Hussein Pointed to Iranian Threat
Specter of Arms Allowed Him to Appear Strong, He Told U.S.
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Saddam Hussein told an FBI interviewer before he was hanged that
he allowed the world to
believe he had weapons of mass destruction because he was worried
about appearing weak to Iran, according to
declassified accounts of the interviews released yesterday. The
former Iraqi president also denounced Osama bin Laden as "a zealot"
and said he had no dealings with al-Qaeda.
Hussein, in fact, said he
felt so vulnerable to the perceived threat from "fanatic" leaders
in Tehran that he would have been prepared to seek a "security
agreement with the United States to protect [Iraq] from threats in
the region."
Former president George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq six
years ago on the grounds that Hussein possessed weapons of mass
destruction and posed a threat to international security.
Administration officials at the time also strongly suggested Iraq
had significant links to al-Qaeda, which carried out the Sept. 11,
2001, attacks on the United States.
Hussein, who was often defiant and boastful during the interviews,
at one point wistfully acknowledged that he should have permitted
the United Nations to witness the destruction of Iraq's weapons
stockpile after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
The FBI summaries of the interviews -- 20 formal interrogations and
five "casual conversations" in 2004 -- were obtained under the
Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive, an
independent non-governmental research institute, and posted on its
Web site yesterday. The detailed accounts of the interviews were
released with few deletions, though one, a last formal interview on
May 1, 2004, was completely redacted.
Thomas S. Blanton, director of the archive, said he could conceive
of no national security reason to keep Hussein's conversations with
the FBI secret. Paul Bresson, a bureau spokesman, said he could not
explain the reason for the redactions.
The 20 formal interviews took place between Feb. 7 and May 1,
followed by the casual conversations between May 10 and June 28.
Hussein was later transferred to Iraqi custody, and he was hanged
in December 2006.
The formal interviews covered Hussein's rise to power, the Kuwait
invasion, and Hussein's crackdown on the Shiite uprising in
extensive detail, while the subject of the weapons of mass
destruction and al-Qaeda were raised in the casual conversations,
after the formal interviews. Blanton said this suggests that the
FBI received new orders from Washington to delve into topics of
intense interest to Bush administration officials.
The FBI spokesman did not know why those subjects were raised in
the later meetings. In an interview last year on CBS's "60
Minutes," George L. Piro, the agent who conducted the interviews,
said he purposely put Hussein's back against the wall
"psychologically to tell him that his back was against the wall,"
but he did not use coercive interrogation techniques, because "it's
against FBI policy." The interviews released yesterday do not
suggest any use of coercive techniques.
During the interviews, Piro, who conducted them in Arabic, often
appeared to challenge Hussein's account of events, citing facts
that contradicted his recollections. He even forced Hussein to
watch a graphic British documentary on his treatment of the
Shiites, though that did not appear to shake the former
president.
At one point, Hussein
dismissed as a fantasy the many intelligence reports that said he
used a body double to elude assassination. "This is movie magic,
not reality," he said with a laugh. Instead, he said, he had used a
phone only twice since 1990 and rarely slept in the same location
two days in a row.
Hussein's fear of Iran, which he said he considered a greater
threat than the United States, featured prominently in the
discussion about weapons of mass destruction. Iran and Iraq had
fought a grinding eight-year war in the 1980s, and Hussein said he
was convinced that Iran was trying to annex southern Iraq -- which
is largely Shiite. "Hussein viewed the other
countries in the Middle East as weak and could not defend
themselves or Iraq from an attack from Iran," Piro recounted in his
summary of a June 11, 2004,
conversation.
"The threat from Iran was the major factor as to why he did not
allow the return of UN inspectors," Piro wrote. "Hussein stated he was more
concerned about Iran discovering Iraq's weaknesses and
vulnerabilities than the repercussions of the United States for his
refusal to allow UN inspectors back into
Iraq."
Hussein noted that Iran's weapons capabilities had increased
dramatically while Iraq's weapons "had been eliminated by the UN
sanctions," and that eventually Iraq would have to reconstitute its
weapons to deal with that threat if it could not reach a security
agreement with the United States.
Piro raised bin Laden in his last conversation with Hussein, on
June 28, 2004, but the information he yielded conflicted with the
Bush administration's many efforts to link Iraq with the terrorist
group. Hussein replied that throughout history there had been
conflicts between believers of Islam and political leaders. He said
that "he was a believer in God but was not a zealot . . . that
religion and government should not mix." Hussein said that he had
never met bin Laden and that the two of them "did not have the same
belief or vision."
When Piro noted that there were reasons why Hussein and al-Qaeda
should have cooperated -- they had the same enemies in the United
States and Saudi Arabia -- Hussein replied that the
United States was not Iraq's enemy, and that he simply opposed its
policies.
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