Janabi, a heavily-built 50-year-old with the thick moustache, speaks without passion about a world that sounds like a nightmare: he is a journalist and broadcaster by training. And he casts only an occasional sidelong glance at his companion, a fit twenty-something who sits, palms on thighs, methodically scanning the lobby of the hotel where we are talking.

In his time as private secretary to the second most powerful man in Baghdad Janabi was privy to many secrets; the bodyguard is a sensible precaution even in the sedate European country where he has been granted political asylum.

Janabi, say fellow exiles and spooks on both sides of the Atlantic, is one of the most important defectors to come out of Iraq in a long time -- and live. ``I worked for Uday for 15 years andI know everything about him, his private life, business deals, the places he goes and the people he meets,'' he explains carefully. ``You can imagine how much I know. It was a shock for Uday because he never thought I was going to defect. He trusted me -- and he treated me badly. But this is normal for him.''

Since Uday escaped assassination two years ago, says Janabi, he has become even crueller, more erratic and unsound. ``Saddam was planning to give Uday the role of heir apparent but now he has a problem because Uday is permanently crippled,'' Janabi believes. ``That's why he has become so cruel and wicked.''

In 1991, after writing what he thought was an innocuous item about the army in one of the government newspapers he then edited, Janabi was locked up and taught a terrible lesson. ``Uday sent one of his bodyguards to the prison and he used pliers to pull out one of my front teeth. Then he took it to Uday wrapped in a Kleenex to show that he had done the job.'' On another occasion Janabi saw Udaytorture a man who had looked after his business interests in Jordan, beating him with baseball bat on the soles of his feet, then suspending him from a revolving ceiling fan and flogging him with a cable.

But his most dramatic testimony is about the 1995 killing of Hussein Kamel al-Majid and his brother Saddam Kamel, Saddam's sons-in-law. Janabi was with Uday when intelligence agents sealed off Kamel's house in Baghdad. ``It was like a battlefield. The army surrounded the area and they used machine guns and grenades. After successive attacks they managed to kill him and then threw his body on to a rubbish heap.''

By February this year, Janabi had had enough: after 11 spells in prison and the threat of more torture convinced him he had to go. Wreathed in cigarette smoke, Janabi describes a world of casual brutality and terror masked by mannered obsequiousness -- truly the Republic of Fear, the title of the chilling book by Samir al-Khalil.

Janabi says he will go home, but only when Saddam and sons aregone. ``When I defected I left everything, my house, my friends, my future, my memories,'' he says. ``But Iraq is not a secret any more. Iraq is an open book to the West. What is still hidden are the weapons and Saddam's game with them and the UN.''

-- The Observer News Service