This book is based primarily on more than one hundred interviews conducted mainly with surviving participants in the events described, as well as on transcripts of tape-recorded meetings from inside Saddam Hussein’s regime; meeting notes and memoranda; oral histories, diaries, and memoirs; and journalism and scholarship.
As noted elsewhere, I filed a FOIA lawsuit against the Pentagon to obtain a collection of materials mainly from Saddam’s presidential offices and intelligence ministries, including audio recordings, transcripts, and minutes of meetings at which Saddam was present. These materials were captured by U.S. forces after the 2003 invasion, then collated and translated at a Defense Intelligence Agency facility in Qatar. Starting in 2010, some of the documents were made openly available through an archive—the Conflict Records Research Center, or CRRC—housed at the National Defense University. The CRRC released only about one-tenth of the approximately two thousand hours of Saddam recordings and only a sliver of the millions of pages of other files. The center closed for budgetary reasons in 2015, and the materials it had released were withdrawn. Through a settlement with the Justice Department, I obtained a specific subset of the archive that I had identified from CRRC indexes and requested in FOIA filings.
The CRRC and Defense Department materials, which remain largely unavailable as of this writing, are invaluable in many ways. There are other important archives illuminating the era of Saddam’s rule, but the records that capture Saddam’s comments, letters, and memoranda between the late 1970s and 2002 present a rare portrait of a modern dictator’s private discourse. They offer extraordinary and vivid insights into the Iraqi side of Saddam’s conflicts and relations with the United States, as well as into his dealings with the Soviet Union, Iraq’s neighbors, the wider Arab world, and the Global South. Yet the records are also complicated in both ethical and practical respects. After the materials were seized by U.S. forces, some Iraqi and Western scholars argued that they rightly belonged to Iraq, had been improperly taken, and should be returned. Iraqi government officials also sought their repatriation. In 2013, with little publicity, the Obama administration agreed to return millions of the seized records to the Iraqi government while retaining copies in Defense Department systems. The records provided to Iraq have not yet been made available to researchers or the Iraqi public, however. The Iraqi government has not explained its decision-making, but one general concern is that actors in the country’s sectarian and political violence might exploit information in the records to attack or pressure vulnerable individuals. In settling my FOIA lawsuit and obtaining the CRRC materials, I agreed to review any excerpts about private Iraqi individuals to be sure that my writing would not pose such a risk.
Despite the return of the captured records to Iraq, at least a few international scholars still decline to make use of them on ethical grounds, because of their provenance as a kind of war booty. I understand this reluctance. Yet in my four-decade career as a journalist, I have often had to grapple with human sources and documentary files with problematic histories. Like other American reporters, I work in a First Amendment tradition that often protects the use of even “stolen” or illegally leaked information if it is of public interest. Such journalism can be tricky, but I have found that there are ways to proceed thoughtfully—by prioritizing accurate information of public importance, minimizing harm, and offering context and transparency to readers. I have tried to do that here, persuaded as I am that the CRRC records offer unique and timely insights of lasting significance.
There are also practical issues with the materials. The English translations that were produced at the Defense Department facility in Qatar are sometimes choppy or ungrammatical, raising questions about that project’s quality control. I have studied Arabic but am inadequately trained to work in the language, so I collaborated with Ibrahim Al-Marashi, an associate professor and scholar of modern Iraqi politics at California State University, San Marcos. He reviewed the English translations of the excerpts I have quoted in the book, consulting the original Arabic source where available. In some cases, he suggested changes, which I have incorporated, to better capture nuance or a speaker’s obvious intention. In a majority of instances, he found that the CRRC translation was acceptable, even if it was not artful. In those cases, I have used the original translations, with only minor grammatical corrections. Here and in my choices of transliteration and recurring Iraqi names (Barzan, Hussein Kamel, etc.), I have accepted some inconsistency while prioritizing the reading experiences of nonspecialists.
Because the U.S. government has declined to make available all of the captured Saddam Hussein regime files, it is impossible to judge whether the materials released through the CRRC and other channels may be misleading or distorted, as excerpts of the entire archive. Subjects such as Iraqi sponsorship of terrorism and the history of Iraq’s WMD programs figured heavily in the initial Pentagon-supervised releases, for instance. I have no way to determine whether these files are representative of the whole archive or contradicted by other materials. In my FOIA request, I targeted materials that documented Saddam’s meetings and activity after 9/11, because I found this period to be underrepresented in the earlier releases. The records I received turned out to be lively and revealing, but there may be other files of interest from that period that have never seen the light of day. It is long past time for the White House and Defense Department to release the full archive and make it accessible to global researchers, with procedures in place to protect vulnerable individuals.
The chapter-by-chapter notes below offer a full account of the specific CRRC records and the many other sources that I have relied upon in the book.