TIKRIT, Dec 20: The Iraqi man who gave up Saddam Hussein to US forces last weekend was his top aide through eight months on the lam, a senior US military intelligence official told reporters.

“He was someone I would call his right arm,” said Major Stan Murphy, the head of intelligence for the Fourth Infantry Division’s First Brigade in Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit.

The major ruled out the possibility the informant, who is currently in detention, would receive any of the 25-million-dollar bounty on Saddam Hussein’s head.

“He is a bad man and should rot in jail,” he said.

The man, whose name the military will not reveal, was a longtime aide of Saddam Hussein and hailed from one of five major tribes in a 20-kilometre stretch around Tikrit that the former ruler relied on to elude the Americans after Baghdad fell last April.

“He was in the five families. There were members of the five families that were in the security forces, the army” and the government, Major Murphy said.

Since April, Saddam’s top lieutenant, along with four or five other Iraqis from the prominent Tikrit-area tribes, formed the inner circle that helped hide the ex-president, implement his orders to the resistance for attacks, finance the resistance and provide combatants with weaponry.

“He (Saddam) would give general guidance, hey I want to see more attacks, I want to see more of this. His enablers would then go out to their different tiers below them, give a little more specific guidance, maybe some money or weapons or something, and that tier would go out to the other tiers all the way down to the trigger puller,” Major Murphy said.

There were four to nine tiers of the resistance, he added.

But while the other enablers shared the burden of labour and their functions overlapped, the man who eventually informed on Saddam Hussein was the strongman’s most trusted confidante.

“In my mind, he was that important... to get the general guidance from Saddam and add specific details for everything,” the major said.

The middle-aged man, whose name or job in the former government Major Murphy refused to disclose, had started to serve Saddam in his late teens or early twenties and had risen to become one of Saddam’s most valued sidekicks.

He fit a stock profile of many of the men who served under Saddam Hussein. He was balding and heavily overweight, with an almost 50-inch waistline, and “loved women”, Murphy said.

Among other responsibilities, Saddam’s right hand man and the other three-to-four enablers supervised a two-man cell under them that was responsible for the logistics of moving Saddam around safehouses north and west of Baghdad where the fallen ruler counted tribal support, the US official said.

While the military has estimated Saddam had 20-30 safehouses, Major Murphy believes there very well could have been more. He also suspects Saddam moved far less frequently than what the US commanders have suggested was every four hours.

Saddam, who suffered from back problems, possibly spent a day to two days in any one place, and possibly as much time as a week or two weeks, depending on how secure he felt, Murphy suspects.

Generally, Saddam travelled with a small group of aides who drove and cooked for him that came from a pool of about 20-25 people, again that hailed from the five families based around Tikrit, Major Murphy said.

He also probably travelled in the common orange and white Passat Toyota taxis that dot the Iraqi countryside. But Saddam’s enablers did not travel with him and it is not even sure how often they met, with some of their exchanges coming through human messengers.

However, although he had been considered important since July, the Americans did not realise how crucial the lieutenant was until the end of November when information started to flood in about his involvement in all kinds of resistance activities.

“We had him as a key player, but I did not have him templated in the position he ended up being... We did not have him as the right arm,” Major Murphy said.

The aide, along with all but one of Saddam’s four or five most trusted aides, did not even appear on the US government’s black list of the top 200 most wanted from Saddam’s government. All but one of them is now in jail.

A huge break in the case came with the arrest of several of Saddam’s top enablers in September and October. Coupled with a rush of intelligence at the end of November, a no-holds barred search began for the individual who would betray Saddam Hussein.

After escaping three raids the first week of this month in Tikrit, Samarra and Baiji, he was captured in Baghdad on Dec 12 where he was most likely plotting more attacks on the coalition, Major Murphy said

The man was then brought to Tikrit where, under interrogation, he confessed Saddam was hiding at one of two locations in Ad Dawr, a small farming community down the road from Tikrit.

As US special forces searched the palm groves around two farms, Saddam’s most trusted aide pointed to the secret underground room where the former Iraqi president was hiding, the major said. —AFP