Treading on the Trappings of Hussein’s High Life

The regime of Saddam Hussein is dead. Now its trappings and underpinnings are being crushed under the footfalls of American soldiers.

At the dictator’s propaganda headquarters, his dark eyes stare up from thousands of photographs scattered on the filthy floors. The chronicles of three decades of rule, of Hussein receiving Yasser Arafat and King Hussein and kissing babies and mustachioed commandos, have been pawed through and stomped on by soldiers after being looted by Iraqi civilians.

The garish mansions and palaces of Hussein’s sons and cronies have been stripped bare and peeled open to expose a chimera. For all its claims to Islamic piety, the regime’s elite was Western to its core. Their grand homes hid American computers, whiskey, pornography, videos and pop music. They drove big Chevys, smoked Marlboros and read Newsweek. They fired Beretta pistols and Smith & Wesson .38 Special revolvers in an indoor shooting range. They drank French Champagne and Tanqueray gin with a twist.

A week of stepping through the rubble inside dozens of bombed-out buildings in the walled-off palace and residential complex reveals a regime obsessed with comfort and tribute, in a setting marked by elegance and tackiness.

The grounds by the west bank of the Tigris River, long sealed from ordinary Iraqis by high stone walls, served as a private country club.

The privileged set enjoyed Olympic swimming pools, weight rooms, sunken bars, polished marble floors, big-screen TVs and paddleboat rides on canals carved from luminous pale stone.

When the end came earlier this month, their cash outweighed their discretion.

Hundreds of prominent Baath Party and Republican Guard officials living in palaces and mansions in a palm-lined paradise of rose gardens and orchards apparently couldn’t carry every last groaning box of $100 bills they had amassed. More than $650 million in $100 bank notes was found by American soldiers Friday in 164 metal boxes stored inside four woodland cottages that had been hastily sealed with cinder blocks and cement.

Until the fall of Baghdad, the elite soaked in sunken marble tubs and drank tea from English bone china, always under the gaze of a Saddam Hussein portrait, poster, mural or wall calendar.

A palace belonging to Hussein’s son Uday was decorated with homages to his father, including an oil painting of an open-shirted Hussein, beaming like a burgher on a country picnic, watching Uday caress a tiger.

In an upstairs bedroom, dumped on the floor next to cognac bottles and pornography, was a box containing hundreds of key chains and lapel pins bearing Hussein’s image apparently bestowed upon commoners as part of Uday’s official duties.

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Versailles Meets Vegas

The palace complex boasts the grandeur of Versailles but also the shallow glitz of Las Vegas and the low taste of Graceland.

The soaring dome of the gilded reception hall of the Republican Guard palace now has a perfectly round hole in its center as a result of an American bomb. The catastrophic explosion unmasked walls buttressed by sloppy concrete, moldings fashioned of flimsy wood painted gold, baroque furniture made of painted pine and enormous chandeliers of plastic shaped to look like cut glass.

This bizarre world was merely a rumor to ordinary Iraqis, who now claim people were shot dead merely for attempting to peer over the walls. Faisel Amin, a merchant seeking work as a translator for American soldiers, was craning his neck Saturday to see past a U.S. tank crew guarding a stone arch entrance to the palace grounds.

Outside, the dust and grit and windblown garbage of an Arab metropolis was swirling before Amin’s sweaty face. From beyond the arch, whose gates had been smashed by American tanks, Amin caught a glimpse of graceful palms and violet bougainvillea and the shocking burst of reds and pinks from the manicured rose beds.

“You know the Forbidden City in China?” he asked. “This is Iraq’s forbidden city. We still haven’t seen it.”

Citizens could not see the armor-plated Mercedes, or the photos in Hussein’s propaganda factory showing the dictator waving to crowds from its open hatch.

They could not see the 25-foot Grady White cabin cruiser stowed in a warehouse, or the collection of vintage Chevrolets, Pontiacs, sports cars and classic convertibles.

They could not see Republican Guard insignia, a sinister eagle evocative of the Third Reich, pasted onto virtually every mansion wall and writing pad and desk blotter.

They knew nothing of the private zoos. At one animal pen, American soldiers now feed live sheep to lions and cheetahs. One soldier, alas, had to shoot the brown bear when the animal escaped its enclosure and refused, even at the point of an M-4 rifle, to return inside. At Uday’s private zoo, U.S. Special Forces now feed ostriches and gazelles to three mangy lions. The cats snooze under a sign pasted up by the soldiers: “Anyone caught abusing our pets will be their next meal.”

And the guns. The one thing ordinary Iraqis may have known about was the guns. There was an arsenal in every elite home. Some bedrooms were supplied with gold-plated MP-5 machine guns. Others were stacked to the ceilings with boxes of Colt Diamondback .38 Specials, .357 Combat Magnums, and Sig Sauer pistols, still in their packing boxes, complete with owner instructions and generous supplies of boxed ammunition.

And what would a luxury home be without a bunker? They all had them, dank little sandbagged pits among the roses and privet hedges, poorly concealed by palm fronds. Along the broad avenues on the palace grounds, and on the roads leading in from the city, hundreds of bunkers had been dug in preparation for an American attack.

The soldiers inside these bunkers lived a parallel existence of deprivation and discomfort. They ate stale bread and drank tea brewed on campfires in cheap tin pots. Their supply kits looked like a child’s toy kitchen set. They were issued no-brand soap, toothpaste and razors wrapped in filmy plastic. They survived on onions and dates.

Their weapons were Soviet-era AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades and Russian heavy machine guns. It was lethal stuff, but no match for American tanks and A-10 Warthogs and laser targeting systems.

When the American tanks rolled through on April 7, thousands of soldiers -- conscripts, Republican guard and Special Republican Guard troops and fedayeen -- ran for their lives. They peeled off their uniforms, helmets and boots and tossed aside their weapons.

It’s all still there in the bunkers and on the sidewalks, a tangle of poorly sewn wool trousers and jackets, thin-skinned green helmets, bulk sale combat boots, and snapshots of girlfriends and wives and school chums. Souvenir hunters can still find copious supplies of Special Republican Guard berets with the metal eagle insignia still attached.

The Baath Party and Republican Guard elites who fled seemed to have stripped their mansions and palaces of many incriminating documents, but they didn’t take everything. They left files, ledgers, logbooks, diaries, journals, manuals, photographs and reams of boilerplate announcements, regulations and official declarations.

Ordinary Baghdad residents, who looted portions of the palace complex for about a day before American soldiers took firm control, also left these accouterments of the Hussein regime.

Men like Chief Warrant Officer 2 Steven Walker, a counterintelligence specialist, are poking through it now, along with teams of Special Forces and groups the soldiers refer to as OGAs -- Other Government Agencies such as the CIA and FBI.

“You really have to sift through a lot of stuff to find something of value, but it’s there,” Walker said. He added: “It’s a long and tedious process.”

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Conflicted Regime

From the detritus come clues to the character of a conflicted regime.

At a spa where photos of Hussein and sons Uday and Qusay grace the walls, a desk apparently used by Uday contains car descriptions downloaded from Yahoo for an Aston Martin V-12 priced at $231,260 and a $77,850 Mercedes-Benz. Next to it is another Yahoo page of Koranic verses titled, “The Importance of Being Truthful.”

A two-story, split-level house on the palace grounds, nicknamed “Saddam’s love shack” by American troops even though no evidence exists that Hussein ever stayed there, is decorated in 1970s disco: brown shag carpet, Naugahyde bean bag chairs, smoked bedroom mirrors. The cassette tape player featured “The Bee Gees Greatest Hits Vol. II,” and “Disco Festival ’85.”

In a sunken bar were bottles of Johnny Walker, Otard cognac and Seguin French brandy. The shower slippers are hot pink plastic. The trash cans are heart-shaped. The sunken garden is studded with plastic ferns.

Yet in a glass credenza was elegant Chinese porcelain and an entire set of English bone china emblazoned with the royal seal of the J.A.J. al-Sabah ruling family of Kuwait. Apparently it had been looted from Kuwait during the 1990 invasion and put on prominent display in a house whose walls bore fantasy paintings of full-busted women and muscular men with swords and mullet haircuts slaying dragons and snakes.

At the riverside mansions east of the palace, some Baath Party officials apparently returned to their homes after the American bombing campaign began. They carefully sealed broken windows with plastic and secured padlocks on windows and doors. Looters with crowbars and American soldiers with bolt cutters easily smashed in and took whatever they needed or wanted.

Journalists followed, pocketing bric-a-brac and souvenirs scattered among the broken glass and smashed marble.

At the two-story propaganda building around the corner, an entire staff had apparently toiled year after year to perpetuate the personality cult of Saddam Hussein.

Even in a nation where virtually every home, office and public edifice bears a photo, bust or mural of the dictator, the propaganda enterprise is a breathtaking sight.

File rooms contain thousands of photos of Hussein in every imaginable garb: Arab horseman, English country gentleman, Russian Cossack, Iraqi commando, business-suited statesman, uniformed commander in chief, German mountain climber.

There are endless shots of Hussein addressing his troops, conferring with generals, comforting widows, hugging schoolchildren and kissing bearded old men in kaffiyehs.

Hundreds of photo albums have been lovingly filled with more Hussein photos: the thinner, smooth-faced Hussein of three decades ago, the portly middle-aged Hussein, and the current jowly, age-spotted dictator in decline.

They are all dumped on the floors now, smeared with footprints and grime. So too are the microfilm archives, the hundreds of spools of Hussein audiotape, the stacks of Hussein videotapes. The Hussein calendars that hang in every government office are buried under broken glass.

All that remains unmolested is the unfinished work of Hussein’s propaganda machine.

Still stacked neatly are hundreds of new photo albums and gilded photo frames, as empty and hollow as the collapsed regime.