CIA analyst wore down Saddam Hussein with tough
family questions
Sherryl Connelly5
days ago
© AP Images SaddamThe end was not
pretty for Saddam Hussein.
On Dec. 13, 2003,
U.S. special-ops soldiers dragged a haggard, white-bearded man from a spider
hole in the town of Ad-Dawr, Iraq.
Before his captors
could inform President George W. Bush that one of the largest manhunts in U.S.
military history had ended in victory, the prisoner’s identity needed
confirmation.
Enter CIA analyst
John Nixon.
“Debriefing the
President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein” is Nixon’s account of his work
as the first U.S. inquisitor to confront the brutal dictator with the hard
questions.
Nixon, like Saddam,
was in a tough spot. In the wake of 9/11, the U.S. went to war and targeted the
murderous dictator accused of harboring weapons of mass destruction — and evil
intent.
Nixon, armed with a
specialized knowledge of Saddam, was able to identify the Iraqi strongman by an
old scar, a bullet wound and two tribal tattoos.
A few targeted
questions from Nixon — whose book hits stores Dec. 27 — eventually sealed the
deal.
“When was the last
time you saw your sons alive?” he asked Saddam.
“Who are you guys?”
replied a still-arrogant Saddam. “Are you military intelligence? Answer me.
Identify yourselves.”
Informed that Nixon
would ask all the questions, Saddam settled in. He then had the gall to
complain of a few cuts and bruises incurred in the capture.
Mass graves would
be uncovered across Iraq, the burial grounds for thousands of victims of his
regime. And Saddam had the nerve to whine about a few scrapes.
Throughout days of
prolonged grilling, Saddam was both garrulous and wily. Whenever the
interrogation turned to his depravity, surliness curdled the notorious
dictator’s face.
One line of
questioning focused on the massive clouds of lethal gas unleashed on the
Kurdish town of Halabja as the Iran-Iraq war wore down in 1988.
It was not only
genocide but proof that Saddam once had weapons of mass destruction.
Saddam refused to
answer, glaring at Nixon with “such murderous loathing” that it was “frightening
even though he was under lock and key.”
Nixon was
restrained from investigating acts of terrorism. The FBI would pursue building
a criminal case against Saddam when they took him into custody early the next
year.
What emerged in
that first interrogation was how completely out of touch Saddam was with
military reality in those final few years.
“Saddam was busy
writing novels,” Nixon reports. “He was no longer running the government.”
In other words, the
evil madman wasn’t plotting an attack on neighboring countries — much less the
United States or any Western nations.
“Saddam appeared to
be as clueless about what was happening inside Iraq as his British and
Americans enemies were,” writes Nixon. “He was inattentive to what his
government was doing and had no real plan to prepare for the defense of Iraq.”
Saddam pointed out
that since Iraq was not in possession of any WMDs, he posed no threat to any
enemy nation.
He insisted he’d
never plotted to assassinate President George H.W. Bush in the aftermath of the
Persian Gulf War. He stopped viewing the one-term President as an adversary
after his defeat by Bill Clinton in 1992.
What Saddam didn’t
get was that the alleged plot created a lasting enemy in President George W. Bush.
As the
interrogation rolled on, the sounds of distant bombings clearly indicated the
U.S.-led coalition wasn’t doing well.
Saddam took obvious
pleasure in that.
The deposed
dictator knew the invasion would not prove a “cakewalk,” as one boastful Bush administration
official said.
“You are going to
fail,” Saddam predicted in 2003. “You are going to find it is not so easy to
govern Iraq.”
Saddam shed some
interesting insight into the fractured dynamics of his regime’s corrupt and
viciously brutal first family.
He loathed
discussing his wives. His first spouse, Sajida Talfah, was the daughter of a
Baghdad politician. Their union came with political advantages that facilitated
his rise to power.
Saddam provoked a
severe rift in the family when he took Samira Shahbandar, a blond flight
attendant, as wife No. 2.
Saddam’s son Uday
was close to his mother, Sajida — and even murdered Saddam’s valet over
rumblings that the man’s duties included procuring women for the despot.
Saddam obviously
preferred the company of Samira, but was furious when Uday openly disapproved.
The dictator
refused to discuss the matter with Nixon, but said he was realistic about his
son’s views. Uday, widely regarded as psychotic, was in his father’s view “a
particular problem.”
He learned that
Uday kept a fleet of luxury cars in Baghdad guarded by the military. Saddam
felt it sent the wrong message to Iraqis suffering under sanctions, so the
despot ordered the cars torched.
Nixon confronted
Saddam with the rumor that he and Samira had a son named Ali. Saddam, who also
had a son Qusay with Sajida, appeared particularly pained.
“If I told you yes,
would you kill him like you killed Uday and Qusay?” he inquired.
Nixon pressed
harder, and Saddam finally answered.
“In Arab culture we
have a saying: ‘Those who have children we regard as married, whether they have
performed the ceremony or not,’ ” he declared. “ ‘Those who do not have
children, we regard as unmarried.’ ”
© Provided by New York Daily News After Saddam
Hussein's capture, John Nixon, a CIA analyst and Hussein expert, went to work
on asking the dictator just the right answers to identify him. - Anonymous/APSaddam and Samira
were unquestionably married, and the CIA man read that as confirmation there
was a son.
As Nixon notes,
there could be any number of enemies eager to eliminate Saddam’s last male
heir. The author feels such a plot is unlikely to succeed: “Like his mother,
Ali appears to have slipped away from history's grasp.”
The only time
Saddam showed any emotion was in discussing his daughters Rana and Raghad.
Both defected to
Jordan in 1995 with their husbands, Hussein and Saddam Kamel. Uday prompted
their panicked escape after shooting up the Kamel residence during a drunken
spree.
Saddam Hussein’s
eyes watered and his voiced quivered as he admitted to missing them.
© Provided by New York Daily News Nixon, after
seeing the video of Hussein's execution, remarked that the former Iraqi leader
"looked like the most dignified person in the room." - Jerome
Delay/APSaddam became the target of the massive manhunt in March 2003, first
escaping Baghdad with Uday and Qusay. Several days into the journey, Saddam
decided to split from his sons.
Uday was severely
crippled from a 1996 assassination attempt where he was shot 17 times. His
inability to walk made the band of escapees entirely too noticeable.
Saddam ensured his
safety first and left his sons to find harbor on their own. Qusay was said to
hate Uday, but he refused to abandon his brother.
Younger sibling
Qusay put his life and the life of his son Mustafa at risk to protect Uday. All
three were killed by U.S. forces in Mosul in July.
Saddam, turned over
to the Iraqi government by a U.S. helicopter in the dead of night, was executed
Dec. 30, 2006.
A video surfaced
one day later of Saddam climbing up a makeshift scaffold to meet his death at
the hands of a “lynch mob” of Shiites.
“I was struck that
Saddam looked like the most dignified person in the room,” Nixon writes. “This
is not what our young men and women were dying for.
“This is not what
President Bush had promised a new Iraq would be.”