Where's Saddam? Mystery deepens

By Dana Priest and Walter Pincus
Washington Post

When U.S. troops, rifles drawn, burst into a headquarters of Iraq's much-feared intelligence service in Baghdad this week, their mission was to seize thousands of files documenting the nation's foreign spy network, its secret weapons purchases, its executions of civilians and the location of chemical and biological weapons.

They found nothing.

The safes, shelves and locked rooms of the Mukharabat headquarters were empty, meticulously and "professionally" cleaned out in what U.S. intelligence officials now say they suspect was part of an escape planned by many of Iraq's top security, military and political leaders.

As U.S. troops yesterday began creeping around the dark, seemingly endless tunnels beneath Baghdad as part of an intensified effort to find deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and his senior officials, the mystery of their whereabouts only deepened. To aid in the manhunt, the U.S. military gave soldiers in Iraq decks of playing cards bearing the photographs of Saddam and 54 other of the most sought-after members of his regime.

This week's best guess — that Saddam's inner circle may have fled to his hometown of Tikrit to prepare for a bloody last stand — seemed to evaporate yesterday as images from U.S. Air Force unmanned drones showed Saddam loyalists abandoning their posts there. U.S. warplanes have bombarded the town since the war began, significantly weakening combat units and destroying underground bunkers, defense and intelligence officials said.

By the end of the day yesterday, Syria was left as the most likely escape route for Saddam and his top advisers. U.S. military commanders stepped up reconnaissance and unmanned surveillance flights along the 375-mile border between Iraq and Syria, a traditional smuggling route, and moved more troops to the area.

President Bush warned Syria against providing sanctuary for the Iraqi leadership. U.S. intelligence officials said that some leaders' family members had headed west to Syria before the war began and that others had continued to try to escape there.

Syrian spokesman Imad Moustapha said the U.S. allegations against his country were "a fabrication." Syria closed its borders with Iraq shortly before the war began, he said. "This is an unfair campaign," Moustapha said. "We don't even have an ambassador to Iraq. How would we know what's going on there?"

A senior U.S. military official, on the other hand, said that one of Iraq's top nuclear scientists had taken refuge in Syria.

On the question of whether Saddam was alive, one senior administration official said the informal "dead or alive" needle had "inched more in the dead direction" yesterday as communication intercepts picked up discussion about Saddam's death from people "who ought to be in the position to know."

"They were telling each other they think he's dead," the official said. But "we don't know if they really know or not, or if they are trying to fool us."

CIA and military intelligence analysts have been wading through a mass of documents, intercepts, imagery and reports from Iraqis in an effort to determine where Saddam and almost his entire retinue of top civilian and military leaders have gone.

"There's a wide array of sources that provide us information," Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks told reporters yesterday at U.S. Central Command headquarters in Qatar. He said allied forces were trying to prevent Iraqi officials from leaving "by air, by smuggling (and) by movement in vehicles," but "it is very difficult to be able to cast the net over all of Iraq and prevent any movement at all."

"We can't be everywhere in the country, and there will be no shoulder-to-shoulder, arm-in-arm type of fence that goes around all of Iraq," he said.

The Army's top intelligence officer, Lt. Gen. Robert Noonan, said yesterday on NBC's "Today" program that the search of tunnels under Baghdad was proceeding carefully because of concern about booby traps. In addition, he said, the tunnels — built, "we strongly believe, to hide things" — may also house chemical or biological agents or weapons.