Report: Saddam's Cash Stash

Ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein may still have tens of billions in U.S. dollars deposited in foreign banks as a result of an order to skim money from the country's oil revenues, according to a former Iraqi minister quoted Wednesday in a London-based Arabic newspaper.

Jewad Hashem, planning minister in the late 1960s and early '70s who now lives in Canada, said that 5 percent of oil revenues was ordered deposited abroad in accounts under Saddam's supervision when Iraq nationalized its oil industry in 1972.

Hashem's assertion is in his autobiography, which is being excerpted in the Asharq Al-Awsat pan-Arab daily. In Wednesday's except, he wrote that Iraq's former Revolutionary Command Council issued the decree to create a sort of war chest for Saddam's Baath Party.

There was no way to independently confirm Hashem's story. International efforts are under way to track accounts around the world in the name of Saddam, the Baath Party and other former Iraqi officials.

Hashem wrote that Saddam told him and some other ministers that "the Baath Party has come to rule for 300 years and to continue ruling or to come back to rule if toppled by a coup, (and therefore) the party must have a huge amount of money outside Iraq."

The former minister said Saddam told them that the party did not want to repeat the mistake of 1963 when a military coup toppled the first Baath government after nine months and it could not return to power quickly because it lacked money.

Saddam was jailed in that coup. He and the Baathists returned to power in 1968 and remained in control until the U.S.-led invasion in March.

Hashem said that by his calculation the 5 percent revenues from 1972 until 1990 would amount to $31 billion. After 1990, United Nations sanctions following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait blocked the free transfer of money abroad.

U.S. officials have long charged Saddam with pilfering Iraqi resources. On the second full day of the war, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld listed eight goals of the invasion; the seventh was securing "Iraq's oil fields and resources, which belong to the Iraqi people, and which they will need to develop their country after decades of neglect by the Iraqi regime."

Saddam's financial resources are a worry for U.S. commanders because the deposed president might be using that cash to fund attacks on U.S. troops that have killed more soldiers since the regime was toppled than died before it fell.

Some $2.9 billion in regime assets were either vested or frozen by June. In October, a U.S. official told Time magazine some $3 billion of Saddam's assets was deposited in banks controlled by the Syrian government. Syria claimed to have frozen two funds, but American officials said that's not enough.

However, U.S. commanders have been unable to say whether insurgents' attacks are subject to any centralized command or funding. Some guerrilla commanders have depicted the insurgents as small, independent bands of fighters with little loyalty to Saddam.

Saddam is a member of the Treasury Department's list of Specially Designated Nationals whose assets are blocked or frozen. He is listed there as "Hussein, Saddam (a.k.a. al-Tikriti, Saddam Hussein; a.k.a. Abu Ali; a.k.a. Husayn, Saddam; a.k.a. Hussain, Saddam)." His date and place of birth are listed, and he is described simply as "President since 1979."

He was also named in the Security Council resolution passed this May that called on governments to find "funds or other financial assets or economic resources that have been removed from Iraq, or acquired, by Saddam Hussein or other senior officials of the former Iraqi regime and their immediate family members" and freeze them "without delay."