‘I never drank before, or smoked, or danced. I was very correct with people,’ Yahia said. ‘I had to learn to drink Dimple (Uday’s brand of whisky), smoke cigars and talk differently. And I had to learn to be rude with people, like him.’ He also learned intelligence and sabotage techniques, and was taught to check under cars before getting into them.
After six months of intensive training, Yahia made his first public appearance as his double at a football match at the People’s Stadium, where he was surrounded by people who knew the president’s son. With a trainer by his elbow every moment, even driving the black Mercedes 500SL that was Uday’s favourite car, Yahia passed muster. He remembers thinking when he arrived back at the sumptuous villa Uday had given him: ‘Latif Yahia doesn’t exist any more.’
Four lost years followed. Yahia appeared as Uday and travelled with him to London, Geneva and Paris. Whenever Uday wanted a suit – he preferred Christian Dior and Yves St Laurent – he bought two: one for himself, one for Yahia. Uday owned more than 100 luxury cars, and selected them daily to match the colour of his suit.
Outside Baghdad, Yahia would travel in a security convoy as Uday, sometimes with as many as 72 bodyguards. By the time of the Gulf War, Saddam had so much confidence in Yahia that he used him in a cruel confidence trick against his own people. Every Iraqi remembers the visit by Uday to troops on the Kuwaiti front; in fact it was Yahia, sent there with a television crew to counteract truthful reports that Saddam’s family had fled to safety outside Iraq.
During the years of their ‘partnership’, Uday gave him only one rule: ‘Don’t touch my girls.’ At one point, Uday sent him to prison for 21 days because a girlfriend of Uday’s became angry with Yahia, and told the president’s son that he had tried to seduce her. When he was released, his double gave him a Mercedes by way of apology.
Uday often beat his guards, so in public Yahia would have to do the same. He had to learn to curse people; now, in an embarrassed voice, he repeats Uday’s favourites. ‘I would have to say “Your mother is a whore” and things like that,’ Yahia said.
Gradually his public life merged with his private; he is ashamed to admit that he began to beat his wife, Bushra. ‘I would kill Uday if I saw him again,’ Yahia said. ‘I would cut his body into small pieces and feed it to dogs. He made out of me a criminal like himself.’
Yahia was at a party on the river Tigris given for Suzanne Mubarak, the wife of the Egyptian president, when Uday committed one of his worst outrages. Uday hated Kamel Hanna, his father’s favourite retainer, for serving as the go-between for Saddam’s mistress, Samira Shahbandar, wife of the president of Iraq Airways. When Hanna failed to invite Uday to the Mubarak reception, he threw a party nearby out of spite; hearing shots at midnight, he crashed drunkenly into Hanna’s celebration.
Uday saw Hanna firing into the air, Yahia recalled, and ordered him to stop shooting. ‘I only take orders from the president,’ Hanna replied. The night degenerated into violent chaos. Uday cut Hanna’s neck and beat him, then downed pills at the thought of his father’s anger. Both were taken to hospital, where Uday met Saddam waiting for word of his aide.
‘Saddam grabbed Uday by the shirt and said: “If Kamel dies, you die”,’ Yahia said. Hanna died that night, but Uday’s mother intervened to save her son. Yahia worried that he would be executed instead of Uday, but there had been too many witnesses.
Life was not all misery. Yahia had three villas, six luxury cars, all the money he wanted, beautiful women in droves. ‘But I was always afraid,’ he said. ‘I was afraid Uday would kill me. I was afraid of being killed instead of Uday. Nine times I suffered assassination attempts.’
The attempts to kill him were sometimes by family members outraged that Uday had dishonoured their women, sometimes by political opponents. Once, he recalled, an outraged man burst into Uday’s office at the Special Olympic Committee, which he headed, claiming he had raped his young daughter. The father said he had killed his daughter because of the dishonour and wanted satisfaction from Uday.
‘Uday pulled out his pistol and shot him on the spot,’ Yahia recalled. ‘I sat in his office, six metres away. I was not shocked. I had seen it before. I knew I could do nothing.’
Yahia described a permanent atmosphere of fear in the presidential palace. Even those closest to Saddam refrained from speaking openly; everyone was afraid that they would be reported as disloyal, and the penalty was death.
He said Qusay, Saddam’s younger son, who now heads the presidential intelligence agency, was the Iraqi president’s favourite and heir apparent. ‘Uday never called his father “dad”,’ Yahia said. ‘Even in private he addressed him as “your excellency”.’
One of the few people with whom Yahia could relax was Saddam’s double, Fawaz al-Emari. He was the second man trained to impersonate the Iraqi president; his predecessor was killed posing as Saddam in 1984.
Emari had undergone far more extensive surgery than Yahia. His face had been entirely remodelled in Yugoslavia, and Russian doctors in Baghdad had operated on his vocal cords so he would speak exactly like Saddam. ‘Sometimes when I met him, for a moment I would be afraid, thinking he was Saddam. And we were good friends,’ said Yahia.
He and Emari would practise target-shooting together in the palace grounds, which included a swimming pool, cinema, theatre, hospital and sports centre. ‘We spoke about general matters, but never about what we really felt or our activities. We were both too afraid one would betray the other,’ he said.
Both doubles had to undergo weekly medical examinations. Doctors at the presidential palace would check that they were still the same weight as their masters, that their health was good, and that their surgery work remained sufficient for impersonation.
Saddam’s double remains in the palace to this day, a virtual prisoner of his identity. ‘Fawaz had a much more difficult life than me,’ Yahia said. ‘At least Uday went out all the time to restaurants, parties and discos, so I could. Saddam never did these things so Fawaz never could. He could not even go outside and walk on a street looking like Saddam; he would have been killed. He was banned from ever leaving the palace except when he was working.’
Work meant big formal occasions, including a hugely publicised swim by ‘Saddam’ in the Tigris on 26 July 1992. The swim was staged to prove that the president was alive and in good spirits despite the devastation of the Gulf War. In fact, he was afraid to appear in public and exposed his double to danger instead.
Yahia made the decision to flee almost a year after the allies liberated Kuwait in February 1991. His relationship with Uday had become increasingly tense.
‘We were at a party at the Rasheed hotel,’ Yahia recalled. ‘Uday was invited by the president to receive four medals for his role in the Mother of all Battles. I joked, “You are not worth receiving these: I was in Kuwait instead of you.” Uday said there was no difference, but he was not happy with me.’
The danger sign came the next night at another party, when Uday’s ‘love-broker’, who procured girls for the president’s son, upbraided Yahia for refusing to sell him a car. Then Uday also turned on Yahia.
The master apparently sensed that his double was going to make a break for freedom and decided to stop him. As Yahia stepped from a lift into the lobby of the Babylon hotel in Baghdad the next morning, Uday suddenly appeared and shot him. The bullet hit him high in the chest, missing vital organs.
Bleeding heavily, he says, he managed to get to his car and drive north towards the UN-protected safe haven in Kurdistan. To his surprise, Iraqi guards had not been alerted. ‘At every checkpoint, nobody stopped me, they just waved me through. I would see them saluting in my (rear-view) mirror.’
Yahia has the scars to support his story: a round wound in the top of his right chest, an exit hole out the back. As he approached Kurdistan, he needed urgent medical treatment and feared the reception he would get from the Kurds. ‘I could not go directly to Kurdistan. If the Kurds saw me, they would think I was Uday and kill me. So I abandoned my car in the woods, and went