Saddam alive in Iraq, intercepted calls suggest

New intelligence recovered by American agents electronically eavesdropping on supporters of Saddam Hussein suggests the former Iraqi dictator is alive and still living inside Iraq. It also suggests that his two sons survived attempts by US and British forces to kill them early in the war.

The taped conversations between fugitive members of the Fedayeen militia and the ousted regime's intelligence services, revealed yesterday in The New York Times, include talk about the need to protect Saddam. The fact that the ousted president has been able to remain at large for so long suggests that he had made extensive plans for such a scenario and that there are a number of loyalists prepared to help him.

Many within the Bush administration believed that Saddam - and perhaps his sons, Uday and Qusay - were killed in air strikes on targets in Baghdad on 20 March and 7 April. But the new intelligence is forcing officials to rethink. Most Iraqis living in Baghdad remain convinced the former leader is alive and well.

The new evidence has prompted an increased effort to find Saddam, a task that is being led by a specialist and secretive team of US special forces troops. The so-called Task Force 20 includes members of the Army's Delta Force, the Navy's counter-terrorism specialists and operatives from the CIA. Finding Saddam would represent a massive public relations coup for the Bush administration.

There have been numerous unconfirmed sightings of the former president. Last week, Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, repeated his belief that Saddam was living and moving in an arc from Diyala, north-east of Baghdad, around the Tigris river toward his home town of Tikrit and into the Dulaimi areas to the west of the Tigris.

Mr Chalabi, who has provided much of the intelligence on which Washington has based its claims that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, also said that the former leader was using $1.3bn looted from the country's central bank to offer bounty for all American soldiers killed. The former dictator intends to have his revenge, in the belief that he "can sit it out and get the Americans going", Mr Chalabi told the Council of Foreign Relations in New York.

Victoria Clarke, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said: "Of course the search for all senior Iraqi regime figures is important, and is getting all sorts of effort. But what is really important is the fact that Saddam Hussein is no longer running the country and won't be."

Earlier this week American forces revealed that they had arrested Saddam's closest confidant, raising hopes that he could provide information on the whereabouts of the former leader. Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti, who was number four on the Pentagon's most-wanted list, was captured close to Saddam's former stronghold of Tikrit. At the same time, the fact that Mr Tikriti was able to escape capture for nearly two months highlights how difficult it could be to capture the former leader.

Paul Bremer, the US administrator in Iraq, admitted earlier this month that the failure to find Saddam had an impact on efforts to rebuild the country. "I would obviously prefer that we had clear evidence that Saddam is dead or that we had him alive in our custody," he said. "It does make a difference because it allows the Baathists to go around in the bazaars and villages as they are doing, saying 'Saddam, is alive and he's going to come back and we're going to come back'."