President George W. Bush promised after the attacks of September 11 he would liberate the Iraqi people and bring their oppressor, President Saddam Hussein, to justice. He fulfilled one-half of that promise when Hussein’s troops were demolished within weeks of the American assault. His generals were killed, but the leader himself maddeningly evaded capture. Rumors placed him in a number of locations, from his loyal hometown of Tikrit, to foreign capitals. The U.S. special forces never stopped looking, and then one day in December, they caught a break.

On this day, December 13, in 2003, following a tip that Hussein may be hiding out in Adwar, near Tikrit, a unit of the U.S. army finally found Saddam Hussein.

Hussein was quite literally holed up, in a concealed “spider hole,” just wide enough to stand in, inside the walled compound in Adwar. He was described as “bewildered,” and early photographs from the capture seem to confirm that. Armed with a pistol and an AK-47, with three quarters of a million in U.S. dollars, he does not resist his captors. The next morning, ten hours after his capture, L. Paul Bremer, the administrator of American forces in Iraq, announced in a Baghdad news conference “Ladies and gentlemen, we got him.”