Builder Awaits Word on Bunker Made for Hussein

As U.S. troops tighten their noose around Baghdad, the man who built one of Saddam Hussein’s underground bunkers is watching closely.

Wolfgang Wendler was the manager of the secret project that went by the name “305 Guest House” during its construction 20 years ago. It was, he said almost wistfully, “the most beautiful project of my life,” a spacious, lavishly decorated villa with a massive underground shelter able to withstand powerful bomb blasts and a chemical attack.

Only the best was good enough for the Iraqi president’s $70-million complex: concrete and steel from Kuwait for the reinforced roof and walls, furniture by a famous designer in Germany, ceramic mosaic tiles from Rome for an indoor pool. Even the labor was mostly foreign. Only the sand and gravel were not imported.

Whether the lair can provide a haven for Hussein is hard to imagine, especially if, as Wendler said, the U.S. government has copies of his blueprints for the bunker -- one of several the Iraqi leader had constructed.

“305 Guest House” was close to Hussein’s presidential Palace of the Republic near the banks of the Tigris River.

When he arrived there in late 1981 as an employee of German construction firm Boswau & Knauer, engineer Wendler thought the project was a guest house, albeit a heavily fortified one. Only later did he find out who was the intended inhabitant.

“The whole complex is the residence of Saddam Hussein,” Wendler said. “Nobody knew that because of the name of the project.”

Wendler’s company was hired to carry out a design by Austrian architect Lorenzo Buffalo, who beat out competitors with his proposal for an elegant two-story villa with at least 40 rooms covering more than 30,000 square feet, complete with reception salons, conference halls, a fitness center and even a small dental clinic on the first floor.

Below the villa sprawled Hussein’s retreat, a 14-room catacomb encased in concrete, with a roof 6 1/2 feet thick, walls 5 feet thick and a base slab 10 feet thick.

Its reinforced cocoon was designed to protect the bunker from the heat and shock of bombs and missiles. Cables were insulated to prevent electromagnetic pulses from knocking them out of service. Filters in the ventilation system were installed to thwart a chemical or biological attack.

There were several bathrooms, a kitchen, servants’ quarters and two months of supplies.

Although some of its furnishings were grand, the bunker was not as opulent as the residence that sat atop it, Wendler recalled. For the villa, the Iraqi government hired the expensive German design firm Vereinigte Werkstaetten, which had outfitted the emir of Kuwait’s yacht.

The homey touch, for Hussein, meant lovely antique replicas, fine wood, plush carpets and, in one of the upstairs apartments, a $20,000 bed. An indoor pool boasted a swim-up bar and an Arab mosaic on the wall created by an Iraqi artist using Italian tiles.

Outside, the grounds were to be green year-round, with palm trees and marble pathways.

“I was working in the heart of the power center. I could feel the arrogance of power,” said Wendler, 63. “The Iraqi people were not that poor as [people in] other Arab countries, but the person who ordered this was someone who hoarded everything for himself.”

Evidence of imperial whim was plentiful. Across the Tigris, another German firm had built some high-rise apartments that had a view of the villa; the Iraqi government forbade anyone to live there. For the construction team’s celebratory dinner after finishing “305 Guest House,” authorities closed off a large section of Baghdad surrounding the restaurant.

During work on the project, any time Wendler needed anything, it took only a phone call to his Iraqi counterpart, a cousin of Hussein’s, to get it done.

With a staff of 20 German engineers and supervisors, 100 foreign technical consultants and at least 200 Filipino workers, the team finished building the compound in a little longer than two years, by the beginning of 1984.

But Wendler said he could never shake a feeling of unspoken menace, the acrid taste of fear and oppression in a totalitarian state ruled by a seeming paranoiac.

“We knew that this man was very dangerous. The security on the site, at the entrances, was 100%. You could not make a step without being watched,” Wendler said. “I always had a feeling of deadly danger in the air.”

Wendler was not surprised that Hussein tapped a German firm to build his mansion and bunker. “German construction companies had a good reputation, and he wanted the best,” Wendler said.

Now an independent engineering consultant in Berlin, he harbors no regrets for helping build Hussein’s underground fort. Nor does company Walter Bau, which took over Boswau & Knauer, apologize for its role. The firm noted that during the 1980s Iraq was an ally of the U.S., which supported and armed Hussein as a counter to Iran.

“At the time, business with Iraq was very normal and accepted,” company spokesman Alexander Goerbing said. “Boswau & Knauer not only built this guest house in Baghdad but also the university in Baghdad.”

The interior design firm that decorated the villa, Vereinigte Werkstaetten, is defunct. Buffalo, the architect, who is now based in Munich, had only this to say about his creation: “I built a guest house. That’s it.”

What shocked Wendler was seeing a satellite photo of Baghdad taken in October in which the villa appeared still to be standing. Wendler said that on the eve of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, CIA agents asked him for his designs and photographs, which he handed over. He had assumed the guest house was one of the targets of the air campaign over the Iraqi capital in that war.

Now, he is waiting to see if the structure survives again -- and also the dictator it was supposed to house.

“I met him once. He came to the site,” Wendler said.

Someone introduced Wendler to Hussein as the project manager. “He said, ‘Great’ or ‘fine’ ... and then went to look at the bunker.”