Hussein’s Palaces Brimming With Excess and Intrigue

Crystal chandeliers glitter above polished marble floors. Velvet-covered chairs flank gold-topped tables. Bathrooms gleam with gold faucets and pink bidets. Brocade curtains drape plush canopy beds.

Those who have seen the inside of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s many palaces describe a world of opulent kitsch and lavish excess, rooms adorned with busts, statues and portraits of Hussein and protected by bullet-proof windows, 20-foot-high walls and guard towers.

But U.S. officials say that eight palace compounds also might contain evidence of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons development, which Iraq pledged to give up after losing the Persian Gulf War in 1991.

Gaining unfettered access to the sprawling sites is one of the Bush administration’s key demands as it wrestles to win support at the United Nations and in world capitals for aggressive new inspections in Iraq.

Satellite photos indicate that Hussein has dug swimming pools, built mansions and made other major renovations at compounds that were bombed by U.S. and British forces in December 1998. The raids in Operation Desert Fox were launched in part because Iraq had obstructed U.N. disarmament efforts.

Several defectors say Hussein has hidden secret weapons research labs and other facilities in the palaces since 1998, but U.S. intelligence and other officials acknowledge that they don’t know for sure.

“These are gigantic facilities, extremely well guarded, unknown underground networks with unknown equipment and unknown activities,” said State Department spokesman Philip T. Reeker. “We don’t necessarily know what he’s hiding in these things.”

Some experts suspect that the insistence on surprise inspections of presidential compounds is mostly a matter of psychology.

“I don’t think Hussein hides anything in those palaces,” said Mustafa Alani, an Iraqi-born Middle East expert at the Royal United Services Institute for Defense Studies, a London think tank. “They know the palaces will be inspected. They know the palaces would be attacked in a military strike.”

Getting inside is “more a matter of psychological value because it undermines the credibility of the regime. By inspecting palaces, you remove the immunity of the leadership, and that is a psychological blow,” Alani said.

To some, the push on the presidential compounds is a case of diplomatic deja vu.

In 1997, Hussein’s regime repeatedly blocked United Nations teams from entering the presidential compounds, saying such searches violated Iraq’s “national sovereignty and dignity.” Washington and London were furious, but Paris and Moscow backed Baghdad in the Security Council.

The crisis appeared to ease when U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan negotiated an agreement with Iraq in February 1998 to permit palace inspections--but only if Baghdad had advance notice, and if “senior diplomats” escorted the weapons teams. That agreement is still in force, but it is likely to be superseded by new U.N. action.

Charles Duelfer, who was deputy chairman of the U.N. panel then responsible for disarming Iraq, says the 1998 agreement turned his searches of the palaces into “a circus.”

Duelfer said the inspectors had hoped to find “an audit trail, purchasing documents, presidential directives or other documents” outlining precisely what Hussein had bought, what he had built, what he had hidden and more.

But advance notice gave Iraq time to empty rooms of nearly all file cabinets, documents, computers and equipment, Duelfer said. Even the furniture was removed from some buildings.

“We surveyed all of them, every inch of them,” Duelfer said in an interview. “After six weeks’ advance notice, of course there wasn’t a speck of paper anywhere. They’d taken everything out.”

Over an eight-day period in 1998, the U.N. weapons teams visited the Republican Palace, Kharkh and Radwaniyah compounds in Baghdad, as well as presidential compounds at Tikrit, Tharthar, Jabal Makhul, Mosul and Basra, U.N. records indicate. “It was clearly apparent that all sites had undergone extensive evacuation,” Duelfer wrote in a 1998 summary of his inspections.

Iraqi officials portrayed the investigators as bumbling gumshoes, searching for Scud missiles under Hussein’s bed. The presence of hundreds of Iraqi minders, as well as 20 ambassadors and other diplomats, didn’t help.

The job was enormous. The lush, landscaped grounds cover 40 square miles and contain about 1,500 guesthouses, offices, warehouses, garages, sentry posts and other buildings, as well as man-made moats, fountains, waterfalls and lakes, according to a U.N. survey in 1998.

Still, the U.N. teams made progress. They prepared maps and sketches, using coordinates from global positioning devices. They shot photos from helicopters and on the ground. They took soil samples and, in at least one case, examined an underground sewer system.

Scott Ritter, a former weapons inspector who now publicly opposes U.S. policy on Iraq, says the palace searches were partly based on faulty intelligence that indicated the regime used Hussein’s residences to produce biological toxins.

“We heard he had ‘Special Biological Activity’ teams at the palaces,” Ritter recalled. “It turns out that’s the food testing service for Saddam and his family. They test for poison in his food, his bed linen, his toilets, his clothes, anything the president comes into contact with.”

At this point, the Bush administration is particularly concerned with gaining access to three presidential sites, according to the State Department.

The first is Radwaniyah, west of downtown Baghdad. It has been continually expanded since 1998.

The site houses 360 individual structures, including four presidential residences, 225 VIP villas, plus scores of offices, warehouses, security housing and checkpoints, according to U.N. reports. The compound is surrounded by a high fence and is heavily guarded by Hussein’s internal security forces.

The second is the Tikrit compound, the largest and most elaborate of presidential sites. Located 90 miles north of Baghdad in Hussein’s hometown, it includes farms and rural retreats for VIPs as well as palaces and villas. The facility has been expanded since the weapons inspectors left in 1998.

The third is a new facility known as the Baghdad Al Salam Palace. It has been built on the site of the former Republican Guard headquarters, which was destroyed during the Gulf War. Construction of the facility was completed in 1999, according to the State Department.

Iraq’s U.N. ambassador, Mohammed Douri, indicated this week that Baghdad may be willing to revise the 1998 agreement and let the inspectors into the presidential compounds. He provided no details, however.

But Iraqi offers of cooperation make some suspicious.

Martin S. Indyk, who was assistant U.S. secretary of State for the Near East during the 1998 crisis, said new searches of the palaces are probably fruitless at this point.

“He’s had four years to clean up his act,” Indyk said. “In a sense, the palace compounds are the last place we’re likely to find anything of consequence--because it’s the first place he expects us to look.”

And the shrinking of computer storage discs and other electronic media since 1998 may make future searches even more difficult, said Gary Dillon, the Iraq team leader for the International Atomic Energy Agency, which led the search for Iraq’s nuclear weapons development program.

Entire libraries, he said, now can fit in someone’s back pocket.

“If Saddam’s really as cunning and dangerous as everybody says he is, do you know how many pages you can get onto a CD-ROM?” he asked. “Why would he have three wardrobes of paper, when he can fit them on a couple of CD-ROMs?”

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Times staff writers Sebastian Rotella in London, Alissa J. Rubin in Vienna, Maggie Farley at the United Nations and Robin Wright in Washington contributed to this report.