THE voice on the tape is that of Gen Hassan Kamel, the doomed son in law of Saddam Hussein, just four days before his execution.
"I have written a letter to His Excellency, Mr President Saddam, asking him to allow me to go back home," he says. "I am expecting a positive reply."
He is excited, expectant, constantly expressing his admiration for Iraq and its President, at times bursting into laughter. It is just 12 hours before the Middle East's most notorious defector will depart for the Iraqi border with his brother and their wives.
A Jordanian journalist, Shaker Jawhary, is the keeper of the last public testament of the Iraqi war criminal who massacred the Shias of Najaf and Kerbala and masterminded Iraq's arms bazaar, the man who drove so recklessly to Amman last August to demand President Saddam's overthrow and who then called so vainly for the Iraqi opposition to unite under his leadership.
"I feel sympathy for Mr President Saddam," Hassan Kamel says at one point in an earlier phone call to the journalist. "He was my uncle before he was my father in law. We are one family."
The world now knows how hopeless was Kamel's trust. No sooner had he and his brother crossed the border last week than the Iraqis announced that the wives of both men had divorced their husbands on Friday, Iraqi radio reported that both had been murdered at their Baghdad home along with their father and another brother, supposedly by tribal relatives.
It was the Jordanian newspaper Al-Bilad's publisher, Mr Nayef al-Tawra, who first asked Shaker Jawhary to mediate with Hassan Kamel after the defector had called him to condemn an interview which the Jordanian paper had just carried. Kamel screamed at Mr Tawra and said "I will cut you into a thousand pieces."
Jawhary phoned Saddam's son in law at his heavily guarded villa near Amman airport. "He was worried and said the paper had fabricated the interview with him," Jawhary said yesterday. "He said he had been quoted as saying that Sad dam was suffering from a tumour in the neck. I concluded from his words that the main reason for his concern was the possibility that this would destroy any hope of further contact between him and the Iraqi President."
Al-Bilad agreed to publish a retraction and Kamel said he would meet the publisher and apologise, for having threatened him. But the phone conversations between Jawhary and the Iraqi were to continue through the weekend, providing a last, chilling portrait of the ruthless Baath party commander.
"He said to me on the Saturday that he had not stopped thinking about his life in Baghdad from six that morning until the evening," Jawhary says. "He wouldn't reveal the conditions which would allow him to go back to Baghdad. But he kept talking about the sovereignty of Iraq and that it was to defend this sovereignty that he had defected."
Kamel said he felt sympathy for Saddam. But he seemed anxious to condemn suggestions that Iraq might be confederated with Jordan under a plan allegedly supported by King Hussein.
"He made very negative comments about Jordan," Jawhary said. "He said Iraq doesn't interfere with the domestic affairs of Jordan and he would not allow Jordan to interfere in Iraq's domestic affairs. If Americans or any other forces I suppose he meant Jordanian entered Iraq, he said they would face death and destruction. He was very excited, raising his voice...
"I asked him if he had personally made any calls to the Iraqi government or to President Saddam. Gen Kamel replied My contacts are with Baghdad and they did not stop, even from the first day I entered Jordan. I asked him again if these contacts were with the government or with Saddam and he repeated `With Baghdad.' He was laughing."
On Monday evening Mr Jawhary was in his car listening to Israeli radio news when he heard that Kamel had agreed to return to Iraq.
"I went home immediately and called him at 10 p.m. I asked Is this true or not He said `It's not true.' He told me he had sent a letter to President Saddam and expected what he called a `positive reply'."