December 14, 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Eight months after the fall of his government, Saddam
Hussein was captured by coalition forces near his hometown of Tikrit,
where he was hiding in a farmhouse cellar, U.S. officials said Sunday.
The arrest was a major victory for the coalition that has been
battling an insurgency for months.

Sources from the U.S. Military Intelligence Division familiar with the
details of his capture disclosed today they had been monitoring
cellular telephone activity in Hussein's hometown of Tikrit using
sophisticated satellite eavesdropping technology. Apparently Hussein,
in an effort to further confound U.S. coalition efforts to capture
him, had placed a cellular call to a major cellular carrier in order
to port his cellular number to a new carrier pursuant to the Wireless
Number Portability (WNP) Act enacted on November 24, 2003. Not
knowing they had Saddam Hussein on the line, Customer Service
representatives from the new cellular carrier had placed Hussein on
hold for over an hour while they attempted to transfer his service to
a new carrier thereby allowing intelligence officials to intercept the
call and trace it to Hussein's hiding place in Iraq where the deposed
dictator was soon thereafter captured in a pre-dawn raid by the U.S.
4th Infantry Division.

Major General Ricardo Sanchez, Supreme Commander of the coalition
Occupation Forces in Iraq, told the press in an early briefing that
Hussein was "cooperative and seemed resigned to his fate that it would
take at least five days more before his new cellular carrier would be
able to complete the transfer."

Thus far calls to President George Bush and White House Press Liason
went unanswered this morning as their telephone numbers were still in
the process of being transferred to new carriers.

A joint press release from AT&T, Verizon, Cingular, T-Mobile, Sprint
PCS and Alltell today said, "We are working as hard as we can to
expedite the porting of numbers and improve the process by lowering
hold and transfer times now that this evil dictator, the world's
greatest terrorist has finally been captured."




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