Where were Iraq’s WMD? How close was Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda, really?

These were vital - but still unanswered - questions when the Iraqi despot was yanked out of a spider hole in December 2003 and placed in U.S. military detention. Lives were at stake - along with the entire political rationale for the U.S.-led coalition invading Iraq.

Only one man could say for sure, and now that the U.S. finally had him in custody, they had to find out.

There was only one way: Break Saddam.

The FBI’s newly-declassified interrogation files on Saddam Hussein, reported exclusively in yesterday’s Daily News, stand in contrast to the dark view espoused by Team Bush: only extreme interrogation techniques extract confessions from “high-value” detainees who resist questioning.

The CIA and FBI were intent on getting Saddam to explain what happened to the missing weapons of mass destruction, his operational ties - if any - to Al Qaeda and admit his own crimes against humanity by gassing and slaughtering his own people. CIA WMD hunter David Kay had resigned in frustration in late January 2004, and the missing arsenal was vexing Team Bush just as special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was beginning his probe of the White House over leaks in retaliation against Iraq war critic Joe Wilson.

The pressure was intense.

A young, Arabic-speaking, Lebanese-American FBI agent named George Piro was picked to get Saddam to confess. Detailed interrogation plans were drawn up, and Piro sat down with one of the most brutally ruthless world leaders of the late 20th century, prepared to play mental chess with a master of manipulation, whose intelligence ranged from cunning street smarts to quirky political intuition.

Learn about the intense first meetings between Saddam and the G-man who broke him after the jump.

The first FBI interrogation of Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti - in a program codenamed “Desert Spider” - took place Feb. 7, 2004, in a dingy cell at Baghdad International Airport. Memos obtained by The News through a 2006 Freedom of Information Act request for Saddam’s file show that top FBI and Justice Department officials had decided Feb. 6 not to read high-value detainees Miranda rights or to identify interrogators to detainees in any way other than as “representatives of the United States Government” or “U.S. Government agents.” Saddam assumed Piro was a top Bush aide - not a low-ranking street agent.

Sizing up the G-man, Saddam observed that Piro (an FBI supervisory special agent) was “smart,” and predicted, “Perhaps a conversation between two such educated people will not be useful or successful.” He decreed that it was only important to him what people say or think about him “in the future, 500 or 1,000 years from now.”

The ex-leader ranted about all he had done for Iraq, which “barely had anything” when he came to power in a bloodbath 40 years ago. Piro asked if he had ever failed in his decades as Iraq’s leader, but Saddam countered, “Do you think I would tell my enemy if I made a mistake?”

His ego as yet undiminished by captivity, Saddam gloated that “the only political parties existing in Iraq are the ones with the weapons” - a reference to the growing lethality of the Sunni insurgency - and said it made no difference what anybody thought about him. “Hussein believes people will love him more after he passes away than they do now,” Piro wrote in his first FBI “302” report back to Washington.

Piro wasted no time in asking about Saddam’s crimes against humanity, testing the captive dictator’s emotions and pride. The next day, he brought up the ghastly chemical weapons Saddam’s army used against its neighbor Iran in the 1980s war.

“I am not going to answer,” he said defiantly. Asked again, Saddam lectured the FBI agent that he would “not be cornered or caught on some technicality - it will not do you any good.” But Piro persisted, pointing out that the UN had documented chemical attacks. “History is written and will not change,” Saddam said, smugly. “I am not going to answer, no matter how you put the question.”

This Feb. 8 report by Piro - in effect - framed the challenge facing the FBI to higher-ups back in Washington, including the President: Flipping Saddam into turning witness against himself would not be easy.

In his third meeting with Saddam on Feb. 10, Piro asked about Iraq’s aid and hospitality to Palestinian terrorists. Saddam boasted: “We accepted them as guests.”

While indirectly denying helping the Palestine Liberation Organization or Palestine Liberation Front leader Abu Abbas, which maintained Baghdad offices, Saddam reasoned that, “At any time, we have the ability and the right to help in the struggle” of Palestinians against Israel. When pushed about reports he gave cash to Abbas - the mastermind of the Achille Lauro boatjacking, who killed passenger Leon Klinghoffer - Saddam grew testy. “I didn’t say I helped Abbas. Don’t put words in my mouth,” he barked, insisting it “was not wrong” if his intelligence services helped the terrorist.

Saddam, still assuming he was in the driver’s seat, advised Piro, “I think the questions should be in the context of a dialogue, not an interrogation.”

What would come next would be a case study in how to extract a confession from a tyrant, resonating five years later as the debate over torture - which Saddam mastered, and which Dick Cheney and George W. Bush now, arguably, defend - rages anew. Piro’s team decided to simply have a conversation.

Saddam Hussein was defiant in his first meetings with his American captors. But soon it was time to begin whittling down his ego, bloated by decades of absolute power in Iraq. Brute force, however, was not in the gameplan.

By mid-February 2004, FBI Supervisory Special Agent George Piro had sat down with Saddam Hussein three times - as The Mouth reported on Friday - and listened to the toppled tyrant yap away about his great accomplishments leading ragtag Iraq out of the Stone Age.

The FBI prides itself on “rapport-based” interrogations that have a high success rate for yielding confessions from the likes of 1993 World trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and CIA headquarters killer Mir Aimal Kasi. There was no “ticking bomb” scenario with Saddam - just inherent political pressure - so the interrogation proceeded carefully and cautiously over months.

The strategy involved executing a subtle emotional attack, digging out Saddam’s soft spots and exploiting them. Prick his ego.

Saddam had revealed little, so far - and neither had Piro - other than stating he remained in Baghdad until the day before his capital fell to American-led forces in April 2003. He said he instructed his henchmen in a final meeting, “We will struggle in secret.” After fleeing Baghdad, he gradually dispersed his bodyguards one by one to avoid drawing Coalition forces’ attention. Saddam had evaded capture for nine months, until U.S. viceroy Paul Bremer made his famous exultation in December 2003: “Ladies and gentleman, we got him!”

Piro asked if Saddam ever used body doubles, as was widely believed. “No, of course not,” he scoffed. “This is movie magic, not reality.”

But as the fourth interrogation began on Feb. 13, Saddam wanted answers from Piro.

“Let me ask a direct question. I want to ask where … has the information been going? For our relationship to remain clear, I want to know,” he demanded. Piro replied that he was a “representative of the U.S. Government” and told Saddam many U.S. officials saw his reports, and that readership “may include the President of the United States.” Saddam seemed pleased, commenting that he did “not mind” if the interviews were published.

Piro turned to Saddam’s WMD stockpiles but his quarry brushed it off, saying, “We destroyed them. We told you… By God, if I had such weapons, I would have used them in the fight against the U.S.” Hadn’t Saddam’s own decision to defy the UN on WMD inspections led to crippling sanctions and then a war that ousted him from power? “This is your opinion. I answered,” the stonewaller said. “We (Iraqis) are among the few remaining cavaliers.”

More on how the FBI began to whittle away at Saddam’s ego after the jump.

As the meetings continued through February, Saddam grew increasingly insistent on getting news of the outside world, saying he felt like an imprisoned character in “A Tale of Two Cities” deprived of any news. But Piro was intentionally vague, telling him only that “efforts are underway to rebuild Iraq.

“Over time, some things have changed; others have not,” he told the prisoner.

They discussed Saddam’s ascendancy to power in the late 1960s, and Piro listened to him rant about “Zionist” influence over western policies. He often described key dramatic moments in his rise from revolutionary to dictator as being “just like a movie,” pleading with Piro, “I hope you will be just in what history you write.”

“Fortunately or unfortunately, I will have a major impact on your history,” Piro replied.

In their tenth meeting on Feb. 27, Piro pressed Saddam about the 1990 invasion of neighboring Kuwait and atrocities his troops committed there, describing a litany of horrors to Iraq’s disgraced leader. “This is the first time I have ever heard of this,” the former Iraqi strongman said, shrugging it off.

Then Piro casually - no doubt in a well thought out ploy - referred to Saddam as Iraq’s “ex-president.”

“I am not the ex-president of Iraq,” Saddam snarled. “I am still the President of Iraq.”

Piro also sought the answer to one of the biggest lingering mysteries of the 1991 Gulf war: the fate of Navy Capt. Scott Speicher, a fighter pilot listed at times by the Pentagon as either as missing in action or captured, and whose remains have never been recovered. Saddam said he recalled a “an American prisoner, not a prisoner, excuse me, but an American person. I think an officer,” whose plane went down in the western desert. “The Americans were looking for him,” he said, adding that he had granted permission for a search and told U.S. teams that “they are welcome.”

“Hussein does not remember the pilot’s name, including whether it was Speicher,” the FBI’s Baghdad Operations Center reported back to Washington.

Saddam Hussein loved to talk - and to b.s. his sole interrogator, FBI Supervisory Special Agent George Piro.

But Piro - backed up by a team of FBI agents and crack CIA analysts - knew Saddam’s history too well. Where there were gaps, Piro was able to parry with the imprisoned leader to get credible answers. “High Value Detainee-1” was soon blabbing so freely it was hard for him to keep his lies intact.

As the weeks wore on, Saddam opened up more and more as the FBI-CIA team leveraged its strategy to “overwhelm” - and break - him by confronting the deposed dictator with evidence of his crimes against humanity.

He was soon boasting of terrible misdeeds against his own people - in order to set the historical record straight, which Piro had encouraged.

On Mar. 21, 2004, the FBI team in Baghdad reported they had conducted 16 interviews of Saddam and a dozen with his former henchmen, including ex-foreign minister Tariq Aziz and a death-dealing thug nicknamed “Chemical Ali.” Noting Saddam’s willingness to engage in “dialogue, not an interrogation,” the FBI’s Baghdad agents told Washington that Piro spent several sessions “discussing non-threatening topics,” and that Saddam felt relaxed enough “to talk freely and to boast of past accomplishments.”

But Saddam also quit eating in some unexplained protest, the FBI memo said - though he had grown so dependant on the G-man providing for all his needs that “Hussein announced he was ending his hunger strike for the benefit of SSA Piro.”

“As the rapport and dependency between Hussein and SSA Piro continues to grow, more complex topics are being introduced into the interviews,” such as detailed questions about gassing Kurds in northern Iraq and suppressing the 1991 Shi’a uprising, the once-secret memo reported.

“In the past, Hussein would have refused to discuss these topics. However, he has increasingly allowed himself to be drawn into discussions… [due] to the non-threatening manner in which they are being posed,” the FBI file said.

More on how the FBI needled Saddam into confessing his crimes after the jump.

When quizzed about the use of chemical weapons in early March, Saddam found it “strange” anyone would assume the “unrealistic hypothetical” that Iraq would ever use WMD on coalition forces, since it did not “cross our mind,” he said.

“We would have been called stupid,” he added.

Saddam initially pleaded ignorance about the Shi’a uprising in southern Iraq following the 1991 Gulf war. Confronted with evidence of his brutality, he soon admitted targeting those involved: Iranian operatives and Iraqi Shi’a “outlaws” and “greedy thieves.” He blamed Iran - not George H.W. Bush, who had encouraged the uprising - and cackled that his military’s “blade got longer and longer.” Iraq’s ex-strongman confessed that his minions in southern Iraq were “given the authority and they carried it out.”

Piro confronted Saddam with a Human Rights Watch report that Iraqi tanks stormed Basra with small children tied to them as human shields. The prisoner repeatedly said the allegation didn’t deserve his reply, but that he would “answer for the benefit of the interviewer” by stating, “The lie is clear.”

Despite his diet of Cuban cigars and a calming interrogation setting of plush chairs and carpets, Piro made Saddam increasingly uncomfortable. Together they watched a 1993 PBS documentary by Michael Wood on the Shi’a slaughter he inflicted, but he only made it through the first half before calling it quits to go pray. For the first time, though, he referred to himself as something other than the president of Iraq.

“Your army occupies my country. You are free. I am a prisoner,” he said to Piro.

“The team will continue efforts to overwhelm Hussein with the volume of evidence against him and others regarding human rights violations, mass murders and the use of chemical weapons,” the Mar. 21 FBI report concluded. “When he senses that his strategy of denial is no longer working, Hussein may decide to blame others, including former regime leaders, for these past abuses.”

They finished the film in the next session on Mar. 23, while Saddam ranted about the Bushes and that it was “beneath him” to watch the film and its charges of atrocities. When a Marsh Arab woman told the filmmakers she lost everything, Saddam cracked up. “What did she have before? Reeds?”

Piro - who by then had interviewed other top regime figures at length - continued to demand answers about his crimes, angering Saddam.

“Do you think I would answer based upon who is in custody? I am afraid of no one. I am only afraid of God,” Saddam thundered.

NEXT: Is that your final answer, Saddam? The WMD and Al Qaeda questions.

Three months into interrogating Saddam Hussein, the FBI had heard no bombshells. There had been no startling boasts by Iraq’s ousted president of ordering the Kurds in northern Iraq to be gassed, nor had he bragged of sending his thugs to slaughter Shi’a in the south to quash the uprising that followed the first Gulf war.

But the more the FBI confronted him with its painstakingly-gathered evidence - documents, videos, witnesses and interrogations of other regime detainees - the harder it had been for Saddam to lie, spin or obfuscate. By May 2004, he was still defiant - but the chinks in his armor were noticeable.

He admitted as a point of pride that he was “responsible” for everything his regime did, good or bad.

FBI Agent George Piro had mostly kept Saddam in the dark about current events, forcing him to reckon with the hell he brought on his own people. Now it was time to show the ex-dictator he was no longer in charge of anything more than his own thoughts. Now it was time to humiliate him over his failures. Only then would he come clean about what propelled the U.S. and Iraq into war, agents reasoned.

In the FBI’s 21st interrogation session, Saddam asked what was making headlines. He was told Iraq had signed a new constitution, was about to regain its sovereignty, had a new all-Iraqi Governing Council and that elections were on the way. None of that made him happy, according to the Bureau’s files.

Next came intense discussions about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. “Iraq does not have any WMD and has not for some time,” the FBI reported back to Washington, summing up Saddam’s responses. (Charles Duelfer - who had taken over the WMD hunt from the CIA’s David Kay in January - was coming up just as empty as his predecessor.)

Why had he rejected UN weapons inspections and defied President Bush? Saddam’s answer - one never seriously considered inside the Beltway before the 2003 invasion - was shockingly credible. “Even though Hussein claimed Iraq did not have WMD, the threat from Iran was the major factor as to why he did not allow the return of the UN inspectors,” the FBI reported.

After the jump: Why Saddam was more afraid of Iran than America, and he finally explains WMD and Al Qaeda mysteries.

While the UN was making Iraq WMD-free by 1998, it allowed Tehran’s arsenal to grow, Saddam stated. Told that the coalition had intelligence suggesting he had reconstituted some WMD programs since then, Saddam “denied this,” an FBI memo said. He described holding “meetings with all his ministers and asked them specifically if Iraq had WMD that he was unaware of. All of his ministers said no.”

Piro asked his prisoner to describe his feelings about post-Saddam Iraq. Saddam began to rant, but Piro “stopped him and asked how he personally felt.” The G-man didn’t get much of a response, apparently, so he dropped an emotional anvil on him. “Piro told Hussein he is no longer the President of Iraq; he was done. Hussein replied yes, he knows,” a June 11 FBI memo said. “Piro told Hussein that his life is nearing its end and asked him if he wanted the remainder of his life to have meaning, to which he responded yes.”

The 25th and final FBI interrogation report, dated June 28, 2004, details Saddam’s views of Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden. He didn’t care for the “zealot.” Saddam confirmed his spies met with the Saudi’s henchmen and that he once rejected a plea for $10 million by Al Qaeda. But, operational ties with them? No way, he said.

“Why not?” Piro asked. After all, Saddam was fond of saying “my enemy’s enemy is my brother.” Saddam, however, insisted America “was not Iraq’s enemy,” he simply “opposed its policies.”

In mid-2005, the FBI gave a now-legendary 94-page report to Iraqi prosecutors on Saddam’s crimes. Speaking of the Shi’a uprising, Saddam is quoted as saying, “I am responsible for what I decide.” Tariq Aziz, his trusted political and foreign policy adviser, told the FBI that “only Hussein could authorize the use of chemical weapons” - which his regime called “special ammunition.” Using chemical weapons against the Kurds in 1988 “was at the sole discretion of President Hussein,” the FBI report concluded.

Saddam was found guilty twice and executed on Dec. 30, 2006.

Senior former U.S. intelligence officials debate whether George Piro’s success breaking Saddam proved torture is the wrong way to break a detainee. “You’re not comparing apples and oranges here; it’s apples and pomegranates,” a retired top CIA official complained to The Mouth. “The questions of interest that you cite were only of historical interest … The argument you’re making is tendentious and specious.

“They had nothing to do with time-sensitive threat information or saving lives - which is the only conceivably valid rationale for ‘abusive’ interrogation.”

A Mar. 21, 2004, FBI memo, however, stated: “The primary purpose of interviewing Hussein is to obtain intelligence,” and accurately predicted the prospect of a death sentence might compel Saddam to cooperate.

“Piro’s mission was not to gain information quickly, it was to gain information completely - with a primary purpose in trying to figure out if there was either WMD or precursor chemicals in Iraq,” a retired top FBI official told The Mouth. “Saddam did not, until the last, accept that he would not be restored to the presidency…there is a huge difference between the person who thinks he will be restored to grandeur and the person who has no hope of freedom.”

By James Gordon Meek
www.nydailynews.com

DOWNLOAD the complete FBI Saddam Hussein interrogation reports:

FBI-Baghdad 302 interrogation reports, Feb. 7 - Feb. 24, 2004
FBI-Baghdad 302 interrogation reports, Feb. 27 - June 28, 2004
FBI Prosecutive Report for Iraqi Tribunal, Mar. 10, 2005
Read How the FBI Broke Saddam - Part 1
Read How the FBI Broke Saddam - Part 2
Read How the FBI Broke Saddam - Part 3