These days the man who has led Iraq since 1968 - through two wars, years of oil plenty and years of crisis - does not sleep in the same place two nights in a row, his former associates say.
He sometimes sends out presidential convoys of cars as decoys while he takes the wheel of another car himself, dressed in Bedouin garb, in the company of a bodyguard or two from the Special Guards, his security detail.
In anticipation of a US air attack, President Saddam Hussein has reverted to the pattern of surreptitious moves that he adopted during the Gulf War.
The former associates - several senior officials who worked for him and met him, Arab Cabinet ministers who have visited him
recently and Arab intelligence officers monitoring Iraq - all agree that as Iraq prepares for the possibility of a military strike by the United States and its allies, the nation's supreme goal is to make sure Mr Saddam survives.
And his survival seems almost certain, unless there is a secret plan to land troops to find and kill him, some Arab officials say.
"I saw what happened during the strikes of 1990 and 1991," a former senior Iraqi official said. "He spent nights among people in the most ordinary neighborhoods. You never knew until there was a knock on the door with someone announcing a special guest. The following morning he was gone as fast as he came. He spent nights in tents in the desert, in farms. One night I saw him in a trailer to which I was summoned . . . with curtains drawn and a warning not to look out the window."
A senior Arab official who met the president in the past two weeks said security precautions around him have reached "paranoid" proportions. A letter that he was to have delivered in person to Mr Saddam was taken by an assistant who had been asked by the president to photocopy it.
Others said the Iraqi leader has long had a system to avoid touching envelopes as they could be smeared with poison.
The Arab official who saw Mr Saddam recently said people immediately around him are "forbidden under pain of death" to disclose his whereabouts, even to his closest associates, such as the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Tariq Aziz, or family members.
Part of the reason for the caution is reflected in a remark by a senior Saudi intelligence official who insisted on anonymity: "If an American attack guarantees Saddam will be killed, we would be the first to support it. Anything less would be pointless. It would only kill Iraqis and make him more vengeful."
Former Iraqi officials rejected the importance of the targets the United States has mentioned, especially the much-vaunted Republican Guards, the core of presidential protection and the main fighting force in 1990 and 1991.
"The Republican Guards are finished since the Gulf War," said a senior Iraqi businessman who maintains close ties with the Iraqi regime. "They have long been replaced with the Special Guards, put together over the past five years from the clans, tribes and family" of Mr Saddam. He said the Special Guards number more than 10,000 and are entirely devoted to the defence of Mr Saddam and his family.
"They possess tanks, armoured vehicles, and can put down any rebellion. They are directly answerable to Qosai," he added, referring to Mr Saddam's youngest son, who has run Iraq's security apparatus for some time.