Blood and Betrayal

How Uday Hussein, Saddam's firstborn son, planned a revolution and nearly changed the history of Iraq

3 stars

I. The Answer

On the seventh day of the Iraq war a sandstorm rolled across Baghdad. This gobar, as Iraqis call it, was the worst storm of its kind in memory. The swirling wind brought with it a pall of drifting silt from the primeval deserts to the south, mixed with acrid smoke from smoldering bombed buildings. It was March 26, 2003, and news reports from the front said the American military was bogged down in cities along the Euphrates River.

Of the three major American frontline units, the 101st Airborne Division, with its scores of Apache attack and Chinook supply helicopters, had been temporarily put out of commission by the gobar. In Najaf the advance of the 3rd Infantry Division was facing ferocious resistance from the Saddam Fedayeen militia, and in Nasiriyah the 1st Marine Division was fighting the paramilitary units to capture the strategic river city while containing a growing casualty toll.

In Baghdad there was no rejoicing. Three inches of choking orange dust brought some respite from the constant air attacks, but the cowed population stayed indoors. The Shock and Awe bombing campaign at the start of the war had shaken the capital to its foundations. Not a single shop was open, no one strolled the sidewalks, no tire tracks marked the dusty streets. The Americans were delayed, but everyone knew that sooner or later they would arrive.

On this eerie day Uday Hussein was waiting at one of his newly acquired safe houses, a bungalow with high walls and leafy trees on a quiet street in the privileged Jadriyah section of the capital. The eldest son of dictator Saddam Hussein, Uday traveled with a security staff of five, and they too were there, waiting for a young officer bearing a light brown envelope embossed with the black rampant eagle seal of the Saddam Fedayeen. The envelope, from the most powerful military man in Iraq, was marked Personal and Confidential.

Uday tore it open and extracted the familiar green stationery, with its fancy gold borders. At this moment he had reason to remember his father's anger at him nearly a decade earlier. Uday had rashly denounced the regime back then and vowed to do a better job as president. He nearly paid for that boasting with his life. Now, on this seventh day of the war, one of the final pieces of his scheme was in place. But even as he gloried in his success, fate was about to snatch away his opportunity.

He read the typed paragraphs of Arabic script: "Virtuous and respected Dr. Uday Saddam Hussein, Chief Executive of the Saddam Fedayeen. According to your direction and command to form a government under the leadership of your Excellency, we have informed all the senior officers of the Saddam Fedayeen of your desire to appoint them as candidates for office in your government. All of them state they are ready for this mission in a new Iraqi government should it come about, as we discussed in our last meeting. With my deepest respect, General Maki Hamudat, 26.03.2003."

General Hamudat, the commander of the Saddam Fedayeen, had signed his name with a confident flourish. A week or so earlier he would have thought better of it: This letter would have been his death warrant had his driver taken it to Saddam Hussein. If it had fallen into the hands of any one of Saddam's many security services, the general and all he named would have summarily been put to death, as had so many other plotters who over the years had entertained similar ideas of lèse-majesté in the era of Saddam.

At this moment, though, Uday and his plotters were the real authority in the shrinking domain of Baathist Iraq. They were now the feared ones. It was the Saddam Fedayeen with their pickup trucks and small arms who were fighting the Americans, not the vaunted Republican Guard, the charge of Uday's younger brother, Qusay. Even in Baghdad the only soldiers visible on the dusty streets were the Fedayeen in their bandannas and with their AK-47s slung over their shoulders.

By now Saddam Hussein, whose 10 years of tactical misjudgment were catching up with him, was on the run from aerial assassination--stopping at friends' houses, phoning his information minister and demanding tougher speeches. He complained to aides about the incompetence of his son Qusay, to whom he'd unwisely entrusted the country's defense. But everyone in the inner circle knew that Saddam himself had allowed his armed forces to deteriorate to the degree now becoming evident to the world. It was Saddam who had refused to visit a single military base in the decade after the first Gulf war.

Now Uday, the ostracized, crippled eldest, was commanding a personal army that, for a few days at least, had stopped the United States in its tracks. Later in the day he had planned to make a special personal broadcast over his Youth TV facilities in downtown Baghdad, an unprecedented action undoubtedly sparked by his pact with the Fedayeen. At six A.M. local time, however, a U.S. bombing raid had destroyed the transmission facilities at Abu Ghraib. Uday was hysterical when he learned of the attack.

He phoned Youth TV and told the manager to keep the staff in place and repair the damage in 12 hours "or I will personally kill you all." Even with the invasion forces just days from Baghdad, Uday's threats were not taken lightly. The staff eventually rigged up a satellite link, but by then the power grid had been destroyed and no one in the country could hear Uday's message.

Though it has not been reported until now, Uday Hussein was the biggest proponent of regime change inside Iraq. During the previous 10 years, he had slowly assembled the elements of power--media, military and political management--designed to overthrow his tyrannical father. He had built a television, radio and newspaper conglomerate bigger and more competent than the state media apparatus. Under the cloak of his Olympic committee and funded by secret oil deals that brought him millions, Uday had formed a shadow government on the outskirts of Baghdad. And finally, on March 26, 2003, he had the last and most important piece: the sworn allegiance of General Hamudat and the Saddam Fedayeen.

What follows is the result of an 18-month investigation that began in the last week of March 2003 as bombs again fell on Baghdad. I was there during the final days of the regime and talked to sources in Uday's inner circle who knew about his plans, movements and machinations in the last weeks of his life and, more important, about how he came to be in such a position. This report is based on in-depth interviews with dozens of sources who were close to Uday, most of whom had never before spoken to a reporter: his driver, bodyguards, security team, secretaries, girlfriends and employees at the many ventures he ran. In addition, I have gained access to and examined photos and hundreds of pages of Uday's private documents that reveal much that was unknown about the regime's final days.

In the end the eldest son moved too late. On March 17, 2003 George W. Bush delivered his ultimatum to the entire Hussein family: Leave Iraq or be killed. The war had come too early for Uday, the answer from his fellow plotters too late.

II. Flagrant Indulgence

The Hussein family was as secretive as any modern dictatorship, and the faithful retainers who labored in the security services ensured that secrets were kept. While Saddam's political and military excesses were leaked--or sometimes trumpeted--to an appalled world, the family excesses were mostly hidden. Now as this dazed nation tries to chart a course toward a bearable future, it is also learning much more about the shameless clan that held the country in thrall for 30 years.

Uday Saddam Hussein was Saddam's firstborn, and under Arab tradition he held the right of succession. But at the time of his birth, in 1964, Uday had little to look forward to: Saddam was imprisoned in Baghdad for plotting to overthrow the government, and the family was impoverished. Saddam told his first biographers that baby Uday proved his value to the cause early on when his mother smuggled messages into the prison by concealing them in his diaper.

That Saddam had planned a family succession became clear in the last years of his reign when he appointed his youngest son, Qusay, to several consequential jobs. Saddam had little choice. His methodical liquidation of potential rivals over the years had left none but his immediate family with the authority to succeed him. His purposeful elimination of many of the most qualified personnel because of real or imagined grievances not only degraded the competence of the government but also reinforced his own security phobias, and he passed them on to his family. Saddam chose Qusay, but Uday wanted the job.

Saddam's paranoid governing style also limited his growing sons' exposure to the real world. The pool of available talent to educate and train the young men for future office had been reduced to trusted flunkies. Saddam had come up the hard way, born into dire poverty in a shabby village where banditry was common. At an early age he got a basic education through the help of sympathetic relatives and was introduced to revolution by a radical uncle who set him on the path of violence and political intimidation.

Saddam's sons knew only wealth and privilege. They attended school irregularly but were always marked at the top of the class. The brothers wore pistols in pretty leather holsters, but neither received any military education. Writing in the authoritative Azzaman newspaper, one of Uday's close acquaintances in high school recalled "living our lives in emergency" because the friends had to be at Uday's beck and call. "He would request our company to party at all hours, and if we didn't answer our phone he would punish us, torture us. No one knew what he would do when he got agitated and angry. We didn't know how to please him."

The sons used their bodyguards as shields against the difficulties of the world. The beefy, hard-faced men escorted them everywhere. They pushed their way first into the high school and university classes the sons sporadically attended, intimidating fellow students and teachers. They cleared restaurants of other guests so the sons could dine privately. They eventually became the sons' procurers and enforcers, with Uday's toughs becoming as familiar to the people of Baghdad as the son himself. They began organizing and running Uday's increasingly unpredictable parties, at which prominent singers and dancers were ordered to show up and watch Uday's drunken behavior. By early manhood neither son had received a decent education nor been in a schoolyard scuffle that his bodyguards hadn't resolved.

His father never trusted Uday with important jobs. In the years after graduation he was not appointed to any of the key agencies that buttressed Saddam's rule, such as the Baath Party or the security services. He was made president of the Iraqi National Olympic Committee, at the time a minor responsibility.

Uday was prone to public outbursts of erratic behavior that may have been evident to the family early in his life. This could have accounted for his father's rejection. Or possibly Uday's close bond with his mother, Sajida, tested Saddam's patience. For all the talk about women's rights and female equality in Baathist Iraq, Saddam and his sons freely misused women. The partiality of the male family members for numerous sexual partners was a constant aggravation for their wives and significant others, who could do little to stop it.

Uday was as promiscuous as any man in Iraq--a flagrant indulgence that panicked the father of any attractive daughter who came into his presence. But Uday was a stern moralist when it came to his mother. Sajida was Saddam's first cousin; she had borne the burden of her husband's struggling early years and was enjoying the prestige of being first lady. Uday doted on her, and he took exception to his father's acquisition of a second wife.

The son, muscular and taller than his father, had grown up to be a violent drunkard, a disgrace to Saddam. Tanked on vodka at an official party in 1988, Uday bludgeoned to death his father's trusted valet, who had arranged the second marriage courtship. The visiting wife of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak witnessed the murder, which became an international scandal.

An angry Saddam, who had meted out capital punishment to many others for less reprehensible actions, quickly and publicly sentenced his son to death. The execution of the firstborn was thought to be highly unlikely, and the father graciously acceded to a campaign that family and friends had organized for a reprieve. Uday was jailed and then exiled to Switzerland for several months before returning home. When Saddam married for a third time two years later, neither his son nor his first wife raised any objections.

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The first Gulf war weakened Saddam to a degree unknown to the outside world. The savage repression of rebellious Shiite and Kurdish populations was a Pyrrhic victory; the dictator could no longer claim to rule over a united Iraq when 80 percent of the population had risen against him. The United Nations sanctions had steadily undermined Iraq's once prosperous middle class and led to genteel poverty for the well-to-do. Saddam, disappointed by his military, left the well-being of his troops to sycophants who routinely misled him about their readiness. UN inspection teams had systematically dismantled the weapons of mass destruction he had lovingly, expensively assembled in the previous decade. Saddam withdrew into his many palaces a brooding, discouraged figure.

His sons had come of fighting age. Uday in particular was aggressively laying claim to once again be heir apparent. Uday was a formidable figure, strikingly tall and assertive, with a trim beard and a Havana cigar usually sticking defiantly out of his mouth. Qusay, small in stature and two years younger, stuttered and appeared to be (continued on page 86)Uday Hussein(continued from page 76) intimidated by his older sibling. Guests who attended Uday's many parties say Qusay drank little and left early and alone. The younger brother was said to be smarter, though neither is remembered for his book work. Qusay was being groomed for the top security and Baath Party jobs that could have paved his path to the presidency one day.

One late evening in 1995 Uday arrived drunk at the Youth TV office in downtown Baghdad. He complained aloud about the adverse effects of UN sanctions on the economy and blamed his father. "I can do a better job as president. I will do a better job as president," he exclaimed to the astonished staff. Uday demanded a TV camera and insisted on making a videotape of his message, to be broadcast on Youth TV the next day. He ordered one of his favorite sports anchors to assist the technical staff in the lighting and camera work. "We knew insurrection when we heard it," the sports anchor said. After Uday departed, the management staff had a hurried meeting and decided to send the tape to Saddam's palace for approval. The tape was never returned to Youth TV, nor did Uday raise the subject again.

A more sober Uday enjoyed embarrassing Saddam's obeisant cabinet ministers with critical interviews for Youth TV, supplying his reporters with lists of questions calculated to emphasize the ministers' incompetence. The aging minister of information once complained directly to Saddam, who sympathized with him and ordered that only questions officials had approved in advance would henceforth be permitted in interviews. Uday sometimes called in zingers just as the reporters were sitting down with their subjects, challenging the officials to ignore him. Uday also used the pages of his daily newspaper, Babel, to roundly and frequently criticize the ruling establishment. After the first Gulf war, Saddam's practice of relying on tribal allegiances rather than on government institutions to run the country was criticized in a strident Babel campaign. One old-line official wrote that encouraging tribalism "sows the seeds of division" by inciting one part of the country against another, annulling the law and deprecating legal justice.

The intransigence of the first son was rarely noted internationally because visiting reporters usually abided by the understanding that only the official version of events inside Iraq was to be told to the outside world.

One upshot of the internal power struggle was the much publicized defection, on August 7, 1995, of two of Saddam's sons-in-law, Hussein and Saddam Kamel, and their families. They were said to have fled to Jordan because they feared the wrath of Uday. Their actions rocked the ruling regime because both men had key military and security positions, and they revealed to the UN and Western intelligence agencies the last secrets of Saddam's WMD programs.

Saddam apparently blamed Uday for the defections. The defectors' wives were Saddam's daughters and Uday's sisters, and Uday tried to atone by promising all who would listen that he would personally kill both men if they ever returned. His threats apparently did not reach the defectors, because they were persuaded to come back to Baghdad six months after fleeing. They died three days later in an armed assault on a family home, supervised by Uday. The bloodbath did not end the matter. Saddam's widowed daughters, Raghdad and Rana, were disconsolate, and there were recriminations all around.

Uday's continued family meddling had brought about the biggest internal crisis the regime had ever faced. New information suggests that Saddam gave the go-ahead for a terrible punishment to be inflicted on his errant offspring.

Uday loved tooling around Baghdad in his orange Porsche, just one of the 1,200 or so costly automobiles he collected. He once turned up to vote at a referendum polling place in a pink Rolls-Royce, and he filled warehouses inside and outside Baghdad with Lamborghinis, Ferraris and Mercedeses in a rainbow of colors. But this evening, December 12, 1996, the Porsche best suited his mood and his mission--to pick up two attractive young women who came highly recommended and were willing to spend the night with him.

The rendezvous point was the Arowad ice cream parlor, a popular spot for young people in the upscale Baghdad neighborhood of Mansur. Upscale is a relative term because the first Gulf war and the sanctions that followed had reduced the once flourishing neighborhood to a slum. But this was the best the city offered, and this Thursday evening the streets were crowded with people looking for something to do.

Mansur adjoined the presidential palace grounds, and Uday sped down the Qadisaya Expressway and turned onto broad Zaitun Street, passing Zawra Park. With him was his trusted bodyguard Ali al-Sahir, a boyhood acquaintance who helped organize many of Uday's sexual escapades, including this one. Al-Sahir gave a lot to Uday and would give a lot more--such as part of his tongue when his boss objected to something he said several years later. But on this early winter evening, as the Porsche raced through the dark streets, they were just pals out for an adventure.

Uday was not unaware of the dangers he faced in a country where the dictatorial regime had made life cheap. Assassins, some financed by the CIA, were thought to be lurking in the shadows. Although Uday had no important role in governing Iraq, he was a tempting target to those who hated the regime and wanted to hurt Saddam. On this night, however, Uday was confident. Only his household staff knew where he was going. It was evening, and he drove fast.

Uday arrived at the ice cream parlor around 6:30 and stopped his car in the middle of the street. From this vantage point, he believed, he had a better chance to spot potential trouble. His bodyguard ran into the shop to find the girls while Uday idly scanned the road. A black Land Cruiser slipped unnoticed into Arowad Street and, before Uday knew it, had pulled alongside his Porsche on the driver's side. A gunman leaned out of the open Cruiser window and started pumping bullets into Uday at point-blank range with a machine pistol: five bullets into his groin, another in his left leg and two in his back as he slumped forward. His bodyguard, running from the ice cream parlor with pistol waving, was felled by a bullet in the leg. Then the Land Cruiser and the assailants disappeared into the night.

That the loyal Al-Sahir seemed to have saved Uday's life by running into the gunfire and then hustling Uday to the hospital despite a bleeding leg wound was lost on the ruling family. Al-Sahir was arrested as news of the attack was broadcast to the public, a security dragnet was initiated across the capital and accusations were leveled against Iran.

Baghdad at the time was one of the most paranoid cities in the world. The security and intelligence services were believed to number as many personnel as the military, and the sense of surveillance was palpable in the streets. Saddam (continued on page 142)Uday Hussein(continued from page 86) Hussein had reason to fear for his life because the CIA was known to be spending at least $100 million trying to overthrow him. Several ingenious plots had been hatched and failed. Yet Uday's attackers escaped easily as he lay near death in the hospital, and they remained at large as he slowly recuperated to face a lifetime as an invalid. After the war many claimed the title of Uday's attacker (I counted seven different versions of the assault in the postwar Iraqi press), but none has gained any credibility.

Uday's misadventure preoccupied the gossips of Baghdad, who had been predicting for years that Uday would come to a bad end. He was notorious for choosing his sexual partners at random from any gathering, sports match or nightclub he happened to attend. The younger the girl, the better. His bodyguards would present a chosen one with his phone number and order her to call soon; refusals were unacceptable. After the war the gargantuan extent of Uday's depredations was revealed through his own notebooks and through interviews with his female victims, chosen primarily from middle-class Iraqi families in thrall to the regime and in no position to resist. The choice of fleeing the country to save a daughter's honor was available to few.

Many assumed Uday was the victim of a botched honor killing by a distraught family, which would account for the bullets to the groin but not explain the absence of a lethal shot to the head. For years Uday had been a likely target for one enemy or another. In addition to his womanizing, there was his psychopathic administration of the Iraqi Olympic committee. Rumors abounded of corporal punishment inflicted on losing athletes and of a private prison under the new 10-story Olympic committee headquarters that included torture devices, many of his own design. But any assailant would risk severe punishment to himself and his extended family if the Saddam regime were to catch him. The Iraqi term for the fourth degree, which originated in Iraq under medieval caliphs, designates the right of rulers to destroy families down to the fourth degree of relationship to the challenger. Saddam ordered similar sweeping punishments for his opponents. Upholding the honor of an abused daughter or getting even for the agony of thumbscrew torture would hardly be worth the risk of bringing Saddam's wrath down on one's whole extended family.

But one man in Iraq was further above the law than Uday: his formidable father. After the war several officials in the secretive security service responsible for the ruling regime's protection expressed the belief that Saddam had to have organized the attack on Uday. In such an absolutely controlled political environment, they said, the assailants could never have gotten clean away. CIA-employed plotters never succeeded in laying a finger on Saddam or any member of his family. And there was the nature of the attack--designed to punish, not to kill, the way an all-powerful man might show an ambitious first son who's boss. "Look at the hit--bullets to the groin, the back, the leg, fired right into the vehicle window from an adjoining car," commented one of the investigating officers. "But where was the coup de grace, the bullet to the head that would have finished him off? It was never fired. And I think I know why. Dad was teaching his son a lesson."

Perhaps in an attempt to mollify Uday, Saddam returned control of the Fedayeen to his son. Uday had established the fanatical Saddam's Martyrs in late 1994. Two years later, however, the militia had been wrested from his control when Saddam discovered that his son had illegally transferred weapons allotted for the Republican Guard to the Fedayeen.

To repair his shattered leg Uday meanwhile underwent repeated surgeries. On June 15, 1998, still recovering from the grievous wounds inflicted in the ambush, Uday wrote about the family problems in a rambling letter to his father, a copy of which was discovered after the war among the papers in Uday's Olympic committee office. His scrawling, uneven handwriting covers seven pages of a letter that is part mea culpa and part accusation. He asks for patience concerning rumors about his activities: "The prophet says jealousy exists. I can tell you it exists not just among ordinary people but also among our relatives who don't know how to distinguish between reality and unreality. See what has happened to our little family. Two women without husbands and the children without fathers. And me, your son: Nobody knows what has happened to him except God. He has lost the goodness of life after the loss of his health and the separation from his father that has continued for eight months."

Separated for eight months. That statement says much about the deterioration of the relationship between son and father.

Uday brings up his own poor health. "I'm lame. I can't walk without support," he writes. He warns his father about enemies in Baghdad and tells him to take care. "After all I have seen and suffered, I want to tell you to be careful because my enemies are your enemies, and they are also enemies of the nation. They are my enemies because I am Saddam's son."

Uday laments that the regime had less of a free hand in the capital, Baghdad, than it did elsewhere in the country: "I wish Baghdad were like the south of Iraq, where we could solve all problems radically and, if necessary, by cutting out tongues."

Although he was indifferent to the Shiite people, Uday quotes their founder, Imam Ali, several times in the letter, possibly indicating his growing interest in their religion. He concludes his remarks to his father with a reminder of the earlier theme. "Imam Ali said jealousy reveals bad character. If God wants to punish someone, he makes him jealous."

Despite the warnings against jealousy, Uday never suggested he had been betrayed by a filicidal father. He may not even have been able to think that thought because of the mistrust it would have represented.

Uday's birthday party on June 18, 1998 was his first social appearance after the attack. He phoned some of the girlfriends he hadn't seen since the ambush; they gathered at the Jadriyah Equestrian Club and sang songs and danced together as Uday watched. He was subdued and did not drink. He didn't fire his pistol in celebration as he so often had at earlier birthday parties. And he didn't ask any of the girls to stay the night.

Uday was so far down in spirits that he went on a religious pilgrimage late in 1998 to the holy Shiite cities of Karbala and Najaf, south of Baghdad. He stayed for weeks and met with holy men and mystics. He returned convinced that they had set him on the path to recovery. A few months later he walked a few steps with a cane. He was so excited that he asked his father if he could sponsor a day of celebration for the Shia in their sacred cities. Saddam had been repressing the Shia for years, but he was trying to put a better face on his regime to win the sympathy of neighboring Arab states. He turned down Uday's request but sponsored the festivals himself.

III. Fear and Pain

Uday never fully recovered from his ambush injuries. He needed frequent medical attention and never again walked without support. Yet it was clear that, even with his left femur in fragments and a bullet lodged in his spine, Uday's predatory behavior grew unabated. So enfeebled that he could no longer swing a club at those who angered him, he ordered his bodyguards to inflict the punishment for him. Around Uday fear floated like a noxious smell. In his business dealings, his administrative work and his love life, he used brutality as a management tool.

Uday developed his media properties to include print, TV and radio, outshining even the Ministry of Information at propaganda. His media outlets were popular with the citizens of Iraq. And if he did nothing for Iraqi sports, he parlayed the institutional framework of the Iraqi Olympic committee into a black-market empire centered in the modern 10-story building on Palestine Street.

Uday recruited for business and pleasure from the large pool of compliant Iraqis spawned by the 1968 Baathist revolution. The 35 years of dictatorial rule that followed had placed such great restraints on life and liberty that many in the population had become passively cooperative with the demands of the state.

As the first son, Uday felt especially privileged. His private e-mail screen name was Shahrear, taken from the legendary king whose philandering excesses were tempered by Scheherazade's storytelling in The Arabian Nights.

He was greedy for power and pleasure. Businessmen were required to yield 10 percent of their profits to Uday to receive a government contract. His national soccer players had to win every major game to avoid a beating from his henchmen. His TV anchors would wind up in jail for presenting a routine news item that Uday did not like. A teenage girl had to surrender her virginity if she caught Uday's eye, and his eye roved constantly. They all complied with Uday's demands. To demur was to invite unpleasant physical retaliation. In Saddam's Iraq the police worked for the first family, and there was no recourse to the courts for justice. Uday's yes-men did not necessarily escape his wrath. He nursed a vicious temper and rarely engaged in friendly banter with associates. Even his senior deputies feared the phone call that might put them on the carpet. And there was no quitting his service. Once you entered Uday's orbit you stayed there, as if you were doing business with the Cosa Nostra.

Uday the detail man paid close attention to punishments, sometimes personally supervising beatings. Pain was the remedy for all transgressions. Punches to the body and whippings on the legs and the soles of the feet were given for minor infractions. In the basement of the Olympic committee headquarters he installed a prison manned by toughs from the Saddam Fedayeen. The place was outside the realm of the regime's Stalinist justice system, which usually at least listed the names of most of the accused and punished. The men and women sent down to Uday's basement prison might disappear for weeks or months. They would reappear, ashen-faced and skinny, with scared eyes, or they might disappear altogether, transferred to one of the Fedayeen prisons outside Baghdad that were even further above the law. Many victims were from Uday's prominent family of top athletes and broadcasters, whose skills he rarely rewarded but whose real or imagined failings ignited his wrath.

Uday worked at his sadism. His were not political punishments used to force confessions or eliminate opponents--tactics his father and brother used routinely. Uday wanted to inflict pain, and he devised the instruments to do so. Fished from the water of his basement prison, flooded during wartime bombing, was an array of torture devices Hannibal Lecter would have approved. Several were variations of those described in Alexandre Dumas's novel The Man in the Iron Mask--crudely modeled metal headpieces, heavy and menacing, intended to intimidate. A much larger metal structure, a full human figure that hinged open to reveal blunted spikes, was apparently hauled outside and used to cook victims in Baghdad's brutal summer heat. One monstrous metal device shaped like a large spring onion could be expanded, forcing open and mutilating a human orifice. And there were the leg and head clamps and the metal whips.

Uday routinely beat up his lovers and required them to return for more of the same. His relations with women caught the public eye more than anything else he did. In Baghdad in the years before the war, his womanizing was the one subject involving the first family that officials would talk candidly about with visitors. Even after Uday received his incapacitating wounds, his appetite for the company of women remained insatiable.

After the regime collapsed and Uday fled Baghdad, his associates at the Iraqi Olympic committee took his private papers home for safekeeping. I acquired stacks of his letters, e-mails, desk Post-its and love notes, as well as his black book and an old desk calendar he had been using to track his dating in the months before the war. They portray an obsessive womanizer with an enormous capacity for partying. The black book contains the times and locations of dates with 297 named women and lists the names and phone numbers of 41 others.

Few Iraqis have been willing to talk about their relationship with Uday because of the prospect of retaliation. But in his papers I found a request a woman had scribbled on his personal notepad not to tell a man named Omar about their affair because he is a member of her family. Another woman, named Dalia, e-mailed Uday in German, English and Arabic that she had kept their relationship secret but that her mother suspects something.

Before the shooting Uday would personally pick up his dates from the anonymity of public places. That is how Uday discovered a girl I'll call Hala. According to those in Uday's inner circle, there were many like her. Hala's story is atypical only in that she was willing to sit down and tell it. Many others I contacted through Uday's black book refused to speak for publication.

In early 1996 Hala and her family were at the Al Sayed club and restaurant in the Mansur district. Her father was a minor government functionary, her mother a strikingly handsome woman. Hala at the time was a 15-year-old schoolgirl enjoying one of her rare nights out. Her family was Christian, and her parents were drinking along with most of the others in the club, a mix of Arab and Kurdish businessmen and Baath Party officials. Hala made do with Coca-Cola.

During the evening the burly Ali al-Sahir, Uday's chief bodyguard, came to Hala's table and introduced himself. He presented Hala with his boss's telephone number and invited her to call. The young girl was flattered. She was an attractive teenager, already aware of the power of her womanly figure. She wanted to call, she said. Her parents, aware of Uday's lewd reputation, had mixed feelings, but they also knew he was the closest thing to royalty in Iraq. And he knew where they lived. Hala made the call two days later.

Al-Sahir arrived at her house early the next evening in a black Mercedes sedan. He promised her parents she would not be late. "I was thrilled with the Mercedes," Hala remembers. "I liked the new-car smell. I'd never been in such luxury before." She was excited by the promise of adventure. They drove to one of Uday's walled mansions in Jadriyah, which was off-limits to ordinary Iraqis like Hala's family. Saddam had taken more than 500 acres of prime Tigris riverbank land in Jadriyah and was building five large palaces for his family, but no one in the city ever saw the construction. Even fishermen were forbidden to drift downriver.

Uday was waiting in the hallway, already drunk. He greeted Hala by name and handed her a bottle of what she later learned was scotch. She had never tasted alcohol before. She could barely stomach the stuff, but Uday insisted. "He was much taller than I," Hala says. "He was much stronger." There were few preliminaries. He led her to an upstairs bedroom and told her to undress. She was unsteady on her feet; she was frightened. And here was Saddam Hussein's son standing in front of her, grinning and pulling off his shirt.

Blaming the booze, Hala claims not to remember much of that first night. "He started slapping my face and punched my body as he bore down on me," she recalls. "He entered me forcibly and was snarling when he had his orgasm." Hala had never had sex with a man before and for a while was under the impression that that was how it was done. Afterward Uday tried to make her finish the whiskey bottle. He slept for a while and then rolled onto her again, beating her a second time. Al-Sahir drove Hala home the following afternoon. She had showered and eaten breakfast. The bruises didn't show, she says, but she wasn't the same little girl who had left home the night before.

Hala was not the first teenage girl Uday molested. She tells of many others she befriended over the years, girls her age. Hala told her story to her mother, who consoled her and let her take a couple of days off from school. Then Al-Sahir knocked on her door again.

Hala went back to Uday. She had no choice, she says. She got used to his drunken sex play. She got used to scotch. Sometimes he called at three in the morning, and she would arrive to find a score or so of girls cavorting with him. She grew to feel possessive because Uday had a pleasant side, too, when he was sober. He gave her costly foreign-made designer clothes, expensive makeup and perfume. He gave her money when she needed it.

He also had sex with her mother, a briefer relationship than Hala's, just half a dozen visits. The mother could hold her liquor better than her teenage daughter. She admitted in an interview to knowing a few sexual tricks that surprised even Uday. He was probably intimidated. He didn't beat her. He gave her gifts and then left her alone.

Hala's father caught on early. First came his daughter's late-night adventures. Then it was his wife rising from her bed at two A.M. to leave the house. His pride was bruised, but he accepted this. "Dad just wanted to believe we were close friends of Uday," Hala said in an interview. "We never talked to him about it then and not today." Her father noticed his superiors treated him a little better at the office. The extra money the women brought into the family was also handy in those troubled times. Uday corrupted the family as surely as his father, Saddam, had corrupted the nation.

Hala says she hung around with Uday to the end. She was invited to the first party he threw after his ambush injuries had healed a little, in 1998, and to many similar gatherings. Uday had changed for the worse, she says. He was bad tempered with guests. He didn't touch her but forced her to strip naked and table dance crazily as the whole room laughed at her. He fired rifles and pistols with increasing frequency. Guests ducked, dodged and hid under tables. Hala drank more and more, as did Uday. Toasting her one evening, he boasted, "There is no one like me. I can do anything. I'm not afraid of anyone, not even God."

Uday was crippled. He never again took Hala back to his bedroom, and she assumed his injuries had left him impotent. He began passing off some of his former girlfriends to his bodyguards even as he invited new women into his life. Hala met Lebanese, German and other foreign women Uday imported into Iraq in the prewar years. His personal party videos, looted from his residences, have been best-sellers in Baghdad, and Hala worries that someone she knows may someday see her dancing naked for the president's son.

Uday had many young women like Hala in his short life of prodigious excess. There were rumors that he terribly injured some of them or even had them killed when they incurred his wrath. Others fell for him the hard way, or so they say in their love letters, which he kept locked in his private office filing cabinet. A woman named Abeer faxed him that she had cried when he left her for another woman at a party. "I found you, and I tried to tell you why I was crying, but you got angry," she writes. "You attacked me and beat me. What hurt more was that you called me a whore. I don't deny that I needed the money, but I swear to God I really wanted to know you and see you."

Abeer appended a crude self-portrait she claimed she had painted with her blood: "Any word between us is useless. This is my blood as a memory. I hope it will not wind up in the trash bin."

IV. The Fedayeen

Uday Hussein's long convalescence set back his ambitions. He was under regular medical treatment at his Abbasid palace and was impatient with the doctors who provided sedatives and supervised his exercise. The palace maids heard him yelling at his medical staff. He was more capricious than ever, his mean streak more evident. A maid told Al Arabia television that she had angered Uday when she stumbled and dropped a tray of drinks at a party. The next morning Uday sent her to the Olympic committee headquarters, where his goons caned the soles of her feet until they bled. According to those who were there, such "motivational" practices were becoming routine occurrences for the staff at his many enterprises.

Uday's relationship with his father was also convalescing. Saddam had put Iraq through another of its confrontations with UN weapons inspectors. The crisis led to their withdrawal in late 1998 and a retaliatory series of U.S. air strikes against Baghdad. The pressure lessened as President Bill Clinton's entanglement with Monica Lewinsky took center stage at the White House. Iraq began successfully reaching out diplomatically to its Arab neighbors. Uday authored a 300-page political-science treatise that praised his father's dogged defiance of the West. The tribute must have pleased Saddam; he allowed Uday to stand in the 2000 Iraqi National Assembly elections as a Baath Party candidate, guaranteeing him a seat and a voice in the public affairs of government. Uday was next seen on TV frolicking in the murky Tigris River to show his improved health. In private, however, Saddam was handing the levers of power to Qusay, who was taking over the important military and security posts. He was still the heir apparent, a status confirmed in 2001 when the ruling Baath Party voted him its leader. Uday's injuries had put him out of the running--or so everyone thought.

In 1994, after the demoralizing defeat of Iraqi forces in the first Gulf war, Uday assembled a ragtag pack of young bullies and irregular soldiers to restore the honor of the armed forces. Though he had his father's approval, he worked in secret, diverting scarce military matériel to his militia. He handed out bonuses and introduced sophisticated indoctrination techniques that emphasized harsh discipline and total loyalty. With Uday back in control, the Fedayeen quickly grew in size and power even as the regular military forces, including the elite Republican Guard divisions, fell into decay. Outside experts wrote off Uday's militia as a maverick assemblage of thugs and miscreants hardly worthy of serious study. They were wrong. The Fedayeen proved to be the most resilient force in the second Gulf war and are still thought to be part of the insurgency.

By the eve of the second Gulf war, the Fedayeen had increased to an estimated 60,000 fighters, with units in all of Iraq's main cities. Their training curriculum included suicide-bombing indoctrination and instruction in guerrilla warfare, not routinely required in the regular armed forces. As did Hitler's Nazi SS, the Fedayeen operated completely outside the law, above the political and legal structures of the country. The black-clad, often masked militiamen prowled the backstreets of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities with lists of political suspects, sometimes administering on-the-spot executions by beheading.

By the end of 2000 Uday had assembled the elements of power. He had acquired a political base to augment his media empire and the Olympic committee front for his lucrative black-market businesses. And he had his own private army. His reclusive father no longer even appeared in public, seemingly besotted with dreams of securing his place in Iraqi history. The country's oil revenue was being used to plan and build gigantic palaces and mosques. Even the top officials in the land, the members of the Revolutionary Command Council, were never sure where Saddam was going to host their next meeting. They assembled in the early hours of the morning and were bused to various conference points over unexpected routes.

Saddam kept occupied by producing a 52-hour television movie on the Baath Party's rise to power, a project he eventually scrapped in favor of a book he wrote from the script, called Men and the City. He was reputed to have written several sappy historical romances and a musical based on a similar theme. Saddam also took to giving long, windy interviews to visiting reporters, talks that were avidly studied by intelligence specialists abroad who were trying to divine the truth about his withdrawn regime. Legions of visiting journalists were stymied by hard-eyed minders who forbade access to all but the most predictable information. The world tended to believe the worst about Iraq's capabilities.

As war approached in late 2002 Uday used the columns of Babel and his bully pulpit in the National Assembly to speak his mind. His political philosophy departed from his father's in marked ways. He was becoming a pragmatist with seemingly little faith in Baath Party policies of Pan-Arabism and socialism. He believed that Iraq's traditional allies, France, Russia and China, had failed to deliver on promises of protection. He submitted a working paper to the National Assembly in November 2002 that was highly critical of the sweet oil deals Iraq had made with China and Russia, deals worth billions of dollars.

Uday also revised his views about the inevitable decline of America. He suggested that a better idea for the Iraqi regime would have been to cultivate business relations with "Democrats and Republicans in the United States opposed to Bush's policies. And what if we had given a percentage of our money to the English, what influence would that have achieved?"

Uday's economic-initiative suggestions were naive and futile. The U.S. and the United Kingdom had forbidden trade relations with Saddam's regime anyway, but Uday was signaling his impatience with the old guard and the old ideas around his father. Early in 2002 he had taken his plans a step further, secretly reorganizing the structure of his Olympic committee front and integrating its operations with his TV, radio and newspaper empire.

On February 3, 2002 Uday wrote to two close associates, Major General Jabbar Rajab Habbush and No-man Idan, his financial aide, ordering them to "revise the whole system, administrative and structural, from all sides." They came up with an elaborate reorganization that required a multiplicity of new job titles and departments more suitable for a state enterprise than a private business.

By late summer that year, with senior Iraqi officials privately conceding the likelihood of war, Uday demanded rapid implementation of his plan. The director of his Youth TV operation, Alaa Mekki, responded by letter on August 20: "We are aware of the structural, managerial and directional changes you wish to implement, but they are far-reaching and we don't fully understand them. It will take time to make the changes, and we beg for more time."

Broadcasters and producers at Youth TV recalled that they quickly began to realize that the abrupt reorganization effort seemed directed at something more than new programming. Elaborate schematics were drawn up to redistribute office space. The network was suddenly required to accommodate a new layer of executives at the cramped Iraqi TV center in downtown Baghdad. Uday loyalists were coming to positions of power with little or no media knowledge. Faces of senior Fedayeen officers were seen around the organization. New communications links were established with the Olympic committee. All this was done without publicity; Uday was clearly up to something.

Now he needed to absorb the leadership of the Saddam Fedayeen militia into his organization. He could bend his media and business enterprises to his will easily enough, but the Fedayeen were another matter, professing loyalty in blood oaths to Saddam Hussein himself. To ensure that the Fedayeen, the third leg of his future governing triad, would stand firm when he needed them, Uday turned to his sumptuous resources of money and privilege.

On the eve of war Iraq's military establishment was in tatters. The high concrete walls built to keep the numerous encampments from public view were the only contemporary feature of the military; all else was in decay. Ruthless purges of the officer corps had brought mediocre talent to the fore. Saddam himself had not been photographed in a military uniform since the first Gulf war.

The defenses had been adequate, however, to quell internal division. Saddam's rusting Russian tanks and outdated artillery pieces had proven decisive in suppressing internal unrest in the years since the Gulf war, just as his omnipresent security services had crushed political opposition. For that reason Saddam entrusted command of the armed forces to Qusay, whose loyalty had been proved in the years he successfully ran the internal security services. Qusay had no military training, but he was quietly ruthless. The previous decade had been devoted to the security and preservation of the regime above all else, and preparations for the war with America centered on the same strategy, that of ensuring Saddam's survival in power.

The specter of internal rebellion haunted the Baghdad regime, and it squelched plans for city defenses from Mosul in the north to Basra in the south, defenses that rebels might turn to their advantage. Because of the same concern, bullets were withheld from many military units posted in those cities. Important highways and bridges linking parts of the country, clearly of value to an invader, were never considered for demolition or interdiction. They were too vital for the suppression of rebellion, as was demonstrated in the bloody civil struggle that followed the first Gulf war. Saddam's tanks had raced from Baghdad to the resistance cities in Kurdish and Shiite lands and blasted their way to victory. But the goals of defending Iraq from without and Saddam from within had by this time become mutually exclusive.

Iraq's senior military commanders knew this, but because Saddam's inner circle had become so small they were distrusted outsiders. With Saddam ignoring battle plans to study blueprints for palaces and mosques, fantasy ruled in the military. The capabilities of the once vaunted Republican Guard divisions were mythical; their Soviet-era hardware had long ago deteriorated along with the soldiers' morale. The regular army was in an even more pitiful state, with soldiers unable to afford the bus fare home on their infrequent leaves. Only the public face of the military was steadfast and loyal, an illusion created by the propaganda services and believed by the West.

Ironically Saddam did come to terms with one deception. For years he had played a cat-and-mouse game with the international community over weapons inspections, leaving the vivid impression he had something diabolical to hide. Saddam yielded to Russian and French entreaties late in 2002 to open his country totally to UN weapons inspectors to end the threat of war. In the view of some senior Iraqi commanders, this was his downfall. The inspectors found no such weapons. Now there was no longer any military reason for American forces to hesitate to attack, whatever had been publicly stated as justification for the war.

As war rapidly approached, fantasy continued to rule. Senior military staff meetings that Saddam presided over were characterized by gung ho portrayals of Iraqi military capability. Commander in chief Qusay played as pernicious a role as his compliant subordinates, openly lying to his father about military readiness. A general officer on the planning staff recalled in a postwar interview that in a November 2002 senior staff meeting Saddam had asked if his orders to extend the range of 37-millimeter antiaircraft weapons had been carried out. "We all looked at each other, knowing it had been impossible to do so. But Qusay responded, 'Yes, our engineers have succeeded.' Everyone but Saddam knew that was a lie," the officer said. The war plan as it evolved envisaged strong defenses of all borders and cities with effective air and ground-to-air weapons support, attacks against U.S. aircraft carriers in the Gulf and a loyal population eager to do battle with the invaders.

That none of this was practical or doable was never mentioned by knowledgeable military men at staff meetings. Some argued that Saddam himself had to be in on the illusion, but none dared to cross him, not even Qusay. Lying had become endemic in Iraq because to agree with the regime was to live a less troubled life. The greater lie was that war would not come at all.

Uday was left out of the war planning. His playboy reputation and his injuries pushed him from the center of power. His plain speaking was also causing pain. The Ministry of Information prevailed on Saddam to close Uday's paper, Babel, for a month because it had criticized the governments of Jordan and Egypt, two Arab states Iraq was desperately courting. His Saddam Fedayeen militia was similarly excluded from the war plan because of its independence from the chain of command.

Uday had already begun planning his own war. Maybe because of his cruel injuries, he had become a realist, unlike others in his family. Late in 2002 he was making changes in the regional commands of the Fedayeen, promoting young but proven officers. He ordered a complete reappraisal of the militia's military readiness with an emphasis on honesty. The responses began coming back in mid-January 2003, about two months before war began. The Fedayeen were ill-equipped, ill-trained and unready. Uday moved to change all that in a hurry, setting an inspection deadline of March 8.

V. Coup D'État

But even an impending invasion would not spoil the fun. Among the many Post-its found in Uday's desk, some scrawled with red marker, are lists of videos he wanted to see: The First Wives Club, The Odd Couple II, Sabrina Goes to Rome and Dark City. Other notes mention various additional desires: two new Mercedeses and another Rolls-Royce. There are lists of Internet porn sites. A bundle of incoming e-mails addressed to [email protected] detail three weeks of negotiations to purchase a million-dollar diamond from a Saudi Arabian princess.

Five days before the war began Uday threw his last party. Officials from his media properties and the Olympic committee gathered at one of his favorite haunts, the private Jadriyah Equestrian Club on the Tigris River near the University of Baghdad. The entryway was framed by a large ceramic mural of Saddam and his two sons dressed as Bedouins astride Arabian stallions. Crude stone sculptures of naked women were scattered about the grounds to add a sybaritic flavor.

In earlier days Uday would climb onto the club's roof and fire his automatic rifle into the sky to the nervous applause of young women gathered on the lawns below. And he would cavort drunkenly on the dance floor with his female guests before ordering a comely girl to the notorious "black room," where he had a simple bed and washbasin and to which no invitation could be refused. But that was before his crippling.

This night Uday hobbled to his table and sipped quietly on a vodka tonic. He called for the band to "sing to me about the end" and applauded when it came up with the sad music of popular Iraqi singer Kadim al-Sahir. Uday seemed to have forgotten he had sent Al-Sahir into exile several years earlier for some minor grievance. Later in the evening Uday invited several of his favorite associates to a back room and presented them with small memorial pistols. He was crying. He said, "Bush really means it this time. It is good-bye." Five days later the Equestrian Club was one of the first targets of the invasion's cruise missiles.

Few others in the ruling regime seemed to understand that the end was indeed near. Perhaps decades of political isolation had made it easy for the leadership to hide from the reality of the threat. Or maybe they believed the nonsense from the state media about Iraq's overwhelming ability to resist invasion. As the U.S. and coalition armed forces were gathering strength in the Gulf in the final 10 days before the war, Qusay Hussein was seen idling for a few hours at an expensive furniture store on Arasat Street with his father's senior aide Abid Mahmoud. Qusay's responsibility at the time was to command the defense of the entire country, with a special emphasis on Baghdad.

Maybe the leadership had been so misled by the rising tide of international resistance to the war that they believed the Americans would fold at the last minute. Saddam had escaped oblivion a decade ago when an earlier Bush administration decided to leave him in power after the first Gulf war rather than risk the uncertainties that would follow his ouster. Senior Iraqi officials planted more uncertainty. They began talking confidently to Western reporters about plans for a spirited defense of Baghdad. It would rival the famous World War II battle for Stalingrad that pitched Soviet troops against the Nazis. Such a drama fought before the cameras of the international media would supposedly force the Americans to yield to an aroused world opinion and sue for peace.

As anyone could tell, there were no sensible defenses of Baghdad, no outer rings of concealed armor or inner rings of entrenched soldiers in city buildings to force an invading army to fight in the streets. Only two of the city's many bridges were mined. The lightly sandbagged street corners and shallow foxholes dug in empty city lots were so cosmetic as to be laughable.

George W. Bush's rush to war had driven the Iraqi regime to greater rhetoric, but it drove Uday to greater effort. By now his militia had formed specifically trained suicide squads modeled on the Palestinian example and motivated by a cult of personality that Uday was quietly growing for himself. His picture was starting to compete with his father's in Fedayeen encampments.

Uday's oil riches provided the militia with sophisticated Russian guided antitank missiles and the sturdy Nissan trucks on which to mount them. He tapped into resources unavailable to regular army units, some of which were scrapping target practice because of a lack of ammunition.

On March 8 the Basrah Fedayeen commander reported the arrival of 350 new AK-47 rifles and 394,970 rounds of ammunition. The Missan commander had earlier received 250 AK-47s and 214,000 rounds. And so it was across the country for all the Fedayeen units. Uday had created a mobile guerrilla force numbering in the scores of thousands, with high morale and high motivation. Uday's ragtag country boys had risen to become the cream of the military crop.

No direct documentary evidence yet available marks exactly when Uday committed to a coup d'état. The reorganization of his media empire in 2002 and its integration with the Olympic committee suggested his intention to circumvent government institutions at an early point in a takeover and to use his own personnel to run the government. He began integrating the Fedayeen into the Olympic committee about the same time. He was giving generals seniority over civilian counterparts. As would soon be seen, the military men accepted his invitations to serve in his coup cabinet.

During this same period Uday was unsuccessfully reasserting his claim within the ruling family to the right of accession. A friend recalled that Uday privately ridiculed his brother Qusay's promotion to head the Baath Party, a job he maintained should rightfully be his. In better health and more mature in personality, Uday felt he deserved a return to grace. His brother was in the way, of course, and growing ever more powerful in his father's esteem and in his security and military connections.

Uday now hurried his planning. Unlike Qusay, he was not entirely beholden to his father. His media and business empires placed him closer to the Iraqi people and the outside world than any other member of the ruling family. He knew the glaring weaknesses in the regime and observed his father's flagging strength. With Bush clearly planning war, this would be a fine time for new leadership and a new direction for Iraq. He was hinting at it in his newspaper columns, with his criticism of the regime's oil deals and its international business relations, while he was implementing it behind closed doors.

But his courtship of the Fedayeen leadership was taking time. These were simple men, chosen for their ruthlessness and their obedience to the regime. They killed willingly for Saddam Hussein, their lord and master, who allowed them their excesses. Uday had to court such men with caution.

On February 28 Uday received a letter labeled Confidential from the secretary general of the Fedayeen, Lieutenant General Muhssin Abdul Karim Mahmood. It named a committee of the senior general officers to discuss military preparedness. None had so far committed himself to Uday's cause.

VI. The Ace of Hearts

In the weeks leading up to war, Uday was put in charge of Iraq's internal security forces, his first significant job in the ruling regime. Qusay was his nominal boss, but the older brother now had a powerful new post and an official reason to communicate with his formerly distant father.

Uday's confidence seemed to have trumped his wisdom on the eve of war when Bush issued his public ultimatum to Saddam Hussein to leave Iraq with his sons and family or face the full force of military invasion--but perhaps Uday's move was deliberate. Rather than wait for his father's response, Uday rushed a statement to Youth TV, trying to ridicule the American leader by suggesting that Bush and his family should leave the U.S. He warned that American troops would die horrible deaths and that their loved ones would "cry not tears but blood." A surprised Baghdad waited several more hours for Saddam to offer his official rejection of Bush's demands, and senior military officers began wondering who was in charge.

Several days before the Shock and Awe bombings that signaled the invasion's start, Uday moved to a war footing. He assumed correctly that his properties would be among the first to be bombed. He moved his essential staff and all the computers from the prominent 10-story Olympic committee headquarters to the modest football federation building and sent the female staff home.

He conferred with his television executives and devised an escape route from the Youth TV offices to an old house across the parking lot and then by tunnel to the Tigris River about 500 yards away, where boats would be waiting.

Uday also called a final conference of the Saddam Fedayeen planning staff that included several retired officers brought back for their experience in the first Gulf war. Uday was, typically, not present at the conference but sent a video crew to film it for him. His representative insisted Uday be kept informed at all times of the Fedayeen's operations when war began, with the most important message traffic moving by car, not phone or fax.

The Fedayeen conference concluded that, as in the first Gulf war, the U.S. would try to cut Iraqi field communications quickly. This meeting signed off on the Fedayeen's operational independence, which would come into effect once contact with Baghdad headquarters was lost. Each unit would rely on the self-sufficiency attained through its rigorous guerrilla training and the weapons and ammo stockpiling completed in the previous weeks.

Uday's common sense gave him foreboding about the war's outcome, but the early successes of the Saddam Fedayeen and some commando units buoyed his spirits. At a family home in the Zaiyouna area of Baghdad he briefed close friends, explaining excitedly that the country's defenses were holding. For a few days at Umm Qasr the resistance to U.S. and British marines, as well as heavy action at Basra, seemed to bear out the state media's unlikely assertions that Iraqis would fight the American invasion to the death.

Uday was emboldened to appear in public. In the first days of the war he was spotted a few times hobbling on his cane down the broad expanse of Palestine Street, security men in tow. He cordially greeted the few passersby who ventured outside. That part of eastern Baghdad was distant enough from the city center to avoid routine bombing. A small yellow Sunny taxi was always seen following him, the nondescript conveyance a far cry from the expensive autos stored in his many garages. His belated discovery of the common touch was picked up by his father and younger brother, who began popping up in odd places around the city to the great surprise of the public, few of whom had ever seen the family members in person.

Just 90 minutes after the Bush deadline expired, 40 U.S. Tomahawk missiles crashed into a residential complex in a northern suburb where Saddam was believed to be meeting associates. This was the first of a series of much publicized unsuccessful attempts to kill the Iraqi leader with missiles and bombs and led to much speculation about his wellbeing. One such attempt later in the war, on April 7, almost did the job when warplanes dropped four 2,000-pound bombs on several houses located behind the Al Saa-ah restaurant in the Mansur district. Saddam was in one house preparing for lunch with Qusay and several top aides when a security man came inside and whispered in his ear. An SUV had driven past the house, stopped briefly and then moved on. The vehicle may have been spying. Saddam looked concerned, stood up and told everyone to disperse. The bombs fell 15 minutes later, damaging the safe house but obliterating three adjacent homes and killing nine people.

With his father's death a distinct possibility, Uday needed to confirm the support of the Fedayeen commanders. Under the existing institutional arrangement, the leadership succession would automatically pass to Qusay and senior Baathist leaders. Just two days into the war Baghdad residents were surprised to discover that all police posts in the capital were deserted and there were no street patrols or traffic police on duty. In their place were Saddam Fedayeen militiamen, many with sinister masked faces and all with automatic weapons and rocket launchers. They manned the sandbagged street corners and intersections. No other security forces were visible.

Uday's maneuvering had paid off. He controlled the streets of Baghdad. He ran the internal security services. His Olympic committee associates--a possible minigovernment--were functioning in their obscure wartime location, and his media properties were humming. At the end of the war's first week his Fedayeen militiamen were slamming U.S. Marines at Nasiriyah on the Euphrates River, holding the bridges and shocking the invaders with suicide bombings and the taking of prisoners.

Around this time Uday called his friends together again, and they met at a private house in Jadriyah. He was still confident, "with high morale and high spirits," one of the attendees recalled. There were no maids, just security men who handed around drinks. They thanked God for the bizarre weather that had shrouded Baghdad in an orange dusk as airborne desert sands drifted in with the wind. The choking gloom was thickened with black smoke billowing from trenches of burning oil dug around the city, a primitive, useless defense against modern warplanes.

On March 26 the Fedayeen high command sent Uday the hand-delivered letter he'd been waiting for. He had their backing for a coup d'état. Now everything was in place. At an earlier time Uday could have made his move and probably gotten away with it. And at a future time, had the Americans played the game Saddam had originally envisaged--a long siege of Baghdad followed by political negotiations to end the war--Uday could equally have taken over.

His younger brother was no real threat. Saddam's last strength lay with the Republican Guard divisions he had entrusted to Qusay. As the American military discovered, the guards were paper tigers, their ability hampered by some of the worst leadership in modern military history. Qusay blithely dispatched one division after another down open roads into the teeth of the American bombing offensive, leaving hundreds of tanks and artillery and men in pieces and all the doors to Baghdad wide open. A desperate military command staff sent Saddam a message begging for permission to implement a sensible defensive strategy. The response was a laconic "I have appointed your commander in chief. Now listen to him."

The Fedayeen were swept aside as the American offensive gathered full force in the first days of April. Tens of thousands of troops backed by armor and air power rushed toward Baghdad, their dominance indisputable. The Fedayeen would come back to fight another day, but by then Uday's dreams of glory had turned nightmarish.

Uday met once more with his group of close acquaintances in early April when U.S. troops were reportedly advancing on Baghdad's international airport. "He was pessimistic and looked very weak," recalls one friend. Uday shook their hands and expressed concern about their safety. "I will be in contact with you again if God wants," he said as he departed, never to see any of them again. All those at the house had at one time been victims of Uday's mercurial temperament, suffering his punishments and disapproval for minor things. They had partied with him in the good years and suffered with him through his bad health, his personal feuds and his ugly public behavior. "In the end we all loved Uday," one friend comments. "But the only person Uday really loved was his mother. He feared his father, but he admired his strength."

Uday would be seen once more with his father in Baghdad newspaper photographs. In a last gesture of his authority Saddam promoted both Uday and Qusay to the rank of brigadier general on April 4. With American troops crawling all over Baghdad Airport, demotion would have seemed the most appropriate gesture, but Saddam was never one to publicly slight his nearest and dearest.

Uday made a run for it on April 7. American troops were already in Abbasid Palace when he sent for two members of his security staff. They found him in one of his small safe houses in the Mansur district. He was dressed as a Bedouin tribesman in flowing robes. Uday complained that he had spent the two previous nights in uncomfortable bunkers near the Equestrian Club because he feared capture. He climbed into the backseat of a Sunny taxi with his driver at the wheel and ordered his security men to follow. "I will destroy all my cars. I won't let the Americans get them," he told them.

They crossed the suspension bridge to Jadriyah, then traveled south toward Hilla and an area where the security men knew Uday had several large car warehouses. They took back roads to avoid advancing American troops. Near their destination they spotted a pink Rolls-Royce of 1960s vintage pulled over to the side of the road; local farmers were tearing at the interior leatherwork and removing the wheels. The vehicle had apparently run out of gas. It was the same one Uday had ostentatiously driven to a referendum in 2000. He was furious. He told his security men to help him out of the taxi. He wanted to shoot the looters with his pistol, but his men prevailed on him to be discreet.

They drove on to the warehouses, eight large low-slung wooden buildings beside a large dairy farm that Uday owned. Seven of the warehouses had been broken into, and they were swarming with farmers pushing Rolls-Royces and Mercedeses and tinkering with Lamborghinis and Ferraris. Numerous other vehicles were being cannibalized, including two stately vintage Rolls-Royces stolen from the Kuwaiti royal family during the first Gulf war.

Uday drove to the last locked warehouse. His security men broke open the door. Lined up inside were rows of late-model Mercedes sedans and sports cars. "Burn them all," Uday shouted from the back of his taxi, unwilling to get out now that many locals were crowding around. With pistols drawn, his security men doused all the vehicles with gasoline and tossed a match. Uday watched the last of his car collection burn, then drove off in his taxi after a final wave to his men.

Uday lived above the law but died a hunted man in a shoot-out after a desperate flight and a double cross. He is believed to have teamed with Qusay in the Sunni triangle region west and north of Baghdad in early June, and they fled with Qusay's 14-year-old son, Mustafa, to Mosul. By then U.S. authorities had launched an intensive search for Saddam and his sons, offering large rewards for their capture. The brothers moved in with an old family retainer in Mosul, but he apparently turned them in to the authorities for a $30 million reward. In the resulting shoot-out with U.S. troops on Tuesday, July 22, 2003, both brothers and Qusay's son were killed, their mutilated bodies displayed to the world.

A U.S. Army spokesman said Uday's briefcase, found after his death, contained $400,000 in $100 bills, Viagra and a solitary condom. To the very end Uday evidently believed he had a chance to become a whole man again. After all, in the famous Iraq's Most Wanted deck of cards, Uday was the ace of hearts.

A gunman leaned out of the SUV's window and started pumping bullets into Uday's groin.

"I wish we could solve all problems radically and, if necessary, by cutting out tongues."

A dictator in waiting

Scenes from a tortured city

The true face of a sadistic regime