52 Card Pickup

One of my first jobs at the Convention Center was assisting the Military Police and others in capturing Saddam’s henchmen. At the time, the Army produced a deck of playing cards with the pictures and names of Saddam’s top 51 henchmen. Saddam was the Ace of Spades. These guys were everyone from high Baath Party officials, secret police and intelligence officers, nuclear scientists, and known human rights violators. The process played largely on the vanity of these people. The formula went like this: we’d put word out around town that we were seeking to re-construct the government of Iraq and we needed the very important people of Saddam’s regime to help us. So we would schedule meetings in the large conference rooms at the Convention Center and invite in all who answered the call. Doughnuts, coffee. As the “meeting” started, the speaker (an officer with a pre-arranged script) would start into a long winded speech about rebuilding Iraq. I would sit off to the side and surreptitiously thumb through the cards looking for a match. I identified two of the 52 in these meetings. I would walk over to the MP’s lining the conference room and point out the offender. They would approach the man and escort him out of the building. One went quietly. The other guy ran! It was a wild chase through the Convention Center. I eventually caught up with the faster MP’s and the REALLY fast war criminal and found two MP’s sitting on him. This worked for a short while until the word got out. After that, real meetings were conducted with former officials who were not also on the payroll as criminals.