S3E5 How To Interrogate A Monster: Saddam Hussein

IN THIS EPISODE In the previous two Spy Academy episodes, we talked about liars and how to spot them. Now it's time to put all that knowledge to good use as we deep dive into interrogating a true psychopath, the former leader of Iraq Saddam Hussein. While it would be easy to see Saddam as an unsophisticated bumpkin, it also would be a profound mistake. Saddam may have struggled to understand American motives and actions in the lead up to the American invasion of Iraq, but he understood his corner of the world as well as if not better than anyone. As he stared across the table at his interrogator, Saddam believed he was the host and that the Americans were his guests. In fact, Saddam was so cagey that he managed to interrogate his interrogators even as they were interrogating him. This episode's guest, former intelligence officer John Nixon, had studied Saddam, for years; getting the chance to interrogate the man himself, truly a monster metaphorically speaking, was not just a career-defining moment, it was a personal triumph. SHOW NOTES If you enjoyed this podcast, please sample the rest of our podcast lineup at Costard & Touchstone Productions costardandtouchstone.com. Your next podcast obsession is just a click away! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:24Speaker 01

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• 0:33Alan Katz?

  This podcast, it's a Coster and Touchstone production.

• 0:36John Kiriakou?

  I've told the story of my initial encounter with Abu Zubaydah many, many times. After he came out of his coma, I began to question him. At first, the question was as basic as, what is your name? He would not tell me. And I said, that's okay, Abu Zubaydah, we know who you are. But as he began to open up, he told me things like, he never wanted to attack the United States on 9/11. That was a decision made by Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden wanted to damage the US economy as much as he possibly could. Now, there was no plan for what to do after they damaged the American economy on 9/11.

• 1:20John Kiriakou?

  But this was the first high-value target that we had captured in the so-called War on Terror. Welcome to Dead Drop. What makes a spy tick? I'm John Kiriakou. We thank you, as always, for listening and for doing all of those proactive things that help others find their way here too. You know, like liking, rating, reviewing, and commenting on the podcast. Algorithms, notice those things. So, good morning, class. Welcome back to the academy. Today's lesson is pretty special. We're going to talk about the finer points of interrogating monsters. Up to now, we've talked about liars and their lying.

• 2:05John Kiriakou?

  Having a solid fix on whether the person you're talking to or interrogating is speaking truthfully to you, that's the bottom line of any interrogation. But keep in mind, spies sometimes have to work out in the open. That is, they have to work out in the open, but no one can know that they're a spy while they're doing it. For example, an interrogation can occur over a pleasant dinner, without the subject even realizing that he's being interrogated. Or it could take place in a cold, dank basement room with little inside it except a bare light bulb, a table, a couple of chairs, and a lot of dread.

• 2:46John Kiriakou?

  Regardless of where it takes place, the bottom line in any interrogation is the truth. Has this interview gotten us closer to the truth? In this episode, we're going to talk about technique, as much as anything. Good interrogators do lots of prep work before they start asking questions. They have a game plan in mind, too. Now, it's just a fact of interrogation life. Some of the people you'll be interrogating, they'll be completely innocent of the crimes that we're investigating. Accusing and prosecuting them won't do anything but gum up the works. We need to ID the innocent as quickly as possible, return them to their lives, and return to our focus on the guilty. We need to know what they know.

• 3:31John Kiriakou?

  More importantly, we need to trust what they know. For sure, this would be a hell of a lot easier if we only ever interrogated Boy Scouts and Mother Teresa's. But that's not the case, of course. Some of the people you have to interrogate are truly deplorable, the worst of the worst, serial killers, mass murderers, child predators, monsters. In the last episode, I talked about the differences between sociopaths and psychopaths. Both fall under the umbrella of antisocial personality disorder, ASPD. They present, though, very differently. Experts estimate that around 1% to 4% of the general population meets the criteria for

• 4:16John Kiriakou?

  ASPD, with men diagnosed far more often than women. Sociopaths, by and large, are hot-headed, volatile, and emotionally reactive. They frequently fly off the handle, they act rashly, or they act on sudden impulse. Because their behavior can be, in turns, aggressive, risky, chaotic, disruptive, sociopathic people often struggle to hold down steady jobs, stick to conventional routines, or keep and maintain long-term relationships. Emotionally, they lack the ability to fully understand or care about other people's feelings or pain. They disregard social norms, rules, and the rights of others.

• 5:00John Kiriakou?

  As for guilt or shame, they don't seem to have any. That's why they feel no compunction at all about hurting other people, or taking advantage of them, or of a situation. Lying doesn't faze them. In fact, they have, at best, a marginal relationship with the truth. Chronically irresponsible sociopaths will readily lie, manipulate, or charm others. Sociopaths can be very charming to get others to do what they need to have done. Sociopathy is more often shaped by environmental factors, such as severe childhood trauma, abuse, neglect, or an unstable upbringing.

• 5:41John Kiriakou?

  Psychopathy, on the other hand, is strongly linked to genetics and to differences in brain structure, such as reduced activity in the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. Psychopaths really do think differently from the rest of us. Calm, organized, and methodical psychopaths can mimic normal human emotions without actually feeling them. Psychopaths often appear superficial, charismatic, and socially adept. They can mimic normal human emotions and charm a room to manipulate people. But even then, they lack genuine empathy or a conscience. They can't feel your pain, and they frankly don't care about your pain, because they

• 6:25John Kiriakou?

  view other people as objects or as useful tools. Psychopaths never form any genuine attachments to other people, and they plan their actions carefully. They rarely lose their temper. Because a psychopath's emotional pathology is so different, an interrogator needs to approach interrogating them differently. With sociopaths, the goal is to undercut their confidence. Sociopaths are the most important person in their world. They think that they're the most important person in your world, too. It's your job, then, to disabuse them of that notion and make them realize just how

• 7:05John Kiriakou?

  unimportant they are, not just in your world, but period. A sociopath who suddenly feels irrelevant is a sociopath on the road to confessing. Psychopaths also think that they live at the center of the universe. But whereas we want to undercut a sociopath to get them talking, with psychopaths, you have to take the opposite tack. Make them believe that you are fascinated by them, you can't get enough of what they have to say. Give a psychopath enough rope in an interrogation, and he'll usually use it on himself. How about this for an example? Herman Göring.

• 7:47John Kiriakou?

  Göring was the second most powerful person in Nazi Germany. Göring founded the Gestapo, served as the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, ordered Reinhard Heidrich in July 1941 to prepare the comprehensive plan for what was called "the final solution to the Jewish question," and had been named Hitler's successor in 1941, though Hitler stripped him of his titles in April 1945 after suspecting him of treason. During the Nuremberg Trials, prison psychologist Dr. Gustav Gilbert and other military psychiatrists evaluated Göring and classified him as a

• 8:26John Kiriakou?

  psychopath, noting traits such as a lack of empathy, grandiosity, callousness, and an absence of any genuine remorse. The charges against Göring ranged from human rights violations to systematic theft of cultural pressures throughout Europe. He was found guilty on four counts of war crimes, and he was sentenced to death. Göring would end up committing suicide before justice could be delivered to him. But before that happened, he was interrogated by officers of the Air POW Interrogation Detachment, and by officers from the US Military Intelligence Service. Göring's interrogators noted that, quote, "He tried hard to make a case for himself,

• 9:11John Kiriakou?

  and despite rumors to the contrary, is far from being mentally deranged. In fact, he must be considered a very shrewd customer, a great actor and professional liar who most likely made some mental reservations, trying to keep what he might consider a few aces up his sleeve throughout the entire interrogation." Göring has made partly subtle, partly obvious efforts to clear himself. Not only did he render Hitler responsible for almost all mistakes made by the German High Command in general, and by the Luftwaffe in particular, but he also took great pains to show that he himself was not such a bad fellow after all, unquote.

• 9:54John Kiriakou?

  So, I founded the Gestapo and helped set up the final solution, but otherwise, I'm a really good guy? This is psychopathy at scale, psychopathy on steroids. But Göring's interrogation offers a great example of how to navigate it. Göring's interrogators wanted several different but equally important things from their interview with him. As much as they wanted Göring to confess to crimes against humanity, they also wanted him to take them behind the scenes of the Third Reich and into its various thought processes and less understood actions. One series of questions explored the extent to which Adolf Hitler himself dictated Luftwaffe

• 10:37John Kiriakou?

  policy and micromanaged the German air campaign. At one point, Göring observed that Hitler was, quote, "a great ally," unquote, "of the United States and Britain in matters of aerial warfare." He insisted that the Luftwaffe could have easily defeated Britain without a land invasion, had Hitler not diverted so much of Germany's assets to the campaign against Russia.

• 11:02John Kiriakou?

  That was probably true. He was also critical of Italy and declared that Germany would have fared much better if Italy had joined the Allies. Because he was an aviator himself, he was decorated as a World War I German fighter ace. And because he'd run the Luftwaffe, Göring's interrogators wanted to go as deep as they could into all of the strategic decisions informing Germany's use of air power. How did they develop new airplanes? What drove their decision-making? Göring, being a psychopath and loving to hear his own story puffed to the max, suggested that if the Luftwaffe had had just four additional months of development time, the Luftwaffe

• 11:45John Kiriakou?

  would have turned the war's tides away from the Allies and back to Germany. Because he was now talking and because they knew he had insights, the Allied interrogators also pressed Göring about the disposition of various art treasures stolen by the Nazi leaders, especially by Göring. While we're discussing interrogations and World War II, one of the topics that interrogators had to consider as they asked their questions was treason. The Brits had wanted a piece of US-born Britain William Joyce from almost the start of the war. Joyce was a broadcaster known to his listeners as Lord Ha Ha. The character spoke in a sneering, ultra-privileged, very high-class British accent, and he spewed

• 12:29John Kiriakou?

  Nazi propaganda to the UK throughout the war. In 1940, Joyce took German citizenship, making his treason official. Before leaving Britain for Germany, Joyce had been associated with the Black and the Tans. This was a group of constables, cops, police officers, who fought against Irish nationalists. Joyce knew when he was only 14 that the Black and Tans were a terrorist group. In fact, when he was only 14 and just starting out with the Black and Tans, young Joyce participated in the murder of an Irish Catholic priest. And he was just getting started. Everyone knew the Black and Tans were a terrorist organization.

• 13:12John Kiriakou?

  As an adult, Joyce became the deputy leader of the British Union of Fascists, but he was so violent, just him being himself, that the organization expelled him. Joyce's interrogators bumped into an unexpected problem that would have prohibited their being able to prosecute him. He had never actually been a British subject. For a moment, that stymied the case against Joyce. He seemed to have the upper hand, until he didn't. The authorities found that he had an illegal British passport. With a justifiable angle now in place, the British authorities could arrest Joyce and

• 13:55John Kiriakou?

  make his life going forward absolute hell. Joyce would be convicted and hung on January 3, 1946. Human monsters take many forms. It doesn't matter how big or small they are, their actions hurt other people, and they couldn't care less. Saddam Hussein was a monster, no two ways about it. Plenty of Iraqis felt that way about him. But when, in the middle of going after Osama bin Laden, the man most responsible for 9/11, the George W. Bush administration chose instead to go after Saddam Hussein.

• 14:35John Kiriakou?

  Plenty of very smart people warned that this was a catastrophic mistake. Instead of finishing one job, eliminating the very real threat still posed by Al Qaeda, and then stabilizing Afghanistan, America instead went after a nuisance. Sure, Saddam was a neighborhood bully, and sure, he was stealing oil and selling it outside the deal that had been made between Iraq and the United Nations Security Council. But he had nothing whatsoever to do with Al Qaeda. And as for his weapons of mass destruction, as one headline put it, Saddam had only weapons of mass distraction. Why then did America think that Saddam had these terrible weapons?

• 15:15John Kiriakou?

  The ultimate irony revealed by Saddam's interrogation was that the big secret about his weapons of mass destruction was that he didn't have any weapons of mass destruction. He needed the Iranians to believe that he did, which was one of the reasons that Saddam was so squirrely about it. That's an important element to digging for secrets in an interrogation, knowing when the secret isn't actually information, but it's a lack of information. Some animals' defense mechanisms are to appear larger than they actually are. That was Saddam in this instance. HVT, High Value Target, number one, later HVD, High Value Detainee, number one, as

• 15:58John Kiriakou?

  Saddam was identified by US personnel, was found hiding in a hole near Ad Daur, outside the village of Tikrit on December 13, 2003. That hole, the location, was the reason his interrogation was called Operation Desert Spider. They called it a spider hole. You might think that a high-value detainee like Saddam Hussein was a dream job for any interrogator worth his salt. But from the very first days after his capture, there was a profound reluctance by many agencies to accept responsibility for questioning Saddam. While success, however defined, could make a career, failure could just as easily destroy

• 16:43John Kiriakou?

  that career. What's that kid's game, Hot Potato? Saddam was the hot potato. The US Army Military Intelligence Corps began the interrogation. Their interrogators felt that Saddam was being evasive in his responses. Each session began with Saddam demanding that his interrogators identify themselves and their job titles. The CIA feared that if its interrogators did the work, having identified themselves as CIA, then should Saddam ever go to trial in a court of law, those interrogators might be called to testify, which would then necessitate them breaking cover. So the agency didn't want to be too present in the questioning.

• 17:27John Kiriakou?

  That's why most of the responsibility fell to the FBI, which selected an Assyrian-American supervisory special agent named George Pirro to do the heavy lifting. One of Pirro's skill sets that made him a great candidate, he spoke Arabic. Another benefit to having FBI agents asking the questions instead of CIA people was that FBI agents are skilled in interrogating suspects who will have to face legal prosecution. There really is a right way to do it, and there are a lot of wrong ways. The formal interviews, conducted in secret, began on February 7, 2004. Officials feared that since Saddam faced the possibility of the death penalty, he had little incentive to cooperate or to provide any information whatsoever.

• 18:12John Kiriakou?

  When the CIA was still in the running to conduct the interrogation, they had intended to employ the good cop, bad cop routine. The FBI differed. They believed the key to getting through to Saddam was rapport building. To that end, George Pirro would be Saddam's only interrogator, and over a long period of time was in fact able to develop a rapport with the prisoner. By contrast, enhanced interrogation methods, those favored by the CIA, were rejected by the FBI. First, because torture is against FBI policy. And second, because, most importantly, the FBI understood that torture as an interrogation technique does not work.

• 18:56John Kiriakou?

  At their first meeting, Saddam confronted Pirro, this young FBI agent, about his youth. But being prepared, Pirro replied, pointing out that when Saddam reached his first powerful political position, he had been one year younger than Pirro was right then. That impressed Saddam, that Pirro knew that detail about him. It inspired Saddam to continue the conversation. For his part, Pirro wanted to have total control over every aspect of Saddam's situation during the interrogation and to make Saddam feel dependent on him. He required that Saddam be seated at all times while they spoke, with his back to the wall behind him.

• 19:37John Kiriakou?

  Because Saddam was considered to be a psychopath, Pirro chose to make Saddam feel that he was still important and would be treated respectfully. No matter how long Saddam talked, Pirro would sit there and listen patiently. Pirro was not allowed to threaten Saddam or to give promises of better treatment in return for cooperation. That would have been counter to FBI policy. More importantly, it wouldn't have been helpful. Ultimately, two interrogators sat down with Saddam, George Pirro and John Nixon. Nixon was a senior leadership analyst at the CIA from 1998 to 2011. He did several tours in Iraq and was recognized by a number of federal agencies for his contribution to the war effort.

• 20:21John Kiriakou?

  During his time with the CIA, Nixon regularly wrote for and briefed the most senior levels of the US government. Nixon conducted the first CIA identification and debriefing encounters with Saddam Hussein over roughly a month, beginning on the night of the capture, while Pirro ran the FBI's far longer Operation Desert Spider, 20 formal interviews, plus at least five casual conversations between February and June 2004. John Nixon had profiled Saddam since joining the CIA and was sent to identify him by his tribal tattoos, a bullet scar on his leg, and a drooping lip from a lifetime of smoking cigars.

• 21:06John Kiriakou?

  Nixon wrote in his book, "Debriefing the President," about Saddam's interrogation, that their first encounter was contentious. Nixon felt a chill when Saddam gave him the same look as the cover photo of Republic of Fear, the book on Nixon's desk for years. The relationship that developed was analytical rather than personal. Saddam acted as though he were the host and his captors were the guests. Saddam, Nixon wrote, loved to talk especially about himself. He was genuinely proud of his accomplishments as the president of Iraq. Nixon closely observed Saddam's body language. At first, Nixon suspected Saddam was being dishonest.

• 21:50John Kiriakou?

  Except Saddam was being honest. He just presented physically the way dishonest people do. Saddam was by turns charming, nice, funny, and polite. He became rude and scary when angered and answered nearly every question with a question of his own. The CIA had no leverage to offer, so Nixon appealed to Saddam's sense of history and vanity, telling him that his words would be read by the highest of powers in the world. Nixon's most famous exchange came when Saddam warned him, "You are going to fail. You are going to find that it is not so easy to govern Iraq because you do not know the language, the history, and you do not understand the Arab mind."

• 22:35John Kiriakou?

  Nixon privately thought, "I think you have a point there." Nixon believed that Saddam's interest in the Americans was just as great as the Americans' interest in him. He would talk constantly about his questioners' interests and backgrounds. In a sense, he was interrogating his interrogators as they were interrogating him. Nixon came to believe that Saddam was telling the truth about weapons of mass destruction. "Telling the truth generally," he concluded. Piro's later public framing went further. Saddam deliberately projected WMD capability, "Because that was what kept him, in his mind, in power. It kept the Iranians at bay."

• 23:20John Kiriakou?

  Washington received the finding with disappointment and resignation. By January 2004, President Bush's attitude toward Iraq was essentially, "Problem solved." Taking over the interrogation, Piro's operation was a masterpiece of controlled dependency. Saddam never knew that Piro was an FBI agent. Piro let him believe that he was a high-ranking official with direct access to President Bush and staged scenes where guards scampered at Piro's shouted orders. Piro controlled Saddam's baby wipes, his pen and paper for poetry, and even time itself.

• 24:02John Kiriakou?

  Guards removed their watches while Piro wore the largest wristwatch you could imagine in the windowless cell. Asked how you crack a man like Saddam Hussein, Piro's answer was one word: time. No enhanced interrogation was used. It was against FBI policy. It was illegal, and it would not have worked on Saddam anyway. A man immune to fear, that's according to both CBS News and CNN. The relationship between the two men genuinely evolved, though always on Piro's chessboard and at Piro's pace.

• 24:41John Kiriakou?

  Mr. Saddam and Mr. George became Saddam and George in private. A pivotal moment was Saddam's five-day hunger strike. He finally ate, telling Piro that he could see his captor was genuinely worried about him. Piro's read was that Saddam did him a personal favor and became more emotionally attached afterwards, complaining when Piro didn't spend enough quality time with him. On Saddam's 67th birthday, a day that he spent watching Iraqis celebrate no longer having to celebrate it, Piro brought him cookies that his own mother had baked. Saddam told Piro he knew him better than his own sons did.

• 25:24John Kiriakou?

  At their farewell with Cuban cigars in the prison garden, Saddam kissed his cheeks three times and actually teared up. Crucially, Piro waited roughly five months before raising the issue of weapons of mass destruction. First discussing Saddam's novel, Zabiba and the King, privately deemed to be a terrible novel. I remember it well. Then using a June 2000 speech to corner him on the subject obliquely. One general objective of the interrogation was to study how Saddam's regime was put together and to study his leadership methods. With time, it became apparent that Saddam still possessed the qualities required to run Iraq.

• 26:06John Kiriakou?

  He retained his swagger, believing that he was still Iraq's rightful leader. Though he really had no secrets, if Saddam had any sort of hidden agenda, it was probably to divert guilt from himself for some of his more atrocious acts, like those against the Madan, the Marsh Arabs, a distinct population of Arabic-speaking Shia Muslims who had lived in the ancient Mesopotamian marshlands of southern Iraq for millennia. During the 1984 Battle of the Marshes, Saddam actually ran high-voltage electrical cables directly through the marsh waters and what was called Fish Lake, east of the city of Basra.

• 26:48John Kiriakou?

  While this defense system was designed to electrocute invading Iranian troops rather than the Marsh Arabs themselves, Saddam later targeted them too. Following a 1991 Shia uprising, his regime systematically destroyed the Marsh way of life by draining the Marshes. That atrocity dried up the Marsh Arabs' homeland, poisoned their water supply, and displaced more than 200,000 people. So yeah, Saddam wanted us to forget all about the terrible things he had done, especially if we might want to actually prosecute him for it. While Saddam clearly understood the politics and culture of Iraq, he was relatively naive about international affairs.

• 27:31John Kiriakou?

  Now, we had said that about him since the 1970s. He was genuinely surprised by the American reaction to the invasion of Kuwait, believing that the US would understand his need to cross his southern border. Kuwait was stealing Iraq's oil, after all. But even worse, Saddam miscalculated about the impact of the September 11 attacks. He believed that the attacks would draw the US and Iraq closer together in opposition to radical Islamic movements that threatened both of their countries. We used to say at the CIA that Osama bin Laden hated Saddam Hussein as much as he hated the United States.

• 28:14John Kiriakou?

  Saddam expressed his confusion about inconsistencies in US foreign policy and did not understand why Washington supported Iraq in the early 1990s in its war against Iran, but then denounced the country as being a Hitler-type aggressor a decade later. More recently, there was confusion about the role of Muqtada Assad, the Shia cleric and militia leader who was denounced by President George W. Bush as being worse than Saddam. Piro's public framing went further. Saddam deliberately projected WMD capability, "Because that was what kept him, in his mind, in power. It kept the Iranians away."

• 28:58John Kiriakou?

  As for any relationship or alliance with al-Qaeda, Saddam dismissed Osama bin Laden as a fanatic. He even joked with Piro that, "You can't trust anybody with a beard like that." He saw al-Qaeda's ideology as a threat to his own secular rule. That matches the official record. The 9/11 Commission found, "No credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States." And that contacts, "Do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship." As for Kuwait and the invasion of Kuwait, Saddam told Piro that the 1990 invasion was sealed by a personal insult.

• 29:44John Kiriakou?

  Kuwait's Emir vowing to turn every Iraqi woman into a $10 prostitute.

• 29:50Alan Katz?

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• 30:04John Kiriakou?

  Actually, Alan, there are a couple of Quince pieces in my growing collection. There is a sweater that I absolutely adore. It's actually the first Quince piece that I bought. It's cashmere, and it is the softest, yet lightest, cashmere sweater I've ever owned. And I just bought a pair of linen trousers. I'll tell you, when I go to the doctor, I always wear jeans. And then I get on the scale, and the doctor's like, "Oh, you should lose three pounds." Well, my jeans are three pounds. And so I bought these linen trousers. I wore them to the doctor, and he says, "Hey, buddy, you lost a pound or two." The truth is, these linen trousers are light, they're beautiful, they're comfortable, and now they are my go-to pants.

• 30:49Alan Katz?

  For me, it's my two 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters. I love how they feel. I love how they make me feel.

• 30:57John Kiriakou?

  And because they go with everything. They make getting dressed easy.

• 31:01Alan Katz?

  And being somewhat lazy that way, I think you and I both love the easy part, don't we?

• 31:06John Kiriakou?

  Quince focuses on high-quality wardrobe staples made with premium materials, like that 100% Mongolian cashmere we were talking about, or organic cotton and merino wool.

• 31:19Alan Katz?

  Everything is timeless and versatile. As we've said here, Quince makes classics but without all the stodginess that often comes with them. And we haven't even mentioned how reasonable everything at Quince is priced.

• 31:31John Kiriakou?

  Their 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters start at just $60, giving you the softness and the quality you'd expect from a luxury brand without the luxury price tag.

• 31:42Alan Katz?

  Not to go all Game of Thrones, but winter is coming. And when the temperatures start to drop, Quince is the perfect destination to find everyday clothing staples like premium down jackets and classic wool outerwear.

• 31:55John Kiriakou?

  All versatile layers designed to keep us warm and comfortable all season long and always priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands.

• 32:04Alan Katz?

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• 32:12John Kiriakou?

  The ethical part is very important.

• 32:15Alan Katz?

  In these here times, it absolutely is.

• 32:18John Kiriakou?

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• 32:45Speaker 04

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• 33:25John Kiriakou?

  If you're enjoying Dead Drop, and of course, we hope you are, then while you're waiting for new episodes, I'd like to suggest another great granular story podcast from the Costard and Touchstone family. Just the photographer with David Swanson does for photojournalism what Dead Drop does for spies. Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist David Swanson tells you stories his amazing news photos just can't. What it felt like being in all those dangerous places like war zones and natural disasters, doing his job, taking pictures. Having been to a few war zones myself, I can tell you this. Just the photographer will put you right there, on the ground, right next to David. Inside his head, in fact.

• 34:09John Kiriakou?

  It's a hell of a podcast, and you can find it wherever you find your favorite podcasts or at costardandtouchstone.com. There's a link in this episode's show notes. In fact, you'll find lots of great story podcasts at Costard and Touchstone, like The Donor, a DNA horror story, The Hall Closet, Sage Wellness Within, and the How Not to Make a Movie podcast. Who knows? Your next favorite podcast might be just a click away. Now, back to Dead Drop.

• 34:39John Kiriakou?

  Perhaps it's renewed tension in the Middle East that's made the subject of Saddam's interrogation must-see TV. In September, the network TNT ran a limited series called High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam. The series tells the full story of the hunt and the interrogation, and it depicts the different ways both George Piro and John Nixon approached and interrogated Saddam.

• 35:05John Kiriakou?

  While I've played myself for the camera, I've never watched anyone else, an actor, play me. I can't quite imagine how strange an experience it's been for both John and George. It just so happens that John is a great friend of mine. In fact, I'm proud to say that I was John's mentor when he first arrived at the CIA, and John replaced me as Saddam Hussein's psychological analyst. So, let's actually get a seat in the interrogation room and hear what that interrogation was like. John, is there any place in particular you would like to start? The reason I ask that is because I want to end with the series and how you've made

• 35:47John Kiriakou?

  this full circle, and now the story is being told. So, how would you like to start? Any place in particular? Or should I just jump in?

• 35:55Speaker 05

  You can just jump in.

• 35:57John Kiriakou?

  I'm gonna start then by blowing my own horn a little bit.

• 36:00Speaker 05

  You can start by talking about how we... You were the first person I ever met at CIA.

• 36:06John Kiriakou?

  That's where I was gonna start.

• 36:07Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 36:08John Kiriakou?

  I've spoken a lot about my own analytic background at the CIA. I started off on Iraq before most Americans had ever heard of Iraq. Iraq was quiet and boring and slow, and as the Deputy Director of the CIA himself once told me, "Nothing ever happens there. So, learn the tradecraft, and then you can move on to something interesting like Romania." Just as I got comfortable, Iraq invaded Kuwait, and the rest is history.

• 36:41John Kiriakou?

  Well, by 1986 or 87, I was looking to move on, and my boss in the CIA's Office of Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis told me, "We've hired a new analyst. His name is John Nixon," he whispered to me. "I think he's related to President Nixon." And I said, "Oh, that's kind of cool." And he says, "Don't bring it up." I said, "All right, I won't." But John Nixon is going to be the new Iraq leadership analyst. He's going to take the same job that I had started with seven years earlier and to become

• 37:24John Kiriakou?

  Saddam Hussein's essentially classified psychologist or classified biographer at the CIA. John Nixon comes to the CIA on his very first day, and I had the pleasure of meeting him. And of course, the first thing I said to John was, "So, I understand you're related to President Nixon." And John said, "No, I'm not at all related to President Nixon." He said, "I kind of wish that I were, but I'm not." And John and I have been friends or friendly acquaintances ever since. I'm proud to say that we collaborated a lot in those early days of his career.

• 38:03John Kiriakou?

  I ended up moving on to operations soon after, but John became an analyst extraordinaire. He immersed himself, not just in the psychology of Saddam Hussein, but in the psychology of everybody around Saddam Hussein. And when it came time for the US to really press for the overthrow of not just Saddam, but the entire Iraqi government and leadership, John was the go-to man. Not just for the CIA, whether it was analysis or operations, but for the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon as well. In the end, Saddam was overthrown.

• 38:47John Kiriakou?

  He famously was found in a hole in the ground, and when the hole was uncovered and American Special Forces shone their flashlights down the hole, Saddam said, "I am Saddam Hussein, President of the Republic, and I am ready to negotiate." We weren't interested in negotiation. Saddam was arrested and incarcerated, and virtually the first thing that the American government did was they called on John Nixon to come out and to begin debriefing Saddam Hussein. John, we are so glad to have you. You and I, we've known each other for coming up on 30 years, just about 30 years.

• 39:31John Kiriakou?

  And I remember when we first met, thinking, professionally, I'm ready to move on from Iraq analysis, but I knew I was gonna miss it. I knew I was gonna miss it, and I was even maybe a little envious that you were gonna take over Iraq. Well, you became an expert on Saddam Hussein, on his family, his cabinet, his military leaders, in very short order. And then you've been on the job about five years, six years, and the United States attacks Iraq. So, take us back to those early days. You first arrived at the agency, was it 1997?

• 40:10Speaker 05

  It was February 3, 1998. It's a date etched in my memory. I showed up there, and you and Marnie greeted me, and despite the fact that I'd been hired by CIA and had gone through the vetting process, I suddenly found out that I didn't have a desk with the rest of the team, and then I had to sit in another... I had to sit with the Iran team.

• 40:32John Kiriakou?

  I forgot that.

• 40:33Speaker 05

  It was great if I was doing Iran. It wasn't so great if I was doing Iraq, because I didn't... I'd walk past, and I'd see there'd be a team meeting going on. Nobody would have told me. And it was... And I remember you giving me the lay of the land on that first day, and I was... And I just was like, "Oh, my God, what the hell have I gotten myself into here?" And... But it was... And also, I knew that the... Back then, the analysts that worked on this issue were really good. They were the best.

• 41:01John Kiriakou?

  Yeah, they really were.

• 41:02Speaker 05

  They had a really strong team, and I knew I had to get up to speed really, really quickly. And that was a little intimidating, but it made me work harder.

• 41:10John Kiriakou?

  When I first started on Iraq, it was the first week of January. It was January the 7th, 1990, and the agency-wide Iraq team was very small, because literally nothing happened there. And there was one leadership analyst, that was me, and there was... Up in the Office of Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis, there was what was then called the Iran-Iraq Team. It was Iran and Iraq combined, and so you had maybe one political analyst, one military analyst, one econ/ oil analyst, and then that was it. And then all of a sudden, we go to war with the Iraqis in the first Gulf War, and the agency starts to beef up its analytic team.

• 41:55John Kiriakou?

  By the time you joined, we were in this, something of a lull during the Clinton administration, where we had established the no-fly zones, we would bomb the Iraqis every once in a while, but there was really no stomach in the White House or in the State Department to do anything that would approach finality, let's say.

• 42:17Speaker 05

  Right.

• 42:18John Kiriakou?

  And then things changed, because George W. Bush was elected president in 2000. So, by the time... I'm gonna guess this was just around the time that you started feeling comfortable as a substantive expert, the go-to guy on the Iraqi leadership. We decide to invade Iraq. So, take us back to... Take us back to 2002. And let me add one other thing. When I got back from Pakistan in May of 2002, it was Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda. And I'm promoted and given this job as the Executive Assistant to the Deputy Director for Operations. And I walked in on my first day... I've told this story before, but I walked in my first day, very lightheartedly, I said,

• 43:03John Kiriakou?

  "What are we doing?" And he, very seriously, he said to me, "I can't tell you. You have to go to the sixth floor, sign a bunch of secrecy agreements, then come back down, and we'll talk about it." And I went up to the sixth floor to security, and they were waiting for me. I signed six separate security and secrecy agreements, and I said, "What the heck is going on?" And the security officer said to me, he takes a deep breath, "Well, next year, we're going to attack Iraq, we're gonna overthrow Saddam Hussein, and we are going to create the world's largest air force base in southern Iraq.

• 43:43John Kiriakou?

  We're gonna move all of our air assets out of Saudi Arabia into Iraq so we can deprive Osama bin Laden of the ability to say that we are polluting the land of the two holy mosques." And of course, immediately, like anybody else, immediately, I recognized the import of this. Like, this is war. We're preparing for war, all-out war.

• 44:04John Kiriakou?

  What was the indication to you that something big was gonna happen? Was it in 2002? Was it in early 2003? Where were you getting your information?

• 44:15Speaker 05

  In 2002, I had switched over from Iraq to the Iranian issue group. But I still kept my hand in Iraq issues as much as I could. And I still was reading all the reporting, particularly about Saddam. Because one of the things about Saddam Hussein's regime is just someone. A friend of mine once said, it's malaria. Once it gets in your bloodstream, it never leaves.

• 44:37John Kiriakou?

  Isn't that?

• 44:37Speaker 05

  And what I would do, I think the thing that really struck me most was the steady drumbeat that we kept on hearing from the administration. And also, one of the things that also struck me at the time was that Iran was a very important, hard target country. And it was right up there in terms of policymaker interest. But I saw all the resources going towards Iraq and to the Iraq Operations Group and to, and the beefing up of what was then called Iraq Issue, which then became Office of Iraq Analysis. And it was pretty clear to me that we were starting, we were on a path towards something. And so what happened was, right after the war started, I remember I was writing for a PDB

• 45:22Speaker 05

  on Iran, the night that the war started. And everybody on the Iraq Issue was in the office that night. And I was talking to them and everybody was just, wow, this is really intense. And they were watching it on CNN. Subsequently, when I was, when, during the, when I was first meeting with the production group about the TV show, the limited series, they had asked me about this. They said, how did you know the war was starting? And we said, I said, we watched it on CNN. They were like, what? You mean, you didn't have some sort of, you didn't have cameras strapped to the bombs? And it was like, why would you put cameras on bombs? You know, I mean, so anyway, so that was that.

• 46:03Speaker 05

  And then shortly thereafter, there was a call to have analysts go out to Iraq to support the war effort. I think, once they realized that this was not, that this war was not going to be over in a week, or as it was in 1991, then all of a sudden, I put my hand up and I said, hey, listen, I'm, I have this background on Saddam Hussein and on working as a leadership analyst on Iraq. I think I should go there. And so they approved it. And then they said, I was gonna be out at the airport, working on WMD documentation, to which I said, I don't know anything about WMD. But they said, oh, no, no, we've thought about this. We think you'd be very helpful there. And I said, oh, okay, fine.

• 46:44Speaker 05

  And then suddenly, I got a call one day and they said, the HVT One analyst was a guy named Sean. He has to come back, he's getting married and he has to come back to the United States. And can you go out there and take over for him? And I was like, I was like, thank God.

• 47:00John Kiriakou?

  Finally.

• 47:01Speaker 05

  Now at least I'll have something that I'll be working on, that will be interesting, but also that plays to my abilities and my knowledge base. So that's when I went over there. And it was, it was, when I got there, it was, it was just, it was a bad situation that was just getting, seemed to be getting worse every day.

• 47:18John Kiriakou?

  Let me ask you about that too, because your expertise is in, frankly, what made Saddam Hussein tick?

• 47:26Speaker 05

  Right.

• 47:26John Kiriakou?

  But Saddam Hussein, at that point, was on the run. He was hiding somewhere. I remember, we were pretty confident at the time that he was somewhere in Tikrit. He was probably somewhere in the environs of Al-Awja, which was the village in which he was born. His tribe's people were probably protecting him. So you're not doing psychological analysis, because psychological analysis, at that point, was unnecessary. The, what was necessary was just to find the man and capture him.

• 47:55Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 47:56John Kiriakou?

  So you're the HVT One analyst. Are you physically looking for him? Are you going through all sorts of intelligence, trying to pin down a location? Or what exactly was it that you were doing?

• 48:08Speaker 05

  That's a great question. That's exactly what I was doing. I was using my background and using my knowledge of who his inner circle was and who are the people that he most had to rely on to survive his life on the run. You have to remember Saddam Hussein had been president of Iraq since 1979 and had been largely in power since 1968.

• 48:31John Kiriakou?

  Yes.

• 48:32Speaker 05

  And now, all of a sudden, he was living a very different lifestyle. And he had left Baghdad. And yeah, we all basically thought that he was up in the Tikrit area, for the most part. And we were focusing mostly on the bodyguards. Saddam was a very clever guy. There were two things that really stood out. One was, the fact that he had no plan for when the regime fell, was kind of a brilliant move on his part. Because if you have no plan, then there's no plan for someone to sell to your enemies so that they can capture you and do whatever. The other thing was that he just, so he just went in a car and he went. The other thing was that for years, we focused on the bodyguards and all of these people

• 49:15Speaker 05

  that he needed to have around him to get from point A to point B. And he got rid of, he fired all of them. He basically told them, go home. And he put in a new set of bodyguards, many of whom we didn't have photographs of, we didn't even know their names. And so suddenly, we're having to play catch up very quickly and trying to get a bead on who these people were. And so, basically, what I was doing was researching things like that, looking at the intelligence that was being collected from the various raids as the, as the special forces went out and captured people on our hit list, finding out what was found in terms of notebooks or computers or phone logs or anything like that.

• 49:57Speaker 05

  And then building up the next list and working with the military as best I could. I tried getting up to Tikrit, because that's where all the interrogating that was of any consequence was happening. And eventually, I tried three times to get up there between late October and Thanksgiving, late November. And every time, there was a sandstorm, can't go. In other words, oh, helicopter needs a part and it's grounded for now. The third time I went up there, the chief of station kicked me off the flight, because he had to go up. And so I lost my seat. By that point, Task Force 121, which was the special forces group that was targeting,

• 50:40Speaker 05

  trying to find Saddam, they had a pretty good bead at this point. By late November, early December, they really were closing in. And suddenly, the military's desire to have help from the CIA was waning a little bit, because now it was like, they felt that they didn't really need us to help them anymore. And they also felt that they were very close to finding him. And at this point, it's all about who gets the credit for what. And I remember those last few days, we would get bits and pieces of information from our military colleagues, but it was very tightly, very closely held. And getting the full story from them was like pulling teeth.

• 51:18John Kiriakou?

  I think I might be able to speak to that a little bit. When I was serving as the executive assistant to the deputy director, it was Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, 24 hours a day, Iraq. And so I was right into, because of these six secrecy agreements, six different compartments that were specific to the targeting of Saddam Hussein. One of them was particularly sensitive. I'm gonna talk around it a little bit.

• 51:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 51:42John Kiriakou?

  But we recruited a small group of people who claimed to have not just access to Saddam, but regular, daily access to Saddam. He was moving, of course, from palace to palace to palace, to private home, to garage, to wherever, to try to mix us up. And one of the sources told us that Saddam had a tell, like in a poker game, he had a tell. And that when this one specific thing happened, that was the tell, that he was gonna be in XYZ palace and we could hit him.

• 52:18John Kiriakou?

  And so, I would literally refresh that database every couple of minutes, for the 12, 13, 14 hours a day that I was there. And then, the person who would handle it overnight would do the same. We got a report saying, he's here, he's at the palace, he's shown his tell. And so, I remember calling the director's office and speaking to his executive assistant, the director of the CIA, George Tenet, and saying, he's at target A. And within minutes, we had called in a missile strike on the palace and we blasted it. And then the source says, you've hit him.

• 53:02John Kiriakou?

  He's severely wounded and he's being carried out of the rubble of the palace.

• 53:06Speaker 05

  I remember that.

• 53:07John Kiriakou?

  Literally, none of that was true.

• 53:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 53:10John Kiriakou?

  We had been lied to from the very beginning. It was all about the money. There was no tell. The whole network was just a bullshit scam that they were running on the CIA to try to make money. And that we paid them millions of dollars for this. But this was something that was actually quite common. In fact, when you were working on the case, they actually caught him. So where were you? What were you doing when you got word, oh my God, we've got Saddam Hussein?

• 53:44Speaker 05

  I was at Baghdad Station, in the villa for that night. And I, around, it had been a hell of a day. We had gotten diverted on Airport Road. A friend of mine went out to send something home via the mail. And you had to go out to the airport to do that. And we got diverted on the way back and we got lost in Baghdad. It was, it was, it was a hell of a, hell of an afternoon. And the more lost we got, every, every street, we seemed to get more lost and more lost. And then eventually we, I found a landmark and we got back to the, to the green zone. But, once I got back, I ran to this guy, Mike, who was on the CENTCOM Fusion cell. And he said, I met him at the DFAC and he just said, hey, they think they're gonna go after him tonight.

• 54:28Speaker 05

  He said, I just spoke with Seun, one of the TF121 guys. And he said, they're gonna, they're gonna go after him tonight. They think they, they think it's him. And that Mohammed Ibrahim, the guy who dined Saddam out, had basically, he had been captured. I knew it was captured the night before. But he didn't hold out very long. That was around four o'clock. And then around seven o'clock, I was in the station. And there's all this commotion going on. And people are, you know, when something's happened and all of a sudden people start rushing around in any office environment. And then, that, that's when, and somebody came by and they said, they caught Saddam. And so then, next thing I know, I'm getting pulled into the chief of station's office. Chief of station was not there at the time. He was in Paris on his R and R.

• 55:12Speaker 05

  And, but the, the deputy was there and the Exter of the CIA was there as well. All the CIA brass was in that room, that, at that point. And they called me and they said, how, how would you identify him? And so I gave him some ideas about what to look for. And then someone said, okay, we want you to go out and, and identify him. Make sure it's him before we, we tell Washington that this is accurate. And we, because we don't want to tell, we don't want to announce this to the media and then find out it's one of the body doubles.

• 55:42John Kiriakou?

  Body double.

• 55:42Speaker 05

  And that's what, that's what Buzzy Kronegaard, he's like, yeah, we don't want to, we don't want to announce this. It might be one of those body doubles. And I wanted to say to him, sir, for the eight millionth time, I'm gonna say this, there are no body doubles. And, and I swear to God, the amount of disinformation that was out there about Saddam. And, oh Saddam, he's got suicide vests. And if anybody comes near him, he's gonna blow off the building from kingdom come for a block around. And he'll kill anybody in a block radius of him. And, and meanwhile, it's like CIA, the psychiatrists who you used to work with and I worked with, they were like, Saddam is the last person on earth who's gonna kill himself.

• 56:21John Kiriakou?

  Yeah, you could say that.

• 56:22Speaker 05

  He's just not psychologically made up in that way. It's, suicide is for others to do. Martyrdom is for others, it's not for him. But I decided not to say anything because I didn't want Buzzy to say, okay, then maybe we don't need you after all. Because I was like, this is the most important thing.

• 56:39John Kiriakou?

  And we should point out, Buzzy, Buzzy Kronegaard was the executive director of the CIA at the time. The third ranking official inside the CIA. He had the executive director, it's the director, the deputy director, the executive director. He was the one that ran the day-to-day operations of the CIA.

• 56:56Speaker 05

  Right.

• 56:57John Kiriakou?

  And he was a regular, both in Iraq, when you were there, and in Pakistan, when I was in Pakistan. He, he loved being on the ground all the time.

• 57:06Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, oh, yeah.

• 57:07John Kiriakou?

  So they catch Saddam. And then all eyes turn and they look at you.

• 57:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. And, and so then someone says, put together a list of questions that you think only Saddam can answer. But make them unclassified, okay?

• 57:22John Kiriakou?

  Yeah, good luck.

• 57:24Speaker 05

  As though Saddam and I are old friends and we, we've been hanging around for years. So I, immediately, I go back upstairs and I'm working on my questions. I had about 40 questions. And then someone yells out, Nixon, come on, we're going, like that. And so, at this point, my friend Mike, who was my partner in crime there, he was with NSA. And he says to me, he's, I can't believe, I can't believe you're getting to do this like that. I said, Mike, you're coming with me. And so I grabbed him and I said, just stick by my side, I'm gonna get you into this. And so we walk out, I'm literally holding him by his jacket arm. And they're like, he can't go. And I said, no, he's coming with us, he's coming with us. And he gets one foot in the suburban, then all of a sudden, someone comes out and goes, hey, Mike, General Casey's on the line.

• 58:09Speaker 05

  He wants, he wants a PowerPoint presentation on how, on the whole capture thing.

• 58:15Speaker 05

  And Mike just looks at me, it was like that scene in Titanic when Kate Winslet has to let go of Leonardo's hand. Because it's like, it's like, I'm sorry, Mike, I, I tried.

• 58:24John Kiriakou?

  That was a very honorable thing that you did.

• 58:26Speaker 05

  Yeah. He was so pissed off. It was, the next morning, I was, I came in and he said something like, so how was it? And I explained it to him, he's just, meh.

• 58:38Speaker 04

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• 59:53John Kiriakou?

  I mentioned in a podcast a couple of weeks ago that I became so obsessed with Saddam when I was working in the job that you ended up doing, that I actually used to dream about him. And I had a dream once that I got a job as a cook in his palace. And I'm standing in, in the kitchen and I'm thinking, oh my God, this is my opportunity. I'm gonna poison him. I'll poison him and I'll kill him. And then I look up and Uday is there, his bloodthirsty psychopathic son, Uday is there. And Uday smiles at me and says, do you think we're so stupid that we don't know who you are? And then I woke up.

• 1:00:35John Kiriakou?

  So, listen, you had been working on this guy for years at this point. And then you walk into the room and he's standing there. You gotta tell us, what in the world was that like?

• 1:00:46Speaker 05

  Oh, let me, I'll tell you about my dream about Saddam, which happened afterwards.

• 1:00:50John Kiriakou?

  We all have PTSD from Saddam.

• 1:00:52Speaker 05

  We all do. We, so we go out to the, we go out to the Battlefield Interrogation Facility out by the airport. And we're waiting, we get there and we're waiting and waiting. And finally, someone says, it was like being backstage at a rock concert. But instead of groupies, it's all people in camouflage. And so someone says, okay, guys, your turn. I walked, I'm walking down this hall and I'm thinking, the whole time I'm thinking, I hope it's not like, they've got the wrong guy. Because it's so many times, we got close or we thought we were close, only to find out that it was nothing. It was a mirage. And I'm just saying to myself, I, I don't, I hope this is, I hope this is him and it's not the wrong person. And then the door opens, we get outside this room and it's like a shower room.

• 1:01:36Speaker 05

  And the door opens and I just went, huh! And I had this in-breath of air and I, in my mind, I just, I said, holy shit, it's Saddam! And, and I came out there to identify him. I didn't have to ask him one thing. And the minute I laid eyes on him, it was him. He had been shaved by this point, so his hair was still kind of long, but he was shaving. And so it was, it wasn't like when he was, had the full beard or anything. But beyond a shadow of a doubt, I was just like, and so we walk in there. And I didn't need to ask him any questions, but I knew everybody was expecting me to. So I played along with the charade and I started to ask questions.

• 1:02:17John Kiriakou?

  What did you call him? Did you call him Mr. President?

• 1:02:20Speaker 05

  No, I, no, at first, I didn't say anything. I just, all I said to him, I just walked up to him. And somebody said, these gentlemen want to ask you some questions. And so then he looked at me and I swear, I used to have this book on my desk. It was called Republic of Fear by.

• 1:02:37John Kiriakou?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, great, great book.

• 1:02:39Speaker 05

  The 1989 version, there was a picture of Saddam on the cover, looking at the camera. And he looks at me and he has that same look on his face. And I went, show my spine. And I was just like, oh my God. So I just said to him, I said, we are here to ask you some questions and you are here to answer them truthfully. Do you understand me? And he listened to the, he listened to the translation and he just went. Yeah. And so I started asking him questions. And the first question I said, when was the last time you saw your son's life? And so then, and he just listened to the translation and he just went, he had this mean kind of laugh and he just said, let me ask you something. Who are you guys?

• 1:03:23Speaker 05

  Tell me.

• 1:03:23John Kiriakou?

  What a Saddam thing to say.

• 1:03:26Speaker 05

  It was a control thing to say.

• 1:03:27John Kiriakou?

  Absolutely, yes.

• 1:03:28Speaker 05

  And, and it was just, and so someone stepped in at that point. I was going to say something and someone stepped in and said, we're not here to answer your questions. You're here to answer our questions. And that, and he was just like, okay. And so I, I went on to the next couple of questions and he answered them very truthfully and accurately. And he, he acted like we were his guests, that like, he did this every Saturday night when we were just the latest round of visitors who have come to ask him questions. And he was, he could, he was very, very cooperative. But once we got on the topic of, like, at one point, we got on the topic of weapons of mass destruction. Where are the weapons of mass destruction?

• 1:04:09Speaker 05

  And he, he was just like, why do you keep asking me about this? Why don't you ask your president? Doesn't he know where they are? And then he'd be like, you people are awful. And he's like, you people are ignorant. You're, you don't know what you're doing. And he went on this tirade and he just said, I don't mean about you guys. I'm talking about your president. Like, he didn't want to insult us. And so, you know, I just was like, it's okay. It's okay, Saddam. It's no offense taken. But then after about a question for about 90 minutes, two hours, and then, and then at the very end, I just was like, I have to, I thought this was it. I'm never going to see him again. So I have to ask this question. And I just said, Saddam,

• 1:04:47Speaker 05

  now that all of these statues and pictures of you that have been all over Baghdad, now that they've all been taken down, and, and if there are any standing, they've been defaced. How do you feel about that now? And he just looked at me and he just said, I want you to listen. They brought the finger up and I subsequently learned that's when like, you better listen. It's like, I never asked anybody to put up a statue of me. If that was done, it was done by order of the command. Who am I to over, over, to overturn the demands of the command?

• 1:05:22John Kiriakou?

  Good grief.

• 1:05:23Speaker 05

  And then he said, you could learn a lot from talking to me. You can learn a lot about politics.

• 1:05:27John Kiriakou?

  True.

• 1:05:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:05:30John Kiriakou?

  You can learn a lot from a man like him.

• 1:05:32Speaker 05

  Oh, of course. And so I said, Saddam, I hope we have that conversation about politics. And I said, I'm done. And we had a very testy exchange with the militaries. And one of the things that happened during it, I've said this in a lot of interviews, I'm going to say it again. The military had a translator and the CIA had a translator. And the CIA translator would translate and then the military translator would say, no, you've mistranslated that. Or no, that's not what he said. And after a while, it started to get really annoying. And Saddam picked up on this. And he was, he would just, he would say something and then the translator would translate and then the military guy would say, no, no, no, that's wrong. And then he'd start, every time he answered and the CIA translator translated, he'd look at the military guy and go.

• 1:06:18John Kiriakou?

  You know, when I first started as, as an Iraq analyst and we were getting ready to go to war with Iraq in the first Gulf War, there was a real debate over whether or not Saddam spoke English. And I found an interview that he gave to an American journalist in the early 1980s, in which he actually corrected his translator. And so we concluded that he spoke, I think in the official bio, we said that he spoke limited English.

• 1:06:49Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:06:50John Kiriakou?

  So what was your experience then, as he's watching these translators go back and forth? Did he speak English?

• 1:06:55Speaker 05

  He understood English very well. So much so that subsequently I learned, a lot of times he knew exactly what I was saying. And a lot of times he'd wave off the translation later on. But he didn't speak it well. He spoke it very, very haltingly. He knew phrases here and there. And he just, he couldn't really have, you couldn't have a conversation in English with him, but he understood it very well. And like with the translator, after a while, he began to notice that the, that there was a difference there, that there, there was disagreement. And he played to that. And then he, and it got so bad, he just, he'd get the question and then he'd just look at the translator and go.

• 1:07:39Speaker 05

  And then the other, the translator would just shake his head. So much so that by the time we got out of there, our people were like, the first thing they said, the first thing, the head of the group, of our group was, said was, who the fuck let that guy in there? Who the fuck was that guy? And just was really, everybody was just outraged that this guy was doing that. And what nobody had really noticed other than myself was that Saddam was the one who was cultivating this. He just sat there and he exacerbated the differences and he basically got, he noticed that there were guys in civilian clothes and guys in army uniforms. And he got the two sides that should be on the same side to start disagreeing amongst themselves, which is basically a metaphor for how he ran Iraq.

• 1:08:22John Kiriakou?

  That's how we ran Iraq. Our official analysis from early on was that he ran the country like a mob boss runs a family. It's strictly business. He's going to kill a lot of people, but it's strictly business.

• 1:08:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:08:34John Kiriakou?

  That was the analysis. I have to ask you too, weapons of mass destruction aside, people have written volumes and volumes of books on things like that. I'm very interested about what he might have said about his sons, about his half brothers, and about somebody like, like Ali Hassan Al Majid, who was known from the 1980s as the butcher of Kurdistan, for example. Chemical Ali for dropping chemical weapons on, on the Kurds in the north. What did he say? Let's start with his sons. Uday, who was a psychopath. Everybody acknowledged he was a psychopath and a cold-blooded murderer. And Qusay, who probably wasn't a psychopath and was Saddam's most trusted advisor.

• 1:09:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, I did a lot of work. As you may recall, we had a colleague named David who had done some work on the sons.

• 1:09:26John Kiriakou?

  Brilliant analysis that David did. Brilliant. One of the best papers I ever read on the psychology of Saddam's sons.

• 1:09:34Speaker 05

  Absolutely. And, and it got a lot of attention. And it's, it's a shame that the CIA didn't keep a guy like David on, on board. Or couldn't keep a guy like that on board. But the thing is, so I did a lot of, I started doing a lot of work on the sons. And I, my dream had been that, okay, once the war started, I was just like, really cool if I got to meet Uday. I wasn't even thinking about Saddam. And then I was in weapons training when he was killed with his brother. And I was like, oh, okay, but there goes that dream.

• 1:10:01John Kiriakou?

  There's that.

• 1:10:01Speaker 05

  But we did talk about the sons and he, Saddam was very, he would, he said to me, it's like, we were talking about, I asked him about, his third son, Ali. And he said something to the effect of, I said, is Ali your son? And he said something like, if I tell you yes, will you kill them? Will you kill him like you killed Uday and Qusay? And so I said, Saddam, I didn't kill anyone. Okay. And he said, look, my sons died. They died the way I wanted, I would have wanted them to have died. They died as heroes, defending the honor of Iraq. They were playing video games.

• 1:10:38John Kiriakou?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:39Speaker 05

  In a Shake's house in Mosul.

• 1:10:41John Kiriakou?

  Yeah. And we burst through the door and there was a gunfight.

• 1:10:44Speaker 05

  But they had done the thing that's, this is what happens when, in the next generation sometimes where like, they did the thing that Saddam never did. They overstayed their welcome. They were on the run. And they stayed in the same spot for a long time, probably because it was very difficult to get to travel with Uday, because of his various infirmities stemming from the assassination attempt in 96. But also like Saddam, when he went on the run, or even during the first Gulf War, it's just like, he stayed in a different place every night. And it was of his choosing and it was done at random. And again, it was genius to, to do that.

• 1:11:23Speaker 05

  And the sons didn't, but he maintained that, I think he would acknowledge every now and then that Uday was a problem for him.

• 1:11:32John Kiriakou?

  Interesting.

• 1:11:32Speaker 05

  And he said something at one point where he said, we don't all get to select who our sons will be.

• 1:11:37John Kiriakou?

  Wow, that's fascinating.

• 1:11:39Speaker 05

  Yeah. And, because I'd mentioned the thing about burning Uday's cars and, and.

• 1:11:46Speaker 05

  And some of the problems that Ude caused in the family and his shooting of Saddam's half-brother. And it was just, and he just, and as far as Qusay was concerned, I said, were you grooming him to be your heir, your heir, your political heir, that is? And he said, no, of course not. No, this is a, this is a republic. It's not a monarchy.

• 1:12:06John Kiriakou?

  That shocks me. That shocks me.

• 1:12:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, I was like, I just was like, Saddam, it seemed, he said, no, I said, the command made him, the RCC made him part of the, the command and blah, blah. He said, I told them that he wasn't ready for that, but they overruled me and I just, I couldn't, I couldn't stand in the way of that. And it was, he was trying his best to be very presidential and disinterested, but I got, I always got the sense from everything that I learned following them, but also from talking to him that, yeah, he was grooming Qusay to succeed him at some point. The problem is that Qusay still had a long way to go in terms of learning the ropes and being mature and understanding and learning how to, how Saddam managed to rule because he was very effective.

• 1:12:52Speaker 05

  If it hadn't been for nine 11, Saddam Hussein would still, if he were alive, he'd still be in power today.

• 1:12:58John Kiriakou?

  I think that's probably right. I spent a lot of time, a lot of time working on analyses of Saddam's half-brothers. His half-brother Barzan Tikriti had been the head of the Iraqi intelligence service and then a longstanding Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. His brother Sabawi was a long time, half-brother Sabawi was a long time intelligence official. He had another half-brother, Watban, who was an intelligence official. What about those guys? They all ended up dying. They all ended up being executed to the best of my recollection. I think Barzan was the first to be executed.

• 1:13:34Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:13:35John Kiriakou?

  But on the one hand, Saddam relied on them and trusted them and loved them. On the other hand, he believed that over the course of the long term, they could all pose threats to him. Did he say anything to you that was insightful about his half-brothers?

• 1:13:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, and he was, with the exception of Barzan. Barzan, I think he respected. I think he had some regard for what Barzan would say. Watban and Sabawi, not so much. He acted with, he told me this story, I think it was about Watban, that how he had learned about, Watban had caused some sort of really bad accident in a traffic circle in Baghdad and had basically just left the scene. And he learned about this the next day and he ordered Watban to basically put on a policeman's uniform and go direct traffic in that traffic circle as his punishment.

• 1:14:33John Kiriakou?

  What a Saddam thing to do. That's a Saddam thing to do. I remember giving a briefing to George Tenet after the war had begun. Saddam issued a presidential decree saying that if anybody spoke ill of him, they were to have their tongues cut out and nailed onto the front door of their houses. And so, somebody told President Bush that the Iraqis were cutting people's tongues out and nailing them to the front doors of houses. And so, I get this call, the director wants to see you. I rush over to his office and he wants to know the details. How many people have had their tongues cut out? And I said, wait a minute, it hasn't happened? Nobody's had his tongue cut out?

• 1:15:16John Kiriakou?

  This is a presidential decree, they published it in the National Gazette just to frighten people. He said, so they're not actually cutting tongues out? I said, no, they're not. Nobody's had his tongue cut out. So George had to call the president and say, we need to back off on this tongue cutting out situation. It hasn't happened. But it was a very Saddam thing to frighten people with.

• 1:15:40Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. And the thing is, he would, he probably would have done it, but.

• 1:15:45John Kiriakou?

  Probably would have.

• 1:15:47Speaker 05

  One of the things I found is that a lot of Iraqis, even after he was captured, I would talk to Iraqis and the minute his name came up, they would be, all of a sudden, they would be like, and they'd start, and they'd very quietly say Saddam Hussein. And he's already, everybody knows he's in jail.

• 1:16:03John Kiriakou?

  Yeah. And they're still terrified.

• 1:16:06Speaker 05

  This sort of psychosis or this, this mass kind of, gotta keep this on the down low because you don't know who's listening.

• 1:16:13John Kiriakou?

  You've seen the famous grainy, black and white video of the day that Saddam took power. Barzan, his half-brother, is with Saddam at what I think is a high school auditorium. All the generals who that morning had helped Saddam come to power are sitting there thinking that they're there to be congratulated or given medals. And one by one, Saddam calls them to stand up and accuses them of treason. And then Barzan takes them out of range of the camera and you hear a gunshot. And then finally, they say, yes, I'm guilty, Saddam, I throw myself at your mercy. And everybody just ended up getting shot.

• 1:16:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:16:52John Kiriakou?

  And that set the tone for the next, what, three decades, two and a half decades of his rule. It was no wonder that everybody was afraid of Saddam.

• 1:17:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And apparently, supposedly, as the story goes, videotape of that, of the Ba'ath Party Conference meeting that you just mentioned, was then given to every embassy in Baghdad, just to let everybody know that, yes, this is the person who's running the show.

• 1:17:20John Kiriakou?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:21Speaker 05

  I did ask him about it, how, like, when he replaced the president, Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, and he, from Saddam's standpoint, he said, you don't understand, it was one of the few times where Saddam got very upset with me because I said something about when, after you had him killed, or after you moved against him and you removed him from power. And the next day, he came in and I started to talk to him, I put his hand up and he just said, I have something I want to say. And he said, I want to speak to you about saying hurtful things.

• 1:17:53John Kiriakou?

  Wow, you hurt Saddam Hussein's feelings?

• 1:17:57Speaker 05

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. And so, he said, do you know this man was my relative? Do you know that I love this man? Do you know that I worshipped him and I worked very closely with him and that he came to me and he said, Saddam, I don't want to govern anymore. I want to go back and I want to retire. I want to live on my farm. Apparently, a lot of senior Iraqis who always wanted to just live on their farm because even Saddam said, I want to just retire and live on my farm at some point. But, and he said, he begged me to take this job. I didn't, I didn't want it. I wanted to go on my farm. And that was, yeah. So I just said, okay, thank you, thank you, Saddam. Thank you. I'll try to keep that in mind as we, as we talk.

• 1:18:36John Kiriakou?

  I want to ask you two about Saddam's wife, Sajida, and his daughters, Rana and Ragad and Hala. I met them in Amman and never encountered any relative of Saddam ever again. Two of his daughters were married to Hussein Kemal Al-Majid and his brother Saddam Kemal Al-Majid. Hussein Kemal, of course, had been the Minister of Industry and Military Industrialization and Saddam Kemal had been, I think he was the head of the Special Security Organization, something like that. And they defected. They defected to Jordan, they begged Saddam's forgiveness, they went back and Ude killed them at the border.

• 1:19:21John Kiriakou?

  Did Saddam ever say anything about his daughters? The conventional wisdom is that they're probably living privately, secretly in Amman somewhere, but nobody really seems to know. We don't even know if Sajida, his wife, is still alive. I read a report recently that she may have died earlier this year. Did he ever say anything about his wife or daughters? Or did he ever express any concern about their well-being?

• 1:19:44Speaker 05

  Of course, of course. We asked him about Sajida and we asked him about the daughters. And the only time that Saddam ever showed any emotion was when we talked about the daughters. He just said, first, he didn't want to talk at all. He said, we have a saying in Iraq. He said, the women are separate and meaning they're not part of our discussion. They are, they are separate from all of this. They're not in the political world and that's that. And I said, I know Saddam, but we really do have to talk about this. And he said, okay. And then that's when I was asking him about Samira Shahbinder, who was the second.

• 1:20:23John Kiriakou?

  His second wife.

• 1:20:24Speaker 05

  Second wife.

• 1:20:25John Kiriakou?

  The, the mother of Ali.

• 1:20:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. And he said, no, but he said about his daughters, he said, I love them very much and I miss them terribly and I know that they love me and I can't wait for the day when we are reunited, whether it's in this life or the next life. And he got a little misty-eyed and his voice got a little choked up. And it was the only time he showed any emotion whatsoever. He certainly didn't sound like that when he was talking about his sons. And as far as Sajida is concerned, he had, I think it's hard to, he had a great deal of respect for her. He wanted her to be treated respectfully. He made sure that when I began to talk about Kairalat Telfa, that that was Sajida's father.

• 1:21:09John Kiriakou?

  Yes.

• 1:21:10Speaker 05

  And he, he really idolized her, her father. And he had lived with them for many years. And then he asked Kairala for Sajida's hand in marriage.

• 1:21:22John Kiriakou?

  In fact, wasn't it Kairala who took Saddam to commit his first murder?

• 1:21:28Speaker 05

  Kairala was the guy who he, basically, he was his political godfather. He was, when he left Tikrit, and if I can correct another thing, you always hear that, oh, Saddam's father beat him, his stepfather beat him.

• 1:21:41John Kiriakou?

  Stepfather.

• 1:21:42Speaker 05

  There were so many things that when I was talking to Saddam, it would just, you know, I had this sort of, this story that I'd been, that I'd learned about and I would find that it was just all myth. It was just mythology. And one of which was, oh, Saddam's father died before he was born and he had this stepfather and he was cruel and he beat him and that's why he wanted WMD.

• 1:22:02John Kiriakou?

  You're right.

• 1:22:03Speaker 05

  And the thing is, I, so I said, tell me about your relationship with your stepfather. And he said, I loved him. He was a wonderful man. He made me what I am and he saw in me something that others didn't. And he said, he sent me to Baghdad. He said, you have no future here in Tikrit, but you have a future in Baghdad and you're a very smart person and you will do well there. And he is the one who sent him on his way. And also, that's how, and somehow, there was a tie between him and Kairala Telfa and they took him in and that's what launched Saddam's political career, basically. This whole thing about him being an abused child, from what it sounds like, Saddam actually felt that he had a sort of an idyllic, like, they were poor, no doubt about it.

• 1:22:48Speaker 05

  And Tikrit was not, Tikrit was a true backwater in, in Iraq. But he told the story also of. One day, he and his friend were out by the river and they were fishing. And his friend started to put his finger into the sand and he was moving it around and everything. And Saddam said, what are you doing? And so he said, I just wrote my name. That's my name. That's how you write my name. He was like, how'd you learn that? I learned it in school. He said, can I go to school? Can I learn that? He said, yeah, just go to school. They'll teach you how to do this. And that tells you what the kind of upbringing that he had.

• 1:23:28Speaker 05

  It was, he was a guy who climbed up the greasy pole and he, and he did it largely through, because he was a very clever person. He was not an intellectual by any stretch of the imagination, but he was very smart. And he also, he developed a very ruthless streak and he often acted before others acted. And that's one of the ways he maintained himself in power for as long as he did.

• 1:23:52John Kiriakou?

  John, in my own career, my own experience,

• 1:23:57John Kiriakou?

  nothing could have topped the Abu Zubaydah capture. Everything was, it just didn't, it just didn't hold up. The excitement, the import. You have just made a place for yourself, not just in the history of the CIA, but in American history. And we're going to get to that in a moment. But you finish your time debriefing Saddam. You go back to headquarters and then what? Because you didn't stay at the CIA for terribly much longer after that, did you?

• 1:24:29Speaker 05

  I stayed for another, I got back in 2004 and I stayed until 2011.

• 1:24:34John Kiriakou?

  Oh, you did.

• 1:24:35Speaker 05

  Another seven years. The crazy thing about all of this is that I thought, like, when I got back to headquarters, I was going to be, I was going to be hitting the circuit. I'm going to be briefing the president, the vice president, the CIA director. Everybody's going to want to talk to me.

• 1:24:51John Kiriakou?

  Yes.

• 1:24:51Speaker 05

  My phone did not ring at all. I was just like, wait, we spent how many billions of dollars getting rid of this guy? And now nobody wants to even know if you're a Yankees fan. When they win the World Series, the next day, everybody wants to talk about, oh, it wasn't a great game. But Yankees fans now, it's just like they, they lose in three straight to Tampa Bay. The next day, no one wants to talk about it, you know? And that's what, not finding any weapons of mass destruction had done. Everybody saw that the writing was on the wall, I think, especially at CIA. But the thing is also is that it was a situation that was getting worse. And, and once he was gone, it was like yesterday's news.

• 1:25:32John Kiriakou?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:32Speaker 05

  And yet, he was gone and yet the problem was still persisting and it was getting worse. And this is one of the things that I just tell people. It's this regime change sounds great, but it's really hard to do. And it's very rarely ever going to work that you're going to change a regime and that you can leave the next day.

• 1:25:51John Kiriakou?

  That's right. Before we get to the really great things that have been happening to you in the last couple of years, I wanted to ask, when Saddam was finally executed, he was hanged and it was done in a brutal way. There was a miscalculation and, and his neck was torn with his brother Barzan. His head popped off when they, when they, they hanged him. What were your feelings, your thoughts that day when Saddam was executed?

• 1:26:20Speaker 05

  I had, Saddam had told me, he said, I know this is going to lead to my execution. This is back in 2004. He said this, I said, I'm under no illusions as to where this process is going. But I'm, I did what I did and I did it for Iraq and I am at peace with that. And I'm at peace with God about that. And I knew, when I was talking to him, I knew back then, even though there was no functioning judiciary system in Iraq at the time, I knew that this was going to happen.

• 1:26:47John Kiriakou?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:48Speaker 05

  Eventually. But I thought it would be a process similar to where you would have, I thought it would be good for the Iraqi people to see him executed in a sort of, in a way in which there would be a court process, a sentencing process, and then a carrying out of the sentencing. And that people would see that rule of law as being established. And instead, what we got was a kangaroo court that was going to convict him no matter what. And then we got him being dragged out in the middle of the night and being taunted. Saddam was the most dignified person in that room and behaved, his behavior did not surprise me one bit. It's exactly as I thought he would.

• 1:27:29Speaker 05

  The guy really was amazing when it came to showing no fear. I never, ever saw him ever give any sort of indication of that he was fearful. And he never expressed fear and he never said, oh, I was afraid of this. That, that word never came into, so when you hear people say things like, oh, Saddam feared that Iran was going to get weapons of mass destruction so that he had to do that. No, he didn't, he didn't fear, he didn't fear anything. And when it happened, I was appalled, basically. And I thought this is, there are so many things that have turned out to be lies here. There was no weapons of mass destruction. Saddam was not the guiding force behind the use of chemical weapons in Kirkuk.

• 1:28:12Speaker 05

  The clowns they have running Iraq now are probably worse than he is and they're incompetent. And now we have this moment in which instead of having a rule of law, we, we have just anarchy, mob justice. And it really, it disturbed me a great deal. And it affected me to the extent that I really began to question what we were doing in Iraq at all anymore.

• 1:28:37John Kiriakou?

  Wow. And John, this has really come full circle. There, you wrote a wonderfully received book, a memoir of exactly what it is that we've been talking about. It's been developed into a limited series and your story is getting out there. And not only is it getting out there, it's getting exactly the kind of reception that we would have hoped it would get. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

• 1:29:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, about eight years ago, they, I sold the rights to the book. And thinking that that would be great if this happens, but who knows? And then all of a sudden, I'm meeting with the producer and the director and the screenwriter. And we're sitting down and it took, and it had many stops and starts. And it survived COVID and the writer's strike and all of these things. And even Joel Kinnaman, who was the star who plays me, he even said, he said, normally, he signed on around 2023, I think. And when he signed on, that's when I knew that, okay, I think this is going to, this is going to be good and it's going to, it's going to actually happen.

• 1:29:48Speaker 05

  But he said, normally in a project like this, if you have two or three stops and starts, people get tired of it and they just move on and then it just dies. So I'm thrilled that they, that the producers wanted to carry through and see this to the end. I think the eight part mini series is really, really good. There are, certainly there are some liberties taken with, that are for, done for dramatic content and dramatic purposes. But overall, particularly the, the scenes where I'm meeting with Saddam, that stuff is taken, a lot of that's taken straight from my notebook. And so it, for me, it was very, it was surreal watching it because we didn't videotape any of our sessions.

• 1:30:29Speaker 05

  So this was like the closest I've ever come to actually watching myself when I was with him. In my lifetime, it was an epochal event because I never thought in a million years did I ever think I'd do something like this.

• 1:30:42John Kiriakou?

  No.

• 1:30:43Speaker 05

  But it's one of the reasons why I joined the CIA. I wanted to have a career and maybe have opportunities like this. But never in my wildest dreams did I think it would happen.

• 1:30:53John Kiriakou?

  John, this is the thing, and I say this all the time. You and I, we're just normal guys and we found ourselves in these historic situations. That's just the nature of the job. And so what you do is you embrace the opportunity. You work as hard as you can possibly work. You rely on your own experience and your own intellect and then hope for the best.

• 1:31:17Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah, it's preparation and luck.

• 1:31:20John Kiriakou?

  It is. Yes, it is. There's that element of luck. Where can people, tell us the name of the book, where people can find it and where they can watch the series.

• 1:31:29Speaker 05

  Okay. The name of the book is called, Debriefing the President, The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein. And it is paperback is out from Dutton. And the limited series is called High Value Target, The Search for Saddam, The Hunt for Saddam. And it is now, it was on TNT and now, starting October 14th, it will be on HBO Max. And it'll be streamed, you can stream it on HBO Max.

• 1:31:52John Kiriakou?

  Fantastic. John Nixon, thank you so much for being with us and congratulations on your success.

• 1:31:58Speaker 05

  Oh, thank you, John. Thank you for having me.

• 1:32:00John Kiriakou?

  Thank you, John.

• 1:32:02John Kiriakou?

  So how do we assess the interrogation of a monster of Saddam Hussein? Piro's approach was engineered asymmetric intimacy, dependency dressed as companionship, complete with a prisoner who came to see his manipulator as his closest confidant. Nixon's was a month-long contest between a suspicious narcissist and the analyst who had spent years studying him from an academic distance. And Saddam, the entire time he was held captive, used both of them. He was bored and he was starved for conversation. But he was also speaking for the record, to history, to President Bush and to the very highest of powers.

• 1:32:46John Kiriakou?

  While we can't get into his head, a fair reading of the signs, behavioral and physical, suggests strongly that Saddam, the spider hole photos in his head, was also reconstructing his own legacy. Piro's most astute observation may be that Saddam treated his trial and execution as a stage, refusing the hood at the gallows so that the last image of him would be defiance rather than capture. The last thing he could control.

• 1:33:18John Kiriakou?

  Saddam was a psychopath to the very end.

• 1:33:22John Kiriakou?

  Until next time, I'm John Kiriakou. Dead Drop is written by John Kiriakou and Alan Katz. Costart and Touchstone Productions produces the podcast. And John Kiriakou, Alan Katz and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers.

• 1:33:47Alan Katz?

  This podcast, it's a Costart and Touchstone production.

• 1:33:52Speaker 04

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