Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

CHAPTER 19 AFTER SADDAM

By January 2003, five months after he had walked from the Mossad headquarters canteen to thunderous applause, Meir Dagan had become a hero to his staff and a man feared by Israel’s enemies. Even the most bitter of them acknowledged that Mossad was once more the most effective and ruthless spy service in the Middle East, and beyond. Dagan knew more about the secrets of Arab security services than did the Arab political rulers. Indeed, he had placed new agents in the private offices of senior government officials in Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates. Under his watchful eye, Mossad had infiltrated with new vigor all sectors of Arab political life, its business communities, and other areas of Muslim society.

In the past four months since taking command, he had studied the sins and mistakes that had led to a collapse of morale in Mossad. He had rectified this by ensuring that those who were responsible were culled from the ranks of Mossad. Replacements had been brought in from the army; some were also recruited from Shin Bet and Israel’s other intelligence services. Dagan made it clear that he had chosen them because they would follow his rules — not the rule book. For their part, they had shown they would serve him purely out of the conviction that he was the man they wished to follow.

He worked eighteen-hour days, and longer, at his desk. He sometimes slept on his couch. Life was hard. He came and went like the proverbial thief in the night. He went to Mombasa and places beyond to follow the trail of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Other intelligence chiefs would not have left their office. But that was not his style. He had always led, from the front.

Dagan had created a plan that he felt would reduce the threat from suicide bombers. Israel should reduce the stranglehold on Yasser Arafat and ease the blockade on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip — after a firm guarantee from the Palestinian authorities that they would deal with the bombers. The plan had gone to the Sharon cabinet, which had rejected it unless Arafat was removed.

Dagan had bided his time. He well understood that the relationship between Ariel Sharon and Arafat was one of personal hatred: there would be no resolution until Arafat was removed. Dagan’s intelligence acumen suggested that this might well come from within Palestine. One of his tasks since coming to office had been to foment dissatisfaction among its more susceptible groups, promoting the idea that Arafat was the one remaining obstacle on the road to peace. Propaganda, in all its guises, was a weapon Dagan had used in his days as a military commander.

Mossad’s Department of Psychological Warfare, the LAP, had created a mythical “Academy of Terrorism” in Gaza City, where suicide bombers were trained. The story received wide coverage. Many other stories followed that piece of propaganda, and their results were often included in the Overnight Intelligence Summary delivered to Ariel Sharon when he awoke. Dictated by Dagan, the summary shaped the thinking of Sharon for his coming day.

Both men still shared a close relationship and the same ideal for Israel: to ensure that, in Sharon’s words, “this little patch of soil, barren and inhospitable, until we Jews turned it into the powerhouse of the region, will never be taken from us.”

Over dinner in his home shortly after Dagan had been appointed, the prime minister had shown him a black painted arrowhead in a showcase. It represented the code name — Hetz Shabor — Sharon had chosen for his attack against the Egyptian army in Gaza in the Six Day War. It had been the start of his career as the most ruthless military commander since Moshe Dayan. Then had come the massacre in the two Lebanon refugee camps in which allegedly up to one thousand men, women, and children had been slaughtered on September 17, 1982 while Sharon’s troops did not intervene. Sharon’s career seemed to have ground to a halt. But he had entered the political arena and outsmarted Benyamin Netanyahu — no mean feat — to take charge of the Likud Party. It had been a stepping-stone to the premiership he now held.

Over that dinner, Sharon had told Dagan he had chosen him to head Mossad because they both were fearless, hard-driving leaders.

But there was one difference: Sharon was a gambler, ready to take risks, like his visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, which had triggered the Second Intifada and paved the way for the suicide bombers to gain strength. Dagan was not a gambler. He calculated every move.

Weeks into the job, Dagan had taken an El Al flight to London to meet Britain’s two intelligence chiefs, Richard Billing Dearlove, head of MI6, the secret intelligence service, and Eliza Manningham-Buller, the director of MI5.

He had studied their backgrounds as thoroughly as when dealing with an enemy. While both the intelligence chiefs were most certainly not that, they did cause him concern. Britain had for years been a hotbed of Islamic terrorism. Both Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber who had attempted to destroy an American airliner with explosives packed in his shoes, and Zacharias Moussaoui, identified as the twentieth hijacker of the September 11 attacks, were recruited for their missions in London mosques.

The capital had become the headquarters for extremist Islamic preachers who, through a network of organizations, were dedicated to sowing pure hatred: hatred of Israel, hatred of America, hatred of the West — hatred of all democracies that valued tolerance and freedom, the very ideal that gave the extremists freedom to operate in Britain.

Despite protests, Britain had continued to give refuge to Islamic fundamentalists wanted for terrorism in other countries. The governments of France, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, as well as the United States, had all challenged Britain’s refusal to extradite the terrorists. But the British had successfully claimed that to remove them from British protection would result in their “political persecution.”

The Islamic preachers who had inducted these individuals into terrorism had hired expensive lawyers to fight extradition. Legal maneuvers had tied up cases for years. Khalid al-Fawwaz, wanted in the United States for his role in the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, had successfully used the English courts to ensure that he stayed in the country. His legal costs of sixty thousand dollars had been met out of public funds.

Dressed in one of his custom-tailored black pin-striped suits, a hand-stitched white shirt, and a striped club tie, Dearlove had sat in his office overlooking the Thames River while Meir Dagan set out his case for why the presence of terrorists in Britain must stop.

The Mossad chief knew exactly the right tone to strike with one of the grandees of the intelligence world, commanding a staff of 2,000—of whom 175 were field intelligence officers, spies. Dearlove had a salary of £150,000 a year, many times greater than Dagan earned. The head of MI6 also had enviable perks: a car with an armed driver, and membership to several exclusive London clubs.

Dagan did not begrudge him any of this. He knew Dearlove had earned his perks.

After graduating from Cambridge, Dearlove joined MI6 in 1964. Four years later he was working undercover in Nairobi. From the Kenyan capital he often traveled to South Africa, making contacts with BOSS, then the South African security service. In 1973 he was posted to Prague as deputy head of the MI6 station. In that position he ran an operation to penetrate the Warsaw Pact. Under his guidance several senior pact spies defected to the West.

After a stint in Paris he was posted to Geneva, his cover was that he was a diplomat attached to the United Nations. There he made his first serious contacts with Arab intelligence officers from Iraq, Syria, and Iran.

A year later he turned up in Washington as a senior liaison officer for MI6 with the U.S. intelligence community. In the spring of 1992 he was back in London, charged with the task of supervising MI6’s move from its crumbling headquarters in Century House in the rundown suburb of Lambeth to its postmodern £236 million structure in Vauxhall Cross. It is said that by the time the building was opened, Dearlove had personally checked out every room, tested the menus in the canteen, and slept in the beds in the basement dormitory used by staff during a crisis.

His trips to Washington were frequent. He had astonished his counterpart at the CIA, George Tenet, by making it clear that he no longer saw the hunt for Osama bin Laden as a top priority for MI6. Privately Dearlove had been heard to say that “capturing bin Laden, dead or alive, is very much Bush seeking a headline.”

Dagan had warmed to Dearlove when the latter said he was no devotee of the American faith in “Sigint”—satellite signals intelligence. He believed spies on the ground were more valuable and trustworthy, that with human intelligence “you get what they see at close up, not from outer space.” In a world of encrypted e-mail messages and superenhanced satellite imagery, Dagan found something endearing in that judgment. It mirrored his own views.

Dagan looked forward to his meeting with Eliza Manningham-Buller more than with any other spy chief. The director of MI5 was only the second woman to head the service. With her double chin and a booming laugh, which seemed to come from somewhere in her ample bosom, she was a striking figure.

At fifty-three, four years younger than Dagan, she also earned a salary far greater than he could ever hope to command; indeed, she earned more than her ultimate political master, Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Her crystal-shattering voice went with her upper-class pedigree. She was the daughter of a former lord chancellor of England; one of her two sisters was married to a former deputy keeper of the privy purse to the Queen.

She had attended Oxford, where she’d been known as “Bullying Manner” for her intimidating ways. In 1968, the university’s Dramatic Society pantomime program for Cinderella listed “The Honourable Eliza Manningham-Buller” as the Fairy Godmother. Wearing a headdress of flowers and with her bushy eyebrows trimmed, she came onstage in a puff of smoke. She twirled and, to a startled Cinderella — and audience — she boomed: “We thought you would be surprised. But have no fear. I am your Fairy Godmother, my dear.”

That night an MI5 recruiter — an Oxford don — suggested that Eliza should give up any plans to take up acting and join MI5. She listened carefully, then consulted her father. He said spying was no career for a lady.

Eliza promptly joined MI5 as a transcription typist of tapped telephone conversations, mostly those of Soviet Bloc diplomats in London. But soon she displayed a talent for making sense of their guarded talk. She became a counterintelligence officer — a spy catcher.

“Bullying Manner” became “Formidable Manner.” She rose rapidly through the structured MI5 hierarchy.

Taller than most of her colleagues, she had an imperious way of looking down her Roman empress nose when someone annoyed her. Rebuke delivered, she strode off down one of the cheerless corridors of MI5 “like a man o’war in full sail,” one colleague said. She had worked in Washington, and in those other postings where the streets have no names. She headed the MI5 team that investigated the Lockerbie disaster and spearheaded MI5’s undercover war against the IRA.

In 1997 she became deputy director general of the service. Three years later, she ran MI5.

For both his hosts, Meir Dagan had the same uncompromising message: London had become a paradise for terrorists, a city that allowed a terrorist to live in a democracy and be able to destroy what the word meant. Because their prime target was still Israel, this had to stop. Dagan said it politely. But he said it firmly.

He understood, he added, the difficulty Britain faced. It was home to 1.8 million Muslims, the great majority of whom were law-abiding, peaceful citizens. He knew Britain had strong trading ties with Arab nations. But he also understood that extreme Islamic groups had been able to operate deep within the closed Muslim community of Britain. He was ready to put Mossad at the disposal of MI5 and MI6. For that to work he would require permission to increase the number of his agents operating in Britain. Since 1987 the number had been curtailed, after the Thatcher government had complained about Mossad’s methods.

Both Dearlove and Manningham-Buller swiftly agreed. Within days, the Mossad agents arrived in London. With them they brought a list of Muslim radicals they feared were preparing to strike at Israeli targets. The Mossad team made it clear that they would operate on their own. And they would deal with any threat to Israel as forcefully as they always had. They could make an assassination look like an accident — or let it serve as a warning to others by not bothering to hide what they had done.

And now, in January 2003, it was an assassination that Meir Dagan knew also preoccupied President George W. Bush and his aides. It was how best to kill Saddam Hussein.

As the drumbeat of impending war with Iraq beat ever louder in Washington, President George W. Bush let it be known to his closest advisers that he was prepared to lift the ban on the CIA assassinating Saddam Hussein. The restraint on the agency killing any leader had been in force since the CIA’s inglorious bungling of its attempts to murder Cuba’s leader, Fidel Castro, in the 1970s. The Executive Order was never officially waived, but on the first days of the new year, in the seasonal cold weather of the American capital, the neoconservatives who surrounded the president — men and women who for the most part had advised Bush’s father when he had been president — exchanged toasts that Saddam could soon be dead.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld argued that the United States had the legal right to assassinate anyone who had been involved “either directly or planning” the September 11 attacks. Saddam had, Rumsfeld claimed, “another strike” against him because he was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Though Secretary of State Colin Powell and CIA director George Tenet and his analysts insisted there was no firm evidence that Saddam was linked to the September attacks or that he had WMDs, Rumsfeld insisted his own sources told a different story.

Mossad’s resident katsa at the Israeli embassy in Washington had discovered that Rumsfeld’s main source was Ahmad Chalabi, who had helped to found the Iraqi National Congress, the self-styled “Iraqi government in waiting” to replace a deposed Saddam.

The floridly handsome Chalabi had been a Mossad informer in Iraq after Saddam seized power in 1979. Chalabi had moved to neighboring Jordan, where he set up the Petra Bank. For a while it had served as a conduit for Mossad to fund black operations in the Middle East. But in 1979 the bank collapsed, owing hundreds of millions of dollars to depositors.

Mossad had managed to withdraw its own modest deposits before the crash. Shortly afterward, the head of Jordan’s central bank, Mohammed Said Nabulsi, had accused Chalabi of switching $70 million of the bank’s funds into his own Swiss bank accounts.

Chalabi had arrived in Washington at the time George H. W. Bush had been elected as president. Until the first Iraqi war, following Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, Chalabi had seemed to be no more than another of those Middle East lobbyists, in a city filled with them, trying to promote their own interests. But the war changed all that. Using his imposing-sounding Iraqi National Congress, Chalabi found himself readily being welcomed by Bush’s neoconservatives. They included future vice president Dick Cheney and future deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Through them, he was introduced to Donald Rumsfeld. Common ground was established in their belief Saddam was a menace to peace not only in the Middle East, but possibly the entire world.

Incredibly, Chalabi began to see intelligence reports provided by the Pentagon on Saddam that had been prepared by the CIA and the National Security Agency. At first he confined himself to expressing that some of the intelligence did not fit what his small organization knew from inside Iraq. Gradually those expressions, often made directly to Rumsfeld, became more critical. Chalabi felt the CIA, in particular, was out of touch because it had no agents on the ground in Iraq.

In the late summer of 2002, in the run-up to the first anniversary of the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, Rumsfeld ordered the formation of a special secret unit in the Pentagon to “reexamine” information provided by Chalabi and to “reassess” ties between Saddam and al-Qaeda and Iraq’s development of WMD.

Ahmad Chalabi, a discredited banker accused of looting his own vaults, had become a prime source for Rumsfeld. CIA chief Tenet, a man who jealously guarded his turf, was furious — to the point that in August 2002 he had threatened to resign. Cheney had poured balm on very troubled waters, and Tenet had stayed in office. But using his own backdoor connections to MI6 director Richard Dearlove, Tenet had briefed the MI6 chief on Chalabi’s continued involvement in the upper echelon of the Bush administration.

When he took over Mossad, Dagan had quickly picked up on Chalabi’s bizarre role as Rumsfeld’s source. From the Mossad file on the banker, it was clear that Chalabi had provided only low-grade intelligence when he had spied for them in Iraq. Now, over a decade since he had left Baghdad, it was unlikely the banker had any real connections within Saddam’s regime.

Not for the first time Mossad analysts wondered how matters of importance were being conducted within the Bush administration.

Dagan’s own trips to Washington, obligatory for any new director, had filled in the gaps in the reports from the katsa in the Israeli embassy in the capital. In meetings with members of the administration — men like Lewis Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff, and Elliot Abrams, in charge of Middle East policy at the National Security Council — Dagan had encountered advocates of what they called “muscular democracy.” They peppered their conversations with Arabic words like jihad and phrases like Allah akbar wallilahi’l-hamd. They knew what they meant: “holy war” and “Allah is great to whom we give praise.” What baffled them, they told Dagan, was that they could not understand how God could endorse such a terrible massacre as had occurred on September 11.

Dagan was uncomfortable in religious discussion; his faith, like much else in his life, was a private matter. He had tactfully sidestepped the question. Nevertheless, he later told colleagues in Tel Aviv, he was fascinated by the way religion assumed such an importance in the Bush administration.

When President Bush returned to the White House four days after the attacks of September 11, he received a welcome visitor. The evangelist Billy Graham, a longtime friend of the Bush family, had sat with the understandably shaken president and spoken for a long time about the evil of terrorism and the Bible’s “righteous wrath” to destroy it.

A scripture passage struck a chord with the president: “Thus saith the Lord. Because the Philistines have dealt by revenge, and have taken vengeance with a despiteful heart; therefore thus saith the Lord God: Behold I will stretch out my hand upon the Philistines. And they shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.”

The words of the prophet Ezekiel became a leitmotif for George W. Bush, the rallying call for all he would say and do in the months to come for his “War on Terrorism”: the justification for his attack on Afghanistan, for his forthcoming war against Iraq. The Iraqi dictator was his Philistine.

Ezekiel, that biblical man of iron, had infused Bush with a similar strength.

At the end of the meeting, Graham gave Bush a pocket-sized Bible. The evangelist had taken the time to annotate it, using a marker to highlight all the scripture passages that reinforced the right to use “righteous wrath.”

Bush, like Bill Clinton and other past presidents, was not short of Bibles. He had grown up in what he liked to call “God-fearing country”—that great swath of the southern states known as the Bible Belt. No shack, house, or stately mansion is without its Bible. On the Bush Texas ranch, and in his office when he had been state governor, a Bible stood on a table close to the furled flag of the United States. Equipped with the Bible Billy Graham had presented to him, the president had no doubt that God was on his side as he launched his Global War on Terrorism.

The belief was an insight into his thinking. Another came with his admission he wanted bin Laden “dead or alive.” Further evidence of his mind-set came when he spoke of “an axis of evil”—Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. The phrase had a strong biblical connotation.

Throughout 2002, for his speeches to Congress and his military commanders, in his folksy weekly radio talks to the nation, and in meetings with world leaders, Bush drew on passages in Graham’s leather-bound gift to reinforce the notion that the War on Terrorism had the total approval of God. Holy war — the jihad of Islamic fundamentalism — had taken on a new meaning.

President Bush’s insistence that he would conduct a preemptive strike against Iraq was also deeply rooted in the religious faith of the neoconservatives around him.

Against that background of increasing religious fervor, Mossad monitored Washington’s progress to try to assassinate Saddam Hussein — a move that could head off an all-out war against Iraq.

In early February 2003, after a telephone conversation between Ariel Sharon and President Bush, Israel’s prime minister told Dagan he had offered to allow Mossad to become directly involved in the assassination of Saddam. Bush had accepted.

In Tel Aviv, the operation planning followed a well-tried procedure. First, previous attempts to kill Saddam were examined to understand why they had failed. In the past ten years there had been fifteen separate attacks on the Iraqi leader. They had been sponsored by either Mossad or MI6. Their failure was due to inadequate planning, or enlisting Iraqi assassins who had either been discovered by Saddam’s formidable security apparatus, or simply been unable to get close to their target.

Mossad had made one previous attempt itself, in November 1992. Its agents in Iraq had discovered that Saddam was planning to visit one of his several mistresses, who lived near Tikrit. The agents had learned that Saddam intended to arrive around dusk at the woman’s home. Next day, he would visit a military base close by before flying back to Baghdad. In the estimated fifteen minutes between leaving the woman’s villa and reaching the air base, Saddam could be vulnerable to attack.

Under the personal control of General Amiram Levine, at the time the deputy director of Mossad, the plan to kill Saddam was approved by Israel’s then prime minister, Benyamin Netanyahu. Code named Skah Atad, the assassination team trained for weeks in the Negev Desert.

Details of the operation offer an insight into the thoroughness of the planning. The Mossad kidon team would be supported by forty hand-picked members of Israel’s Special Forces Unit 262—burned into Israel’s memory as the one that in 1976 rescued the hostages from Entebbe airport in Uganda, where they were being held by terrorists who had hijacked their passenger plane.

Using two Hercules C-130 aircraft, the assassins would fly into Iraq below radar range. On the ground they would divide. The kidon would move to within two hundred meters of the route Saddam would travel from his mistress’s villa to the air base. The main group would wait about six miles away, equipped with a special Mossad-developed radar-controlled missile, code named Midras, Hebrew for “footstep.”

The kidon team was to target Saddam and open fire on his car. At the same time one of the assassins was to signal the missile team to fire from the precise coordinates the kidon would provide — and destroy the vehicle.

But Ariel Sharon, then foreign minister, and Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai had ordered the operation canceled because the risks of failure were too high.

Now, almost a decade later, supported by Washington, there was no such hesitation in trying to kill Saddam.

Each morning as the creeping gray ended and another day began — the moment Saddam Hussein’s mother had taught him was the “first dawn”—a truck drove to one of his palaces, in which the country’s self-appointed president for life would have spent another secure night.

The truck contained live lobsters, fresh shrimps, and sides of fresh lamb and beef, all fat had been trimmed from the meat. There was a variety of yogurts and cheeses, and a special favorite of Saddam Hussein’s, olives picked from Syria’s Golan Heights. He likes to spit out the pips, “the way I will one day spit out the Israelis from their land,” he once said to his former chief of intelligence, General Wafic Samarai.

Later, when he fell out of favor, the spymaster had fled for his life, walking for forty hours to escape through the north of Iraq into Turkey. Samarai was lucky. Most of those who crossed Saddam Hussein were killed by methods that surpassed the torture chambers of ancient times. Samarai’s input to the plan to kill Saddam was fed into the Mossad computers.

While the sixty-five-year-old Saddam still slept, perhaps in the arms of another young girl selected by his Republican Guards to satisfy his voracious sexual needs, the truck was unloaded.

In each palace were stationed scientists from the country’s nuclear arms program. They worked in a restricted area in the basement of a palace. Access to it was only through swipe cards, whose codes changed every day. In the basement was a suite housing a powerful hospital-style X-ray machine. The scientists X-rayed each item of food. They were looking for any sign of whether it had been poisoned or exposed to previous radiation.

When nothing suspicious was detected, the food passed on to further checks. Chefs took a small portion: a morsel of lobster or fish, a sliver of meat, a nibble of cheese, a small spoonful of yogurt. Food that needed cooking was prepared. Then all the items were tastefully arranged for the waiting tasters. They were selected from some of the untold legions of prisoners in Iraq’s jails.

Watched by members of Al Himaya, Saddam’s personal bodyguards, each prisoner swallowed and displayed his open mouth to the bodyguards. The tasters were then observed for an hour to ensure they had not been poisoned. Next they were taken to a lab to have blood drawn. This was tested to make sure there was no trace of radiation in what they had digested. The prisoners were then taken to a courtyard in the palace and shot — usually with a single bullet to the back of the head.

The gunshots were a signal for Saddam Hussein that his breakfast, and the other meals he would eat during the day, were safe to consume.

This chilling ritual was one of many that governed his life.

Whichever woman shared his bed overnight was dismissed. Her fate, like those of so many others forced to sleep with him, was a matter of conjecture. Alone, Saddam made his way to his private swimming pool. For him a number of laps was an important exercise to strengthen his spinal cord. Some years before he had undergone surgery for a slipped disk. He swam naked, watched only by his bodyguards. From them there were no secrets about his physical infirmities. He had a limp, in public he would walk only a few steps before pausing. For a man so muscular in uniform, he had a belt of fatty tissue around his lower abdomen.

Swim over, there was another essential ritual to the start of his day. His barber, who traveled everywhere with him, arrived to trim Saddam’s mustache and touch up the black dye in his hair. The chemicals used in the process came from Paris, each bottle had been tested to ensure it contained no lethal agent. His hair uniformly tinted to hide any trace of gray, his nails were then buffed and manicured with a colorless polish.

Then his personal dresser took over. Saddam’s uniform was custom-made, cut to emphasize the musculature of his body. His biceps and strong thighs were the result of those early teenage years when he went camel racing. His jacket was tailored to disguise the spreading waistline he had failed to halt despite periods of strict dieting.

These vanities were in a man who was irritated by the way his wife of forty years, Sajida, allowed her hennaed hair to be less than perfect and whose body was matronly.

His physical needs attended to, Saddam Hussein was ready for another day. No one could deny his capacity for work. A twelve- to fourteen-hour day of meetings was not unusual. At the end of each session he would take a small nap in a room adjoining the office. Thirty minutes later he could be back at the top of a conference table ready to plunge himself into a new round of discussions.

Each meeting began the same way. Saddam studied an executive summary of the reports that had been prepared. Sometimes he would ask to see the full report for closer examination. No one around the table knew which report would be chosen for scrutiny. If the summary did not match the full report, he would closely question the writers of both. He then displayed a harsh, inquisitorial manner. He was a natural bully.

Every few hours — wherever he was — his closest aides knew they must arrange for him to be near water a fountain, an indoor waterfall, a flowing stream. Water is a symbol of wealth and power in the desert land of Iraq. In Saddam’s personal milieu — his social relations, the customs and culture in which he was raised — water is a prerequisite. In all his personal offices — no one knows how many there were scattered around Baghdad and beyond — there was always the sound of cascading water on a background disc.

It was Saddam’s obsession with personal violence that was the most terrifying side to his multifaceted personality. He had become obsessed with the dynamics of creating pain, spending countless hours reviewing the videos of those he had tortured and then executed. The methods of killing ranged from a victim being buried alive, to a specialty Saddam learned from the Taliban: a long nail was driven through a victim’s ear into his brain. His torture chambers were reputed to contain effigies made of wood and iron in which a victim was confined. The hollow effigies contained spikes positioned so as to penetrate the victim’s body. Strangulation and being buried alive in the desert were fates reserved for those for whom he had decided hanging was too quick.

Saddam’s fixation with torture was passed on to his sons when they were still in their preteens. Uday and Qusay were both taken on weekly visits to witness torture and executions in Baghdad prisons.

Yet despite the carapace of evil that surrounded him, Saddam had also been known to weep openly after having condemned a friend, a relative, even his two sons-in-law to death. During the 1979 purge of the Baath Party that gave him power, he stood at the lectern and wept openly as he condemned party members. As each man was taken to his death, the conference hall echoed with his amplified sobbing, picked up by the microphones on the podium. It was a macabre piece of theater.

All these personality traits, and more, had been studied by Mossad before a plan of how to assassinate Saddam Hussein was prepared.

Once more the operation revolved around Saddam’s insatiable sexual appetite. A Mossad katsa in Baghdad had learned that a new mistress — the wife of a general Saddam had recently had executed for disobeying an order — had been installed in a villa on the bank of the Euphrates River. Saddam had taken to swimming in the river with his bodyguards before visiting her.

The plan was based on one that the CIA had once used to try to kill Fidel Castro. On that occasion, seashells were rigged with explosives and deposited on the seabed off Cuba, the spot was one where Castro liked to go diving. That operation failed because the CIA had not taken into account that strong sea currents would carry the shells out of the area.

The river would present no such problem. The explosives were designed to be detonated by Saddam and his bodyguards surging through the water.

With days to go before the plan was to be implemented, the Baghdad katsa sent a coded short-burst transmission to Tel Aviv that the mistress had committed suicide.

Two days later, the second Iraqi war started. Mossad agents in Iraq’s western desert, Baghdad, and Basra provided important intelligence that enabled U.S. and British aircraft to launch devastating air attacks. Thousands of Iraqis were killed or injured.

In the run-up to hostilities, Dagan had experienced a familiar pressure. Tenet had started to call several times a day to inquire whether Mossad was able to confirm that Iraq possessed WMD.

Dagan had replied the way he always did: Not yet, but we are still looking. Indeed, the search had become a priority for his deep-cover katsas in Iraq. They had worked independently of the United Nations weapons inspectors, who had had a similar lack of success — much to the barely concealed disappointment of President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair. The UN Security Council had become a forum for their frustration. Both leaders were now committed to the claim that they had to go to war to protect the world against WMD.

But in Tel Aviv, Mossad analysts told Dagan that no matter how the CIA and Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) presented the evidence, there was no “smoking gun” proof that Saddam did have WMD. Nevertheless, Ariel Sharon, committed to Washington’s claims, mobilized Israel’s civilian population: gas masks were widely distributed; a warning of an impending chemical or biological attack was repeated over the radio. The precautions were widely reported in the United States and Britain, creating a mood that WMD were about to be launched. Propaganda fed fear, fear created more propaganda.

There was talk of a preemptive WMD strike against Israel; or Cyprus, where Britain had a sizable force; or the Persian Gulf, where the U.S. Navy had gathered in strength; or Kuwait, the launch point for the assault on Iraq. With every rumor the fear increased.

But nothing happened. Not a single rocket containing so much as one spore of a nerve agent or a drop of chemical poison was launched. In the history of warfare, there had never been such an anticlimax.

Twenty days after the war started the fighting was over. But another war, in many ways more deadly, had begun. Inside Iraq, a potent mixture of religious hatred, oil, and greed had started to ignite. In the south of the country, the Shias of the marsh Arabs began to lay their claim to be a powerful voice in planning Iraq’s future. They had suffered much. Their demands, uttered from the minarets of their mosques, were reinforced by the mullahs of Tehran. They traveled to the Iraqi holy city of Najaf. The first of many confrontations with American forces took place. There was more bloodshed.

In the north of Iraq, the Kurds prepared to grab their moment of independence. That brought them ever closer to conflict with Turkey, which saw an independent Kurdish nation as unacceptable. In central Iraq, the other tribes wanted their views taken into account in the formation of a new Iraq. Saddam’s once all-powerful Baath Party could not be ignored. Just as in postwar Germany it had turned out to be impossible to eradicate the Nazi Party completely from the country’s bureaucracy, so it turned out to be with Baathism. The party was embedded into the very structure of what Iraq had been, was, and could become. It ran the police, the civil service, the utilities. To sack and arrest every party member was impossible; they were the only hope to get Iraq moving again.

Inevitably, Iraq had descended into lawlessness, which by May 2003 had turned out to be even more frightening than even Saddam’s reign of terror.

Meantime, the search for the tyrant had become a manhunt once more led by Mossad. Its analysts had created a scenario that owed something to Saddam’s own liking for theatrical gesture.

The analysts suggested that Saddam had washed out the expensive black dye from his hair and shaved off his mustache, and was dressed as a peasant. His most likely way out of Baghdad had been through the vast, forbidding, empty spaces of Iraq’s eastern desert, this was the ancient contraband route from Afghanistan that first the silk traders and then the drug dealers had used.

In those first postwar weeks, the route had become the favorite one for Iraqis who feared for their lives now that the regime had fallen.

Was Saddam really among them? No one knew. But the feeling grew that he was heading for the mountains of northern Iran. There were suggestions — never supported by real evidence — that from there he would disappear into the hands of two powerful friends he had counted on before, Russia and China. While both officially denied they would grant Saddam sanctuary, Moscow’s and Beijing’s records of support for Saddam were long. To have Saddam now in their hands would certainly ensure that he would never reveal all the details of the secret deals he had made with both.

To discover his whereabouts, Mossad agents were supported by American spy satellites. Their multicameras produced thousands of close-up images and scooped up even more separate conversations every minute from refugees across the sands. But there was still the old problem of analyzing and interpreting the data. The American intelligence community was still pitifully short of translators. But the hunt went on.

Then, in May 2003, Meir Dagan switched many of the katsas trying to track Saddam onto a more important threat for Israel. Despite the vigilance of Shin Bet, two British-born radical bombers had launched a suicide attack on a Tel Aviv club; three were killed and fifty injured. The explosive they used had overcome the most stringent of airport and airline security checks. It was more lethal than Semtex; it could be smuggled undetected from one country to another, from one terrorist cell to another. For the eighty terror groups listed on Mossad’s computers, the weapon had once more tipped the scales in favor of the terrorists.

After a week of intensive investigation by chemists in Israel’s center for weapons research in a suburb of Tel Aviv, its lethal qualities and country of origin had been discovered. The revelation sent a collective shock wave through the global intelligence community. The Israeli experts concluded that the explosive had been manufactured in the weapons research laboratories of ZDF, one of China’s leading military defense contractors.

The first hint China was working on a new type of explosive had come in March 2001, when a top-ranking Chinese defector, Senior Colonel Xu Junping of the People’s Liberation Army and one of the nation’s leading military strategists, had defected to the United States, where he was personally questioned by CIA director George Tenet. So important was the debriefing that President Bush had authorized Condoleezza Rice to sit in.

Xu detailed the work that was being done to create the explosives in the ZDF laboratories situated some forty miles to the west of Beijing. He also revealed how China had secretly been helping rogue states like Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Most critical of all, he outlined China’s contacts with terror groups through its powerful intelligence services, the Military Intelligence Department (MID) and its Science and Technology Department (STD). Employing some five thousand field agents and defense analysts, both agencies operate globally. They are supported by satellite surveillance and state-of-the-art equipment. Xu told the CIA that part of the work of the two services was to maintain contact with terror groups not only in the Middle East, but also in the Philippines, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka. But what astonished the CIA was Xu’s revelations of Chinese intelligence contacts in Colombia with FARC, in Spain with ETA, and in Peru with Shining Path.

Now, two years after Xu’s revelation, intelligence services were bracing themselves to confront this latest weapon of choice for terrorists.

Mossad established that the two British suicide bombers had smuggled their explosive in from Jordan. It had arrived there from Pakistan, whose intelligence service has had long and close links to China’s.

Mossad agents already knew that in the months before the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, it was from Pakistan that Osama bin Laden made three separate visits to Beijing. Each time he was accompanied by China’s ambassador to that country and the head of Pakistan’s powerful intelligence service, PIS.

He had gone to organize a defense contract for the Taliban worth $1 billion.

“We now believe that during those visits he was appraised of the progress with the new explosives,” a senior Mossad source in Tel Aviv told the author. He agreed that there “is a very strong possibility” al-Qaeda had been provided with a quantity of the explosive — a tiny portion of which had been given to the two British suicide bombers. This takes terrorism into a new dimension.

It was a judgment that was never far from Dagan’s thoughts as he continued to lead Mossad into the new millennium.

The failure to locate Saddam or discover if he was dead had irritated Ariel Sharon, Tony Blair, and George W. Bush. On the surface, they said it did not matter, that Saddam was no longer a threat. But few believed that Bush, in particular, would want to write closure to the war until he was able to announce that his much vaunted need for a regime change in Iraq had been completed with the actual death of Saddam.

But soon it was not the disappearance of a tyrant that came to haunt George Bush and Tony Blair. It was the failure to locate any WMD. Bush ordered in hundreds of CIA agents and scientists to find WMD. They searched and they searched. In London, Tony Blair insisted the weapons were there, that he had been told of eight hundred sites that had still not been checked in the deserts of Iraq.

Increasingly, however, the truth seemed otherwise. Britain’s former foreign secretary Robin Cook, who had resigned over the war, and Claire Short, a former cabinet minister in the Blair government, both said Blair had lied to Parliament and to the people of Britain when he said that WMD existed.

By June 2003, Blair was fighting for his credibility and his political future. In Washington, Congress announced there would be a public hearing into the matter. Nobody seriously believed all the truth would finally emerge. But for the moment, there was talk of a scandal that could balloon into another Watergate. Commentators remembered that Bush’s own father had won the first Iraqi war, but lost the presidency to Bill Clinton shortly afterward.

In Tel Aviv, Meir Dagan kept Mossad clear of the deepening crises in London and Washington. When calls came from the CIA and MI6 for any assistance he could give, he stuck to the same story: Mossad would go on looking. No more, no less.

In December 2003, the hunt for Saddam finally ended. He was captured, ironically, because of the demands of the one woman he still trusted: Samira Shahbander, the second of his four wives.

On December 11, she had called Saddam from an Internet café in Baalbek, near Beirut; she and Saddam’s only surviving son, Ali, had lived under assumed names in Lebanon after leaving Baghdad some months before the war started.

Samira, whose curly blond hair came from the same French hair product company that provided Saddam with his hair dye, was the married woman who first became his mistress and then his wife.

At the start of their courtship, Samira was married to an Iraqi air force pilot. Saddam simply kidnapped him and said he would be set free only if he agreed to divorce Samira. The husband agreed. In return, he was made head of Iraqi Airways — and given a choice from one of Saddam’s cast-off mistresses.

Married, Samira became Saddam’s favorite, though he took two more wives and scores of mistresses.

The marriage was cemented by the birth of Ali. The child’s arrival deepened the hatred of Saddam’s elder sons, Uday and Qusay, toward Samira. But by December, both were dead after a shoot-out with U.S. Special Forces.

Earlier, in March 2003, with the coalition forces closing in on Baghdad, Saddam had arranged for Samira and Ali to flee to Lebanon. With her she took $5 million in cash and a trunk of gold bars from the vaults of the Central Bank of Iraq.

She told friends she was going first to France and then to Moscow, claiming Saddam had been secretly promised by Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, that he would give her sanctuary. Instead, she went to a prearranged hideout, a villa in the Beirut suburbs.

It was there that Mossad discovered her in November 2003. Meir Dagan sent a team of surveillance specialists from the service’s yaholomin unit to follow Samira’s every move.

They discovered that the Lebanese government had provided her and Ali with Lebanese passports and new identities. Samira was given the name “Hadija.” But Ali, who has the same deep-set eyes as his father, insisted he would keep the family name of Hussein.

The Mossad team noted that Samira had transferred most of her money out of Lebanon to a Credit Suisse bank account in Geneva. In the past, the bank had been a repository for some of Saddam’s own fortune.

Early in December 2003, Samira cashed in her gold bars for U.S. dollars with a Beirut money dealer. Then she started to call Saddam.

Supported by Israeli air force surveillance aircraft, the yaholomin discovered that the calls were being made from inside Syria, which borders on Iraq. “The calls were affectionate. It was clear there was a close relationship still between them,” said a high-ranking Mossad source in Tel Aviv after Saddam had been captured. That one of the most reviled tyrants in the world — a man who had personally ordered the terrible torture of many thousands, including women and children — could speak of love, both fascinated and repelled the Mossad team.

But along with endearments the listeners also heard, through their electronic equipment, that Samira wanted more money.

Time and again, in further calls in December — each made to a different number the yaholomin team pinpointed as going to an area in the desolate sands of the Wadi al-Myrah, which is close to the Syrian border with Iraq — Samira repeated her request for money.

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.

From time to time, the interrogators asked questions they knew Saddam could not answer. What was going on in Washington and London in the run-up to the Iraqi war? Where was he on a certain date? When he could not answer, he would be accused of covering up.

“After a while, a question will be slipped in that he can answer. If the interrogators have done their groundwork properly, he will be glad to answer it. Then the questions will move to other questions they want him to answer,” said Koubi.

“Another means to break him would be to offer simple inducements. If Saddam answered a series of questions, he would be promised uninterrupted sleep. And possibly a change in his carefully monitored diet. But always the promises would not be quite kept. And followed by more promises that if he continued to cooperate, they would be fulfilled,” explained Koubi.

In January 2004, he was visited by an International Red Cross team of doctors. They pronounced he was being fairly treated.

The deadly mind games would continue until the interrogators and specialists were satisfied that no more could be wrung out of Saddam Hussein. Then he would be left to his fate. More, he would know by then, he could not expect.

Meanwhile, Mossad had joined other intelligence services in the hunt for Saddam’s missing fortune. By January 2004, Meir Dagan’s team of financially trained agents, some of whom had worked in the City of London and Wall Street before joining the service, had established that the Queen of England’s banker, Coutts of London, was one of eighteen British banks Saddam Hussein had used to hide his $40 billion fortune over the 1980s.

The bulk of that money was stolen by him from the central bank of Iraq, transferred to banks in the Middle East, and then deposited under false names in the London banks. Later, the money was transferred to banks in Switzerland, Germany, Japan, and Bulgaria.

“Any transfer coming from a London bank was assumed to be legitimate,” said Christopher Story, a former financial adviser to British prime minister Margaret Thatcher at the time Saddam was salting away his fortune. Story, the quintessential English gentleman in his pin-striped Savile Row suits and customized shoes, is a recognized authority on the financial duplicity of the Iraqi leader, and his once close relationship with the major banks of the world. A clippedvoiced Englishman, Story edits a respected financial banking journal, the International Currency Review. Its subscribers include the World Bank, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, and the Bank of England.

Story has amassed documentation showing that Robert Maxwell, the disgraced tycoon who once owned the London Daily Mirror newspaper group, arranged for billions of dollars to be laundered through Bulgarian banks to the Bank of New York. It was then owned by Edmund Safra, known as “financier to the mafia.” He died in a mysterious fire in his Monaco penthouse in 1999. Maxwell was killed by Mossad agents when he threatened to reveal Israel’s intelligence secrets.

“If Saddam gives up all the names of those who helped him, it would cause panic greater than any Wall Street crash. Many still hold high office today. It is impossible that they did not know what was going on with Saddam. He was moving out huge sums of money right up until the eve of war,” said Story.

Until now untold, the story of how Saddam Hussein began to amass one of the world’s largest private fortunes began when a private jet took off from London to Baghdad in 1982. During the five-hour flight from London, its solitary passenger, financier Tiny Rowland, spooned beluga caviar into his mouth and sipped vintage Krug champagne. That was his regular diet on a business trip in his Learjet. The delicacies had been sent from Baghdad by Saddam Hussein.

This was no ordinary journey on that summer’s day in 1982, even for the sixty-eight-year-old financier with a fearsome reputation as a predator in the City of London, on Wall Street, and on the stock markets of Europe. Sitting in his hand-tooled tan leather armchair on board his customized jet, feet resting on a $150-a-square-foot carpet, Roland W. Rowland — the name on his gold-embossed business cards — had indeed come a long way from where he had been born in 1917 in a British prison camp in India.

He was the son of a German trader called Fritz Fuhrop. His mother was the daughter of a pillar of the English Raj who had followed her husband into internment. Following their release after the end of World War I, Rowland’s Indian nanny had called him “Tiny.” Even though he would grow to be six feet tall, the nickname stuck. Now it was the only link with his past — those days when he had dug latrines for the British army in World War II and later was a porter at Paddington railway station in London.

Those humble beginnings had fed his determination to join the ranks of the rich and powerful. He sold secondhand cars and refrigerators in postwar London. By the time he was thirty, he was a millionaire. He began to trade in gold in South Africa. His fortune grew. He was hired to “sort out” an ailing company called the London and Rhodesia Mining and Land Corporation — Lonhro. Rowland made it the single most powerful trading company in all Africa. His deals in copper, tin, and other metals made him the darling of Lonhro stockholders.

They did not suspect how Rowland had paid off Lord Duncan Sandys, Winston Churchill’s son-in-law. Using a secret account in the Cayman Islands, Rowland had given the peer $500,000 for helping to buy the largest gold mine in Ghana. When Duncan Sandys became mired in sexual scandal, the prudish Rowland cut him dead — refusing to send “even a bunch of flowers” to his funeral in 1987. No one, however rich and well connected, was allowed to implicate Tiny Rowland. He treasured his image as the quintessential Englishman. Only in the confines of a small circle of right-wing friends did he reveal his anti-Semitism and contempt for the way Britain was being run.

Already a multimillionaire, Tiny Rowland allowed his hatred for socialism to surface during the British crisis with Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) over its determination to challenge the Wilson government over self-rule. Sanctions had been introduced against what Prime Minister Harold Wilson called “this pariah state.” It later emerged that Rowland broke them. But by then Mrs. Thatcher was in Downing Street and the matter was not pursued.

Tiny looked for new fields to conquer. He bought the Observer, a London Sunday newspaper, and tried to use it to support his business interests in Africa. Next he enlisted the notorious Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi to broker a deal with Colonel Gadhafi to buy the Metropole hotel chain for $150 million.

Rowland’s ability to use anybody to further his own interests had earlier led Britain’s then prime minister Ted Heath to castigate him as the “unacceptable face of capitalism.” Tiny Rowland shrugged that off in the same imperious way he dismissed other financiers who came to him with deals. He preferred to work alone, to share his profits with no one — except his Siamese cats. Every day he fed them the same fine caviar that he ate on his Learjet as it headed for Iraq on that June day in 1982. They had curled up at his feet as he worked at his desk preparing his greatest coup yet — hiding Saddam’s fortune.

When Saddam came to power, his pro-West sympathies were welcomed in London and Washington. Their governments, along with those of France and Germany, saw the need to reinforce Iraq’s infrastructure against the looming threat posed by Iran. Baghdad became a vast bazaar. Massive bribes to secure contracts were common. They were siphoned into Saddam’s accounts. More money flowed there for his cut on deals to build superhighways, hospitals, and schools. If anybody suspected, nobody cared.

Saddam’s relationship with Rowland stemmed from the breathtaking theft of the shah of Iran’s personal fortune of $3 billion. In 1979, with the ayatollahs about to seize power in Iran, the shah’s most trusted aides had held secret meetings with the director of the Central Bank of Iraq. Rowland had acted as the go-between, and on his advice, the Shah agreed to transfer his fortune to Baghdad into the Iraqi central bank, beyond the reach of the ayatollahs. Rowland received a “handling fee” of 15 percent.

In a second deal that laid the foundation for Saddam’s fortune, the Iraqi tyrant, then barely a year in power, transferred the money out of the central bank in Iraq to his own numbered accounts with Credit Suisse in Switzerland and a Cayman Island bank. Rowland arranged this, pocketing another handling fee. The deposed, and dying, shah ended up in Washington. He asked the U.S. government to help recover his stolen fortune. His plea fell on deaf ears. The road map in the Middle East had once more changed. Washington was openly backing Iraq against Iran.

All this, and more, the Mossad team had established as they hunted for Saddam’s fortune in the winter of 2004.

I have spoken to intelligence officers in London, Washington, and Tel Aviv who have described other documents that reveal the extent of the secret network Rowland set up.

One Mossad document shows how Rowland used one of his London banks to provide a facility for Iraqi arms dealer Ibsan Barbouti to lodge $500 million of Saddam’s money. From London, Barbouti helped Libya to build a chemical warfare plant. When he suddenly died — widely believed to be a victim of one of Saddam’s hit men — the money was transferred from the London bank to the central bank of Libya.

Another document details how Saddam’s son Uday went to Geneva in 1998 to “iron out some financial problems” with Swiss banks who were part of the money-laundering network Rowland had created.

On the eve of the second Iraqi war, accompanied by Iraq’s finance minister Hikmat Misban al-Azzawi (now in American custody), Saddam’s son Qusay went to Iraq’s central bank with a handwritten letter from his father saying he was authorized to remove $1 billion from the vaults. The money was loaded onto a convoy of trucks. U.S. satellite photographs show the convoy heading for the Syrian border. Later, U.S. troops found $656 million in dollar bills stuffed inside 164 aluminium boxes on the grounds of one of Saddam’s palaces, along with 100 million euros in an armored car.

By the spring of 2004, the search for Saddam’s billions had become the greatest hunt since the post — World War II search for Nazi gold. Mossad, supported by MI6 and the CIA, deployed scores of agents and financial experts to try to discover the vast fortune Rowland’s master plan had enabled Saddam to hide around the world.

A Mossad document, signed by Meir Dagan, names more than seventy banks as being included in Saddam’s money-laundering trail that electronically sped out of Iraq to London, Europe, through Gibraltar, down to South Africa, across the Pacific to Hong Kong, on to Japan, up into Russia, and back down to the Balkans. But the searchers — spies, bankers, and brokers — trying to follow the trail found that Rowland’s built-in safeguards stood the test of time.

“He used surrogates and cutouts, people in the international banking world. Banks in Eastern Europe which serviced the KGB and were used to not asking questions, were also used,” confirmed a Mossad source.

In a memo prepared for the FBI shortly before he died in the World Trade Center attack in September 2001, John P. O’Neill, the FBI executive agent in charge in New York, wrote that Saddam’s money “was almost certainly being laundered through international criminal corporations run by South American drug cartels and the Russian Mafia.” The memo identified Edmund Safra, the billionaire banker who then owned the National Republic Bank in New York, as a “money laundering conduit for the funds.”

Investigators had found that others who could have helped them follow along the money trail were also mysteriously dead. One was Janos Pasztor, a Wall Street analyst. He had worked for Rowland. He died on October 15, 2000, of a previously undiagnosed cancer. The week before, his doctor had given him a clean bill of health.

Another conduit through which Saddam’s fortune flowed was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). Based in London, the now dissolved bank provided funds for terrorist groups Saddam already supported. It was closed down after City of London regulators discovered its activities.

MI5 has a fat file on another of the middlemen Rowland used. His name was Cyrus Hashemi. Ostensibly an Arab millionaire playboy who would spend $150,000 on the turn of a card at a Mayfair casino and give doormen Rolex watches for parking his Ferrari, Hashemi allowed his BCCI bank accounts to be used to send Saddam’s money on down the money trail. The MI5 intelligence file on Hashemi also says that he was trying to broker a better deal for his services. On July 16, 1986, he suddenly collapsed at his Belgravia home and was rushed to a private clinic owned by BCCI. Two days later he was dead.

Scotland Yard’s Serious Crimes Squad investigated. They called in forensic pathologist Dr. Ian West. He said, “Hashemi’s death was one of the strangest I have investigated.” West sent tissue samples to Porton Down, Britain’s chemical and biological warfare establishment, for its scientists to decide if Hashemi had been poisoned. The result of their findings remains unknown to this day.

The location of Saddam’s billions may also remain undiscovered in the foreseeable future.

In April 2004, the French lawyer Jacques Verges announced he had been appointed by Saddam’s family as lead counsel for his trial. Verges became famous when he represented the former SS officer Klaus Barbie, who was convicted of “crimes against humanity” in 1987. Since then the attorney has acted for the notorious terrorist Carlos the Jackal, now serving a life sentence in Paris, and still acts as adviser to Slobodan Milosevic, whose trial at the Hague War Crimes Tribunal is now into its fourth year and could last several more years.

Verges has said he expects Saddam’s trial to last even longer. “I will present him as a vanquished hero.” He plans to call President George W. Bush and his father, the former U.S. president, as witnesses, along with Britain’s prime minister Tony Blair and other world leaders. “Arguing why they should appear should take at least a year,” said Verges, in his seventy-eighth year when he took the case. One of the key elements of his defense will be to show “how very important people took their slice of the action for helping Saddam hide his money. They still hold high office. But not after I finish with them.”

Only time will tell if that will lead to the discovery of the tyrant’s fortune. More certain is that by then Mossad will have other tyrants to hunt down.