Having been rewritten by official biographers, Saddam's official biography is hazy. It is known that he is born in the small village of Al Awja and that he leaves home at an early age. He arrives in Baghdad at age 10 to seek an education and to live with his Uncle Khayrallah, an Iraqi nationalist who had served time in for anti-British activities.

During the 1950s and 1960s the Ba'ath Party is a small, underground Arab nationalist group that supports the creation of a pan-Arab state -- a popular idea to Middle East Arabs. At age 20, Saddam Hussein joins the party.

Saddam is selected by the Ba'ath Party to be part of seven-man hit squad to assassinate Iraqi leader Gen. Abdel Karim Kassem. The plot fails. Although Saddam later portrays himself as the leader of the team, in reality he has a small role. He is slightly wounded in the incident and escapes the next morning in a daring swim across the Tigris River. Saddam flees to Cairo and becomes caught up in Egypt's own revolution under the charismatic Gamel Abdel Nasser, whose pan-Arabism Saddam finds appealing. Saddam also becomes a leader of the Ba'ath Party's student cell in Cairo and reportedly regularly visits the U.S. embassy to meet with CIA agents interested in sparking Gen. Kassem's overthrow.

In February, Kassem is assassinated by members of the Ba'ath Party and the CIA helps the Ba'athists by providing lists of suspected communists for the party's hit squads, who kill an estimated 800 people. Saddam returns home and rejoins the party as an interrogator, torturer and killer. Nine months later, the army overthrows the Ba'ath Party and Saddam is jailed. He is said to have studied the political tactics of Hitler and Stalin while in prison.

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