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Friday, March 21, 2003

By Bob Woodward, Walter Pincus and Dana Priest, The Washington Post

U.S. intelligence officials believe Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, possibly accompanied by one or both of his powerful sons, was still inside a compound in southern Baghdad early yesterday when it was struck by a barrage of U.S. bombs and cruise missiles.

Intelligence analysts are comparing images from recent appearances by Saddam Hussein to determine if the Iraqi leader has been killed or wounded. Iraqi television has identified the man shown in all four of these photos as Hussein. The top two photos are from separate appearances yesterday, the third photo is from an address on Monday and the bottom photo is from Jan. 17, 2003. (APTN via Associated Press)

But intelligence analysts in Washington and operatives working in the region weren't certain whether the Iraqi leader was killed or injured or escaped the attack, according to senior Bush administration officials.

Yesterday intelligence officials worked to analyze a videotape of an appearance by Saddam broadcast on Iraqi television within hours of the pre-dawn bombardment.

"The preponderance of the evidence is he was there when the building blew up," said one senior U.S. official with access to sensitive intelligence. The official added that Saddam's sons, Qusay and Uday, may also have been at the compound. "He didn't get out" beforehand, another senior official said of the Iraqi president.

A third administration official said "there is evidence that he [Saddam] was at least injured" because of indications that medical attention was urgently summoned on his behalf. The condition of Saddam's sons, and any others who may have been at the compound, was also unknown, officials said.

While U.S. intelligence monitored Iraqi government communications and movements yesterday to pick up signs of Saddam's fate, the administration's attention was focused on the television appearance by Saddam in which he stated yesterday's date and made reference to "dawn" and an attack by the United States.

Officials said they weren't surprised by the broadcast because they had information that the Iraqi leader had recorded several statements earlier in the week in anticipation of a military strike.

Officials also said they were receiving conflicting analyses of the identity of the man in the broadcast.

Technical analysts, who used digital enhancement techniques and triangulation measurements of facial proportions, assessed that the broadcast depicted the real Saddam.

But the government also consulted Parisoula Lampsos, who the Defense Department believes has passed a polygraph examination in support of her claim that she was Saddam's mistress in Iraq for many years. Lampsos has previously distinguished Saddam from his doubles in more than a dozen cases, one official said, and this time she said he was not the man in the broadcast.

White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, who last September said a U.S. invasion could be avoided by "one bullet," said yesterday, "We continue to hope that Saddam will leave Iraq."

Local forensic and criminal justice experts said the techniques the analysts are employing to compare Saddam's known physical features with those that were broadcast are a slight variation from what they use in their fields.

Allegheny County Coroner Dr. Cyril H. Wecht said the analysts would digitize the videotape from Wednesday's broadcast and would do the same with a known videotape of Saddam "and then you can overlap these pictures and ascertain the true physiognomy, or the facial structure."

Moreover, Wecht said, the analysts would be taking "measurements of things not likely to change -- from the forehead to the chin, from the cheekbone to the chin, the shape of the eyelid, the eyebrows, the curvature of the nose and lips, the contour of the ear, the hairline. They would zero in on very fine, specific details."

Dennis C. Dirkmaat, director of the Applied Forensic Science Department at Mercyhurst College in Erie, said the photographs would be superimposed and scaled using a certain reference point, such as the iris of the eyes.

Dirkmaat, a board certified forensic anthropologist, said he's done similar work to identify human remains. Using a computer program that takes into account anthropological measurements and estimates, the skull is rebuilt with virtual tissue and then superimposed onto a photograph of the suspected victim.

A non-match is much easier to ascertain than a positive one, he noted.

"When it's not a match, it sticks out like a sore thumb. No matter what you do it won't fit," Dirkmaat said. "But if it's close, you can't rule out that it's the same person, so you give different degrees of probability relative to a positive match."

Similar methods have been used to try to match human remains to photographs and paintings of historical figures, such as Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro, Czar Nicholas of Russia and Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele, Dirkmaat said.

While the techniques the CIA analysts are using require scientific precision, Dirkmaat didn't expect a determination one way or the other to take an inordinate amount of time.

"I don't think they're taking a lot of coffee breaks," he said.

Larry Likar, a retired FBI agent who teaches criminal justice at La Roche College, said a voice spectrogram would be used to compare a known recording of Saddam's voice with the sound broadcast on Iraqi television Wednesday.

The spectrogram breaks down a voice by time, frequency and intensity and records the findings on electrically sensitive paper. The paper readouts of the known voice and the broadcast voice then would be visually compared by an expert, Likar said.

"There was research being done to computerize all of it," he added. "The CIA by now could have it computerized totally."

Likar said the analysts would use both techniques to be certain it was both Saddam's face and voice because it is possible he taped the message and a stand-in lip-synched it.

Echoing the feeling of many who saw the tape of Saddam's broadcast, Likar said it didn't appear to be the Iraqi leader.

"I looked at him and I thought that in the past he looked very drawn and lean, such as in the interview with Dan Rather, and here he looked puffy and possibly sick or on steroids.

"I told my wife, 'That guy's a double.' "

Post-Gazette staff writer Michael A. Fuoco contributed to this report. He can be reached at mfuoco@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1968.