Hussein's movements since his government fell - remained unclear on Sunday. Many details of the raid on Saturday night - the precise information that led American forces to his hide-out and Mr. ''Our ability to locate him is only as good as the most recent intelligence.'' ''Saddam moves all the time,'' said one Bush administration official. Intelligence agencies that used to zealously guard their secrets now pool their information so troops can act swiftly on a highly perishable tip. Conventional Army soldiers work alongside members of Task Force 121, a military Special Operations unit that includes Central Intelligence Agency officers. The operation illustrates a new style of cooperative American warfare. The capture of the former Iraqi dictator ended months of painstaking efforts to gather and analyze information from informants, detainees, interceptions of cellphone conversations and interrogations of Mr. Hussein's clan or tribe, but have not been more specific. Officials have described the Iraqi seized Friday as a member of Mr. And finally we got the ultimate information from one of these individuals.'' ''Over the last 10 days or so, we brought in about 5 or 10 members of those families who were then able to give us even more information. ''As we continued to conduct raids and capture people, we got more and more information on the families that were somewhat close to Saddam Hussein,'' General Odierno said. After a half-dozen raids and arrests, one senior administration official said, the crucial breakthrough came Friday when a raid on a house in Baghdad led to the capture of an Iraqi who, under questioning in the hours that followed, identified the location where Mr. Hussein, including bodyguards, former palace functionaries, tribal leaders and others not prominent on previous American wanted lists. In recent weeks, American officials had started a new effort to draw up a list of people likely to be hiding Mr. It just takes finding the right person who will give you a good idea where he might be.'' ''He could have been hiding in a hundred different places, a thousand different places like this all around Iraq. Odierno, the commander of the Fourth Infantry Division, told reporters at his headquarters in Tikrit on Sunday. Hussein hiding alone at the bottom of an eight-foot hole. Saturday, less than 11 hours after receiving the decisive tip, 600 American soldiers and Special Operations forces backed by tanks, artillery and Apache helicopter gunships surrounded two farmhouses, and near one of them found Mr. Hussein and began raids to kill or capture him, only to come up empty, sometimes missing its man by only a matter of hours, military officials here said.īut at 8:26 p.m. Eleven previous times in the last several months, a brigade combat team from the Army's Fourth Infantry Division thought it had a bead on Mr. Hussein, a man who one senior general said had 20 to 30 hide-outs and moved as often as every three to four hours, had become a maddening challenge. The hunt for Saddam Hussein ended late Saturday with information from a member of his tribal clan.
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