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By Mark Hosenball
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As a young man, Barzan al-Tikriti was "excessively violent and lazy," say U.S. officials. As chief spy for his older half-brother Saddam Hussein in the early 1980s, Barzan's name was synonymous with cruelty: intelligence reports say he drank beer while watching prisoners being tortured. Later, Barzan allegedly became the Tikriti clan's chief money washer. The Bush administration hopes that his capture last week, along with the capture of former Iraqi finance minister Hikmat Mizban al-Azzawi, will lead U.S. investigators to millions of dollars worth of Iraqi wealth stolen by Saddam--money the United States hopes to spend on rebuilding Iraq.
After serving as head of Iraqi intelligence, in the mid-1980s Barzan became Iraq's ambassador to U.N. agencies based in Geneva. While there, Barzan worked with European business contacts to set up a network of companies and bank accounts through which plundered Iraqi government and oil money was laundered, U.S. investigators believe. During the first gulf war, the then President George H. Bush launched a hunt for Saddam's hidden treasure. But after freezing more than $1 billion in Western bank accounts, the United States gave up the search after the 1991 war ended. Now the current Bush administration is promising a new campaign to confiscate al-Tikriti booty.
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Administration officials suspect large sums of illicit Iraqi money have moved through Syria, which for years helped Saddam's government evade U.N. sanctions by operating a black market in Iraqi oil. International oil traders have also talked of illicit kickbacks paid to secret bank accounts in Jordan. U.S. officials note that Amman allowed Iraq's biggest financial institution, the Rafidain Bank, to continue operating despite sanctions.
Investigators believe Barzan, Saddam and other family members still have large sums squirreled away in financial havens like Switzerland and the Far East. A December 2001 report by private detectives Kroll Associates UK alleged that millions in al-Tikriti assets were being handled by Iraqi and Iranian businessmen in Switzerland (though a Kroll spokeswoman said that an allegation in the document that an Iraqi family in Switzerland controlled a $41.6 billion Saddam family "pension fund portfolio" was "a typo"--the figure should have been $1.6 billion). U.S. officials say that some Swiss-based financiers identified in the report are under American scrutiny. Among them are the Bakhtiar brothers, two Iranian-born traders who reportedly were treated by Saddam as "adopted sons" after their father, a former Iranian official, was assassinated. One brother, Bahman Bakhtiar, confirmed meeting Saddam during the 1970s, but told NEWSWEEK his family stopped all business dealings in Iraq after Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990. An anti-Saddam group called Indict submitted Kroll's report to Swiss authorities and asked them to charge Barzan with war crimes. Officials in Bern declined to investigate, but did cancel Barzan's Swiss visa last October.
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