We got some chairs, some Pepsis, put them in a cool place in the building, and for the next two and a half hours, they sketched out on butcher paper Saddam’s security apparatus: half a dozen families, cronies who had been with him since the 1950s, people related by blood or marriage. Russell: The biggest breakthrough came in June, when two businessmen came to a complaint center we’d set up for Iraqis. And that gave us new prisoners, and through their interrogations, they started to talk about a certain family-the al-Muslits-and their former role as a bodyguard family for Saddam. The Special Forces team and I started to pursue individuals who we learned about from prisoners. We had to use HUMINT from prisoners exclusively. There was not a single cell phone used to track any part of this hunt. You ain’t finding those guys without cell phones. Army: If you look at how we got Zarqawi, how we got bin Laden, it was cell phones. Staff Sergeant Eric Maddox, interrogator, U. I thought we’d catch him by accident on the side of the road. But we thought they were passing through town on a regular basis. It’s the Iraqis who stay.Ĭaptain Bradley Boyd, commander, Charlie Company, First Battalion, Twenty-second Infantry, First Brigade, Fourth Infantry Division: We assumed Saddam and his supporters weren’t hanging out in town. We were just one of the armies that had passed through-along with the Persians, the British, the Turks, the Romans.
Reed: It wasn’t a place that welcomed us with open arms.Ĭolonel James Hickey, commander, First Brigade, Fourth Infantry Division: Historically, Tikrit is an interesting piece of ground: It’s on the east-west route along the Tigris, one of the great rivers of the world. This was Saddam’s hometown, 97 percent Sunni.
Lieutenant Colonel Steve Russell, commander, First Battalion, Twenty-second Infantry, Fourth Infantry Division: Our orders were to occupy Tikrit. Lieutenant Colonel Steve Russell Shutterstock That work fell to the roughly thirty thousand troops of the Army’s Fourth Infantry Division, working alongside a special team of Delta Force operators known as Task Force 121 intelligence suspected he might be found: northwest of the capital, around Tikrit and the area that would later be labeled the Sunni Triangle-reflecting the ancestral roots of Saddam’s Sunni backers. In fact, the search for Saddam, aka “High Value Target #1,” never stopped, particularly in areas where U.S. troops settled in to occupy post-Saddam Iraq. government established its own interim government in Baghdad, called the Coalition Provisional Authority and more than 150,000 U.S. Bush took to the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and, under a banner reading mission accomplished, proclaimed major combat operations over the U.S. As months passed and priorities shifted, it seemed that our interest in finding him did, too. Saddam made his last public appearance on April 9, 2003, in the streets of Baghdad, as U.S. This is the story of the hunt for the Ace of Spades-the ruler of Iraq, Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti, known around the world simply as Saddam-told by those who caught him. In the first weeks of the Iraq war, the Pentagon assembled a pack of playing cards denoting Iraq’s most wanted, the fifty-five figures in the Iraqi government and military deemed its most important targets.
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