BORN in 1937 and inducted into the Ba'th party in the early 1960s, Saddam Hussein rose quickly through the ranks to become the party's chief of security, and then its leader, subordinating the entire party to the will of the small clan from his native Tikrit village. Saddam held Josef Stalin as his mentor, and in 1968, the year of the Ba'thist takeover in Iraq, he carried out ferocious 'purges'. Non-Ba'thists were removed from state institutions, thousands were killed for alleged 'plots'. The following year he ordered mass hangings of 'spies'.