US intelligence believes Saddam alive

US intelligence analysts now believe Saddam Hussein is much more likely to be alive than dead, it was reported today.

Officials told The New York Times that view has been strengthened by intercepted communications between fugitive members of the Saddam Fedayeen and the Iraqi intelligence service.

Two Pentagon officials said the intercepted communications talk about the former Iraqi dictator being alive and about the need to protect him.

The hunt for Saddam and his sons Uday and Qusay is being led by Task Force 20, a secret military organisation that includes members of the CIA and the US army’s elite Delta Force.

It was known that Task Force 20 led the hunt for chemical and biological weapons in Iraq. But its role in trying to determine Saddam’s fate had not been previously disclosed.

If Saddam is alive, most intelligence officials believe he is still in Iraq. They do not believe he would risk being caught by fleeing overseas.

Increasingly, other officials in the United States and Britain have said publicly that Saddam probably survived the war.

The arrest on Monday of Saddam’s closest confidant, Abid Hamid Mahmoud al-Tikriti, has raised hopes of finding more conclusive information about the fate of the former Iraqi leader.

Mahmoud was number four on America’s Most Wanted list, and he is thought more likely to have detailed knowledge about what happened to Saddam than almost anyone else in the former regime.

At the same time, US officials’ optimism about Mahmoud’s capture, near Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit, has been mixed with disappointment that he was not found hiding with the former dictator, as some had suspected.

Mahmoud’s success in eluding capture for nearly two months in a country occupied by nearly 150,000 American troops underscored what intelligence officials said was the reality that Iraq still offered many hiding places – even for a figure of Saddam’s prominence.

Also contributing to the belief that Saddam may be alive is that the authorities have so far failed to recover specific physical evidence, like his body or DNA material, from the sites of two American bombing raids that tried to kill him on March 20 and April 7.

The whereabouts of his two sons also remains a mystery.

The second son, Qusay, is believed almost certainly to be alive, American officials told the Times.

But they said debate continued about Uday Hussein, the elder son, with some intelligence officials believing he had been killed, possibly in the first American raid.