Ruins of a Lush Life
Sunday, May. 25, 2003
After months of recovering from an attempt on his life that put eight
bullets in his left side, Uday Hussein, the eldest son of Iraqi
dictator
Saddam Hussein, was ready to party. At his first outing in 1998, at the
posh
Jadriyah Equestrian Club, he used high-powered binoculars to survey the
crowd of friends and family from a platform high above the guests. He
saw
something he liked, recalls his former aide Adib Shabaan, who helped
arrange
the party. Uday tightened the focus on a pretty 14-year-old girl in a
bright
yellow dress sitting with her father, a former provincial governor, her
mother and her younger brother and sister.
Uday's bodyguards picked up the signal and walked through the darkened
room,
flicking cigarette lighters as they approached the girl's table. Uday,
then
33, flipped on his too, confirming they had identified the right one.
When
the girl left the table for the powder room, Uday's bodyguards
approached
her with a choice, says Shabaan, who was Uday's business manager. She
could
ascend the platform now and congratulate Uday on his recovery, or she
could
call him on his private phone that night. Flustered, she apologized and
said
her parents would allow neither. One of the guards replied, "This is
the
chance of your life" and promised she would receive diamonds and a car.
"All
you have to do is go up there for 10 minutes," he urged. When she
demurred
again, the bodyguards pursued Uday's backup plan. They maneuvered the
girl
in the direction of the parking lot, picked her up and carried her to
the
backseat of Uday's car, covering her mouth to muffle her screams.
After three days the girl was returned to her home, with a new dress, a
new
watch and a large sum of cash. Her parents had her tested for rape; the
result was positive. According to Shabaan's account, Uday heard she had
been
tested and sent aides to the clinic, where they warned doctors not to
report
a rape. Furious, the father demanded to see Saddam himself. Rebuffed,
he
kept complaining publicly about what Uday had done. After three months,
the
President's son had had enough. He sent two guards to the man to insist
that
he drop the matter. Uday had another demand: that the ex-governor bring
his
daughter and her 12-year-old sister to his next party. "Your daughters
will
be my girlfriends, or I'll wipe you off the face of the earth." The man
complied, surrendering both girls.
It has long been known in Iraq and beyond that as venal and vicious as
Saddam Hussein was, Uday was worse. Now that the regime has fallen, the
quotidian details of the son's outrages are beginning to emerge. With
Iraqis
free to speak more openly, it has become clear that the malignancy of
Uday's
behavior actually exceeded that of his reputation. At the same time,
new
hints are emerging about his psychological state. Uday, now 38,
suffered not
only from the anguish of Saddam's disapproval—the son was too
unprincipled
even for his father—but also often from physical pain as a result of
the
1996 attempt on his life. TIME has obtained a three-page medical report
that
lays out the until now undisclosed gravity of Uday's injuries, which
nearly
killed him and resulted in a stroke, brain damage and seizures in
addition
to the wounds to his torso and left leg. Uday displayed a compulsion to
control the tiniest of details in his life, perhaps with the hope that
he
could stave off the situation in which he finds himself today.
According to
both a family servant and another source familiar with communications
from
Uday, despite two U.S. attempts during the war to kill Saddam as well
as
Uday and his younger brother Qusay, all three survived. Even now, says
this
other source, Uday, from a hideout near Baghdad, has reached out to the
U.S., hoping to strike a deal for his safe surrender. A relative, says
the
source, has approached an intermediary asking, "What are the chances of
working out something? Can he get some kind of immunity?" The U.S.,
naturally, has no intention of pardoning a man with Uday's record. The
first
son of Saddam Hussein seems to be the last to know he is irredeemable.
And what of the supposedly more civilized Qusay, who in recent years
usurped
his older brother's position as Saddam's heir apparent? Specific tales
of
Qusay's transgressions are rarer, but it is only in comparison with
Uday
that Qusay, 37, could be regarded as a moderate man. He, too, had an
eye for
women, though he is not known to have raped any. Like his brother and
father, he lived extravagantly, even as Iraqis survived on government
food
rations. And he did his share of killing.
While the regime held power, few dared to speak of any discord between
the
brothers, who have three sisters and a seldom-mentioned half-brother
from
Saddam's second marriage. But insiders are now opening up with tales of
great strains between them. These tensions may help explain why,
according
to both a family servant and the source familiar with Uday's surrender
bid,
the brothers went separate ways when it came time to go into hiding.
Uday,
the second source says, is laying low with a number of aides, while
Saddam
and Qusay remained together, until recently at least, in a separate
location
near Baghdad.
To get a closer look at the brothers Hussein, TIME interviewed dozens
of
sources with knowledge of the two men—butlers, maids, business
associates,
bodyguards, secretaries, colleagues and friends, most of whom insisted
on
anonymity for fear the Husseins are somehow still capable of taking
revenge.
We visited the sons' homes and sifted through raw material, including
scores
of documents, photographs, videotapes and recordings of phone taps.
Here's
what we found: As the first-born son, generally an unassailable
position in
an Arab family, Uday was seen as his father's natural heir. But he lost
that
status when his brutal tendencies directly touched his father. In 1988
Uday
clubbed to death Saddam's favorite food taster, bodyguard Kamel Hanna
Jajjo,
because the man had introduced Saddam to the woman who would eventually
become the President's second wife. Furious, Saddam had Uday jailed for
40
days and beaten after he struck a prison guard. The jailing fueled
Uday's
anger. "Your man is going to kill me," he wrote his mother, according
to a
copy of the letter obtained by TIME. He demanded that she find someone
who
can "release me from this torture." Uday said he had not been given
anything
but water for eight days and had spent four days in iron handcuffs. "I
will
either die, or I will go crazy," he wrote.
Eventually, Saddam would soften and allow Uday to return to his duties
as
head of Iraq's Olympic Committee. But it was only after Saddam's
humiliating
defeat in the 1991 Gulf War that he would begin to carve out a
significant
role for Uday and his younger brother. In them, Saddam found
complementary
strains that reflected elements of his psyche. Uday was cunning, cruel,
ambitious and headstrong. Qusay was secretive, politically ruthless,
hardworking and so idolatrous of his father that he aped his clothing
style,
bushy mustache and choice of cigar, Cohiba Esplendidos. "Saddam himself
couldn't kill everyone he wanted to or spy on everyone he needed to,"
says
Kenneth Pollack, an ex-CIA and White House expert on Iraq who works for
the
Brookings Institution in Washington. "Having those two boys to do it
for him
was a critical element in his reign of terror."
Qusay had been working for his father in small jobs in internal
security
when his big break came. Iraq's Shi'ite Muslims, who make up a majority
in
the country but have long been repressed by the minority Sunnis,
revolted
against the regime in dozens of cities when Gulf War I ended. Saddam
gave
Qusay broad authority to oversee the crushing of the uprising. He did
not
entirely delegate the task. An eyewitness recalls watching Qusay,
dressed in
gray trousers and a blue jacket, arrive in Suera, where armed guards
herded
300 Shi'ite detainees onto a field. The President's son, dangling a
pistol
in his right hand, walked up to the men and shot four of them in the
head,
according to a military officer at the scene. As he pulled the trigger,
Qusay screamed out, "Bad people! Dirty criminals!" Qusay then ordered
the
execution of the remaining prisoners, got into his car and drove back
to
Baghdad. It was just one of many Shi'ite exterminations that Qusay
ordered
or personally performed in 1991, the ex-officer told TIME. The same
source,
one of Qusay's security commanders, said Qusay, for example, directed
the
execution of 15 families in Saddam City, a Shi'ite enclave in Baghdad.
His loyalty and ruthlessness proved, Qusay would move on to other
assignments. He became commander of the Republican Guard and head of
the
Special Security Organization, which was part secret police, part
security
detail for Saddam and part umbrella group for his elite military
forces.
Before the regime collapsed, Qusay was widely regarded as the second
most
powerful man in Iraq.
Uday held less impressive posts. Apart from heading the Olympic
Committee,
he supervised various Iraqi media outlets and oversaw the Fedayeen
Saddam, a
ragtag band of armed militants, mostly ex-felons, that eventually
became
part of Saddam's security apparatus. Whereas Qusay would icily and
efficiently murder for his father to further a political aim, his
brother
pursued a brand of terror that was personal, arbitrary and spontaneous.
He
was a threat to any father whose daughter might cross his path, to the
women
themselves, even to his own friends, who, it turns out, were subjected
to
torture and humiliation at his hands just as his perceived enemies
were.
Uday demonstrated an insatiable sexual appetite. Five nights a week,
some
two dozen girls, all of them referred to him by his friends, were taken
to
the posh Baghdad Boat Club on the bank of the Tigris to meet Uday,
close
associates of his confirm. After drinks, music and dancing, the young
women
would be lined up like beauty queens for Uday's approval, and all but
one or
two would be dismissed. Those who stayed would join Uday in his bedroom
at
the club and leave with a gift of 250,000 dinars ($125), gold jewelry
or
sheer lingerie. "He never slept with a girl more than three times,"
says a
former butler. "He was very picky." Uday took two days a week off from
girls. He called it "fasting," his close associates say.
A chef at Baghdad's exclusive Hunting Club recalls a wedding party that
Uday
crashed in the late 1990s. After Uday left the hall, the bride, a
beautiful
woman from a prominent family, went missing. "The bodyguards closed all
the
doors, didn't let anybody out," the chef remembers. "Women were yelling
and
crying, 'What happened to her?'" The groom knew. "He took a pistol and
shot
himself," says the chef, placing his forefinger under his chin.
Last October another bride, 18, was dragged, resisting, into a
guardhouse on
one of Uday's properties, according to a maid who worked there. The
maid
says she saw a guard rip off the woman's white wedding dress and lock
her,
crying, in a bathroom. After Uday arrived, the maid heard screaming.
Later
she was called to clean up. The body of the woman was carried out in a
military blanket, she said. There were acid burns on her left shoulder
and
the left side of her face. The maid found bloodstains on Uday's
mattress and
clumps of black hair and peeled flesh in the bedroom. A guard told her,
"Don't say anything about what you see, or you and your family will be
finished."
Although Uday had no children, Qusay's marriage resulted in four kids,
and
he projected the image of a family man. An officer in the Republican
Guard
who reported to him says he occasionally took two of his sons to the
unit's
headquarters. If he didn't have an important meeting, he would
sometimes
play with them there. Still, Qusay did have mistresses, according to
associates. They say he was discreet about them and would return home
to his
wife every night.
At al-Dora, his farm across the Tigris from the Boat Club, Qusay would
throw
parties that were "like The Arabian Nights," says Salman Abdullah, who
worked there as a gardener. The fetes featured as many as 50 belly
dancers
and ample whisky and caviar. Qusay enjoyed the sight of the belly
dancers
and other performers but refused to touch them for fear of disease,
says
Abdullah. Germs were an obsession of Qusay's, according to a family
retainer
who says Saddam's younger son did not like to be touched. If friends or
colleagues kissed him in the typical Arab greeting, he would
immediately go
to the bathroom to wash his face. "If one of his kids touched him,"
says the
source, "he would call a cleaner to brush it off."
Uday, according to a family friend, said he didn't want children.
Automobiles were his babies, and he was particularly fond of European
sports
models. Cars were also currency for Uday: he demanded them as gifts
from
friends who owed him favors, and he took them from rivals who owed him
nothing, according to a Baghdad businessman. One family friend says
Uday had
a staffer whose sole job was to surf the Internet and fill three-ring
binders for him with pictures of new and rare vehicles, along with
Arabic
translations of their specifications. Uday reportedly used underground
parking garages in his various businesses around Baghdad to store his
hundreds and hundreds of cars. When the city was about to fall to U.S.-
led
forces, Uday instructed the Fedayeen Saddam to torch his cars rather
than
let anyone else take them.
Uday exhibited a vain streak. A family friend notes that he scouted for
clothes in the Italian fashion magazine L'Oumo Vogue and on the
Internet.
"He went for anything odd, just to stand out," says the source.
According to
a friend, if someone appeared with the same kind of shoes as Uday's, he
would tell them not to wear that pair again. The same was true of his
favorite cologne, Angel, says a family friend. The source also says
that for
the sake of precision, Uday trimmed the outline of his beard with
tweezers.
That habit left him with black spots, so he was always looking for
effective
vanishing creams to cover them up.
Both princelings gobbled up property, each maintaining several houses.
On
the 10 acres at al-Dora, Qusay grew figs, oranges, limes, apricots,
pomegranates and dates. He also kept ostriches. He had another farm in
Arajdiyah, but his main residence was one of five 10,000-sq.-ft.
mansions in
a presidential complex on the bank of the Tigris in the Jadriyah area
of
Baghdad. Qusay commissioned a 10-ft.-high marble-inlaid family portrait
to
overlook the entrance. The swimming pool was embraced by sparkling
white
marble colonnades.
Qusay had his own private procurement officer, who says he was
dispatched
abroad every couple of months, usually to Beirut or Amman but sometimes
to
Paris, with $100,000 and lists of goods the family wanted, including
$120
bottles of Johnny Walker Blue Label, Qusay's favorite. He drank about a
quarter of a bottle each night, says the officer.
Uday's former palace, al-Abit, was on a pond surrounded by pine and
eucalyptus trees inside the presidential compound; peacocks and
gazelles
roamed the grounds. One party pad that neighbors call the China house
was
decorated entirely in chinoiserie, complete with murals of Chinese
women
doing the washing and playing the erhu, a two-string instrument. In the
upscale Baghdad suburb of Karada, Uday kept a love nest for trysts.
Uday maintained an extensive staff. In the guardhouse at al-Qadasiyah
Palace, an old family home that Uday took over and lived in during the
days
just before the American invasion, TIME found a list signed by Uday
dated
March 5, 2003, that showed he had no fewer than 68 personal employees,
including dozens of sentries and bodyguards, two butlers, seven cooks,
12
drivers, two pastry chefs, one baker, one fisherman, one personal
shopper
and two trainers for the lions he kept on the grounds of al-Abit. His
staff
spent hours collecting and counting Uday's possessions. TIME found
careful
reports on the whereabouts of even mundane items, such as a walking
stick,
with every receipt checked, approved and signed by Uday himself.
Uday lived at the center of a complex universe of ciphers and rituals
that
he concocted. He assigned code names for each of the places he
frequented:
the Boat Club was called 200; the Olympic Committee, 60; al-Abit
palace,
111. Those in his employ were assigned numbers—the physiotherapist, 90;
the
cook, 222. Uday changed these codes every few months, and anyone who
forgot
the new system was beaten, according to a note written by Uday at the
bottom
of the most recent code sheet. A family friend says Uday, like his
father,
had his staff periodically weighed. If someone had gained weight, Uday
would
assume they were stealing to buy extra food, and he would send them to
a
"discipline" camp until the pounds were gone.
For all his helpers and his freaky methods of organization, Uday could
not
control the limitations of his damaged body. According to his medical
report, the stroke and trauma he suffered after the 1996 attack left
him
with "clawing" toes on his left foot, which made walking difficult. A
non-Iraqi doctor interviewed by TIME who examined Uday in Baghdad last
December says he continues to suffer from seizures and spastic
reactions in
the muscles of his left leg. His butlers, says one of them, pushed him
around his houses in a wheelchair and changed his stainless-steel
bedpans
when they were full. Uday slept in a twin-size metal-frame hospital bed
attended not by fawning women but by a full-time physiotherapist and a
butler who says that when he helped him put on his socks each day, Uday
screamed in agony.
Uday tried everything to repair himself. In the ruins of the palace in
which
he last lived are thousands of packets of sterile acupuncture needles,
an
assortment of Chinese herbal medicines imported from Argentina and
drawers
full of multivitamins and sleeping pills. In the winter of 2002, says a
butler, Uday demanded that his aides bring him a woman who had just had
a
baby. When the mother, in her 20s, with golden-brown hair and a
henna-colored skirt and matching shirt, arrived, Uday sucked her
nipples for
what he believed would be vitamin-rich milk.
Uday's physical ailments seemed to heighten his sadistic tendencies.
According to his chief bodyguard, when Uday learned that one of his
close
comrades, who knew of his many misdeeds, was planning to leave Iraq, he
invited him to his 37th-birthday party and had him arrested. An
eyewitness
at the prison where the man was held says members of the Fedayeen
grabbed
his tongue with pliers and sliced it off with a scalpel so he could not
talk. A maid who cleaned one of Uday's houses says she once saw him lop
off
the ear of one of his guards and then use a welder's torch on his face.
A family friend says the day Uday discovered the Internet was "a black
day
for Iraqis," because he used it to learn of torture methods from other
ages
and lands that he decided to try. He would lock victims in coffins for
days
at a time, says the source, or put them in pillories. According to a
family
friend, he also liked to have offenders beaten on one side. Then he
would
order medical tests and have the thrashings continue until the kidney
on
that side had conclusively failed.
Uday's favorite punishment was the medieval falaqa, a rod with clamps
that
go around the ankles so that the offender, feet in the air, can be hit
on
the bare soles with a stick. A top official in radio and TV says he
received
so many beatings for trivial mistakes like being late for meetings or
making
grammatical errors on his broadcasts that Uday ordered him to carry a
falaqa
in his car. Uday also had an iron maiden that he used to torture Iraqi
athletes whose performance disappointed him.
The younger brother was not above petty abuses of power either. Once
while
Qusay was visiting a relative, something amused a maid who broke out in
giggles. One of Qusay's bodyguards locked her in a cell for a day,
slapped
her around and told her never to laugh in the presence of the
President's
son. "I didn't think I'd ever get out alive," she told TIME.
Uday, however, was much more dangerous. The smallest thing could set
him
off. He was a stickler for personal hygiene, recalls a butler, and
hated the
smell of sweat. One summer day Uday stopped the butler and said, "What
the
hell is that smell?" Uday ordered five falaqa lashes on the butler's
right
foot and five in his right armpit. On another occasion, the butler says
he
received 160 falaqa for the sin of serving Uday's food on the wrong
type of
plate.
Uday was no less demanding at his parties. He was an expert at filling
a
highball glass to the top, without spilling a drop. Then he would force
his
mates to down an entire glass of liquor. When Uday was in the hospital
after
being shot, he called his friends in to cheer him up. Since he couldn't
drink, he forced them to consume obscene quantities of alcohol,
installing a
stomach-pumping station in the next room for emergencies, says a
friend. At
the Boat Club, Uday kept a monkey named Louisa in a cage in the
kitchen.
Louisa had a taste for whiskey and was an angry drunk. If one of Uday's
friends passed out in the course of an evening or was caught napping,
says a
butler, Uday would have the friend thrown into the cage with Louisa,
who
would scratch at the poor inebriate's face.
Only Qusay could say no to Uday at his parties. At the Boat Club, Qusay
liked to sit at a table facing the river. Qusay always limited himself
to
two shots in this setting, says a butler, who poured for him. "Have
more
drinks," Uday would insist. "Why are you leaving us?" But the younger
brother would always depart early. "This is enough for me," he would
say. "I
have some work to do."
Qusay disapproved of Uday's lifestyle and was open about it with
relatives
and friends, says his personal shopper. Another source who frequently
visited Iraq's ruling elite says Qusay thought Uday's outrageous
behavior
contributed to the regime's dreadful image internationally. For his
part,
Uday complained that his younger brother plotted to marginalize him,
says a
source who has known Uday over the years. "Uday hates his brother with
a
passion," says this man. Whenever Qusay visited Uday's house, a worker
there
reports, "there was always shouting." Uday was so jealous of his
brother,
says a senior broadcaster, that he leaned on editors to keep Qusay's
picture
out of the media and threw tantrums when he couldn't prevent it. Uday's
former business manager Adib Shabaan said the competition extended to
women.
Uday demanded that beautiful women who had had sex with his brother be
brought to him. In several cases, Shabaan said, Uday also had sex with
the
woman, then had her branded on the buttocks with a horseshoe, producing
a
scar in the shape of a U, for Uday.
Saddam plainly favored Qusay, and certainly had more use for him. When
Uday
was in his mid-20s, Saddam wrote his tameless son a letter, on official
presidential stationery, in an effort to rein him in. Two sources, a
classmate of Uday's and one of his bodyguards, said Saddam used words
to the
effect of, "Don't be like your grandfather, with no morals or
principles,"
referring to his father-in-law, a gout-stricken former politician known
as
the Thief of Baghdad for confiscating private property for himself. As
for
Qusay, says a staff brigadier in the Republican Guard, "Saddam trusted
him
completely."
In a letter to his father found at al-Abit palace, scrawled in Uday's
loopy
style, the elder son was obsequious and defensive. "You know, Dad, you
are
the only powerful man in Iraq who can stand up to a lot of big nations
and
defeat them," he wrote. Then he continued, "I'm not looking for the
materialistic things, so that's why I don't want to work in
government." He
was pursuing other fields, such as sports, because they were no less
important. "I want to learn," read the letter, "so I'll be ready for
the
stage after Saddam Hussein." When that day came, he said, with
surprising
frankness, he would be ready to defend against "the hatred toward you
that
will come out in the people after your death."
Uday won't have that chance. But he did have an opportunity to defend
his
father's regime before it fell. Indeed, he did a much better job of it
than
his more respected younger brother. The Republican Guard, under Qusay's
command, barely resisted the U.S. invaders, and it was partly Qusay's
fault.
One reason the front lines against Baghdad fell so easily, says one of
his
officers, is that he kept impulsively moving units from one place to
another, right up to the last minute. Many were simply out of position
when
the Americans arrived. The day before Baghdad fell, this source
recalls,
Qusay held a meeting with his top generals. Qusay would ask a question,
get
an answer and then repeat the question five minutes later. "He looked
nervous," he says. "He wasn't stable." By contrast, Uday's Fedayeen
Saddam
were Iraq's best fighters in Gulf War II. They confronted the U.S.
troops
and slowed their march to Baghdad. Their attacks were often suicidal,
but
that was their intent.
In Uday's sprawling al-Abit palace on the banks of the Tigris, U.S.
soldiers
are sorting through rubble, putting together matching pairs of Uday's
many
shoes to give to Iraqi workmen. In a dark recess of one of the
complex's
stone-lined corridors is a steel door opening onto a vault painted dark
green. It was here, his associates say, that Uday tucked away the
admonishing letter from his father. It was a letter he couldn't destroy
but
never wanted to see again. A letter that proved his father's
disappointment
in his elder son. The vault is empty now, cleaned out by U.S. special
forces. The letter is not to be found. The matter of succession has
been
settled. The brothers are finished. |
