Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein had a jail and "torture chamber" built in the basement of the country's mission on the toney Upper East Side in Manhattan — across the street from billionaire former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the New York Post reported.
"It was a dark room. The doors were reinforced in a way that nobody could break in or out," one unnamed official told the newspaper. "You didn’t need to sound proof it."
"You’re not going to hear someone screaming down there," a second unnamed source said.
According to the Post, Saddam installed the "detention room" when he rose to power in 1979, outfitting the basement of the mission's five-story building at 14 East 79th Street.
And to keep the operation secret, the tyrant's henchman, known as Mukhabarat agents, blacked out a skylight in the roof of the townhouse so the Air Force and satellites couldn’t peer in, the Post reported.
They also kept an eye on American intelligence agents doing wiretap surveillance from a car across the street.
The Post reported the agents locked up local Iraqis for up to 15 days at a time, using them as leverage to get their relatives back in the homeland to surrender and cooperate with the government.
After "Gestapo-like tactics," the despot's agents would sometimes kill their captives and ship their bodies back to Baghdad in Customs-exempt packages, the Post reported.
"They just put [the body] in a diplomatic box and it can just be shipped," one of the sources told the Post.
All evidence of the torture chamber was apparently removed when federal investigators stormed the mission after Saddam’s dramatic fall in 2003 during the American invasion of Iraq, according to the Post.
"U.S. government officials came in," one source told the Post. "They took hard drives, computers. They went into vaults — they smash them open. Officially, they were running Iraq because we didn’t have a government. We got the mission back in less than a year."
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