Cracking a Tribal Code to Catch Hussein

To snare Saddam Hussein in his underground hide-out, U.S. commanders overcame a daunting foe -- an age-old, nearly impenetrable tribal tradition that values loyalty above all else and is instinctively hostile to outsiders.

In the entrenched, insular structure of Iraqi tribes, betrayal is not supposed to be an option. Yet that is exactly what happened, U.S. officials say.

For months, Hussein -- falling back, as always, on tribal allegiances in times of trouble -- had stymied U.S. searchers. Then they found the weak link: a former high-ranking operative in one of Hussein’s security services, and a senior tribal figure in the Tikrit area.

“His name just kept popping up,” said Maj. Stan Murphy, chief intelligence officer with the 4th Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team -- the unit that found Hussein in a farmhouse about 10 miles southeast of here. “We knew he was a somebody. We had to know this guy.”

Just one day after the man’s detention Dec. 12, he had given U.S. forces enough “real-time intelligence” to nab Hussein.

Under the direction of Col. James Hickey, the Army’s top Hussein hunter, Murphy’s intelligence team -- some of them not long out of high school -- had begun focusing on tribal connections in July.

The intelligence analysts realized that their likely targets mostly stayed below the radar. They probably were not fugitives depicted in the Pentagon’s deck of cards, the big fish whom U.S. authorities named as the most wanted Iraqis. Those figures would attract immediate attention and were in no position to organize Hussein’s complex concealment.

The intelligence team, working from a bank of computers in the brigade’s tactical operations center inside a former Hussein palace along the Tigris River in Tikrit, created a large, color-coded chart tracking six major tribal groups and their links to Hussein. From Hussein’s image in the center, the web of ties stretched to the tribes.

“We started building our linkages and we started looking at certain families, and it just started to snowball,” said Hickey, a no-nonsense Chicagoan who is a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute and Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

It took all summer and fall, but U.S. forces finally cracked the tribal code.

Hussein had long embraced and manipulated the fundamental tribal nature of his land. Like a Mafia don, he surrounded himself with advisors and security staff from about half a dozen staunch tribes of the Tikrit area, his home base north of Baghdad. He sneered at the educated classes and professionals, he despised technocrats, and he kept religious zealots in check.

“Everything was tied to families, how families were linked,” Murphy said. “It was tied to tribes, and the tribal customs they had. And it was tied to money. I figured if we continued to look at those three things -- tribes and families and money -- that would continue to bring us closer to Saddam. Those were the keys.”

The list of people linked to the tribes expanded in a few months from a handful to 9,000. A major obstacle was simply gathering the names correctly, considering that many Arabs have four proper names, including family and tribal surnames.

“It’s what I called the name game,” recalled Murphy, 41. “We didn’t really know who we were dealing with half the time.... We had to get very disciplined and accept nothing less than three names.”

After mapping the broad tribal constellation, analysts began focusing on identifying a smaller universe -- those whom Murphy calls the “enablers,” Hussein’s inner core of trusted henchmen. They may number two dozen or fewer, typically former high-ranking officials of Hussein’s vast security network. Some must know where Hussein was, the analysts reasoned, and were probably supporting the fugitive former strongman, providing him with cash, a network of safe houses and hide-outs and the special items he wanted -- such as the gourmet honey and sweets found in his small kitchen, not items for an everyday farmer.

“We just keep getting little nuggets and finally zero in on that piece of information that leads us to Saddam,” Murphy said.

Hickey spent five years at Army training centers absorbing military doctrine and theories of military intelligence.

“Intelligence doesn’t come from on high in little boxes and big packets,” Hickey said. “Some guy in the FedEx truck doesn’t show up and say, ‘This is what’s going on in your AO [area of operations], go work on it.’ It doesn’t work that way. You have got to get out on the ground, talk to people. You’ve got to understand the terrain. You’ve got to understand your enemy as you search for him, as you fight him.

“That’s what we do. It’s like a detective would do, except we do it in a more dynamic, less stable environment.”

The front-line grunts in this battle were not Ivy League spooks with button-down shirts. Rather, these were Army S2 (Section 2) specialists, some not long out of high school, from places like Amarillo, Texas, and Jacksonville, Fla.

None spoke Arabic. None pretended to have any special knowledge of the Middle East, although at least two officers on Murphy’s 16-member team were 1991 Persian Gulf War veterans.

Working through translators, soldiers collected information in encounters with Iraqis on the streets, at Army bases, in detention centers and at the Army’s civil affairs office in Tikrit, where residents sought U.S. assistance. Also debriefed were Iraqi officials, tribal leaders, imams and others familiar with tribal matters.

The soldiers had access to a broad array of information: interrogation summaries, Army field reports, classified data from the military and other agencies, and humint -- “human intelligence” -- gathered from the many Iraqis who came forward. Humint was often the most current data, but it had to be processed carefully and double-checked. Not all motivations were pure -- some were keen to settle old scores by denouncing enemies.

On the other hand, people risked their lives by even approaching U.S. forces.

“You have these very loyal tribes, and you don’t want to be seen giving information to the Americans,” said Capt. Mark Terrell, 35, an Army intelligence officer here. “There were very discreet tipsters.... Some people prevented others from coming forward through coercion, through death threats, just like a criminal organization would do, like the Mafia.”

As their investigation deepened, Army intelligence officers here became convinced that the Hussein “enablers” were functioning as paymasters -- and in some cases as high-level organizers -- of the armed insurgency, financing attacks that included bombings and assassinations, at least in the Tikrit area, and possibly beyond.

So finding Hussein -- dead or alive -- became more than a symbolic gesture.

“I always thought that capturing or killing HVT1 would have a very positive effect against the resistance in this area, and probably across the country at large,” Hickey said, using the military’s acronym for Hussein: High Value Target 1.

The informer is one of a number of senior Hussein loyalists who dedicated themselves to violent resistance in the hope of returning their patron to power and restoring their lost status, U.S. officials say.

“All of the guys who are responsible for organizing the attacks around here were balding, 42-inch-waist, middle-aged guys who couldn’t do it themselves, so they hired someone else to do the shooting and bombing,” Murphy said. The turncoat will not be eligible for the $25-million reward because he had been detained for anti-coalition activities, officials said.

Before catching Hussein, Hickey and his “Raider” brigade had led a dozen operations targeting the former dictator -- and more than 500 raids overall. Despite their growing expertise on the tribes and the area, troops acknowledged frustration at missing their elusive quarry, sometimes known as Elvis, because of his many sightings.

On several occasions, Hickey said, his troops probably arrived within hours or a day of Hussein’s departure from a specific locale. By most accounts, Hussein moved around every few days to different safe houses in and around the Tikrit area, although some suspect that he also may have ranged Baghdad and to the north, especially Mosul, a former stronghold of his Baath Party where his two sons were killed.

By December, Hickey said, he felt his raiders were getting close: “We thought we’d have him by Christmas.”

A flood of intelligence pointed anew to the suspect on whom the Army had focused since summer. Early this month, a series of raids in Tikrit and the nearby towns of Samarra and Baiji failed to turn up their man. But other suspected insurgent operatives were found, along with $1.9 million seized in Samarra -- money that was probably meant to help finance the insurgency, the military says.

The crucial break came Dec. 12. In a series of raids in Baghdad, the Army arrested a number of suspected insurgent fighters and organizers. Among those scooped up was the security man whom Hickey and his unit had been seeking.

He was flown to Tikrit the next day. Hickey began preparations for a raid that evening, confident that the source would be able to pinpoint a location.

The interrogation dragged on for hours. The man was initially hesitant to speak, officials said. The Army declined to divulge details, but it is clear that, at some point, the man turned -- dramatically. The treachery that Hussein had so long feared finally caught up with him.

Times staff writers Tracy Wilkinson and Chris Kraul in Baghdad contributed to this report.