Samira Shahbander was being tailed by Mossad / File
Posted on 12/16/2003 4:19:50 PM PST by yankeedame
Saddam betrayed by his wife
By Gordon Thomas in London
December 17, 2003
SADDAM Hussein was captured in a filthy underground hole because of the demands of the one woman he still trusted.
Samira Shahbander was being tailed by Mossad / File
She is Samira Shahbander, the second of his four wives.
And now she may receive part of, if not all, of the $US25million ($33.8 million) bounty the US Government promised for information that led to the capture of the Iraqi dictator.
Israeli intelligence agency Mossad had been tailing her since she fled to Beirut, Lebanon, before the US invasion.
In a tapped phone call last Thursday she arranged to meet the former dictator that weekend after demanding cash.
But the meeting was cancelled at the last minute - perhaps because Saddam was beginning to feel the heat that US forces were closing in. Late last Friday, US soldiers captured an Iraqi fugitive they had been hunting since July - who is believed to have given them the former dictator's exact location - a farm at Ad Dawr, about 15km from Tikrit, his ancestral home and where he was caught late Saturday.
Last March, with the coalition forces closing in, Saddam arranged for Samira and their son Ali to flee to Lebanon.
With her she took $US5 million in cash and a trunk of gold bars from the vaults of the Central Bank of Iraq.
Beirut villa
She told friends she was going first to France and then to Moscow - that Saddam had been secretly promised by Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, to give her sanctuary.
Instead, she went to a pre-arranged hideout - a villa - in the Beirut suburbs.
It was there that the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad discovered her. Mier Dagan, the head of Mossad, sent a team of surveillance specialists from the service yaholomin to bug Samira's every move.
The Israeli team noted that Samira - who may have also been colluding with US intelligence agencies without Mossad's knowledge - had transferred most of her money out of Lebanon to a Credit Suisse bank account in Geneva.
A month ago, Samira cashed in her gold bars for US dollars with a Beirut money dealer. Then she started to call Saddam.
Supported by Israeli Air Force surveillance aircraft, the yaholomin tracked the calls close to the Syrian border.
"The calls were affectionate. It was clear there was a close relationship still between them," said a high-ranking Mossad source in Tel Aviv after Saddam had been captured on Saturday night.
But behind the endearments, the listeners heard that Samira wanted more money.
Time and again, in further calls - each made to a different number, the yaholomin team pinpointed as going to an area in the desolate sands of the Wadi al Myrah inside the Syrian border with Iraq - Samira repeated her request for money.
Expensive tastes
Samira, the daughter of a wealthy aristocratic Baghdad family, had never lost her taste for the good life.
During their marriage, Saddam showered her with gifts, including two palaces.
The marriage was cemented by the birth of Ali. The child's arrival deepened the hatred of Saddam's elder son's, Uday and Qusay, towards Samira.
On the day they died, the Mossad eavesdroppers heard Samira laugh for the first time.
The Israelis knew that across the border in Iraq, a secret US special forces intelligence unit was roaming up and down the border looking for Saddam.
Other Israeli agents inside the Syrian side of the border had heard radio chatter between the unit - known as US Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force 121 - as they set about trying to track down Saddam.
The force was made up from Delta Force; the US Rangers; Britain's SAS and Special Boat Service; and the Australian SAS.
"For political reasons, we had not been formally invited to join the party," said a source close to Meir Dagan.
Mossad - not for the first time - decided to keep to itself the information it was gleaning for the surveillance of Samira.
But on Thursday, December 11, that changed. The yaholomin team picked up a conversation between Samira and the man they were now certain was Saddam.
He told her he would meet her close to the Syrian border.
Details of the meeting were enough to have the Israelis finally alert Washington.
Then, as Samira prepared to drive to her assignation, she received a second call. The meeting had been cancelled. The call did not come from Saddam.
By then, he may well have been inside his bolt hole on the outskirts of Tikrit.
Samira and Ali heard the news of his capture on the radio. She burst into tears. Ali's reaction is not known.
The fugitive, who led to Saddam's exact location, - has not been identified - and it is not known whether he will share in any of the reward money.
Within hours of being caught late last Friday, he cracked and told his interrogators where Saddam might be hiding.
Meanwhile, in his first address to the world media following Saddam's capture President George W. Bush said the world was a better place without Saddam.
Plus the report from a few days ago that Saddam's wife in France has been in contact with him via phone....hell, she may be the one who gave him up!
Good old Pooty Poot! Wonder if that's true?
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