Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service April 05, 2003
Saddam's bunkers remain a mystery wrapped in concrete
By Rick Montgomery
KANSAS CITY, Mo. _ This week, the world's most powerful war machine launched its biggest assault so far on its road to Baghdad.
Once in the city, of course, coalition forces hope to fulfill their mission by capturing or killing Iraq's leader, Saddam Hussein.
But a question remains: Can they find him? It is speculated that Saddam has scores of caves and bunkers hollowed out beneath the ancient city, bombproof labyrinths where he could hide for days, perhaps weeks.
Saddam's hideaways twist through the earth _ as much as 300 feet deep _ below his palaces, below relatives' homes, maybe even below schools and hospitals.
Tales of these secret bunkers abound. Ears pop on lifts that carry down the rare visitor, sometimes blindfolded. When a British Labor Party leader met with Saddam last summer in a bunker, the elevator ride lasted about 20 seconds.
Many bunkers are thought to be connected. A person could enter from, say, the basement of a downtown conference center and exit through the front door of an inconspicuous house blocks away.
Some experts contend the hideaways provide a safe haven from even the most powerful conventional bombs. Others wonder just how secret _ and, thus, how safe _ Saddam's bunkers really are.
It takes time, manpower and convoys of heavy equipment to build a labyrinth of tunnels and living quarters as elaborate as the Iraqi leader's are said to be.
Designs and contracts are drawn up. Workers talk. Satellites may record images of the activity from space.
"I'm sure there are a number of locations U.S. intelligence already knows about, and maybe a number it doesn't know about," said Patrick Garrett, an associate analyst at GlobalSecurity.org who researches military and energy policy.
"At some point, once the U.S. finds out, bombs will fall on a bunker and it becomes pretty clear to Saddam, if he survives, that it's not so smart to sleep there," Garrett said.
In recent days, a German architect and a former Yugoslav army officer have told the Reuters news agency they helped build some of Saddam's underground lairs. Both men described the bunkers as virtually impenetrable _ lined with rounded, reinforced concrete walls four, six and even 16 feet thick.
A palace bunker reportedly designed by German architect Karl Esser "could withstand the shock wave of a nuclear bomb the size of the Hiroshima one" detonating less than a quarter-mile away, Esser said.
In a separate interview with Reuters, retired Lt. Col. Resad Fazlic identified other Iraqi shelters constructed in the late 1970s in the cities of Basra, Mosul, Kirkuk and Nasiriyah.
Fazlic said the strongest bunkers could resist massive bombardment and "keep those inside independent of the outside world for six months."
"If Saddam does not leave (Iraq), and I think he has nowhere to go, they will find him in one of these facilities _ if he does not find a way out by then," Fazlic said.
Despite the bunkers' purported indestructibility, their known whereabouts in some cases threaten that security, as evidenced by the first missile strike of the war. U.S. military planners aimed missiles at a residence thought to be housing the dictator's inner circle, leaving the health of Saddam himself still in doubt.
"No bunker on the planet can survive permanently if everyone knows its location and is determined to annihilate it," said Kenneth D. Rose, author of "One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture."
"Maybe 10 bombs won't get to it, maybe 100 bombs won't, but something like 500 bombs could."
"When you're building a system of bunkers as elaborate at Saddam's, it requires so much material and expertise (that) it's impossible to keep it a secret," Ross said. "Once the secret is out, the effectiveness of all that work is somewhat compromised."
Con Coughlin's biography, "Saddam: King of Terror," details a German company's construction of a bunker "about 300 feet beneath the Tigris River" near Saddam's Presidential Palace complex, which has been the target of repeated air attacks in recent days.
The bunker "rested on huge springs, 2 feet in diameter, on a cushion of hard, molded rubber" to absorb the shock of bombardment, Coughlin wrote. He described the structure as a "James Bond-like fantasy hideout" with two entrances guarded by automatically controlled machine-gun nests.
David Kay headed a U.N. weapons inspection team in Iraq after the first Persian Gulf War in 1991. One of the sites he searched was a two-story bunker covered by a concrete roof poking out of the sands of a Baghdad suburb.
"Iraqi officials called it a residential civil-defense bunker," said Kay, now with the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. "But it was a lot nicer and more elaborate than the homes around it."
It boasted dozens of separate, well-furnished living quarters.
Allied forces attacked the bunker during the 1991 war. At least one laser-guided missile whistled into a ventilation shaft and detonated, reportedly killing hundreds of Iraqi civilians who were huddled inside.
The deaths triggered global scorn of the U.S.-led attack. In later inspecting the facility, however, Kay suspected American authorities were correct in believing it to be a potential command-and-control bunker for the Iraqi military, using civilians as human shields.
Sophisticated devices had been built into the bunker to protect high-tech circuitry, Kay said. "If this had been built for residential use, were they expecting civilians to bring in their big computers and TVs?" he asked.
Pentagon officials express worries that some of Saddam's hideouts today may be located beneath hospitals and other buildings housing civilians.
The United States' 5,000-pound "bunker-busting" bombs probably would destroy an above-ground structure _ punching through several floors at a time _ before even denting a bunker buried deep below, said Garrett of GlobalSecurity.org.
Known as the GBU-28, the most widely used bunker-buster has been shown in flight tests to penetrate more than 20 feet of concrete and up to 100 feet of earth before it explodes.
"The whole idea is to punch through, then blow up," Garrett said.
During Operation Desert Storm, only two crude versions of the GBU-28 fell on targets. Hundreds have been manufactured since then, poised now to sniff out the elaborate bunkers of Baghdad.
Copyright © 2003, Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
