There were no names, no point of contact, only a short email note from a Yahoo-address. I stared one more time at the attachment. It was indeed my handwriting from 14 years ago.

I searched for the IP address to see where this anonymous email had been sent from but the sender had scrambled all known ways of identifying the computer.

Somebody claiming to be an “American Soldier” had found two of my autograph requests to Saddam Hussein. Now the person wanted to return my letters.

At first I didn’t know how to react. I thought somebody was pulling my leg. It wouldn’t be the first time some of my friends would find pleasure in having fun with my hobby. But the scans were real – of my letters to the presidential palace in Baghdad dated 1994 and 2002.

I decided to answer the email. This person had after all spent some time tracking me down. He or she knew where to find me anyway and I didn’t know anything about the American Soldier’s whereabouts or motives.

- They were deemed to have no intelligence value, writes the American Soldier the next day. My letters were found during a raid on the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Baghdad. They were together with many other letters, all in original envelopes, all asking for autographs of President Saddam Hussein. This time the soldier signs with a male name.

He tells me he didn’t capture the documents himself. He just processed what the US soldiers had confiscated in the raid on this particular office that was in the same building as a small library. The American Soldier went through nine huge cartons total in a parking lot for a whole week. He was sorting the documents with two Iraqi Americans, a Kurdish guy and a Chaldean Christian. - They would go through the stuff pretty fast, writes the soldier, saying if it was “khar-a” or not, “khar-a” being Arabic for “shit”.

Now back in the US his private mission is to reunite the letters with the people who wrote them. That’s why he sent me an email in the first place. Why? I ask him. Well, he though it would be fun to reunite Baghdad-letters with the owner. He himself was only interested in the stamps and so retrived the documents for that reason.

I still only know his first name, this American Soldier turning out to be a fellow collector (of stamps that is). He has said he will return my letters as a souvernir - for free. He has also mentioned names of other collectors of whose letters he has found in the Baghdad archives.

So Saddam did file autograph requests even though he never met any of my repeated requests. The past few months I’ve seen a lot of Saddam documents on the internet. Maybe the surprising email from the homecoming US soldier five years after the invasion explains why there are so many signatures of his these days.

- And no, so far the American Soldier has not found any documents with an original signature of Saddam Hussein. Of course I asked...

My bet is that even the Iraqis know the difference between trash and treasure.

Feel free to visit my website: www.geocities.com/atvegard/autographs.html