Top aide turns Saddam over to US troops

"He was someone I would call his right arm," said Major Stan Murphy, the head of intelligence for the 4th Infantry Division's First Brigade in Saddam's hometown of Tikrit.

The major ruled out the possibility the informant, who is currently in detention, would receive any of the 25-million-dollar bounty on Saddam's head.

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"He is a bad man and should rot in jail," he said.

The man, whose name the military will not reveal, was a longtime aide of Saddam and hailed from one of five major tribes in a 20-km stretch around Tikrit that the fallen dictator relied on to elude the Americans after Baghdad fell last April.

"He was in the five families. There were members of the five families that were in the security forces, the army" and the government, Murphy said.

Since April, Saddam's top lieutenant, along with four or five other Iraqis from the prominent Tikrit-area tribes, formed the inner circle that helped hide the fugitive dictator, implement his orders to the resistance for attacks, finance the insurgency and provide combatants with weaponry.

"He (Saddam) would give general guidance, hey I want to see more attacks, I want to see more of this. His enablers would then go out to their different tiers below them, give a little more specific guidance, maybe some money or weapons or something, and that tier would go out to the other tiers all the way down to the trigger puller," Murphy said.

There were four to nine tiers of the resistance, Murphy added.

But while the other enablers shared the burden of labour and their functions overlapped, the man who eventually informed on Saddam was the fugitive strongman's most trusted confidante.

"In my mind, he was that important... to get the general guidance from Saddam and add specific details for everything," Murphy said.

The middle-aged man, whose name or job in the old regime Murphy refused to disclose, had started to serve Saddam in his late-teens or early twenties and had risen to become one of Saddam's most valued sidekicks.

He fit a stock profile of many of the men who served under Saddam. He was balding and heavily overweight, with an almost 50-inch waistline, and "loved women", Murphy said.

He also participated in the old regime's crimes against the Iraqi people, Murphy said, without disclosing the exact nature of his involvement in Saddam's abuses.