After months of recovering from an attempt on his life that put eight bullets in his left side, Uday Hussein, the eldest son of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, was ready to party. At his first outing in 1998, at the posh Jadriyah Equestrian Club, he used high-powered binoculars to survey the crowd of friends and family from a platform high above the guests. He saw something he liked, recalls his former aide Adib Shabaan, who helped arrange the party. Uday tightened the focus on a pretty 14-year-old girl in a bright yellow dress sitting with her father, a former provincial governor, her mother and her younger brother and sister.
Uday's bodyguards picked up the signal and walked through the darkened room, flicking cigarette lighters as they approached the girl's table. Uday, then 33, flipped on his too, confirming they had identified the right one. When the girl left the table for the powder room, Uday's bodyguards approached her with a choice, says Shabaan, who was Uday's business manager. She could ascend the platform now and congratulate Uday on his recovery, or she could call him on his private phone that night. Flustered, she apologized and said her parents would allow neither. One of the guards replied, "This is the chance of your life" and promised she would receive diamonds and a car. "All you have to do is go up there for 10 minutes," he urged. When she demurred again, the bodyguards pursued Uday's backup plan. They maneuvered the girl in the direction of the parking lot, picked her up and carried her to the backseat of Uday's car, covering her mouth to muffle her screams.
After three days the girl was returned to her home, with a new dress, a new watch and a large sum of cash. Her parents had her tested for rape; the result was positive. According to Shabaan's account, Uday heard she had been tested and sent aides to the clinic, where they warned doctors not to report a rape. Furious, the father demanded to see Saddam himself. Rebuffed, he kept complaining publicly about what Uday had done. After three months, the President's son had had enough. He sent two guards to the man to insist that he drop the matter. Uday had another demand: that the ex-governor bring his daughter and her 12-year-old sister to his next party. "Your daughters will be my girlfriends, or I'll wipe you off the face of the earth." The man complied, surrendering both girls.
It has long been known in Iraq and beyond that as venal and vicious as Saddam Hussein was, Uday was worse. Now that the regime has fallen, the quotidian details of the son's outrages are beginning to emerge. With Iraqis free to speak more openly, it has become clear that the malignancy of Uday's behavior actually exceeded that of his reputation. At the same time, new hints are emerging about his psychological state. Uday, now 38, suffered not only from the anguish of Saddam's disapproval—the son was too unprincipled even for his father—but also often from physical pain as a result of the 1996 attempt on his life. TIME has obtained a three-page medical report that lays out the until now undisclosed gravity of Uday's injuries, which nearly killed him and resulted in a stroke, brain damage and seizures in addition to the wounds to his torso and left leg. Uday displayed a compulsion to control the tiniest of details in his life, perhaps with the hope that he could stave off the situation in which he finds himself today. According to both a family servant and another source familiar with communications from Uday, despite two U.S. attempts during the war to kill Saddam as well as Uday and his younger brother Qusay, all three survived. Even now, says this other source, Uday, from a hideout near Baghdad, has reached out to the U.S., hoping to strike a deal for his safe surrender. A relative, says the source, has approached an intermediary asking, "What are the chances of working out something? Can he get some kind of immunity?" The U.S., naturally, has no intention of pardoning a man with Uday's record. The first son of Saddam Hussein seems to be the last to know he is irredeemable.
To get a closer look at the brothers Hussein, TIME interviewed dozens of sources with knowledge of the two men—butlers, maids, business associates, bodyguards, secretaries, colleagues and friends, most of whom insisted on anonymity for fear the Husseins are somehow still capable of taking revenge. We visited the sons' homes and sifted through raw material, including scores of documents, photographs, videotapes and recordings of phone taps. Here's what we found: As the first-born son, generally an unassailable position in an Arab family, Uday was seen as his father's natural heir. But he lost that status when his brutal tendencies directly touched his father. In 1988 Uday clubbed to death Saddam's favorite food taster, bodyguard Kamel Hanna Jajjo, because the man had introduced Saddam to the woman who would eventually become the President's second wife. Furious, Saddam had Uday jailed for 40 days and beaten after he struck a prison guard. The jailing fueled Uday's anger. "Your man is going to kill me," he wrote his mother, according to a copy of the letter obtained by TIME. He demanded that she find someone who can "release me from this torture." Uday said he had not been given anything but water for eight days and had spent four days in iron handcuffs. "I will either die, or I will go crazy," he wrote.
Qusay had been working for his father in small jobs in internal security when his big break came. Iraq's Shi'ite Muslims, who make up a majority in the country but have long been repressed by the minority Sunnis, revolted against the regime in dozens of cities when Gulf War I ended. Saddam gave Qusay broad authority to oversee the crushing of the uprising. He did not entirely delegate the task. An eyewitness recalls watching Qusay, dressed in gray trousers and a blue jacket, arrive in Suera, where armed guards herded 300 Shi'ite detainees onto a field. The President's son, dangling a pistol in his right hand, walked up to the men and shot four of them in the head, according to a military officer at the scene. As he pulled the trigger, Qusay screamed out, "Bad people! Dirty criminals!" Qusay then ordered the execution of the remaining prisoners, got into his car and drove back to Baghdad. It was just one of many Shi'ite exterminations that Qusay ordered or personally performed in 1991, the ex-officer told TIME. The same source, one of Qusay's security commanders, said Qusay, for example, directed the execution of 15 families in Saddam City, a Shi'ite enclave in Baghdad.
Uday demonstrated an insatiable sexual appetite. Five nights a week, some two dozen girls, all of them referred to him by his friends, were taken to the posh Baghdad Boat Club on the bank of the Tigris to meet Uday, close associates of his confirm. After drinks, music and dancing, the young women would be lined up like beauty queens for Uday's approval, and all but one or two would be dismissed. Those who stayed would join Uday in his bedroom at the club and leave with a gift of 250,000 dinars ($125), gold jewelry or sheer lingerie. "He never slept with a girl more than three times," says a former butler. "He was very picky." Uday took two days a week off from girls. He called it "fasting," his close associates say.
A chef at Baghdad's exclusive Hunting Club recalls a wedding party that Uday crashed in the late 1990s. After Uday left the hall, the bride, a beautiful woman from a prominent family, went missing. "The bodyguards closed all the doors, didn't let anybody out," the chef remembers. "Women were yelling and crying, 'What happened to her?'" The groom knew. "He took a pistol and shot himself," says the chef, placing his forefinger under his chin.
Last October another bride, 18, was dragged, resisting, into a guardhouse on one of Uday's properties, according to a maid who worked there. The maid says she saw a guard rip off the woman's white wedding dress and lock her, crying, in a bathroom. After Uday arrived, the maid heard screaming. Later she was called to clean up. The body of the woman was carried out in a military blanket, she said. There were acid burns on her left shoulder and the left side of her face. The maid found bloodstains on Uday's mattress and clumps of black hair and peeled flesh in the bedroom. A guard told her, "Don't say anything about what you see, or you and your family will be finished."
—With reporting by Amany Radwan/Amman and Adam Zagorin/Washington
