Unlike the enormous Republican Palace nearby, a warren of offices and reception rooms still topped by four gigantic busts of Saddam (wearing a medieval helmet, no less), the guest house was supposed to be relatively inconspicuous, private and discreetly impregnable.
In fact, the outside walls are still standing, but the interior is a shambles of broken masonry, shattered glass, collapsed ceilings and charred furnishings. Coalition bombs rained in here like the apocalypse, exploding against and sometimes through the thick concrete of the top two floors but never reaching the ground. The bunker itself finally busted open only when a bomb came in at a very precise angle from outside. Entirely flooded now, it reeks of septic decay.
You can’t know who was in the bunker when the bomb hit. The thick soot in the ventilation shafts suggests the blast burned out the interior of the 14-room underground redoubt. The main exit, a pavilion about 100 yards from the house, was bombed flat. The stinking black water that fills the bunker almost to the ceiling would obscure whatever DNA evidence might have been left inside. If there was anyone, his or her identity will remain another unsolvable mystery, like so much about this war.
I went to 305 Guest House because I question almost everything I was told by anyone on any side of this conflict in the months before the shooting started, and one of the articles I worked on was a story about Saddam’s bunkers, including this one. The sources were good and the information detailed. But there’s no substitute for seeing with your own eyes. Did 305 exist? Yes, it did. And the bunker? Yes. And did Saddam really live there? Now that I’ve been to the place, I don’t think so. At least, not recently.
This “palace,” though largely destroyed, was never extensively looted, so it has a kind of archeological value for after-action reporting you can’t find elsewhere. It’s also within the protected perimeter of the American administrative compound, where tanks, heavy machine guns and U.S. soldiers with fixed bayonets are ready to fend off (and sometimes kill) those locals who try to encroach. So 305 is oddly undisturbed. Even the American contractors living in a village of white double-wide mobile homes just outside 305’s arched gateway haven’t bothered to sift through the Saddamite detritus inside the house. A Coalition official suggests U.S. Special Forces went through it. But in most rooms, no footprints disturb the settled dust.
The same official says that Uday, the pathological elder son, was the family member who actually made this his home in recent years. Perhaps. Uday was left crippled and reportedly impotent after a 1996 assassination attempt, and some of his therapy might have been conducted in 305. A British friend and I, wandering through the rubble on the labyrinthine ground floor, came across Asian medicines and acupuncture needles, leg braces, walking casts, even an in-house dental clinic still smelling faintly of disinfectant, which probably was put there to serve the bucktoothed bad boy of Baghdad. In one of the private bedrooms on the second floor, someone has written in block letters on the wall: UDAY, SORRY WE MISSED YOU. STOPPED BY FOR A QUICK CHAT. CATCH YOU LATER. U.S."
The graffiti was scrawled in lipstick. The soldier who wrote it probably picked up a tube off the floor.
In fact, the upstairs rooms were women’s quarters, and there’s no evident sign that men–not Saddam, not Uday, nor any other–lived in them. But there is plenty of evidence that women did, and had for a long time: A Christie’s catalogue for a sale of precious gems, a hair clip and snood, with fake pearls on the bow. The walk-in closets are designed for ladies of means, although the racks built for hundreds of shoes and the satin-lined jewelry cases are empty now. In one room is a large pink velvet bedstead with a circular mirror; in another, a baroque sofa with every cushion methodically slashed by someone (those SF guys, I guess), searching for something.
This was not a harem, but it is easy to imagine the women’s quiet desperation amid this tawdry opulence. On the floor in one of the bedrooms, as if blown out of a dusty closet, are English-language magazines from a decade ago. The cover of a British Cosmopolitan promises THE USER’S GUIDE TO THE CLITORIS: GUARANTEED SEXUAL SATISFACTION AT THE TOUCH OF A BUTTON. There’s a Mills & Boon romance from England: “The Secret Admirer” (“It’s too late to run, Grace. It was too late the day we met”). There are also copies of NEWSWEEK International. One from July 5, 1993, carries a story headlined “STRIKING SADDAM: In a blow against terror and a bid to reassert his leadership, Bill Clinton orders a missile strike against Iraq.” My friend pulled a cassette tape out of the debris: Natalie Cole singing duets with her late father.
Who were the women who lived here? I imagine, but it’s just a hunch, that they were some of Uday’s sisters, Saddam’s daughters, perhaps even the two who were widowed in 1995 when Uday ordered their husbands killed for betraying Saddam.
Someday soon it may be possible to ask them. Over the weekend, Christina Lamb of the London Sunday Times reached a woman by phone who claimed to be 36-year-old Raghad, the eldest of Saddam’s widowed daughters. She and her sister Rana, the other daughter, are still living in Iraq, said the woman, but the use of satellite phones makes it impossible to know who’s really where. “I spend my days cooking typical Iraqi food, washing dishes, doing housework, laundry.” And although she hasn’t had any contact with her father since five days before the war, she believes he and her brothers are alive, the Sunday Times reported.
Raghad, described as speaking fluent English, told the Times she’s in “a simple house” at the moment, but she and her sister Rana are wondering where they’re going to live. Not Britain, she said, even though one of her in-laws is lobbying to have them admitted there. Perhaps the United Arab Emirates. “All I want,” she said, “is to be able to live peacefully and with no fear and nobody asking us any awkward questions.”
Sorry. It’s too late to run, Raghad. It was too late the day we met. And there are too many awkward questions still to be answered.
