01 April 2023 , 06:01
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The FBI agent who interrogated Saddam Hussein has said that the dictator knew two things about him within a matter of seconds.
George Piro was hand-elected by spy chiefs at the American intelligence and security agency to carry out one of the most important interrogations the country had ever done.
On March 19, 2003, just over twenty years ago, then President George W Bush ordered the US invasion of Iraq.
Bush told America, and the world, that the Iraqi dictator Hussein was armed to the teeth with weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).
The UK followed the US into the Middle East in the war that claimed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives as well as the lives of hundreds of western soldiers.
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It took just weeks for US-led forces to defeat Saddam’s troops but an insurgency sprung up which fought on for years.
But on December 13, the same year they invaded, US special forces found the deposed dictator hiding in a one-man-size hole in northern Iraq.
FBI interrogator George Piro (FBI)After the CIA questioned him, the FBI decided that George Piro, a Lebanese American special agenct, was the man to talk to Saddam.
He spoke to Saddam over a period of seven months, with no one else allowed in the interrogation room.
But, according to CNN’s Peter Bergen, Mr Piro found that Bush’s claims of WMDs were false, and Saddam had nothing but contempt for terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden.
Speaking around the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Mr Piro revisited his time spent interrogating the dictator.
He revealed how he was told on Christmas Eve that he had been selected "on behalf of the FBI" to interrogate Saddam Hussein.
Mr Piro described it as "terrifying" but immediately went and bought two books on the prisoner, to learn more about him.
Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein yelling at the court as he receives the death sentence for his role in the killing in 1982 of nearly 150 people in the mainly Shiite village of Dujail, north of Baghdad (AFP/Getty Images)However, within seconds of meeting him, Saddam guessed two things about his new interrogator.
Mr Piro recalled: "At my first meeting with Saddam, within 30 seconds, he knew two things about me.
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"I told him my name was George Piro and that I was in charge, and he immediately said, 'You’re Lebanese.’ I told him my parents were Lebanese, and then he said, 'You’re Christian.’
"I asked him if that was a problem, and he said absolutely not. He loved the Lebanese people. Lebanese people loved him. And I was like, 'Well, great. We’re going to get along wonderfully.’"
He went on to explain how the interrogation worked over the duration of their seven months together.
Saddam following his capture by US troops (AFP/Getty Images)He said: "Initially, I would see him in the mornings. I would translate for his medical staff. And then, the formal interrogations were once or twice a week for several hours.
"As time went on, I started to spend more and more one-on-one time with him because I could communicate directly and very quickly with him.
"I built that to about five to seven hours every single day, one-on-one, a couple of hours in the morning, a couple of hours in the afternoon and then a formal interrogation session or two a week.
"And we talked about everything. So especially in the first couple of months, my goal was just to get him to talk.
"I wanted to know what he valued in life and what his likes, dislikes and thought processes were. So we talked about everything from history, art, sports to politics. We would talk about things that I knew he wouldn’t have any reservations or hesitations to talk about."
The topic of their first interrogation was Saddam’s published novel, a "terrible" book, that Mr Piro knew he wouldn’t lie about and that he had researched.
Alongside his own legal interrogation of Saddam, the CIA were using "enhanced interrogation techniques" on prisoners from the Iraqi that came to light after the fact and were widely slammed as "torture".
At the beginning of their lengthy interrogations, Mr Piro was told he might spend as long as a "year" with Saddam, so knew time was on his side.
In 2006, Saddam was executed after being handed over to the interim Iraqi government for crimes against humanity.
He was hung at a military base on December 30, 2006.