How The FBI Broke Saddam

By James Gordon Meek
June 26, 2009
Courtesy Of The New York Daily News

Part 1

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.

How the FBI Broke Saddam - Part 2

June 27, 2009

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.

Related Material:

FBI-Baghdad 302 reports from Feb. 13-Feb. 27, 2004

DOWNLOAD the interrogation reports filed by FBI Agent George Piro:

FBI-Baghdad - Desert Spider 302 report, Feb. 7, 2004
FBI-Baghdad - Desert Spider 302 report, Feb. 8, 2004
FBI-Baghdad - Desert Spider 302 report, Feb. 10, 2004

Next week: The FBI and CIA plan to “overwhelm” Saddam with his crimes.