Saddam Hussein sent his son Qusay to the vaults of the Iraqi Central Bank to load nearly one billion dollars onto three tractor trailers, The New York Times said Tuesday.

"When you get an order from Saddam Hussein, you do not discuss it," said an Iraqi official who asked not to be identified.

He said Qusay turned up at the vaults with a letter from the dictator authorizing the seizure at 4:00 am local time on March 18 to carry out what could be the biggest bank heist in history.

The money -- around 900 milliion in US 100 dollar bills and 100 million in Euros according to a US official -- was possibly smuggled into Syria where it disappeared, along with Qusay and Hussein's personal assistant Abid al-Hamid Mahmood.

Some believe the money is being used to finance Saddam's exile, but members of the Iraqi National Congress fear it could be used for a "post-occupation strategy" that envisions Saddam's eventual return to power.

The anonymous Iraqi official who provided details of the "withdrawal" and who held a senior position in the Iraqi Central Bank under Saddam, said he was afraid the former dictator or his associates could track him down and kill him.

Since Saddam Hussein was Iraq's absolute ruler for nearly twenty years, the legal aspects of Qusay's cash seizure were unclear, but the Iraqi official said Iraqi banks were not plundered much by the despot and his family.

"Sometimes they would come in for small amounts, maybe five million dollars," said the official.

In their predawn foray at the bank, Qusay and Mahmood were accompanied by the director of the Central Bank, the Iraqi finance minister, the director of the Iraqi treasury, a group of workers who loaded the cash and the truck drivers, the official said.

Former Iraqi finance minister Hekmet al-Azawi, was already in American custody in Baghdad, he added

US Treasury Department official George Mullinax said part of the 900 million dollars seized by Qusay may have been recovered last month when US troops found 650 million dollars in 100 dollar bills stashed in one of Saddam's palaces.

The Iraqi official, however, believes that money belonged to Saddam's eldest son, Uday, who had a reputation of hoarding cash. "That was Uday's money," he told The New York Times.

The money Qusay took represented about one fourth of the central bank's hard currency reserves, the Iraqi official said.

It is also about twice as much as Iraqis looted from their banks across the country after Saddam's fall -- some 400 million US dollars and 40 million in Iraqi currency, according to US and Iraqi officials.

SPACE.WIRE