COLUMN ONE : What Sort of Man Is Hussein? : Ruthless, enigmatic and unpredictable, the Iraqi leader has relentlessly pursued power and a place in history.

Saddam Hussein is everywhere and nowhere, as familiar as a face on a television screen, as elusive as rumor.

Staring impassively, blank as the head on a coin, he speaks to the world one moment from an anonymous house in the Baghdad suburbs and the next, in heated communiques from a front-line bunker. He dons public masks with an actor’s flourish, each with its own wardrobe--the statesman’s European-tailored business suits, the desert leader’s flowing tribal jellabas , the commander’s drab fatigues and black beret.

Unpredictability is his weapon--as integral to his survival as his penchant for secrecy and his reliance on violence as a tool of everyday business. Throughout his ascent to power--as a young Baath party conspirator, as a political prisoner, as a wily bureaucrat in the presidential palace and, now, as a leader at war--Saddam Hussein rarely has been pinned down.

To Americans, Hussein is both the personification of evil and an enigma. The rush of events has obscured his motivations; wartime blindness to his complexities has simplified and demonized his life.

“The West thinks he is an aberration,” said Hani Fukaiki, an Iraqi political exile in London and former top official of Hussein’s nationalist Arab Baath Socialist Party. “That is not true. For every Saddam Hussein who succeeds, there are 1,000 more who want to take his place.”

From childhood, swaggering to school with a gun under his belt, to his present role as chosen enemy of the Western World, the common denominators in Hussein’s life have been his pursuit of revolution, personal and political power and a place in history. Now 53 years old, he steeped himself in the tactics of insurrection, refining them over two decades of political carnage that shaped modern Iraq.

“The difference between us,” he once lectured a visiting delegation of U.S. congressmen, “is that you came up through the over-ground. I came up through the underground.”

If there is some childhood secret or shattering event in Hussein’s past that goads him on in grim motivation, the scars are long buried under toughened skin. Like Stalin, his totalitarian model, Hussein has either eliminated or co-opted most of those who might shed light on his early life. He has replaced his obliterated past with one of his own making, reinventing himself as the one who can realize Iraqi dreams of leading the Muslim world and Arab yearnings for a seamless Mideast state.

What emerges in interviews with nearly 40 people--Iraqi exiles, scholars, diplomats, Congress members and business people--is the portrait of a shrewd conspirator who summarily disposed of his enemies and rewarded his loyalists. He is, as well, a man of baffling traits and quirks:

The somber leader who claims lineage to Nebuchadnezzar, king of ancient Babylonia, also regularly entertained picnic guests by giddily test-firing new weapons. He is the athletic tennis player who let himself develop a paunch, then ordered frightened ministers into going on the “Saddam Diet.” His meetings with Western visitors are always conducted in Arabic--but he uses a keen grasp of English to correct his interpreters.

Outfitted by Pierre Cardin, Hussein can pause to berate quaking aides with crude tribal oaths. He once ordered all foreign-language typewriters registered to stifle dissent but wrote hundreds of obscure political tracts. He is a proud family man, but he reportedly cavorted in public with the wife of an Iraqi airline official.

“He’s considered very impressive among Iraqis,” said former Assistant Secretary of State Morris Draper, who went to Baghdad in 1981 to renew American ties after years of neglect. “It’s hard for Westerners to understand. He’s got a certain charisma by Iraqi standards.”

Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti was born on April 28, 1937, in Auja, a village of mud-brick huts outside Tikrit, a backwater north of Baghdad. Decades before it was bombed last week by American warplanes, the region was stunted with meager grain and melon farms. Biographers describe Hussein’s parents as dirt-poor farmers. Others say he rose from the “ petit bourgeoisie . “

Hussein’s father is said to have died before his birth. His mother remarried. His earliest influence was an uncle, Khayrallah Tulfah, an army officer stripped of rank by the British after he joined a failed 1941 coup. Taking the 10-year-old Hussein to Baghdad, the older man became his guide through the political maelstrom of postwar Iraq.

Tulfah had definite theories about Iraqi society. He made them part of the boy’s political education. Later, Tulfah expounded on them in a pamphlet: “Three Whom God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews and Flies.”

Tulfah’s leanings were closest to the Baath Party, a nationalist party that espoused socialism and Arab unity--dreams that most Iraqis shared. In the streets of Baghdad, Baathists brawled with Communists. Shiite Muslims oppressed minority Sunnis, Hussein’s religious sect. Sunnis, in turn, named their dogs for Shiite prophets. Ten coups were mounted in a decade, assassination the preferred mode of removal.

Staying ahead of rivals required “the survival of the fittest,” said Roger Owen, a Middle East scholar at Oxford University. “The feeling was that the best way to get rid of your opponent was to kill them. And the best way to maintain yourself in power was to assume everyone was after you.”

Hussein carried a gun to school--”a way of stopping people from bullying him,” said Simon Henderson, author of “Instant Empire,” a Hussein profile.

“He always had a gun tucked away,” said Fukaiki, who first met Hussein in a Baghdad jail in 1958. “Everyone carried weapons then. You carried a gun like you carried an umbrella.”

Both men were confined briefly--Fukaiki for political activity, Hussein for killing a relative. Fukaiki recalls a “slim, quiet” youth with a budding hint of future jowls.

Years later, Fukaiki watched a mature Hussein face down several hundred angry students at the height of tensions between Baathists and leftists. Eyes masked by sunglasses, Hussein and several party gunmen bullied the students into dispersing.

“Class dismissed,” Hussein spat contemptuously.

Rafi Joohari, an Iraqi Jew who now lives in Israel, claims to have attended classes with Hussein. On Israeli television, Joohari described Hussein as “a schlemiel and a failure.” His authenticity has come under fire from some Israeli media, but Joohari clings to the story.

Eager to make something of himself, Hussein turned to the Baath Party, taking up its “hard life,” said Fukaiki. “You were vulnerable to prison, assassination, hanging,” he said. “You moved from one place to another. . . . You trusted no one.”

At secret cell meetings, Hussein “had no use for theory,” Fukaiki said. “It was always, ‘How can the Baathists take advantage of the situation to advance their own ends?’ ”

In 1959, at 22, Hussein took his first giant step up in party ranks. He joined a plot to machine-gun Iraq’s prime minister, Abdul Karim Kassim. The assassins botched the job, and Hussein, wounded in the leg, fled to Syria, then Cairo--an ordeal that, years later, would be taught as lore in Iraqi schools.

Hussein returned to Baghdad married to his uncle’s daughter, Sajida. He took over a Baathist farmers’ organization. Some analysts suggest Hussein also began a new career as a party torturer.

The Baathists took power briefly in 1963, then lost it amid internal bickering. Imprisoned, Hussein refined his revolutionary talents, smuggling out messages concealed in the diapers of an infant son and preaching to prison guards, winning new converts.

Escaping two years later, he burrowed back into the underground, surrounding himself with clannish hometown boys from Tikrit. They formed a deadly party police force, the Jehaz Haneen, or, “instrument of yearning.”

When the Baathists again seized Iraq’s government in July, 1968, Hussein’s men made sure the party corrected old mistakes. Hussein, installed as the No. 2 man behind a relative, Gen. Ahmed Hassan Bakr, clamped down on internal dissent.

Those who made trouble were visited at night. There were no second visits. Kicking down the doors of party enemies, the Jehaz Haneen ransacked houses and wasted bullets like movie gangsters. Relatives of victims described several attacks to Fukaiki, by then a leftist foe of the Baathists.

“They told me that Hussein himself led the raids and shot several men,” Fukaiki said. “He killed some and wounded others. They would shout and drag away the party members. Sometimes they would send the bodies back to the families. Sometimes they left them in the street.”

In the decade that followed the Baathist coup, Hussein steadily consolidated power. Iraq was marked by an unsettling dichotomy: In public, the economy grew. There was social mobility, literacy surged and women were made equal under the law. But prosperity came against a dark backdrop of bloody repression.

The secretive tactics that Hussein learned in the underground now became the practices of government. The Jehaz Haneen grew into the Mukhabarat, the party’s General Intelligence Department.

Enemies--especially Jews and Communists--were labeled Israeli agents and hanged in public spectacles. Schoolchildren and public employees were taken on field trips to watch. Some executions were televised, some victims hung from lampposts.

It was not enough to be quietly loyal; triggering the slightest suspicion might lead to imprisonment or death at the hands of a torturer. Anyone who posed a challenge--real or imagined--to Hussein’s growing authority was at risk.

“It was an opportunity to kill people who were inconvenient,” said David Korn, a retired foreign service officer who has examined human rights abuses in Iraq.

As violent as the repression seemed, it served a calculated purpose: to solidify control and stability in one of the region’s most ethnically contentious countries.

“The nearest thing you think of is a Mafia don,” said Phebe Marr, a leading expert on Iraq. “You limit (violence) and use it to make a point. . . . It keeps people in line. That’s Saddam.”

There are conflicting accounts as to whether Hussein personally tortured his enemies. But by the 1970s, he clearly allowed and often ordered the torture.

Dr. Mowaffak Rubaie’s troubles began in 1973 when, as chief resident at Baghdad’s Karama Hospital, he was ordered to save a terminally ill relative of Saddam Hussein.

There was no chance for the patient, an elderly man with a bad heart. But Hussein did not want to hear that. Although it would be another six years before he officially became president, Hussein clearly was a power to be feared. Dressed in a pin-striped business suit, he strode into the hospital and demanded to see the doctor in charge.

“I want this man alive,” Hussein said. “I do not want him to die. Is that clear? He is not to die.”

From that moment on, Rubaie sat by the man’s bedside, mounting a round-the-clock vigil to save not only his patient’s life, but his own.

When the relative died, Rubaie took an immediate leave of absence. Hussein spared him; but the following year, Rubaie was arrested and tortured for his opposition politics as a member of the Shiite Daawa Party.

For six weeks, Rubaie was beaten, hung hog-tied from a ceiling fan and jolted with electrical shocks. Hussein’s torturers tied Rubaie to a zoba , a plank of wood between two poles. As the plank revolved, the torturers beat him.

“My blood pressure tends to drop rapidly and I lose consciousness, then I don’t feel anything else,” Rubaie recalled. “I was lucky in that way.”

Jailed again in 1976 and 1978, he finally fled Iraq in 1979.

To this day, Rubaie wears a bulletproof vest on the streets of London, his home in exile.

As his grip on power tightened, Hussein disposed of his patron, Bakr. In the summer of 1979, he shoved the president aside and declared himself the new leader.

He then eliminated those members of the ruling Revolutionary Command Council who might challenge his legitimacy.

The removal of one rival, Muhyi Abd Husayn Mashhadi, was instructive. Hussein convened a Baath Party regional congress and forced Mashhadi to recite a confession, apparently elicited by torture. Mashhadi implicated others in the bogus plot. One by one, each official stood at the mention of his name and was hauled away by a guard. Hussein watched, leisurely lighting a Cuban cigar.

The meeting was videotaped; copies were distributed to Baath Party offices and army units. Sixteen days later, the “conspirators” and 17 other people were executed by firing squad--with Hussein himself taking part, according to Peter Sluglett and Marion Farouk-Sluglett, authors of “Iraq Since 1958.”

“The episode was particularly remarkable,” the Slugletts wrote, “in view of the fact that many of those executed had been among Saddam Hussein’s most intimate associates. . . .”

With his last challengers gone, Hussein was in position to seek his ultimate goal: establishing Iraq as the dominant force in the Arab world.

He attempted to balance his fear tactics with the spoils from his nation’s expanding oil industry. The government worked to modernize Iraq, building irrigation projects, libraries, public housing and roads. The standard of living improved considerably for many Iraqis, and by 1980 the government reported $35 billion in reserves.

Some of the development schemes bordered on the grandiose. Hussein spent millions of dollars on a subway in Baghdad that would never be built. Fancy hotels went up around the capital, then sat empty for years.

Relying on Stalinist economic policies, Hussein made mistakes that cost his country’s development, said Patrick Clawson, an economist with the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Hoping to enhance food production, Hussein bought thousands of tractors--but the output of cereal, rice, vegetables and dates fell. Hoping to solve a problem of salt in the water tables, he dammed the rivers instead of building drainage systems.

“Several times he refused to do things he would obviously have to do,” Clawson said. And, in the end, “he had wasted quite a bit of effort and money.”

When it was not prudent to intimidate, Hussein used more pleasant means of persuasion. He paid bankers handsome salaries, upwards of $400,000, and rewarded patriotic citizens with plots of land. Even in a nation of fear, loyalty could still be bought.

The meeting had droned on for hours. The Americans were squirming. Saddam Hussein had talked on and on, reciting his country’s positions like a patient teacher tutoring slow learners.

The 1985 meeting had been sought eagerly by State Department officials, the first major effort to court Hussein into the world’s mainstream and provide a bulwark against fundamentalist Iran. To make points, the Americans had to endure Hussein’s lecture, watching his “black eyes staring into middle distance,” recalled former Assistant Secretary of State Richard W. Murphy.

Now Hussein interrupted himself. He had a joke to tell.

“You Americans,” he said. “You treat the Third World the way an Iraqi peasant treats his new bride. Three days of honeymoon, and then it’s off to the fields.”

Hussein guffawed. The Americans tried to look amused.

Having ignored Iraq for years, U.S. officials were trying to reverse course. Hussein’s vast oil reserves and formidable army made him a major player in the Mideast. And, bogged down in trench warfare with Iran, Hussein was receptive to the overtures.

Iran, though, was a problem. After victories at the war’s outset in 1981, it was going poorly for Iraq. Massing in human wave attacks, the Iranians retook lost land and were poised on Iraq’s eastern border. To boost morale, Hussein gave Volkswagens and Chevrolets to the families of soldiers butchered at the front. To keep top officers in line, Hussein relied on time-honored purges.

“Senior officers seemed to die more from helicopter accidents than any other cause,” said Korn, the former diplomat.

Hussein was vexed as well by internal dangers. Dissatisfaction had seeped into Hussein’s inner circle. During one Cabinet meeting, Hussein reportedly goaded his health minister, Riyadh Ibrahim, into meekly suggesting that the “father-leader” temporarily step down to appease Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and ease peace negotiations with Iran.

Several days later, Ibrahim’s execution was announced.

Also, Kurdish secessionists were rebelling in the north. Early in the war, Hussein had responded by expelling thousands. Later, he would gas an entire village.

The Americans protested the use of chemical weapons against the Kurds. Diplomatic cables brought a baffling response from Hussein. It rambled on about respect and said nothing about gas.

“A non sequitur response,” recalled Murphy.

Relations began to chill between the U.S. officials and the man they once saw as a potential new ally.

As the war ground on, Hussein kept a tight grip on battlefield decisions. Ranking officers not only had to wait for instructions to attack, there had to be minimal casualties. And they had to win.

“They were not in the business of failing, maybe because they knew what the result would be,” said a British military expert who visited the front several times.

Fear had its intended effect. By 1988, the Iraqis had retaken conquered border areas. With 1.5 million deaths between them, the two nations wearily sued for peace.

The war left Iraq with an $80-billion debt. Hussein hoped to cure it with new oil reserves. He was not an economist. Bankers shuttled in and out of Baghdad, urging Hussein to restructure debt payments to stay solvent. Their pleas were ignored.

“He simply didn’t want to play by the same rules other countries played by,” said a New York international banker.

Hussein was more interested in rebuilding his shattered infrastructure and depleted arsenal. He spent millions to patch up the port of Basra--even though the closed Shatt al Arab waterway prevented ships from docking there. Saddam International Airport rose in a remote suburb of Baghdad. It joined the Saddam Dam, the Saddam Center for the Arts and Saddam Stadium.

They were all part of Hussein’s ballooning cult of personality. Two giant sculpted arms, taken from casts of Hussein’s own limbs, stretched over Baghdad’s main thoroughfare. Huge paintings of Hussein in brocaded frames hung over most streets--the leader alone, with his daughters, chatting with Nebuchadnezzar. Statues of Hussein dominated town squares, their all-seeing eyes concealing spy cameras.

One Swiss analyst calculated that Hussein’s name was mentioned 50 times an hour on Radio Baghdad.

“They wake up in the morning and see Saddam,” said Efraim Karsh, war studies professor at Kings College in London. “They go to work and see Saddam.”

Hussein enjoyed dropping in on his citizens. Smiling, he waded into their living rooms with the ease of a genial landlord. Ever-present television cameras lingered on wall portraits of the president. Every good Iraqi family had one.

“It was all very surrealistic,” said Draper, the former State Department official.

Hussein’s placid public face sometimes hid trouble at home. His alleged philandering drove a wedge into his family, said one European diplomat. A brother-in-law who is said to have raised objections died in one more mysterious helicopter crash. And when Hussein’s eldest son, Uday, bludgeoned his father’s valet to death during a party for the wife of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Hussein reportedly considered putting Uday on trial. He later sent him off to Switzerland.

Though they projected a Spartan image to their people, the Husseins were said to live well--at least until the Gulf War. An Irish firm reported being paid $40 million to upgrade Hussein’s two presidential palaces with Italian marble, parquet floors, gold taps and other icons of luxury, Clawson said.

Even after his invasion of Kuwait last August, Hussein still relished his public profile. Sirens wailed when he stepped out into the daylight. The sight of his passing limousine summoned waving crowds to Baghdad’s sidewalks.

The first American troops that landed on Saudi Arabian soil changed all that.

Hussein’s public appearances waned. There were reports he was spending more and more time in subterranean bunkers--built to withstand nuclear blasts. When he came to the surface, according to British officials, it was with a massive force of loyal soldiers to guard against coup attempts.

By the time bombs fell on Baghdad, Saddam Hussein had withdrawn into the hermetic world so familiar to him.

He was back in the underground.

Times staff writer Carey Goldberg in Tel Aviv and researcher Tom Lutgen in Los Angeles contributed to this story.