Hussein’s 64-Bath Getaway

For the record, Saddam Hussein seems to prefer Italian suits, double-breasted, by Canali. He favors silk ties, some by Hermes, in solids or subtle patterns. He brushes with Colgate.

The dictator’s clothes were hanging Thursday in the wardrobe of a luxurious upstairs bedroom in one of the dozens of compounds within a palace complex that stretches for two miles along the west bank of the Tigris River here. On a coffee table lay a wedding album containing photos of Hussein cutting a wedding cake, and on a bureau were snapshots of his sons, Uday and Qusai, as young boys.

Lt. Col. Philip deCamp, commander of a tank battalion that pounded its way onto the palace grounds Monday, riffled through the photos. He let out a soft whistle, amazed to be standing in the room where Hussein apparently had slept, perhaps very recently.

“Hey,” DeCamp said, pointing to three packed suitcases stacked in an anteroom. “It looks like he left in a pretty big hurry.”

Thursday was a day of revelations for the armored crews and commanders camped at the palace -- one of dozens built by Hussein, who is known for changing his location almost nightly. They discovered a pen of emaciated lions, cheetahs and bears on the palace grounds. A stroll through the rose gardens revealed the rotting corpses of Iraqi soldiers blown from sandy bunkers by the crews’ tanks rounds.

Scouts from the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division found a live sheep and fed it to a cheetah, which was joined in the feast by three lions.

Across the pen, a thin brown bear cub bounded through the grass, dragging the entrails of a sheep provided earlier by the same scouts. The soldiers laughed in approval, regarding the sheep donations as a gesture of caring.

On the other side of the palace, an engineer battalion tore into the dry earth with backhoes to dig graves. Local Iraqis were recruited to ensure that the bodies were properly washed in the Islamic tradition and buried facing Mecca.

Civil affairs officers marked the locations with hand-held global positioning system devices and recorded the graves in notebooks. They had buried 15 by midafternoon, with scores more waiting in the gardens and in bunkers carved into the riverbank.

The palace was so large that DeCamp had his men count the rooms and write the numbers on an index card: 142 offices, 64 bathrooms, 19 meeting rooms, 22 kitchens, countless bedrooms, one movie theater, five “huge ballrooms” and one “football-field sized monster ballroom.”

Even a cursory tour took hours, through mirrored hallways, across marble floors, beneath intricately tile-domed entryways.

In Hussein’s bedroom, DeCamp thumbed through a Newsweek magazine on a nightstand. The cover story was “Inside America’s new way of war,” an examination of high-tech U.S. weaponry.

“Guess he was trying to get ready for us,” said DeCamp, who commands the 4th Battalion in the 3rd Infantry Division’s 2nd Brigade -- the brigade that took central Baghdad.

He spotted a black fedora, the type seen in a popular photo of Hussein firing a shotgun with one hand. It was almost an icon, and DeCamp admired it in his hands.

In adjoining rooms were more family snapshots -- Hussein kissing young boys and greeting women wearing head scarves. There were many photos of a dark-haired woman, at various ages, perhaps one of Hussein’s wives or daughters.

In a closet were 20 to 30 black and navy blue suits, tailored for a tall, barrel-chested man. Many were still inside garment bags, tailors’ tags on their sleeves. Dozens of shirts with French cuffs hung in long rows.

In a bathroom with brass fittings lay a toothbrush and toothpaste, a crimson bathrobe, a razor and a bar of Lux soap. Next door, in a study, were shelves of Arabic books, one containing a photo of Josef Stalin, reported to be Hussein’s role model.

Down a spiral staircase, in rooms with gilded chairs and tables, were more photos of family gatherings, showing a young, black-mustachioed Hussein eating and laughing with smiling military officers. These were intimate, apparently unscripted moments, different from the stylized images of the dictator that adorned public buildings in Iraq.

U.S. intelligence officers concluded, based on informants’ reports, that Hussein had stayed in the compound recently. The property was secured, to be scoured by “the alphabet,” OGA and ODA -- “other government agencies,” such as the CIA and FBI, and “operational detachment A’s,” or Special Forces “A” teams. They had already seized a trove of Ministry of Engineering documents detailing illicit oil sales, officers said.

DeCamp moved on to another ornate compound where, the night before, his battalion had discovered a hoard of luxury items. He dragged open a door. Inside were vast supplies of TV sets, Moet champagne, Russian vodka, imported American cigarettes, 150 Persian rugs, Parker pen sets, French wines and expensive Lladro figurines. These, according to the colonel, were gratuities handed out by Hussein’s functionaries to favored members of the ruling Baath Party. He offered no explanation for the cache of UNICEF children’s clothes and toys.

Earlier Thursday, DeCamp discovered some of his soldiers had broken into the compound and looted liquor and cigarettes. He ordered his sergeant major to give the men a one-hour deadline: If they confessed and returned the goods, they would not be punished. If a search turned up the spoils -- or if tests on the liquor bottles produced incriminating fingerprints -- “Turn ‘em over to CID,” the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, DeCamp told the sergeant.

“We intend to return this whole place over to the Iraqi people,” he said. “We’re going to pick up our trash, and there’s going to be no tearing up anything.”

DeCamp has recommended that the palace be the home of Iraq’s transitional government. He has banned American flags from the complex. When a soldier painted “USA rocks” on a palace wall, he said, he made the man paint over the words.

“The war part has been the easier part of all this,” said DeCamp, an energetic, wiry and expressive man of 41. “Now we have to be strategic warriors. We have to win the Arab street.”

DeCamp spotted an Iraqi taxi driver, Ayad Izat, 35, who had driven Polish journalists from the east side of the Tigris. “You were never allowed to see all these palaces, were you?” the colonel asked the awe-struck cabby.

“Oh, no, never, of course not,” Izat said. “For me, it’s the first time to see this -- and you know the people have no money at all.”

DeCamp climbed into his armored Humvee, and the sergeant behind the wheel cruised past more palace compounds. There were swimming pools, exercise rooms with treadmills and bikes, movie theaters, stands of palm trees and carefully pruned bushes of pink roses.

In the parks lay Iraqi corpses not yet recovered by the engineers. At the base of a bridge, DeCamp spotted two bloated forms -- believed to be remains of suicide drivers who had tried to ram vehicles into tanks but were decimated by tank fire.

Things were more pleasant at the main palace, where violet bougainvillea graced a stone edifice topped with four 50-foot stone busts of Hussein wearing an emperor’s helmet.

Silk curtains framed windows and mahogany doors. In the main rotunda, a mural depicted Hussein handing a brick to a laborer building the palace.

Upstairs, there were Egyptian cotton sheets on king-size beds set below gilded mirrors. On every nightstand, a box of pink tissues had been set out. Most bedrooms were furnished with small refrigerators.

The bathroom doors were decorated with inlaid tiles, and the floors and walls were tiled in soft tans and creams.

Outside, the 3rd Division’s tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles that had rolled to the palace so quickly Monday were parked among orange trees and rose beds. Soldiers napped on grass in the shade of the palms. Some bathed and shaved for the first time in days -- out of buckets. Someone dragged out a table tennis set from the grounds, and the hollow pop of the ball cut through the air.

Inside, DeCamp’s battalion had set up its command post in one of the palace’s offices. Officers sat below satellite imagery maps of Baghdad and shouted into field radios.

On one board was a detailed list of which soldiers were billeted in which part of the palace. On another were the battle plans for seizing and holding the remainder of what once had been Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad.