Saddam's big boast was to keep Iran at bay

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BAGHDAD - Saddam Hussein falsely let the world to believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) because he feared revealing his weakness to Iran, unclassified FBI interviews show.

"By God, if I had such weapons, I would have used them in the fight against the United States," he told George Piro, an FBI special agent who interviewed Saddam after he was found huddling in a so-called "spider hole" on a farm near his hometown of Tikrit on Dec. 13, 2003, just over eight months after his regime was toppled by a US-led invasion. An Iraqi tribunal convicted him of crimes against humanity, and he was hanged at the end of 2006.

Saddam said the farm was the same place he took refuge after participating four decades ago in a failed assassination attempt against then-Prime Minister Abdul-Karim Qassim.

More than 100 pages of the FBI interviews done between February and June of 2004 were made public Wednesday by the National Security Archive, a non-governmental research institute.

Saddam said he was never in the neighborhood on the outskirts of Baghdad that was bombed on March 19, 2003, in an attempt to kill the Iraqi leader at the start of the war.

The US military had received a tip that he was hiding there. Saddam made his last public appearance in Azamiyah on April 9, 2003, the day a bronze statue of him was brought down in a central Baghdad square in what became the defining image of his overthrow.

But, he said, he stayed in Baghdad until April 10 or 11 when "it appeared that the city was about to fall."

He held a final meeting with leaders from his inner circle and told them, "We will struggle in secret."

Then he fled the capital, gradually shedding his bodyguards along the way to avoid attracting attention, telling them they had fulfilled their duty.

Saddam denied having unconventional weapons before the US invasion but refused to allow UN inspectors to search his country from 1998 until 2002. The inspectors returned to the weapons hunt in November 2002 but still complained that Iraq was not cooperating. Former president George W. Bush justified the invasion of Iraq in large part on the assertion that Saddam had WMD's and could provide them to terrorists. No such weapons were found after the US-led invasion.

According to Piro, Saddam told him he had "miscalculated" Bush's intentions and expected only a limited US attack. "Hussein stated Iraq could have absorbed another US strike, for he viewed this as less of a threat than exposing themselves to Iran," according to a June 11, 2004, FBI interview report.

Iraq had fought in a ruinous, eight-year war in the 1980s that involved the use of chemical weapons. - APCalled Osama a 'zealot'

Saddam Hussein also dismissed Osama Bin Laden as a "zealot" and said he had never personally met the Al-Qaeda leader. He told FBI interviewer the Iraqi government did not cooperate with the terrorist group against the US. Saddam also stated that the US States used the Sept. 11 terrorist attack as a justification to attack Iraq and said the US had "lost sight of the cause of 9/11." He claimed that he denounced the attack in a series of editorials.

Kuwait invasion
Details about the run-up to the 1991 Gulf War following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait also emerged from the interviews. The notes show that former US Secretary of State James A. Baker III warned Saddam's then-foreign minister Tariq Aziz during a January meeting that if Iraq did not comply with American demands "we'll take you back to the pre-industrial stage."

No body doubles
In order to avoid detection, Saddam Hussein did not use body doubles. "This is movie magic, not reality," he was quoted as saying in the transcript of the FBI interviews. Instead, he said, he evaded enemies by using the telephone just twice in more than a decade and constantly moving from one dwelling to another. He communicated mainly through couriers or met personally with officials."He was very aware of the United States' significant technological capabilities," the FBI interviewer wrote in notes after one interview.

© The Saudi Gazette 2009