Seduced by Power in the Service of Madness

Weeds grow in the cracks of the concrete pavement now and the summer wind off the Tigris stirs the empty liquor cartons in the trashed Boat Club, Uday Hussein’s favorite party spot.

The former bodyguard picks his way through the shattered glass, twisted metal, torn magazines and bottle tops to show a reporter where he and other members of Uday’s security detail used to sit in a small building just across from the club. It was next door to the room where popular singers waited to be summoned for performances that could last until dawn.

“Of course I hated him,” says the bodyguard, who spent four years working for Uday and asked that his name not be used because he feared retribution from former colleagues or regime opponents.

“But you could not leave.”

Uday Hussein, 39, Saddam’s eldest son, was known for his obsession with sex, fast cars, heavy drinking, expensive clothes, torture and murder.

Although many people thought it was unlikely that Saddam would make him his successor because of his unstable character, Uday was a potent and useful symbol of the regime’s terrifying power. Uday was shot to death with his brother Qusai when some 200 American soldiers stormed the house where they were hiding in the Iraqi city of Mosul on July 22.

The bodyguard says he was disgusted by Uday’s activities -- he points to a floor-to-ceiling cage in the corner of the club’s kitchen where he says monkeys were kept for Uday because he liked to have the animals watch him when he was deflowering virgins.

But there is also a lingering boastfulness. Not so long ago, it was a symbol of power to be able to say he knew where Uday sat, what he drank, when he was about to get angry.

Conversations with four people who were close to Uday, including a personal photographer and a car mechanic, give a glimpse of the psychology of those who chose, or felt compelled, to work for the Hussein family.

These were the people who did the regime’s day-to-day work behind the scenes; some intimidated less-fortunate Iraqis and all helped shape its image of omnipotence. They were people whom others dared not cross. Some were cruel themselves, some were voyeurs, some were criminals, but all were seduced by the closeness to money and power in a society bankrupted both financially and personally by Hussein’s rule.

A Favorite Haunt

The bodyguard knows every inch of the club and has almost an owner’s pride. As he walks through the looted rooms, where even the light switches have been stolen, he points out the acoustic tiles, the wood paneling of an intimate bar area where the singers used to perform and the marble on the floor of the diwan -- the Arab-style sitting room -- the only non-Western room in the place.

As he passes a corner near the bar, he points but does not linger: “He used to sit there,” said the bodyguard, who, like many of Uday’s former employees, rarely refers to the son of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein by name.

A tone of disdain mixed with pride is a combination heard often among people who were once close to Hussein or his family. On the one hand they despised them, but at the same time they long for the old days when they were people who mattered.

“Most of the people wanted to work with him,” said one of Uday’s three professional photographers, who recorded his nearly every move. “He was a VIP; his companies opened horizons for you. People who worked for his companies were traveling here and there, they were getting benefits, they were staying in his resorts.”

The photographer says that he did it for the money and, like the bodyguard, asked that his real name not be used for fear of retaliation.

Each employee of Uday did not know that the others had been interviewed, and one refused to be quoted in print. But they corroborated significant portions of each other’s stories. The authenticity of their accounts was further demonstrated by their specific knowledge of the layout of several of Uday’s haunts. None of the employees have yet been approached by the U.S. military for questioning.

For the bodyguard, 30, it was not a matter of financial benefit as much as a steadily increasing entanglement -- both psychological and professional -- with Uday.

A pale, large man with a protruding stomach, thick arms and crew cut, his wire-rimmed glasses and pudgy cheeks make him appear almost childlike. But occasionally he is moved to reenact his job. And at those moments, it appears that he enjoyed his power as an intimidator and that there was a symbiotic relationship between those who did Uday’s bidding and Uday himself.

By his own description of his daily work, he was almost always near Uday, often working for 48 hours at a stretch. It was his to make the singers who entertained Uday at the Boat Club gulp down a liter and a half of a “cocktail,” a combination of 90-proof alcohol often with some drugs thrown in.

When it comes to Uday, it is often hard to know what is true and what is embellished, but the story of the forced consumption of large quantities of straight alcohol is corroborated by several people who went to the clubs. It was not possible to verify whether drugs were added.

“I would line up all the entertainment against that wall,” the bodyguard said, pointing to the side of the garage.

“And I would take a stick,” he said, picking up a long, stray twig that made a menacing, whistling sound as he whipped it through the air. “And I would say, ‘Drink, drink, you have 10 minutes.’ ”

“If any of them didn’t drink, I hit them with a stick,” he said, whipping the stick through the air as he spoke.

Then, if the singers still refused, they were given a “street beating,” meaning that their faces were untouched but they were pummeled until they could hardly stand up.

Inflicting Punishment

There were three types of punishment, according to the bodyguard. The mildest was a head shaving. Iraqis view the treatment as humiliating, especially since it took weeks to grow back and was a constant public reminder that the person had fallen out of favor with Uday.

The second form of punishment was the street beating, and the third was the falanga, a form of punishment in which offenders were seated with their legs sticking straight out in front of them and beaten on the soles of the feet with paddles or bamboo poles.

The bodyguard’s description of the falanga has an odd, clinical detachment. It is hard not to conclude that he has inured himself to the dreadfulness of his acts.

“They could usually walk afterward, but sometimes their feet would be broken,” he said, his tone matter-of-fact.

Once again he was moved to demonstrate. As he walked across the roof of the club, where he was pointing out the view of Uday’s yacht, which still lies at anchor in the Tigris, he balanced on the balls of his feet and made a mock moan. “Allah, Allah,” he whimpered in imitation. “They would have to walk on their toes,” he giggled.

But the worst beatings occurred when Uday was present, he said.

Did he ever beat people in front of Uday? “Yes, yes, I did the beatings in front of him; I did a lot,” he said. “Sometimes their feet would be broken.”

What did he think when he was beating them? His eyes glazed over as they often did when he was asked about his own feelings.

“Time stopped. I thought of nothing,” he said recently and added, “I try to forget.”

But when the same question was asked a few weeks earlier, his answer was more complicated.

“I always felt like I was the one who took the beatings because each shout of pain from the beaten person, I used to pray to God and ask God to punish me for what I was doing. But the person who took the beating did not know that if I didn’t carry out the orders, I would take the same beating that he was getting.”

He estimated that he administered maybe 100 beatings a year, about two per week.

Even so, Uday punished him on a number of occasions -- humiliating him for being late by having his head shaved and once throwing him in prison for daring to hand in his resignation. The relationship seems rooted in the interplay of inspiring fear in others and being fearful of being punished himself.

Uday’s photographer expressed similar sentiments. He said he always told Uday the truth because he was afraid that if he didn’t, someone else would, and then he would be punished.

“I was upset by what happened to those singers, but what could I do? If he asked me if a singer had drunk or not, I would not lie because he would punish me,” the photographer said.

Every night when he went home after one of the parties, he thought about quitting, he said -- especially after he saw one of Uday’s friends die from the amount of alcohol he was forced to consume.

“Whenever I put my head down on my pillow, I thought about going to work for someone else. But the thing was that I couldn’t, because he was paying me very well -- 50,000 denars a day [$25] -- and I could not get that anywhere else because there was not much work,” the photographer said.

He differs with the bodyguard and others on whether it was possible to resign from a job with Uday. Their accounts suggest that Uday was both offended and wary of anyone who wanted to quit. Their resignations were flatly rejected and sometimes they were punished for having attempted to leave. Still, the photographer’s view raises the question of whether there were ways out if people were willing either to give up a certain social standing or, in more extreme cases, flee the country.

“Anybody who tells you that they couldn’t leave his job is lying; it wasn’t that complicated,” said the photographer, who claimed people merely had to tell Uday that they no longer wanted to work for him.

Today, he is out of work. His only income since the regime fell came when Uday and his brother were killed and he was able to make a little money selling copies of his pictures of the Hussein family to foreign news organizations.

For his part, the bodyguard says he even dreamed of killing Uday; three times he says he tried to hand in his resignation. “But they wouldn’t accept it. The only way for me to leave was to escape the country. If I had just quit and gone home, I was afraid that the people who worked for him would have stalked me and killed me.”

Why? “Because I knew too much,” he said. “I knew about his cars.”

Uday had a lust for expensive cars -- some extremely rare -- keeping as many as 300 at a time in his garages. Some were bought, others were stolen, but in many cases the owners were simply coerced into handing them over to Uday.

There were the ordinary ones, Mercedes and BMWs, but also Ferraris, Jaguars, Lamborghinis and Rolls-Royces.

A staff of 15 took care of the cars, procuring them, testing them, refurbishing them and repairing them.

Salim Kasim was one of Uday’s chief mechanics and a man with an uncommon knack for car repair and manufacture. Short, swarthy and muscular, Kasim went to work for the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi intelligence service, when he was 21, after being nominated for a job in the car division by the National Union of Iraqi Students, a Baathist Party organization of which he was a member.

His specialty was electrical systems, but he also knew how to build car bodies and remake their hydraulic systems. He was proudest of his ability to satisfy Uday’s request for cars with new insides and classic exteriors.

When Uday wanted a car, nothing stopped him. “Sometimes he would see a car that he liked as he was driving around and he would call one of us and tell us, ‘I have seen such and such a car in this neighborhood,’ ” Kasim recalled.

Kasim would find the car and its owner. “Then we would tell him: ‘Uday wants this car,’ or sometimes we would just say ‘Someone important wants this car.’ ”

Kasim would either offer cash or, more frequently, a trade -- one of Uday’s out-of-favor cars in exchange for the owner’s car.

The trades do not sound equal. For example, a few months before the March war, Uday sighted a pair of new BMW four-wheel drive vehicles that he wanted; in exchange, he offered the owners two Nissan Safaris.

It is a measure of the value system within the regime that Kasim saw nothing wrong with this, nor with the rampant looting of cars and everything else from Kuwait after the 1991 war.

“Of course cars were stolen from Kuwait,” Kasim said with a dismissive shrug as he sat behind the battered desk in his one-room garage in a neighborhood of car repair shops near downtown Baghdad.

“Was there anything left in Kuwait after the war?” he asked with a pleasant smile.

A Chance to Travel

The greatest reward for Kasim’s work was not the money -- he was paid 116,000 denars a month, which currently is worth less than $60. Rather, it was the perks. Chief among them for a middle-class boy from a family with 10 children was the opportunity to travel abroad.

He went to study Cadillacs in Toronto; Rolls-Royces in Birmingham, England; Mercedes-Benzes in Germany; and Lamborghinis in a small town near Bologna, Italy. He still remembers the name: San Giovanni in Persiceto.

“When I used to go abroad, I hardly slept because I wanted to experience everything,” he said.

Often he and others would be invited to the homes of Iraqis living abroad “and they would feed us the same Iraqi food and I used to say, ‘Please, I’m fed up with Iraqi food, I want to eat the Canadian food, the English food, the Italian food.’

“I have thousands of photographs I took in museums, in factories, in the streets,” he said, looking past the grime of his car shop, the rusting cans of machine oil, the cars lined up outside, where he seemed to be seeing Niagara Falls and the surrounding green Canadian landscape -- his favorite place of all those he saw outside Iraq.

He says he is far happier now. Uday had forbidden him from working in his shop except in his off hours, which were nearly nonexistent. “Freedom is much sweeter. I can get up in the morning and decide whether I want to shave or not; if someone in my family is sick, I can stay home with them. I don’t need to ask permission.”

Change for the Worse

All of those interviewed expressed regret that they had worked for Uday. But for both Kasim and the photographer, there is a lingering sense of privilege. Not so the bodyguard, who is painfully aware that he made an irrevocable mistake and is able to talk about himself with striking objectivity. He says that even before he went to work for Uday, he saw himself begin to change. It happened in the mid-1990s after he had been in the special police force for several years.

He moved up quickly and was sent to work on Saddam Hussein’s fleet of cars. He was paid a token amount for his labor, but there was always the promise that he would receive a car as a bonus. He never did.

By the mid-1990s, Iraq was suffering economically from international sanctions, and inflation was rampant. “It was during that time that people who worked for the regime started to change. People began to take advantage of their rank to help people, and they got presents for doing it. I did it twice,” he said.

The bribes he took appear minor -- one was a large bottle of after-shave -- but he seems to see them as the beginning of his downhill slide.

In 1998, after the attempted assassination of Uday, all his bodyguards were dismissed.

Soon after, the bodyguard was called to an office to which people were summoned only for interrogations or investigations. He still remembers what the Mukhabarat chief said to him during the interview.

“They said, ‘You are working for Saddam Hussein -- are you ready to protect Uday Saddam Hussein?’

“I said yes, because if I said no they would have considered me a deserter, and God knows what the penalty would have been: solitary confinement and beatings.

“Nobody wanted to work for Uday. He was a jealous man, and he was crazy -- and not only crazy, he was perverted. That day, it felt like the end of the world.”

But he steeled himself to do whatever he was told. He lived in a haze, working often two or three days without sleep. The unthinkable became possible. He never told his wife exactly what he did, but sometimes when Uday punished him, it was impossible to hide because he would come home with his head shaved or be detained in prison for several days. He barely saw his first son, who was born in February, because he was working so hard.

“She would cry when she saw me. She was like any other woman when she saw her husband being abused.

“But the things that we’ve been talking about, the things that I did for Uday, she doesn’t know them even now.”

The bodyguard says he remained in constant touch with Uday until early April when the Americans attempted to kill Hussein and his two sons as they were meeting in a safe house in the elite neighborhood of Mansour.

Now the days stretch out, empty as the desert into which the Hussein family fled. He and his wife and son live with his father, with whom he has little rapport; his mother went to Sweden where another sister lives.

He knows he will never be accepted for a job by the Coalition Provisional Administration or one of the reconstituted government ministries because of his former employer. But trained as a bodyguard, he can think of no other way to make a living. His dream is to get a visa to Sweden and start over.

“If I want to work, I have to turn over a big page -- those 11 years are lost. Every night I cannot sleep until 4 or 4:30 in the morning. It’s worse than when I worked for Uday. I am afraid, I am afraid someone will come and say, ‘He used to be one of Uday’s bodyguards.’ ”

Why has he told his story? He does not hesitate.

“Because I want my son to have a nice quiet life so that he might be a good person for the society. I’m ready to work, to do anything so that I can raise my son. And I will talk and talk about it because I hated him [Uday] so much.

“The people thought they were the ones that were badly treated, but they don’t know because the people who worked with the Hussein family were badly treated too. They thought that people like me had everything. We had nothing. The past 11 years, those 11 years will be with me the rest of my life.”