Saddam stayed near home as fugitive

ADWAR, Iraq — Before his capture in a coffinlike bunker in this desolate Tigris River town, Saddam Hussein spent months moving furtively among 20 or 30 nondescript safe houses in the Sunni Muslim heartland, where a tight-knit network of family and clan sheltered him and brought him news from across American-dominated Iraq, American military officials say.

In turn, he 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, according to American officers involved who led the painstaking intelligence efforts that culminated in the raid that captured Saddam.

To avoid detection, the 66-year-old Saddam 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.

Accustomed to mosaic-domed palaces, he let his hair and beard grow, survived on chocolate bars, honey and canned fruit and shed the uniforms and Italian-tailored suits he favored in Baghdad for traditional Iraqi dress, a dishdasha robe and a checkered headdress.

In an ironic twist, he came back, in the end, to a place he wove into his political legend: the site on the Tigris where, in October 1959, as a 22-year-old fleeing Baghdad and his part in the failed assassination of the Iraqi military ruler, Abdul Karim Kassem, he claimed to have swum the river to escape pursuing troops.

The farmhouse where he was seized last Saturday lies a few hundred yards from the riverbank where he came each year to mark the anniversary with a choreographed swim.

Before two of Saddam's sons, Odai and Qusai, merciless enforcers of his terror in the years of power, were killed by American forces in a shootout in the northern city of Mosul on July 22, American intelligence officers say, they met their father periodically at the safe houses, plotting stratagems before separating to avoid standing out.

Their deaths further isolated Saddam from the top officials of his government, many of whom were being hunted down from an American most wanted list of 55 men, some of them offering tantalizing clues as to where Saddam might be tracked down.

Lt. Col. Todd Megill, intelligence officer for the 4th Infantry Division at

Tikrit, which carried out the raid that seized Saddam outside the nearby town of Adwar on Dec. 13, said meetings among the three would have been an operational necessity, as well as a family comfort.