As the US scrambles to find funds to rebuild Iraq after the war, there is a tantalising pot of money which government investigators believe may be squirreled away in bank accounts and investments around the world.
President Saddam and his supporters are thought to have hidden anywhere from $6bn to $30bn in a web of accounts and shareholdings across Europe and the Middle East over the past three decades.
The US Treasury Secretary, Mr John Snow, recently announced a hunt for what he called "the blood money" of the regime, urging other governments to freeze assets belonging to President Saddam or his backers.
The US has confiscated $1.5bn in Iraqi funds that were frozen in 1990, the first time since the second World War that Washington has seized large quantities of a sovereign country's assets.
Mr Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, said yesterday that the assets were seized "so that they can be put to use to help rebuild the country".
But a bigger windfall lies undiscovered outside the US, the UK and 10 other countries which froze Iraqi funds in 1990.
The Treasury Department hopes that the recent experience gained in tracking down the assets of terrorist groups can help locate President's Hussein's hidden wealth.
Mr Jimmy Gurule, until last month the Treasury undersecretary in charge of finding al-Qaeda money, says the US has built a network of relationships with finance ministers and central bankers, including those in traditional secrecy havens such as Switzerland, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein.
And Mr David Aufhauser, Treasury general counsel, said that one country had already uncovered and frozen more than $300m in Iraqi regime assets.
But tracking down President Hussein's billions could be more difficult. For the past decade, the US and its allies have let the trail go cold, despite UN resolutions calling for sustained economic pressure on the regime.
"Did we ever go after it in an aggressive way? Absolutely not," says Mr Jonathan Winer, who was deputy assistant secretary of state for law enforcement in the Clinton administration.
The first efforts to track President Saddam's offshore holdings were during the Gulf war in 1990-91. Kroll Associates, a private investigative service, was hired by the government of Kuwait to see if money could be found to pay reparations to the country.
Kroll discovered a network of investments stretching from Europe to the Middle East and north America, managed largely out of Geneva by President Saddam's half brother, Mr Barzan al-Tikriti.
Most of the money appeared to have come from kickbacks on Iraqi oil sales, with a small percentage of each sale going into private accounts for President Saddam and his closest supporters.
Among the investments managed by Mr al-Tikriti was an 8.4 per cent holding in Hachette, the French magazine publisher.
Following the Gulf war, the UN imposed sanctions designed to squeeze the regime economically. But instead, President Saddam generated more hidden wealth by exploiting holes in the UN programme which allowed Iraq to sell oil to buy food and other necessities for civilians.
A study last September by the Coalition for International Justice concluded President Saddam and his family have earned about $2bn a year since 1997 by evading UN sanctions.
Finding the funds is now much harder because of that history of neglect.
Mr Jules Kroll, who heads Kroll Associates, said that most of the regime's money in the early 1990s was managed through Switzerland, France and the UK. The UK had clamped down on most of that activity and Switzerland's financial system was increasingly transparent. "But the French have very deep economic interests in Iraq."
The Swiss embassy in Washington said that Swiss financial authorities were "examining this matter thoroughly" and that "there are no indications that Saddam Hussein or someone close to Saddam Hussein has bank accounts in Switzerland". The French government has yet to comment.
Mr Stuart Eizenstat, a former deputy Treasury secretary who led the Clinton administration's anti-money laundering campaign, predicts that international enthusiasm is likely to be minimal.
"We're not going to get the kind of co-operation we got on al-Qaeda or Taliban assets because of concerns over US unilateralism."
- (Financial Times)