THE crew of the B1 bomber had a good idea what lay behind their orders. As they prepared to unleash thousands of pounds of high explosives on Baghdad’s four-star al-Saa restaurant, a communications officer flying alongside them radioed: “This is the big one.”

Moments later, with debris still flying through the air, US intelligence officials began trying to answer the war’s greatest mystery. Was Saddam Hussein there or wasn’t he? Did they kill him or didn’t they?

The witness who started the chain reaction that led to the bombing could not have been more specific. He had seen Saddam walking into the restaurant in the early afternoon.

The idea of the tyrant strolling through a Baghdad suburb just as American tanks were rumbling into the capital may sound far-fetched.

But US intelligence officials had good reason to trust it, chiefly because of its source. It was, said one official, the best indication that Saddam was alive since the opening strike of the war.

US chiefs suspected that Saddam’s regime might be using the restaurant as a command centre, almost certainly meeting in a bunker underneath. Its location suggests that to be very possible.

The residential al-Mansour district, west of the Tigris, is a stronghold of Saddam’s Baath party. The area, which shares its name with Baghdad’s founder, the Caliph al-Mansour, used to be an upper-class, professional neighbourhood before Saddam bought or confiscated most of the houses for his supporters after taking power.

It was in the district’s main square that Saddam, or a man looking very like him, staged a walkabout which was shown on Iraqi television last Friday. And it is also close to the headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Saddam’s feared intelligence service.

The CIA and the Pentagon’s Defence Intelligence Agency have Iraqi informers working on the ground in Baghdad, and it was one of these human intelligence sources, or “humint” in the language of the intelligence community, who reported the sighting.

Saddam had entered the building with between 30 and 40 senior aides and bodyguards. One or both of his sons, Uday and Qusay, were also said to be present. US officials assumed they were convening a leadership meeting.

The intelligence was backed up by electronic eavesdropping, which also pointed to Saddam’s presence.

It is understood that British codebreakers listening into the Jaguar V communications system used by the Iraqi leadership provided corroboration.

After the CIA passed on its tip to US Central Command (Centcom) in Qatar, things moved quickly.

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