UPDATE:

CIA Had Fix on Hussein: Intelligence Revealed 'Target of Opportunity' (Barton Gellman and Dana Priest, March 20, 2003, Washington Post)

Shortly before 4 p.m. yesterday, Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet offered President Bush the prospect -- improbable to the point of fantasy, yet suddenly at hand -- that the war against Iraq might be transformed with its opening shots. The CIA, Tenet said, believed it had a fix on President Saddam Hussein.

Hussein and others in "the most senior levels of the Iraqi leadership," ordinarily among the most elusive of men, had fallen under U.S. surveillance. The intelligence was unforeseen and perishable, presenting what one administration official called "a target of opportunity" that might not come again. Not only did the agency know where Hussein was, Tenet said, but it also believed with "a high probability" that it knew where he would be for hours to come -- cloistered with advisers in a known private residence in southern Baghdad.

Bush listened calmly -- as his aides portrayed the scene -- as Tenet described the sources and limits of his information, the likelihood that it was true and the length of time Hussein could be expected to spend at the site before moving to his next refuge. The Iraqi president, a man of many palaces, avoids them at moments of maximum risk. There was no guarantee at all, Tenet said, that his whereabouts would be pinpointed again.

For the next three hours, Bush and his senior national security advisers tore up the carefully orchestrated schedule of violence that the U.S. Central Command had honed for months. Those present in the Oval Office, officials said, included Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. and Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

When Bush signed the launch order at 6:30 p.m., it had a hastily prepared insert. The first shots would strike through the roof and walls of an anonymous Baghdad home and deep beneath it in hopes of decapitating the Iraqi government in a single blow.

"If you're going to take a shot like this, you're going to take a shot at the top guy," said a government official with knowledge of the sequence of events. "It was a fairly singular strike."

Now we just have to figure out who was in the bunker when we hit it.

MORE:
Bid to assassinate Saddam : Missile attack on Iraqi leader á Bush: 'early stages' of invasion á 170,000 troops on border (Julian Borger and James Meek, March 20, 2003, The Guardian)

The United States attempted to kill Saddam Hussein with a cruise missile attack in the early hours of this morning, in what President George Bush said were the "early stages" of a US-British invasion of Iraq.

A sombre President Bush told the American people in a TV broadcast minutes after the blast: "This will not be a campaign of half measures and we will accept no outcome but victory."

A blast was reported in the Baghdad outskirts a little less than two hours after a US-imposed deadline for President Saddam to leave the country expired. It was followed by anti-aircraft fire rising into the pre-dawn sky over Baghdad just before 6am local time (3am GMT)

Pentagon officials said up to two dozen cruise missiles had been launched from ships in the Gulf and the Red Sea in a "decapitation attempt" - an assassination attempt against the Iraqi leader himself and his sons and lieutenants.

It was unclear whether the attack had been successful. A few minutes after the attack, Iraqi radio issued a statement attributed to his son, Uday Hussein, saying : "God protect us from foreign aggressors."

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 20, 2003 1:38 AM