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We began with a history-related question at our fourth session, asking Saddam to name his favorite world leaders. He thought long and hard about this. His answers were surprising. He said he most admired de Gaulle, Lenin, Mao, and George Washington. They were all founders of political systems, and Saddam felt a kinship with them, perhaps because he had shaped modern Iraq and what was known to scholars as the Ba’athist Party. It was notable that he didn’t mention any Arab leaders. Saddam said he particularly liked the French: “I had traveled there twice and had gotten to know the mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, quite well. I had intended to go back, but then the wars started, and who has time to travel when your country is at war.” When we asked him about his relationship with Chirac, Saddam said that he didn’t understand him. He thought they were friends, but Chirac did not come to help him. Saddam had relied on France, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, to support his efforts to get out from under international sanctions. However, the French were never able to support Saddam to the extent that he felt he deserved. During this exchange, Saddam made a sweeping gesture with his upper thigh, as though he were wiping away something unpleasant. *****************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
When I mentioned the USS Stark, Saddam suddenly grew quiet. Until this point, he seemed to be enjoying himself. Now he affected a lack of interest and chose to say nothing. I kept pressing him. In May 1987, during the Iran-Iraq War, the Iraqis mistakenly fired Exocet missiles at the USS Stark, which was in the Persian Gulf protecting international shipping. I told Saddam that some U.S. analysts felt the attack on the ship was deliberate, an attempt by Saddam to get even for the Iran-Contra episode, in which the United States secretly sold arms to Iran via Israel, Saddam’s two most determined regional foes during the Iran-Iraq War. Saddam refused to look me in the eye. He began to nervously play with his hood, picking off invisible pieces of lint and folding and refolding the fabric. This was very unusual behavior and something we would see again whenever uncomfortable topics were introduced. In the language of experienced interrogators and psychiatrists, it was a revealing nonverbal cue.
Saddam tried to act as though Iran-Contra had not soured him on the United States. However, it was clear that he was deeply disturbed by what he saw as American double-dealing with his enemy during a bloody war. Years later, at a briefing at Langley, Charles Duelfer, the WMD hunter, tried to argue with me that Iran-Contra was not a significant event in Saddam’s career. He produced a timeline with milestones in Saddam’s relations with the United States. I asked why 1986, the year Iran-Contra was disclosed, wasn’t on the list. Duelfer became visibly agitated when we spoke about it.
The opening to Iran had occurred in the mid-1980s, during the years of our simultaneous development of good relations with Baghdad. The United States had given Saddam credits and loans, had shared intelligence with Iraq on Iranian troop movements, and had reopened an embassy in Baghdad in 1984. (Memories of the 1979–81 hostage crisis at the U.S. embassy in Tehran were still fresh. Iran was viewed as implacably radical and, unable to get credits from abroad, had to pay cash for arms during the Iran-Iraq War.) In the Iran-Contra report that was published in 1987, Saddam learned that one of Iran’s negotiating conditions was that Washington help overthrow Saddam’s regime. This was the first mention of regime change in Iraq, fifteen years before George W. Bush officially made it the policy of the U.S. government. In 2011, my view of Iran-Contra’s importance to Saddam was vindicated by the publication of secret papers recovered by the U.S. military after the invasion. They included minutes from the Revolutionary Command Council meetings in which Saddam discussed Iran-Contra. As Michael Gordon wrote in The New York Times, “The Iran-Contra affair proved to be particularly bitter for Mr. Hussein and his aides, and they struggled for weeks to comprehend it. Among other things, they could not understand why the Reagan administration had taken military action against Libya in 1986 but was reaching out to Iran, since, Mr. Hussein said, Iran ‘plays a greater role in terrorism.’”
We spoke for two and a half hours and suddenly we heard a knock on the door. It was time for Saddam’s dinner. We all stood up and said that we would be back soon to talk to him. Saddam nodded his head in agreement. He turned to leave and then turned back to face us. He put his hand over his heart and said, “I would like you to know that I have really enjoyed this. It has been months since I talked with anyone. It has been so long since I have been able to have a meaningful conversation and I look forward to our next meeting.” He smiled and turned his back to us as the hood was put over his head and he was led back to his cell. We all almost fell over. We were highly encouraged by Saddam’s affirmation of our effort and hoped it would lead to a productive debriefing process. We immediately conveyed to Langley that Saddam seemed willing to expand the scope of our conversation. Despite our pledge to talk only of “history,” we would soon roll into our questions about the regime.
We got back to our trailer and began to write up our notes. Soon we were visited by the chief of station, a man named Bob, who came out of the National Clandestine Services (NCS), the CIA’s operational arm. He had no Middle East experience and supposedly had been brought in to whip the Baghdad operation into shape. Like many members of the NCS, he had a very low opinion of analysts. The case officers from the NCS professed not to know what analysts actually did. You would try to explain your job to them and they would act even more confused. The case officers were extroverts—confidence men, really—who would cozy up to analysts to tap our expertise when they were vetting a source.
Members of NCS also thought that analysts were the source of leaks to the media. Bob told me that if I so much as breathed a word of what Saddam said, I would be removed from the debriefing team. Clearly, Bob did not like the idea of having an analyst as part of the team, perhaps for reasons stated above. That night he told me that I would no longer be in the room with Saddam and that Charlie, our team leader, would handle the debriefing. When the questioners were finished, I would write up the daily report based on what they told me Saddam had said, and then I would develop their line of questioning for the following day. I pointed out to him that they needed to have an Iraq expert like me when they were talking to Saddam, if only to challenge him if he seemed to be lying. I then left the room and told Bruce that if I was not involved in the actual interrogation, I would be on the next plane back to the States. He managed to calm me down and said he would talk to Bob. I was subsequently able to convince Bob that my expertise was essential to a successful debriefing.
We soon had a major change to our team. A few days after our meeting with Bob, we learned that Charlie was being replaced. This was highly unusual and another sign of trouble brewing thousands of miles away at Langley. For some reason, the pooh-bahs at HQ were uncomfortable with the way our debriefings were being conducted. Charlie heard that a replacement was coming and caught the next flight out of Baghdad. Perhaps they felt as though we weren’t getting the information they needed to placate the White House quickly enough. This was typical of the way George Tenet ran things. If he didn’t have a good feel for the person in charge, he asked his inner circle to find someone else. It was an ominous indication that Langley expected answers right away that would support Tenet’s assurance to the president that finding WMD would be a slam dunk.
Washington consistently underestimated the difficulty of finding WMD or getting Saddam or one of his henchmen to tell us where they were. This was also true when it came to getting accurate intelligence on other matters. During the run-up to war, the CIA received intelligence that Saddam was meeting with his top aides at a leadership facility called Dora Farms on the outskirts of Baghdad. The CIA got the tip from a source supposedly close to the Iraqi dictator, and it was relayed to Langley even as Saddam was supposedly meeting with his key officials. Tenet apparently raced to the White House with the news, prompting President Bush to begin hostilities a day earlier than planned. Two F-117 Nighthawk fighters dropped four bunker-buster bombs on the complex. None of them hit the building where Saddam was supposedly holding court, but it didn’t matter. He wasn’t there. He wasn’t even close. ******************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
We learned during our debriefing that Saddam was preoccupied with money. It was everything to him. Like many people who grow up poor and know deprivation and hunger from an early age, Saddam regarded money as a measure of his status and a source of his power. Money was a lot more important to him than was meeting with government officials at Dora Farms. The source had fed the United States a story that conformed to what we expected: Saddam would be attending to the affairs of state, just as any leader would before a crisis that threatened his regime. But whether it was money or writing, Saddam was more interested in things other than the humdrum business of government. With the coalition preparing to pursue him, he had delegated much of the running of the government to his top aides. Saddam’s unpredictability confounded the United States right from the start of the war.
Money was also an irritant for Saddam in his relations with others. On several occasions Saddam derided individuals who he thought were stealing from him. When he did this, an expression of contempt crossed his face, as though this was the lowest thing a person could do. He described his son-in law Husayn Kamel in this way. Husayn Kamel became world-famous after he defected to Jordan in 1994 with his brother, Saddam Kamel—who was also Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law—and their families. Subsequently, the Kamel brothers grew tired of living in Amman and were led to believe that they would be forgiven if they returned to Iraq. They did so in 1996, but they were denounced as traitors, ordered to divorce their wives, and killed in a firefight with Saddam’s security forces. Saddam told us about Husayn’s wheeling and dealing—how he often started up companies to launder money through Jordan, ********************************************************************************************************************. Bruce told Saddam that Husayn Kamel sounded like a very untrustworthy person. Saddam responded, “Now you know why he is where he is.”
I asked Saddam about the money that was found in his possession when he was captured. Saddam smirked and gave an angry snicker. He named a large dollar amount. ********************************************* he asked. ***************************** “That was the amount I had with me at the time the U.S. forces arrived. Some of your people helped themselves to my money.” Saddam was dead serious. You could see that he was incensed by the thought of someone stealing from him and wanted us to account for the missing money. I told him that it was unlikely that GIs would have stolen anything, given the high-profile nature of the raid and the media blitz that would follow, and further that U.S. Special Forces didn’t do things like that. At this point Saddam motioned me to give him my pen and notebook and said, “May I?” I gave him my pen and notebook and he wrote out a document stating for the record that ******************* was missing from his possession. With a great flourish he signed the note and gave me back my notebook. I had this in my notebook for a day or so, but realized that I couldn’t keep the document. We had been told by the lawyers that anything he said or wrote was discoverable and therefore all documents had to be turned over for the eventual prosecution. Now I wish I had just kept it as a keepsake of our time together. Instead I handed it to one of my teammates and we sealed it in a zip-lock bag and put it in a safe. I am sure this piece of paper is in a folder in a box—somewhere.
We were severely constrained by lack of documents during our early debriefings. We didn’t know about, or have access to, a huge trove of Iraqi records that was in the U.S. Army’s possession. In an undertaking such as Operation Iraqi Freedom, synergy and the ability to coordinate actions among disparate elements of the invading force proved to be impossible. These documents would have been invaluable because we could have shown Saddam that we had the goods on him, cracking his wall of self-assuredness. When I found out about the archive of captured Iraqi documents two years later, I felt sick. This information would have made our debriefing, as well as the FBI’s, much more fruitful. It was further proof of how unprepared the intelligence community was for Saddam’s capture.
Saddam’s government kept an archive of the meetings of the Revolutionary Command Council. It was the highest-ranking government decision-making body, and Saddam was its chairman. Notes from the meetings would have been extremely useful in our debriefing. In any successful debriefing, knowledge is power. You don’t have to torture people or threaten them with physical harm. If you show a detainee that you can document the facts, it severely weakens his ability to withhold information. Most detainees claim to be innocent. But once you start asking questions based on solid information, the detainee becomes nervous and indecisive. You have a better chance of learning more because you have limited his ability to give false or misleading answers. Suddenly the detainee starts offering information in hopes that his cooperation will bring leniency later on.
Although he often said he looked forward to our meetings, this didn’t mean he was especially cooperative. For him it was a way to pass the time. Sometimes when we were trying to get him to explain things to us, Saddam misinterpreted our questions, implying we were ignorant. Sometimes he would use several divergent threads of thought to answer a straightforward question. He would say things like, “I will tell you my point soon, but first I must tell you about X.” This would then produce a long lecture about a seemingly unrelated topic. Then Saddam would zero back to the question and tie it to the topic he’d been lecturing about.
Saddam was the most suspicious man I have ever met. He was always answering questions with questions of his own, and he would frequently demand to know why we had asked about a certain topic before he would give his answer. We would ask him a question about a certain event during his presidency, and he would begin his answer by going back to the rule of Saladin. After a few such long-winded answers, Bruce stopped him and said, “Saddam, I think we need you to focus more on the immediate question and not go into so much historical detail.” Saddam would then look perplexed and answer, “But what I am saying is very important, and you must hear all of it.” I often wondered afterward how many people told Saddam Hussein to keep it brief and lived to tell about it.
He was not without his lighter side, though. He did have a sense of humor, which he would put on display when he felt like diverting our questions. From time to time Saddam would tell us funny anecdotes culled from his experiences leading Iraq. He told us of a time during the 1990s when he went to Lake Habbaniya for a meeting but didn’t bring his usual redundant circles of security with him, instead bringing only a few bodyguards. Soon he was enveloped by a crowd of well-wishers chanting his name. The crowd swelled as word spread that Saddam was in town, and soon his bodyguards were overwhelmed. At one point a guard threw a young boy to the ground as Saddam made his way to the waiting car. Saddam saw this, saw the boy pick up a stick, and then winked at the boy. Saddam called the guard’s name, and when he turned to face Saddam, he got whacked on the side of the head with the stick—the boy’s revenge for being thrown to the ground. At this point Saddam broke out in laughter. We laughed with him. I said, “Saddam, that was a very funny story.” He replied, “I have another,” and proceeded to tell us a few more anecdotes similar to the one recounted above. The one thing all the stories had in common was that they ended with someone experiencing physical punishment with Saddam being the instigator of the punishment.
Saddam’s temper flared when we touched on sensitive areas, notably his personal behavior. One day we discussed Iraq-Syria relations, a topic that annoyed him. He nervously picked at his fingernails, a tic that showed us we had hit a nerve. On those occasions I pushed him harder to answer the question. Once he figured out where my line of questioning was going, he would frown and hold out his hand in front of everyone and pick at the dirt from under his fingernails. If we persisted, he would begin to clean his teeth.
When the conversation moved into areas that made him uncomfortable, he would claim that we were interrogating him and that the discussion was no longer about history. When I asked him about trade between Syria and Iraq, Saddam erupted: “Trade? Who cares about trade? Do you think Saddam Hussein is a tradesman? This is the scum of history.” Some things Saddam wouldn’t talk about at all. These tended to be about his personal security, his relations with other Arab leaders, his relations with those he deemed loyal, and intelligence matters. Saddam also told us he had only two friends in the world, but he wouldn’t tell us who they were.
What made the sessions so stimulating was that we had a chance to question Saddam about things that no one had ever asked him about before. These questions both knocked Saddam off balance and kept him talking. He wanted to provide answers for the historical record and sound convincing about it. Sometimes he was clearly surprised by our questions, as when we asked about his wives (he had two: Sajida and a flight attendant from Iraqi Airways, Samira Shahbandar; he was visibly uncomfortable when talking about them). He occasionally felt he had given away too much and tried to take back things he had said. We set aside time to build rapport, but we were constrained by the fact that we didn’t know how long we’d have with Saddam and there were lots of subjects that policymakers in Washington wanted us to cover. Our CIA team knew far more about Saddam and Iraq than the FBI debriefers who followed us, but we ended up getting far less time to question him. George Tenet and his cronies on the seventh floor of the CIA in Washington just didn’t understand what went into a successful debriefing.
Saddam clung tenaciously to the idea that he was still head of state and referred to himself as the president. For this reason, we would not address him as Mr. President or Mr. Saddam. We would call him only by his first name. He seemed a bit put off by this at first but soon got used to it.
One day he asked a guard for something to read. The guard located a number of books in Arabic and gave them to him. Saddam devoured them. One was a book of his speeches. The next day he brought it into the interrogation room and said he wanted to read something to us. It was a speech he had given in September 1980. He told me, “Yesterday you said that it was I who started the war with Iran. I have something to say to you.” He began reading the speech. It was the speech he gave justifying the invasion of Iran.
We tolerated it for a short while. We thanked Saddam for trying to educate us about the origins of the Iran-Iraq War and said we would come back to that later, but first we had other topics to discuss. I was privately disappointed. I could have listened to him talk about the war for hours. I knew that few people would ever have this opportunity. Saddam was very proud of his leadership of Iraq during the war. It was weirdly fascinating to hear him relive old battles, naturally with minor modifications to enhance his role and diminish the roles of his subordinates.