STORM2K

MSNBC - It was a bold move: speed the battle plan with a risky strike. But Team Bush had a man on the inside. Behind the ‘target of opportunity,’ and what it means for the road to Baghdad

By Evan Thomas and Daniel Klaidman NEWSWEEK

March 31 issue — He was the ultimate spy who came in from the cold. For months, the CIA and U.S. Special Forces had been working on the extraordinarily difficult and dangerous job of trying to penetrate Saddam Hussein’s inner circle.
ACCORDING TO A knowledgeable intelligence source, Delta Force, the supersecret commando group, had managed to tap Saddam’s underground phone lines in Baghdad. But the real break came when the CIA managed to recruit an asset, a senior Iraqi official in a position to know Saddam’s greatest vulnerability: where he sleeps each night.
Saddam, who had stayed alive and in power for more than three decades by never sleeping in one place for long, had to trust at least a few bodyguards. He made the rare mistake of relying on one henchman who was more afraid of the United States than he was of Saddam Hussein.

SINGING TO THE AMERICANS

The Iraqi official “weighed the balance of fear,” says a senior administration official, who described the highly secret operation to NEWSWEEK. The man measured the risk that Saddam would suspect his betrayal versus the mortal certainty that the American military was coming to wipe out the Iraqi strongman and his closest followers. The Iraqi turncoat began to sing to the Americans. He told his intelligence handlers that on the night of March 19, Saddam, probably accompanied by his demonic sons Uday and Qusay, was sleeping in a bunker beneath a nondescript house in a residential area of Baghdad.