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New York - A senior Iraqi official tipped off the CIA, telling Washington where Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would be sleeping on the eve of the war, Newsweek magazine reports. After months of US intelligence groundwork, the magazine quoted an unnamed "knowledgeable intelligence source" as saying Delta Force, the secret commando group, "managed to tap Saddam's underground phone lines in Baghdad. "The real break came when the CIA managed to recruit an asset, a senior Iraqi official in a position to know Saddam's greatest vulnerability: where he sleeps each night," the news weekly added in its report due on news...

Iraq's inhospitable western desert is the scene of a campaign without the presence of cameras or media pools. The battle here is astride the crucial road from Jordan to Baghdad The western desert is a flat land of compacted sand, sharp flints and pavements of limestone and basalt. Its occupants are a few Bedouin encampments and the occasional dirty towns that grew up around the pump stations on the now abandoned Baghdad-Haifa oil pipeline. Now a road follows that pipeline, the main strategic route connecting Baghdad with Jordan to the west. And along this road a very different kind of...

Secret op targeted Saddam By Richard Sale, UPI Intelligence Correspondent From the International Desk Published 3/21/2003 5:34 PM View printer-friendly version A top-secret U.S. intelligence operation, working in Baghdad weeks before the war, provided the crucial targeting information for the attack on Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, which may have killed Saddam's son Qusay, administration officials said. The highly clandestine targeting effort, directed at top Iraq leaders, involved specialized CIA and military teams under command of the CIA, these sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity. A senior, former covert operative of the CIA told United Press International Friday that the...

ELITE teams of US Delta Force commandos have been inside Iraq for weeks and are preparing to descend on Baghdad with the objective of capturing or killing President Saddam Hussein, US defence officials said yesterday. Small, highly mobile units picked from the US Army’s most revered and secretive fighting force have been assigned a key mission of the war: to hunt down Saddam, his two sons and at least a “dirty dozen” of Iraq’s top military and civilian leaders. The Delta Force, the US equivalent of the British SAS, has 306 men. It has been training for several years with...

ELITE teams of US Delta Force commandos have been inside Iraq for weeks and are preparing to descend on Baghdad with the objective of capturing or killing President Saddam Hussein, US defence officials said yesterday. Small, highly mobile units picked from the US Army’s most revered and secretive fighting force have been assigned a key mission of the war: to hunt down Saddam, his two sons and at least a “dirty dozen” of Iraq’s top military and civilian leaders. The Delta Force, the US equivalent of the British SAS, has 306 men. It has been training for several years with...

The U.S. military dominates the globe, but increasingly faces an enemy it cannot see. In the third in a series on U.S. power, Peter Goodspeed chronicles efforts to build a secret army for the covert war on terrorism. - - - The United States is building an elite, secret army to carry the war against terrorism into the world's darkest corners with a new wave of covert pre-emptive operations. For the first time since the Vietnam War, U.S. defence officials are undertaking a massive mobilization of their elite special operations command, pouring billions of dollars in new funding into high-tech...

<p>Army Sgt. William Wright is charged with first degree murder in the death of his wife, Jennifer Gail Wright, one of four Fort Bragg military wives allegedly killed by their husbands in the past six weeks.</p> <p>WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The killings of four military wives in the past six weeks -- allegedly by their husbands who are based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina -- have led commanders to take a new look at whether combat deployments may be causing undue stress.</p>