trying to kill each other. Against the United States, however, the
brothers are putting up a united front. “If Uday is killed in battle, then
there is Qusay,” said the elder brother in a recent Iraqi TV address. “And
if Qusay is killed, then there is Uday.” It is clear that if the United States
attacks Iraq, removing Saddam will be only a start. The Bush administration
still entertains hopes that someone will dispatch Saddam with a bullet. But what
if his sons are the assassins? Getting rid of Saddam won’t be enough. His sons
will have to go with him, or they will continue the family business.
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