Today in Manhunting History -- March 19, 2003: The Dora Farms Mission

After months of steady military buildup in the Persian Gulf region and Sisyphean diplomacy at the United Nations, on March 17, 2003, President George W. Bush announced that Saddam could avoid war under one condition: if he and his sons left Iraq within 48 hours. Speaking from the White House following a meeting abroad with allied leaders, Bush declared: “The decades of deceit and cruelty have now reached an end,” and that if Saddam and his sons did not accept this final offer, their refusal “will result in military conflict.” The intricately planned military timetable for “D-Day” – which involved commando raids, the beginning of the “Shock and Awe” air strikes, and the ground invasion led by the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force and the Army’s V Corps – was synchronized with the expiration of President Bush’s deadline.

The next day on March 18, however, a CIA source learned of a possible meeting that night at Dora Farms, an estate owned by Saddam’s wife southeast of Baghdad on the bank of the Tigris River. Although it was unclear who would be present, indications were that Saddam’s sons Uday and Qusay, and perhaps the entire family, might be planning a meeting there to discuss what to do if the Coalition invaded. “At that point,” CIA Director George Tenet recalled, “we ordered U.S. overhead reconnaissance to examine the site closely. What we saw was a large contingent of security vehicles, precisely the kinds that would typically precede and accompany Saddam’s movements, hidden under trees at the farm.” Sometime after 12:30 PM (8:30PM Baghdad time) the CIA’s source on the scene reported Uday and Qusay were definitely at the farm, that he had actually seen Saddam, and that the dictator would be returning to spend the night with his sons sometime between 3-3:30 AM Baghdad time. Tenet told the President’s war cabinet: “It’s as good as it gets. I can’t give you 100 percent assurance, but this is as good as it gets.”

Given CENTCOM’s elaborate plan of attack, attempting to strike Dora Farms posed a significant risk. If Saddam was not present, the United States would be telegraphing that a major air and ground attack was forthcoming, thereby forfeiting strategic surprise. Yet when President Bush met with his war cabinet that afternoon, all of Bush’s advisors recommended the strike, with Secretary of State Colin Powell saying: “If we’ve got a chance to decapitate them, it’s worth it.” 

The latest information indicated that while at Dora Farms Saddam would be staying in a manzul, an Arabic word that could be translated either as “place of refuge” or “basement/bunker.” If there were a bunker at Dora Farms, cruise missiles would not be able to take it out. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Meyers called CENTCOM commander General Tommy Franks on a secure phone. Could a stealth fighter be loaded with EGBU-27 bunker busting bombs in time for the attack? 

“Absolutely not,” Franks replied. “We don’t have the F-117 ready to go.” Franks checked further, however, and learned that the Air Force been following the intelligence and had prepared the planes at Al Udeid airbase in Qatar. Franks sent word to the White House that an attack would indeed be possible.

There was one important tactical problem, however. To execute the mission the F-117s would have to fly into the heart of Iraq’s air defenses, which surrounded the capital with surface-to-air missile sites and antiaircraft artillery. Although F-117s are virtually invisible to radar and ground observers while flying at night at high altitude, in daylight they become relatively slow, defenseless targets. According to the weather and light data, first twilight – when aircraft become visible from the ground – would be at 5:39 AM. 

General Meyers called again, asking how long the President had to make a final decision on the attack. “Tom, I need your drop-dead, no-shit decision time.”

In order to get the planes in and out of Iraqi airspace before dawn, Franks said, “Time on target must be no later than 0530 Iraq time, Dick, with takeoff from Al Udeid no later than 0330. . . . I need the President’s decision by 0315, so the jets can start engines and taxi.”

It was already 2:27 AM.

Time passed slowly in CENTCOM’s headquarters. At 2:59 AM Franks received word that the aircraft were armed, and the pilots were briefed and sitting on the runway in their planes.

Finally, at 3:12 AM, the phone rang. “The mission is a go, Tom,” General Meyers said. “Please execute.”

At 3:38 Qatari time, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Toomey and Major Mark Hoehn were airborne, flying north towards Baghdad in a race with the dawn. An hour later, 45 Tomahawk land attack missiles (TLAMs) were fired from surface vessels and submarines in the North Arabian Gulf. Each TLAM carried a 1,000-pound warhead, and once launched was impossible to recall. 

The campaign to kill Saddam Hussein was under way.

As Toomey and Hoehn neared Baghdad, the GPS on one of Toomey’s bombs went dead. The EGBU-27’s had never been used in combat, and had only arrived in Qatar the day before the mission. So Toomey, a combat veteran and the squadron’s director of operations, literally pulled out the instruction manual, rebooted the computerized guidance system, and hoped for the best. As Toomey and Hoehn approached Dora Farms along oval flight paths from the east and west, the sun was almost above the horizon. Clouds shielded them from ground observation, but also hid the target complex. At the last moment, however, the pilots found a break in the clouds that gave them six seconds to visually identify the targets and drop the bombs at 5:36 AM Baghdad time.

Although Toomey and Hoehn could not know if they had gotten Saddam, reconnaissance photos showed all four bombs hit their target squarely. When the first intelligence reports from the scene started coming in, the CIA’s source reported that someone who looked to be Saddam was pulled from the rubble, looking blue and receiving oxygen. He had been put on a stretcher and loaded into the back of an ambulance, which did not move for half an hour before leaving the complex. Around 4:30 AM Tenet called the White House Situation Room and told the duty officer: “Tell the President we got the son of a bitch!”

Several hours later, however, Saddam appeared on Iraqi television. He was wearing an army uniform, a beret, and glasses. For seven minutes he read from a notepad, denouncing the American attack. It was not clear to U.S. analysts whether the address was live or taped, whether it was Saddam or a body double.

The remains of Saddam's alleged bunker at Dora Farms.

Today in Manhunting History -- December 14, 2003: "Ladies and Gentlemen, We Got Him!"

[Note: I really, really, really wanted to post the video of this, but apparently lack either the correct program or simply the IT acumen to save and post either the C-Span video of the press conference, or the simple YouTube capture of the announcement.  Someday . . .]

The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA)’s conference center was packed tightly on Sunday, December 14, 2003, as the three men walked to the podium. Adnan Pachachi, the silver-haired patrician serving as President of the Iraqi Governing Council, led the way. He was followed by Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, the handsome statesman in charge of America’s struggling effort to reconstruct Iraq. Following the two diplomats was Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the dour commander of Coalitions forces in Iraq. When they reached the massive podium emblazoned with the CPA’s seal, they turned to face the crowd of western, Iraqi, and regional Arab reporters who filled every seat. A tangible electricity was in the air when Bremer approached the microphone at 3:15 PM Baghdad time.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, pausing briefly, “We got him!”

Bremer did not have to even say a name for the assembled throng to know to whom he was referring. Instantly, Iraqi reporters sprang to their feet and began cheering wildly, forcing Bremer to wait half-a-minute for the emotional outburst subsided before resuming his remarks. Later, when LTG Sanchez showed video of the haggard looking fugitive undergoing a medical exam, there were again shouts, cries, and weeping from the Iraqis in the audience. Several Iraqi reporters cast aside any semblance of objectivity and vented the emotions suppressed during 35 years of tyranny, shouting: “Death to Saddam! Down with Saddam!”

Outside the heavily fortified International Zone, Baghdad erupted in joy. People took to the streets, many in tears and holding tattered pictures of family members killed during Iraq’s reign of terror. The normally reserved Iraqi judges and lawyers studying the Iraqi High Tribunal statute – under which the dictator would eventually be tried – “dissolved in a frenzy of joy and palpable relief as Iraqis literally jumped and hugged and cried on each other’s shoulders. It was a scene of joyful pandemonium.” Celebratory gunfire was audible throughout the Iraqi capital, and continued to crackle throughout the night.

For a brief period of time, U.S. forces and the Iraqi people once again were united in joy and a sense of deliverance. For the first time since the early days of the occupation of Iraq, American flags appeared on the streets of Baghdad. Moreover, in the weeks following Saddam’s capture, U.S. forces obtained the best intelligence they had seen in months. Along with the money and guns, Task Force 121 found a briefcase with Saddam that contained a letter from a Baghdad insurgent leader. Contained in the message were the minutes from a meeting of a number of resistance leaders who came together in the capital. These documents provided targets for further raids in the ensuing days, and within a week these raids had netted over 200 wanted personnel. Knowing Saddam was in U.S. custody, some detainees who had previously withheld information about insurgent networks began talking. At one point some 500 insurgents petitioned for amnesty, and cell leaders put out feelers for surrender.

Consequently, in the four weeks after Saddam’s capture, attacks against Coalition forces in Iraq dropped 22 percent. After suffering 83 deaths in November 2003, U.S. forces reported fewer than half that number – 38 – in December. Major General Ray Odierno, who saw attacks against his 4th ID soldiers drop from 22/day to 6/day, told the media in January 2004 that loyalists of the former regime “have been brought to their knees.” LTG Sanchez was even more optimistic, saying: “I expect that the detention of Saddam Hussein will be regarded as the beginning of reconciliation for the people of Iraq and as a sign of Iraq’s rebirth.”

Other U.S. officials were more restrained in their assessments than Sanchez. In his address marking Saddam’s capture, President Bush congratulated U.S. forces, but warned: “The capture of Saddam Hussein does not mean the end of violence in Iraq. We still face terrorists who would rather go on killing the innocent than accept the rise of liberty in Iraq.” On December 17, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) concluded: “Saddam’s capture will have little impact on foreign terrorist operational planning in Iraq. Sunni extremist groups are fighting against the U.S.-led occupation, not to restore the Hussein regime to power. Saddam’s capture will have little impact on their motivation and operational capacity.”

Events would unfortunately prove President Bush and the DIA to be more prescient than LTG Sanchez.

Today in Manhunting History -- December 13, 2003: The Capture of Saddam Hussein

At 10:50 AM, December 13, Colonel James Hickey – commander of 1st BCT 4ID – received a call notifying him that Task Force 121 had Muhammad Ibrahim al-Musslit in custody, and requesting he prepare a covering force for a seizure mission that night. After four hours of grueling interrogation, Muhammad Ibrahim had finally revealed two likely locations for Saddam: a house and a farm in the town of Ad Dawr, a Ba’athist stronghold about 15 kilometers southeast of Tikrit. Hickey, certain that this time they would capture Saddam, assembled a 600-plus strong force mounted in 25 M2/M3 Bradley fighting vehicles and 30 HMMWVs to support the two dozen special operators of Task Force 121. The mission was codenamed “Operation Red Dawn,” and the two objectives were labeled “Wolverine One” and “Wolverine Two.” These names were fortuitous if somewhat coincidental. The operations staff for the “Raider” Brigade was in the habit of naming each day’s operations after the movies they had watched the night before. Had they viewed “When Harry Met Sally” or “The Wedding Planner” the previous night, it is possible the names for the operation would have evoked less martial images than those inspired by the 1980s movie about teenage guerrillas resisting a Soviet invasion of the United States.

Saddam Hussein before the March-December 2003 strategic manhunt

At 6PM Hickey’s force moved out of the brigade base at Camp Raider, a former palace built on a bluff overlooking the Tigris south of Tikrit. The night was cold and crisp as the covering force moved out to an assembly area at an old granary north of Ad Dawr, while engineers secured the west bank of the Tigris several hundred meters away. The force then moved quietly into position to block any escape and reinforcement routes and stand ready to reinforce Task Force 121 in case of heavy resistance. At 8PM, the special operators – identifiable by their black uniforms and NVGs – fast-roped onto the objectives from hovering helicopters.

The beam of red-lensed Maglite flashlights and laser sights on rifles sweeping across the ground contrasted with the clear night sky over Ad Dawr. Task Force 121 searched the two objectives, but they appeared to be empty of any targets. The team leaders conferred and talked with Muhammad Ibrahim, who had been flown from Baghdad to Tikrit, and then brought to the farm by the special operations team. Al-Muslit suggested another nearby location, northwest of Wolverine Two, where a ramshackle shack stood. There was an animal stench in the air, mingled with the scent of some nearby fruit trees. The operators burst into the structure, which indeed had been an orange-picker’s hut, and seized two men. One was Saddam’s cook, the other was the cook’s brother and owner of the farm, Qies Niemic Jasim, a former bodyguard. The operators found two AK-47s and $750,000, but Saddam was not there.

U.S. forces appeared to have struck another “dry hole” in the search for Saddam.

Picture from On Point II, as available at GlobalSecurity.org.

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To the support and command elements following the operation’s progress via radio, the code words used suggested the operators were fruitlessly going back over the same ground, desperately searching for any signs leading to their quarry.

Then a call went over the command net: “We have Jackpot.”

The Joint Operations Center operations officer coordinating the mission asked for clarification, and an excited operator replied: “We’ve got Jackpot.”

A voice that had never been heard before on the Task Forces’ countless missions came on the radio. Admiral William McRaven, Task Force 121’s commander and a living legend within the Special Operations Forces community, asked: “Do you mean Big Jackpot?”

“Yes, we have Big Jackpot.”

Picture from On Point II, as available at GlobalSecurity.org

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Minutes earlier, Muhammad Ibrahim had yelled at Qies Niemic Jasim in Arabic to show the operators where Saddam was hiding. The Fat Man apparently knew the exact spot, but wanted to be able to say that it was Qies who had betrayed Saddam. Finally, he realized it was going to be up to him, and moved to an area a few meters away from where the U.S. forces were concentrated. He began kicking the ground until he had uncovered a length of rope. The operators noticed Muhammad Ibrahim’s activities, and dug up the rope to reveal a trapdoor. The door was opened to reveal the entrance shaft to a “spider hole,” about six feet deep.

A sergeant shone a flashlight down the shaft. I think there’s something down there, an operator said, as another took the pin out of his grenade.

Then someone shouted, “Movement! We have something coming up.”

The operators held their fire when they saw the upraised hands of a dirty, bearded man with unkempt gray hair, appear. Although armed with a 9mm Markarov pistol, he put up no resistance as the soldiers grabbed him and yanked him out of the hole. As he was deposited on the ground, what looked like a vagrant said in halting English: “I am Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq. I am willing to negotiate.”

“President Bush sends his regards,” the operators replied.


Task Force 121's interpreter, an exiled Iraqi-American named Samir,
posing with the captured tyrant just outside his spiderhole in Ad Dawr.

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At 8:26PM, December 13, the hunt for Saddam Hussein came to a successful conclusion. Saddam was captured on the same farm where he had taken refuge in 1959 when, as a young hit man for the Ba’ath party, he had been part of a failed assassination attempt on Iraqi President Abdul Kareem Qassem, an episode that served as the founding myth to the dictator’s legend. The Arab scholar Fouad Ajami observed, great evil

never quite lives up to our expectations. The image of Saddam Hussein in captivity was true to Arendt’s theme. The haggard, disoriented man at the bottom of the ‘spider hole’ was the very same man who had inflicted unspeakable sorrow on his people, and on the peoples of two neighboring lands. The discovery of the smallness of the men behind the most terrible of deeds is always an affront: if Eichmann was only a clerk, Saddam was only a thug.

In the end, the tyrant who had terrified millions and buried hundreds of thousands of his own citizens in mass graves; who had urged his countrymen to violently resist U.S. forces and bragged about going down in a blaze of glory and defiance was captured without a shot being fired.

Today in Manhunting History -- September 6, 2003: The Arrest of Nasir al-Muslit

In the late summer and fall of 2003, the specter of the missing Saddam Hussein continued to have a damaging effect on Iraqi morale and reconstruction. From hiding, Saddam had issued at least five audio recordings calling upon Iraqis to attack Coalition forces. At the same time, the level of violence in Iraq rose dramatically. Nearly one soldier per day was being killed by hostile action, and in August alone car bombs had destroyed the Jordanian embassy and UN Headquarters in Baghdad, and killed more than 200 Shi’a worshippers at the sacred Imam Ali mosque in Najaf. General Sanchez deemed killing the fugitive Iraqi leader to be critical, as it would “relieve the people of Iraq of the fear of his return.”

Meanwhile, in one of Saddam’s ornate palaces along the Tigris in Tikrit, Task Force 20’s intelligence analysts were conducting social network analysis of top- and mid-level Ba’athist activists functional and tribal ties to the fugitive tyrant. (The 4th Infantry Division was independently conducting a similar analysis). When interrogation specialist, Staff Sergeant Eric Maddox joined the secretive unit in July, an interpreter showed him a list of all the former bodyguards who lived in the area, as well as their kin. On September 6, the Iraqi police arrested a former bodyguard named Nasir Yasim Omar al-Muslit, one of 40 al-Muslits on Maddox’s list. Under questioning, Nasir eventually provided Maddox with the blueprint to the operation of Saddam’s bodyguards. Whereas Maddox had been working off a list of 200 bodyguards of uncertain importance, Nasir gave him the key to the inner circle of 32 Hamaya, the individuals most trusted by Saddam.

SSG Eric Maddox

Today in Manhunting History -- June 16, 2003: Saddam's Shadow Captured

As the nascent insurgency coalesced in increasing attacks against coalition forces and Iraqi civilians in the summer of 2003, graffiti praising Saddam began to emerge in Iraq’s Sunni Triangle, bearing messages such as “Saddam is still our leader” and “Saddam the hero will be back.” CENTCOM commander General John Abizaid acknowledged: “It’s important even to know if he’s alive or dead; and if he’s alive, it’s important either to capture or kill him.” Ambassador Jerry Bremer agreed: “It is important to kill Saddam or capture him because his continued uncertain state has allowed people to play on that uncertainty and make the argument that, in some fashion, the Ba’athists would come back.” This sentiment was perhaps best expressed by an old Bedouin near Tikrit, who warned soldiers of the 4th Infantry Division that “Unless you catch Saddam and show his head to the people, they won’t believe he is gone. This will not end.”

An apparent breakthrough in the hunt for Saddam occurred on June 16, when U.S. forces captured Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti. Al-Tikriti, sometimes called “Saddam’s Shadow,” was the dictator’s personal secretary, and as the ace of diamonds on the deck of cards, the fourth-most wanted man in Iraq behind Saddam and his sons. Although the Associated Press declared “Captured Iraqi May Know Fate of Saddam,” al-Tikriti told interrogators he and Saddam’s sons had separated from the dictator in April after Saddam became convinced they could survive longer apart.

"Saddam's Shadow" captured June 16, 2003