The Iraqi job: How a 4am raid netted the dictator's son a $1bn prize

Amid the cordoned-off, burnt-out wreckage of what was once the Central Bank of Iraq it required a little imagination to visualise Qusay Hussein arriving at 4am on 18 March on the orders of his father and making off with $1bn in three lorries.

But, US Treasury officials confirmed yesterday, that was just what he did ­ in the process depriving the bank of about a quarter of its currency reserves and underlining, if that was needed, that the Iraqi dictator and his family did not believe a word of their own propaganda about crushing the invaders.

For whether the money was, as some US intelligence suggests, spirited rapidly across the Syrian border in those same trucks, it is an inescapable inference that the money was being used to finance a post-defeat strategy. Maybe Saddam Hussein really was, as a member of the Iraqi National Congress has suggested, envisaging a scenario in which the Americans occupied Baghdad but he himself eventually returned to power. And certainly until his body is found or he is captured alive, this is a possibility that many Iraqis still take seriously. Maybe he had merely worked out he was going to need a lot of ready cash because his huge but still not reliably quantified assets abroad were going to be, to put it mildly, inaccessible. But either way, this was not the action of a man who expected to win the battle of Baghdad.

The facts of this astonishing heist, "legitimised", of course, by the obligatory letter of authorisation from the President himself and disclosed yesterday by The New York Times, are clear. Hours before the Americans started to bomb Baghdad, Qusay, Saddam's younger son, arrived at the bank at the dead of night with a select group comprising Abid al-Hamid Mahmood, Saddam's personal assistant, the director of the Central Bank, the Iraqi Finance Minister and the director of the Iraqi treasury, the drivers of the lorries and the workers who would take two hours to load into them $900m (£560m) in US $100 bills and as much as $100m worth of euros.

The job, which will go down in history as probably the biggest bank robbery ever, was completed before employees of the Baghdad bank in the heart of the Rashid Street business district arrived for work.

Explaining the handover, an Iraqi bank official, preserving his anonymity for fear of reprisals from a family still very much at large, said with masterly understatement: "When you get an order from Saddam Hussein, you do not discuss it"

A billion dollars is a lot of money by any standards, but you didn't have to spend much time in Rashid Street yesterday to encounter another intriguing possibility: that Qusay or Saddam, or both, decided later that it wasn't enough. Several men who work in the area are convinced that Qusay made a second, five-hour visit to the bank in early April, about 48 hours before US forces seized the city's international airport.

Haidar Abdul Jabar, a 32-year-old paint factory worker, said he was walking down Rashid Street at about 10am. "The police turned us back and said Qusay was coming," he said. Mr Jabar knew nothing of the first, nocturnal visit. But he said from his vantage point in front of the Souk al-Araby market across the street he saw a black BMW, three Toyota pick-ups, one carrying a machine-gun, and a South Korean people-carrier arrive at the bank. "I definitely saw Qusay get out of the BMW and go into the bank with his guards." The vehicles, he said, then drove down the side of the bank and into its underground car park. "I only stayed 15 minutes and then I went away so I didn't see anyone come out."

A friend of his, Haider Hussein, 20, who works in the market and who also had heard nothing of the $1bn seizure on 18 March, said he was in the area from the time the vehicles arrived until they departed five hours later at about 3pm, shortly before the bank employees left for the day. Like Mr Jabar, he said he was frightened to talk about what he saw. And he didn't, he said, at any point see Qusay himself. But he did see a man who appeared to be wearing a senior officer's uniform, flanked by a AK-47-wielding bodyguards and carrying a big official bag and what looked from across the street like some form of missile under his arm. "A friend joked with me that maybe this was the missing weapons the Americans were looking for." He was also carrying a big official-looking bag, which he put on the back seat of the car before climbing in.

Mr Hussein says he saw another figure almost as intriguing as Qusay: the Information Minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, famous for his recklessly deceptive briefings as the Americans arrived in the city. "I swear on the Koran I saw him," he said. "He took his beret off before he went into the bank. And I saw him coming out as well."

As the vehicles came out from the car park, one of the pick-ups was covered with a white tarpaulin, according to Mr Hussein, which he assumed meant it had a substantial cargo underneath it.

There is no confirmation as yet that Qusay made a second seizure at the bank. And the combination of heavy fighting in the area, a series of strikes by rocket-propelled grenades and even artillery attacks on the now wrecked bank, with the sustained and violent looting which followed the collapse of the regime, mean there will probably never be any definite proof of what, if anything, they did that day at the height of the war. As it is, the US Treasury is still trying to check the denominations of the bills seized on 18 March.

Even the whereabouts of the money is a matter of dispute. A US Treasury official, George Mullinax, told The New York Times it was possible that much of it had already been recovered. He said the $650m found by US forces in one of Saddam's palaces last month may have been from the Central Bank. The anonymous Iraqi official, however, felt the money found in the palace did not come from that Central Bank raid but belonged to Saddam's elder son, Uday, whom he said was known for hoarding large sums of cash. But either way, it is clear that Saddam and his family had not the slightest qualm at robbing the Iraqi people of its assets.