The man who supplied U.S. troops with the information that led them to Saddam Hussein's hideout last weekend reportedly was his personal bodyguard and cousin. CBS News Reporter Lisa Barron in Baghdad cites a Jordanian newspaper as having identified him as Gen. Mohammed Ibrahim Omar al Mouslit.
Barron says he supposedly knew where Saddam was almost all the time, and had been the target of several U.S. raids in and around Tikrit. He was captured in Baghdad on Dec. 12, and sent to Tikrit for a lengthy interrogation. Just hours later, Saddam was captured.
The New York Times, which didn't name him, said in its Saturday editions that the secret informant was part of Saddam's once-feared Special Security Organization, and a member of one of five closely-nit families from which Saddam used to draw his most trusted aides.
Maj. Stan Murphy, the intelligence officer for the Fourth Infantry Division's First Brigade, which conducted the raid that captured Saddam, told the newspaper, "He would be someone I'd call his right arm. In my mind, he was that important. He had real-time information."
A story prepared for Sunday's Times says when he was in hiding, Saddam "spent months moving furtively among 20 or 30 nondescript safe houses in the Sunni Muslim heartland, where a tightknit network of family and clan sheltered him and brought him news from across American-dominated Iraq."
According to American military officials the Times spoke with, Saddam used a word-of-mouth system of couriers to carry his instructions back to a cluster of Baathist cells that helped him guide the anticoalition insurgency.
Hussein traveled on foot, by small boat along the Tigris River and along back roads in an ever-changing mix of cars, taxis and pickup trucks, often at night, rarely with more than two or three loyal followers to avoid notice, the newspaper says.
In other developments:
The Washington Post says in its Saturday editions that Army counterintelligence agents are forcing many Iraqi employees of the U.S.-led civilian authority in Baghdad to submit to polygraph tests after a list of Saddam Hussein's spies was discovered in the former dictator's briefcase. Military officials told the Post "several" Iraqis working as translators and low-level functionaries for the coalition and some who have been hired for the police are being given lie-detector tests this week on suspicion they are giving inside information to Baathist terrorist cells. Army counterintelligence officers are investigating whether Saddam's nest of spies inside the coalition may have helped set up unsuccessful assassination attempts on top civilian leader Paul Bremer and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the Post quoted military sources as sayng.Revenge attacks have apparently been increasing against former Baath Party officials and Iraqis seen as sympathizers of the old regime. The Post said Saturday that there have been at least 50 attacks in recent weeks in Baghdad alone on ex-senior party officials, and more on suspected Baath informants. Two people with close ties to the former regime have been slain in separate attacks in the past two days. On Saturday, bicycle riders opened fire on a former official of Saddam's party in the southern city of Najaf, critically injuring Damiyah Abbas and killing her 5-year-old son, police said. Friday night, police said attackers gunned down and killed Ali Qassem al-Tamimi, a middle-ranking district mayor, as he shopped in downtown Najaf -- one of the holiest cities for Shiite Muslims who comprise the majority of Iraq's 25 million people. Saddam's Baathist regime brutally repressed Shiites. On Wednesday, another Baath official was lynched by an angry crowd in Najaf.There were conflicting reports about a shooting in northeast Iraq. Local police said U.S. forces believed Iraqi policemen manning a checkpoint were bandits and mistakenly fired on them, killing three officers and wounding two. The policemen were on a road 55 miles south of Kirkuk, when U.S. troops opened fire around midnight Friday, said Lt. Salam Zangana of the Kirkuk police force. He said two other policemen were wounded. The U.S. military, however, said American troops on a night patrol killed three civilians who fired on them from a vehicle traveling with its lights out. Local police were caught in the crossfire and four were injured and evacuated to a U.S. medical facility, said Maj. Douglas Vincent of the U.S. Army's 173 Airborne Division.In Samarra, a town near Tikrit where rebel activity has been intense, U.S. forces destroyed a house suspected of being used by insurgents to shoot at passing military convoys. And residents in the western town of Rawah, near the Syrian border, said a large number of American soldiers had entered the town and were conducting house-to-house searches. In a pre-dawn raid Saturday, U.S. troops arrested a shopkeeper believed connected with a Tuesday bomb explosion that injured three American soldiers, a U.S. commander said. The raid on the man's home in Saddam's hometown of Tikrit came after troops on a routine patrol in the suburb of Qadisiyah discovered bombmaking material in his grocery shop Friday, the commander said.Spain's prime minister paid a four-hour surprise visit to 1,300 Spanish soldiers in the southern town of Diwaniyah on Saturday, in an affirmation of his support for the U.S.-led occupation. Jose Maria Aznar's trip was reminiscent of the one president Bush made to U.S. troops on Thanksgiving.Since Saddam Hussein's capture a week ago, the United States has continued raids on insurgents and several attacks on U.S. forces and Iraqi police have claimed more than a dozen lives in Baghdad and in predominantly Sunni Muslim areas west and north of the capital, in the triangle that formed Saddam's power base.
On Friday, the Pentagon announced that the number of American soldiers killed by hostile fire since President Bush declared an end to major combat on May 1 reached 200 this week. During the active phase of the war, 115 U.S. soldiers were killed in action.
Nevertheless, U.S. military officials said this week that there were fewer attacks on U.S.-led coalition forces over the past month while attacks on Iraqi civilians and security forces were increasing. Rebels have targeted Iraqis working with the U.S.-led occupation authorities.
Senior military officials in Washington said the Pentagon is sending an additional 2,000 troops to Iraq and extending the deployment of another unit.
The movements represent a minor adjustment to their plan for rotating fresh forces into Iraq next year. There now are roughly 123,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, and once the rotation is complete in May there are expected to be about 110,000.
Japan also said it was dispatching 1,000 troops on a humanitarian mission to southern Iraq - the country's first deployment to a conflict zone since World War II.