Dr Zaius
Chief Defender of the Faith
- Joined
- May 1, 2001
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- Don
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As unbelievable as it may seem, Saddam's sons may even be more dangerous than he is. Saddam came up through the ranks as a revolutionary, a radical who used torture among other things to seize power. Once in power he used utterly ruthless measure and gain a deathgrip on every aspect of Iraqi daily life. But although Saddam has always been a dangerous and unpredictable gambler, his behavior has been tempored to some extent by his political ambitions and extreme concern for his own personal safety. Saddam doesn't want to be a martyr, he wants to be even more powerful and respected than is already is.
Saddam's sons are another matter. They have been raised from birth in the presence of a maniac and were exposed to barbaric acts of violence from the time they were small boys. Neither appears very stable, and in a post Saddam Iraq they will almost certainly attempt to seize power even if it means they have to kill each other.
Saddam's sons are another matter. They have been raised from birth in the presence of a maniac and were exposed to barbaric acts of violence from the time they were small boys. Neither appears very stable, and in a post Saddam Iraq they will almost certainly attempt to seize power even if it means they have to kill each other.
AS THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION prepares to try to take Saddam out, U.S. war planners and spymasters are intensely interested in the Iraqi strongman’s family ties. If Saddam is killed or somehow cut off, power would most likely pass to his sons, Uday and Qusay. It is hard to imagine how, but Saddam’s male offspring, say a wide variety of sources, could be worse than the father. Their life stories, as pieced together largely from the accounts of defectors, are Gothic in their monstrosity.
If Saddam is Don Corleone, then Uday is Sonny, the reckless, violent, oversexed heir apparent. And Qusay is Michael, the younger brother who is calmer, colder and ultimately more dangerous. A cornered Uday would not hesitate to lash out with chemical and biological weapons. But Qusay is the greater risk to actually control the weapons and find a way to use them against U.S. forces or the American people.
OUTLANDISH DEPRAVITY
The stories told about Saddam’s sons, related to NEWSWEEK by several Iraqi exiles, seem almost too grotesque to be true. Some are probably exaggerated, but not by much, according to a senior administration official who has access to CIA files on Saddam’s sons. More is known about Uday, but only because he was outlandish in his depravity. Qusay is “in the shadows,” says this source. “We don’t know much.” But U.S. intelligence believes that Qusay is Saddam’s true heir apparent, for the simple reason that he controls the security that keeps his father in power and alive. Given their family history, it is remarkable that his two sons have not killed each other (though they may have tried).
Both men (Uday is 38, Qusay 36) were born and bred to violence of the most lurid kind. As infants, they were supposedly given disarmed grenades as toys. More reliably, they were said to accompany their father on outings to the torture chamber. What did they see? The methods used by the ruling Baath Party have never been subtle. When the Army briefly drove out the Baathists in the early 1960s, it discovered a chamber of horrors where Saddam worked as an officer. In the cellars of Qasr-al—Nihayyah (“the Palace of the End,” so-called because King Faisal II was murdered there in 1958), the Army found “electric wires with pincers, pointed iron stakes on which prisoners were made to sit, and a machine which still bore traces of chopped-off fingers,” according to one account based on official sources.
Saddam has always believed in the symbolic power of mutilation. “Under torture, the high and mighty are quite literally exposed as being made of the same stuff as everyone else,” writes Kanan Makiya in his study of Saddam’s Iraq, “Republic of Fear.” As Iraqi ruler, Saddam delivered the broken bodies of his victims to their families. He was aiming at the creation of “a new man” in Iraq, just as Hitler and Stalin had tried to do in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. He may well have made his sons into psychopaths.
SINGLED OUT
Uday has used his position as No. 1 son to try to compensate for his physical shortcomings. Since childhood, his protruding front teeth have made him speak with a lisp. Though married three to five times (accounts differ), he has yet to produce an heir. He has sought to show his virility in other ways. There are numerous stories of his singling out a pretty face on the street, then sending his guards to pick up the unfortunate woman and deposit her at a nightclub, to be sexually abused by Uday, sometimes before an audience. In an interview with NEWSWEEK, Latif Yahia, an Iraqi exile who claims that he was for several years pressed into service as a body double for Uday, described this sordid encounter:
Strolling through a park, Uday spotted a young couple. He called out to the young woman, but the pair walked on, pretending not to notice. Affronted, Uday grabbed the woman by the arm and declared, “You’re much too good for this simple man.” (Her companion was wearing the uniform of an Army captain.) The woman stammered that she had been married only the day before. Uday’s guards promptly dragged her to a hotel room, where Uday raped her as the guards watched from the next room. Latif, who says he witnessed this scene, says he heard the woman scream. He went to the balcony and saw her half-naked figure lying in front of the hotel entrance six floors below. Her husband, who cursed Uday, was executed for “defamation of the president.” It is impossible to confirm Latif’s story, but Iraqi media reported the execution of the husband, Saad Abd al-Razzek.
Uday incurred his father’s displeasure as a young man, when he killed one of Saddam’s favorite bodyguards in a drunken rage. There are various versions of this story, but it appears that Kamel Hanna Jojo, whose palace duties included tasting Saddam’s food, gave too boisterous a party on an island in the Tigris River one night in 1988. The revelry included firing AK-47s into the air, a not-uncommon practice among the Iraqi elite, but the noise apparently irked Uday, who was holding his own party in a garden next door. (Uday, who favors his mother, was also said to be angry at Jojo for acting as a go-between for Saddam and one of his mistresses.) Uday burst into Jojo’s party and stabbed the host in the throat with an electric rose cutter. Then he shot him in the face.
THE OLYMPIC COMMITTEE’S PRISON
Saddam punished his temperamental son by sending him to Switzerland for all of 40 days. He allowed Uday to keep his perks and his position as head of the Iraqi Olympic Committee. (The Baghdad Olympic Committee headquarters may be the only one in the world, notes British journalist Patrick Cockburn, to be protected by medieval-style watchtowers with machine gunners.) Uday runs his own prison at Olympic Committee headquarters, where he has been known to beat Iraqi soccer players who miss a scoring chance. Saddam has long allowed his son to run the import-export ministries, extremely lucrative in a regime that has lived under international sanctions since the 1991 gulf war. “Uday showed a real talent for grand larceny, extortion and bribery,” said “Ahmed,” a former colonel in Saddam’s security service who fled Iraq and now lives in London, where he was interviewed by NEWSWEEK. Uday has been able to rake off many millions of dollars from smugglers of liquor and tobacco, according to U.S. intelligence officials.
Uday was still living high when he ran into journalist Cockburn at the el-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad in 1994. Swilling from his own bottle of cognac, he told Cockburn that he had missed out on his chance to go to America to study at MIT because of the Iran-Iraq War in the ’80s. “I did my SATs. I did well. Passed with high marks,” Uday boasted. (His intended major: nuclear science.) At the table, “neatly dressed and flushed with shyness, speaking quietly about Mesopotamian culture,” was younger brother Qusay. Uday smiled indulgently as he introduced Qusay: “Not such a baby now. He runs the security services.”
Perhaps without meaning to, Uday had revealed that little brother Qusay was in fact more powerful and enjoyed a far greater measure of his father’s trust. Qusay today runs the Special Security Organization, the tip of Saddam’s security network of informants and thugs. The SSO guards Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, his chemical and biological arsenal. Qusay is also commander of the Special Republican Guard, the 15,000 or so troops who are most loyal to Saddam. According to U.S. intelligence sources, Saddam personally controls several score of bodyguards, drawn from his hometown clan in the city of Tikrit. But he relies on younger son Qusay to mind the rest of his security apparatus.
ASSASSINATION MYSTERY
Not much happens in Iraq’s police state without either Saddam’s or Qusay’s knowing about it. Which is why the Dec. 12, 1996, assassination attempt on Uday remains such an intriguing mystery. On that night Uday was driving his champagne-colored Porsche past an ice-cream parlor in Baghdad’s al-Mansour district, an upper-class enclave, when he was ambushed by two gunmen. Uday was shot eight times, in the arm, stomach and leg. Amazingly, he lived, but his recovery was difficult and humiliating. He had to import surgeons to replace his shin, say U.S. intelligence sources, and he still walks with the utmost difficulty. According to Ahmed, the former security-service colonel now in exile in London, “One of the first things Uday did in the hospital was tell his bodyguards to go out and find him a woman,” to test his manhood. Uday was ashamed to be seen in a wheelchair.
Indeed, U.S. intelligence sources wonder if Uday was intentionally maimed, not killed. “The Byzantines would disfigure their victims, slitting tongues and taking out eyeballs,” observes one intelligence official. But by whom? The shooting took place just a block from the feared Muhabarat, the secret police, which brother Qusay headed at the time. Uday went on TV to claim that he had been shot by Iranians—but no one was ever tried or executed. Some speculated that his uncle Watban hired some hit men out of revenge. In another drunken fit in 1995, Uday had shot Watban several times in the leg at a party. Supposedly, the two men were arguing over the favors of a Gypsy dancer. (Greed as well as sex may have been involved: that same night, two of Uday’s brothers-in-law defected to Jordan after family feuds over divvying up smuggling proceeds.) But it’s doubtful that Watban could have gotten away with anything unless Qusay—or Saddam himself—had looked the other way.
Could Saddam or Qusay have tried to eliminate Uday? Entirely possible. “Everyone in the country hates Uday, but his family hates him more,” says “Yusuf,” a former bodyguard on Saddam’s staff who was interviewed by NEWSWEEK in Jordan. “Saddam encouraged Uday’s cousins to kill him,” says Yusuf. His account cannot be independently verified, but when he fled Iraq in 1999 Yu-suf was a captain on Uday’s own bodyguard detail. Saddam chastised Uday as he lay in his recovery bed in 1997. In a tape recording that Saddam probably allowed to be smuggled out of Iraq, the family patriarch can be heard scolding, “Your behavior, Uday, is bad, and there can —be no worse than yours... We want to know what kind of person you are. Are you a politician, a trader, a people’s leader or a playboy? You must know that you have done nothing for this homeland or this people. The opposite is true.” Intriguingly, Saddam also had briefer, but pointed, criticism for Qusay. He called his younger son “two-faced.”
ON A SHORT LEASH
U.S. intelligence officials say that Saddam has been reluctant to openly turn on his older son in part for tribal reasons: it would be an admission of failure as a father. But he keeps him on a short leash. Uday is allowed to run a newspaper full of ethnic rants and to head a commando militia, known as Saddam’s Fadayeen. But he has to apply for an appointment to see his father, and has to leave his bodyguards behind. Qusay, on the other hand, has free and daily access to his father.
Qusay is “very cool,” says an Arab intelligence official who has known him for 15 years. “He tries to show the attitude of a sphinx. He wants to have the image of someone who is very cold, although he has to work at that; it doesn’t come naturally.” He is just as ruthless as his brother. “Really, they are both the same,” Ahmed told NEWSWEEK. “They really like to see blood; they like to see people tortured. The difference is that Qusay does everything quietly; he has never been in the open like Uday.” Left to their own devices, Saddam and his two sons could wind up like scorpions in a bottle, trying to kill each other. Against the United States, however, the brothers are putting up a united front. “If Uday is killed in battle, then there is Qusay,” said the elder brother in a recent Iraqi TV address. “And if Qusay is killed, then there is Uday.” It is clear that if the United States attacks Iraq, removing Saddam will be only a start. The Bush administration still entertains hopes that someone will dispatch Saddam with a bullet. But what if his sons are the assassins? Getting rid of Saddam won’t be enough. His sons will have to go with him, or they will continue the family business.
