Lara Marlowe recalls some of the "minders" assigned to her under the ancien régime in Baghdad: officials encountered ranged from one whohated the Saddam regime to an obnoxious egomanic.
Their names have been changed to protect the innocent and in at least one case, the guilty. The only thing my Iraqi "minders" had in common with each other was that all asked me not to write about them.
It was their job to translate, monitor movements and conversations and report back to the secret police contingent in the Ministry of Information. If unpleasant quotes or facts appeared in Western media, the minders were called to account for it.
It was a risky if well-paying job and fellow journalists sometimes found that a friendly minder disappeared without explanation. Now that the regime has fallen, I hope the minders will forgive my indiscretion. Iraqi records of their work and mine burned with the Ministry.
Said was my first minder, in the wake of the second Gulf War in 1991. A man of few words who never smiled, Said was so self-effacing that I sometimes forgot he was there. But at the end of my stay in Iraq, he insisted on accompanying me for the five-hour drive to the Jordanian border. In those days, the highway was safe at night, so it was possible to avoid the scorching daytime heat.
Once the lights of Baghdad were behind us, Said began talking in the dark.
He was confident the driver understood no English and sitting in front of me, so that I saw only the back of his head, Said delivered a terrible indictment of the regime. He'd been drafted into the army during the first (Iran- Iraq) Gulf War, in which his brother was killed.
"We lived for months at a time in the desert, on the verge of starvation. The wolves circled around us at night . . . That's how I spent my youth . . . I hate that man," he said of Saddam Hussein.
"I want only one thing; to see him die before I do." Said was never again assigned to me, but there was a flicker of complicity in his eyes when I came across him on later visits.
Neither of us ever alluded to that conversation on the highway to Jordan. He now works for a major European television network and for the first time, in the days following the fall of the regime, I saw him smile.
When I arrived in Baghdad three days before the third Gulf War started, the Ministry was overwhelmed with foreign journalists and was recruiting untrained minders, often with only a minimal command of English. Ahmad was a gentle soul who despised the regime and fed on the words of Kuwaiti radio. Every morning, he asked me eagerly how long it would be before the Americans arrived.
But when the bombardment started, Ahmad took fright and began making excuses to avoid outings in Baghdad.
On a particularly bad day, when cruise missiles and precision-guided munitions were pelting the district where government ministries were concentrated, Ahmad turned around in the car and his cheeks were bathed in tears.
He used the word "fish" as a code for Mokhabarat (secret police) buildings and I was amazed by the sheer number of them. When I visited friends in a district that was terrorised by Saddam's eldest son Uday, Ahmad trembled and announced, "Yellow, hateful fish . . . please Mrs Lara, let me leave now. I have a wife and children." With the Americans' arrival in Baghdad, Ahmad blossomed.
The baseball cap he started wearing and a permanent grin, made him resemble a Hispanic-American comic. Like Said, he found a job with a European television network, although he told me his real ambition was to work with US forces.
The Americans will, I am sure, appreciate Ahmad's entrepreneurial spirit. In the last week of the war, when there was no electricity and the Palestine Hotel stopped all maintenance, Ahmad inveigled female relatives to wash journalists' clothes by hand and became the agent for a man who charged $5 for making a symbolic effort at cleaning hotel rooms.
Riad, my final minder under the ancien régime was by far the most unpleasant. After Ahmad, his good English and self-confidence were initially a relief, but I realised it would be difficult when Riad announced he was a colonel in the secret police and showed me the revolver in the glove box of his car.
An attempt to renegotiate his already high salary on the pretext that I ate dinner one night in an expensive restaurant made me angry - all the more so because Riad insisted on going home to his mother for lunch and a siesta every afternoon. I began to hate Riad's loud, synthetic shirts, his bossiness and habit of sucking air through his front teeth during bombardments. My Arabic was just good enough to several times catch him distorting information to make it more favourable to the regime.
Riad's behaviour on the morning of April 9th enraged me.
US forces were about to take over the capital and there were running gun battles and artillery bombardments through much of the city. Riad tried to drive me into a no man's land on Haifa Street, with barricades at one end and US tanks hulking menacingly at the other, because he wanted to take bread to his sister.
He went into a sulk when I insisted that he turn round. At Saddam Medical City, I found some of the most terrible scenes of the war. Burned, disfigured, bleeding and dying men were lined up in the hospital foyer. An orderly pushed a sponge mop through pools of blood on the floor.
In the midst of this, as US tanks opened fire on the Iraqi armour that had been cynically hidden on the grounds, Riad asked the hospital's heroic director to take his blood pressure. Dr Khaldoun Brahim, a surgeon, had barely slept in a week. His house was destroyed in the bombing and he did not know where his wife and children were.
Under bombardment, surrounded by suffering on an epic scale, Riad the egocentric Mokhabarat minder asked to have his blood pressure checked.
"It's a little high," the unflappable Dr Brahim said as Riad rolled his sleeve down, with the sang-froid born of many encounters with obnoxious secret policemen. "It's the stress, isn't it doctor?" Riad responded.
It was a relief to see him decamp at high speed an hour later, as a US armoured column advanced on east Baghdad.
By the time Rashid started working with me, the regime had fallen. A Sunni Muslim in his mid-20s, he ran a CD shop until January, when a distant cousin told him the Ministry of Information needed English-speaking minders.
Rashid had to pay a $200 bakshish (bribe) to secure the job, but it was worth it: minimum daily pay was $100.
Like many other ministry minders, Rashid made a seamless transition from government spy to freelance interpreter. US forces recognised their press credentials and, unlike other English-speakers with whom I tried to work, the left-over minders understood the basics of journalism.
Rashid was the most unabashed "Saddam nostalgic" I met in Baghdad. "At least under the regime, I could sleep at night," he said. "Now there is too much shooting."
Everything about the new Iraq disgusted Rashid and he swore to leave the country as soon as he could obtain a passport. When we called on the offices of the US-backed Iraqi National Congress in the former Hunting Club, Rashid moaned that he would no longer be able to swim and play tennis there. Shia demonstrations outside the Palestine Hotel put paid to Rashid's contention that there was "no difference" between Sunni and Shia.
He winced, as if in pain, when a Shia sheikh praised Imam Hussein, the "martyr" killed at Kerbala in 680.
"They make too much of it," Rashid said. "They talk about Hussein as if he were God." Rashid had a low opinion of his fellow Iraqis.
"They are two-faced," he said. "For more than 30 years, they've been demonstrating for Saddam Hussein, shouting 'With our souls, with our blood, we sacrifice ourselves for you.' Nobody forced them to do it. Now the same people are looting and pulling down statues.
"Believe me, if he came back tomorrow, they would demonstrate for him."