The IRS Takes On Saddam's Kin

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As the early-morning cool gave way to temperatures that would rise above 100º, Saddam Hussein's half brother sat calmly in a pale blue safari suit and sandals waiting to confront his American cross-examiner. Since his capture on April 17, Barzan Tikriti had been through weeks of questioning on military and security issues at an interrogation center near Baghdad airport. Now it was time to talk money. A special interrogator had been flown in from the U.S. to take up the matter of Saddam's hidden wealth with the man long regarded as the dictator's financial mastermind. What the American found was a detainee not only willing to talk about his brother's finances but also eager to denounce the regime he had long served.

According to the interrogator, Scott Schneider, Barzan proclaimed on several occasions, sometimes banging his fist on a folding table, "I spoke out against the regime." He demanded a search for documents that he said would prove his resistance to Saddam's dictatorship. Barzan had fled before the U.S. dropped six smart bombs on his luxurious compound 70 miles west of Baghdad, and was then turned in to American forces by an informer. Yet Schneider, an IRS criminal investigator based in Pensacola, Fla., told TIME that he displayed no ill will toward the U.S. Vain and concerned about his appearance, Barzan did grumble about a tear in his safari suit and waved a hand to show his long fingernails, complaining that he had not been allowed to trim them.

Barzan, who shared a mother with Saddam and whose daughter was once married to Saddam's elder son Uday, repeatedly demanded to be set free to participate in the running of his occupied country. "If you release me, if you let me go and then find a document implicating me in any crime, I will voluntarily come back [to detention]," he told an astonished Schneider. In addition to helping Saddam hide a fortune that U.S. investigators think could be anything from $2 billion to $7 billion or more, Barzan served from 1979 to 1983 as head of Iraqi intelligence, an organization notorious for its brutish tactics. Indict, a British human rights group, claims it can produce up to 30 witnesses to support various allegations against Barzan. Among them: he helped direct the murder of thousands of rebellious Iraqi Kurds in 1983, and he personally visited beatings, electroshock and executions on Iraqi prisoners.