Gordon Carrera

And we were going to a meeting of all the Iraqi exiles at a place called Saladin in this kind of autonomous bit of Iraq, outside of Iraqi control.

And I'll never forget it because we were driving in a convoy and I was part of his convoy and we hit this kind of mountaintop and another convoy came towards us.

And out of this other convoy, it stopped, both convoys stopped, came Ahmed Chalabi.

And Chalabi came out, and Chalabi and Talabani, I remember seeing them embrace.

And it was two guys who knew, we've got the Americans to do what we've been wanting to do for years, which is get rid of Saddam.

There was this moment, this feel amongst the exiles, as they gathered for this conference at Saladin, that it was coming at last.

And for lots of those people, the anticipation was enormous because they hated Saddam.

He'd been their enemy.

He'd been this ruthless tyrant despite his novelistic career.

And he was finally going to be gone.

And this was it.

And so, yeah, it's a very vivid recollection to me.

But actually, when the war started, I was then in Washington covering things.

Louis Rueda, who we talked about, head of the CIA Iraq Operations Group, he describes taking a Black Hawk over Kuwait just before it starts.

And you can just see all this American armor, you know, tanks and

helicopters and gunships everywhere and then watching on a screen as the trackers for all these vehicles suddenly move over into Iraq as the invasion starts.

And of course the invasion itself goes beautifully.

The ground invasion

It goes amazingly well and amazingly quickly with the thunder run into Baghdad.

A few people do wonder why did Saddam not use any of his special weapons as the troops approach Baghdad, but they take Baghdad incredibly quickly.