Books: Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein by John Nixon

When a CIA agent interrogated Saddam Hussein after his capture in 2003, the Iraqi dictator was not the man he was expecting

Students of history occasionally fantasise about the tale that Adolf Hitler might have spun, had he fallen alive into allied hands in April 1945, instead of opting for a bullet. The probable answer is that his explanation of his own life and deeds would have proved mind-blowingly banal. A minority of dictators are influential thinkers (Napoleon and Mao Tse-tung spring to mind) over and beyond the mountains of corpses they create. Most, however, merit attention only because of the power they wielded, the havoc they unleashed.

In the winter of 2003, the CIA analyst John Nixon became the first westerner to question Saddam Hussein in captivity. If he or his masters anticipated a philosophical feast, they received a disappointment.

Iraq’s former president lagged some distance behind Hitler, Stalin and Mao in the ranks of modern mass murderers, but his treatment of Kurds, Marsh Arabs and other minorities within his reach placed him in the second rank, beside the likes of Spain’s General Franco and Uganda’s Field-Marshal Idi Amin.

Nixon starts this account of his conversations with the former dictator in a barren guardhouse outside Baghdad by saying he found Saddam rather like Amin, as depicted in the film The Last King of Scotland, both in his eagerness to ingratiate himself with new acquaintances, and in his bland denials of anything seriously unpleasant. The Iraqi told the American that he loved the Kurds whom he slaughtered; cherished a warm personal affection for all sorts of people he is thought to have executed; and warmly admired Lenin, Mao, Charles de Gaulle and George Washington, who created political systems, but not Hitler or Stalin, whom he dismissed as “not thinkers”.

He claimed as his favourite book Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. He also spoke well of Crime and Punishment, saying: “This man Dostoevsky has a remarkable insight into the human condition.” He nursed a grievance against the American special forces who had captured him, claiming they stole a large sum of US dollars from him. Stealing was wicked, he said.

Even in a dirty old prison smock he retained a sense of his own magnificence, saying to the CIA officer like some bargain-basement Lear: “I am Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti, president of Iraq. Who are you?” Nixon writes: “Saddam had a grand idea of how he fitted into Iraq’s history. He saw himself as the personification of Iraq’s greatness and a symbol of its evolution.” He identified himself with the great warrior Saladin, who came from his own hometown, Tikrit.

Most of this book reads as unconscious black comedy. Here is a man whose life has been steeped in the blood of others. He knows that only the execution chamber awaits, and offers reflections to his captors that Mr Pooter might think a tad provincial. For instance, he said how much he liked France: “I had travelled there twice and had gotten to know the mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, quite well. I had intended to go back, but then the wars started, and who has time to travel when your country is at war?” He felt let down, he said, when the French failed to reciprocate his affection by giving him some help with the UN Security Council.

Nixon writes like a second-year politics student unexpectedly dispatched to Iraq for an internship. Here he describes one session with Iraq’s deposed ruler: “We spoke for two and a half hours and suddenly we heard a knock on the door. It was time for Saddam’s dinner. We all got up and said that we would be back soon to talk to him. Saddam nodded his head in agreement. He turned to leave and then turned back to face us.

The doomed dictator: Saddam after his capture in Baghdad, 2003

“He put his hand over his heart and said, ‘I would like you to know that I have really enjoyed this. It has been months since I talked with anyone. It has been so long since I have been able to have a meaningful conversation and I look forward to our next meeting.’ ”

Our own dear Queen is sometimes mocked for restricting exchanges with most of her subjects to asking them, “Have you come far?” That seems a pretty significant question alongside those posed to Iraq’s former dictator by the CIA, together with the interrogator’s reflections on the responses. “Saddam was the most suspicious man I have ever met,” writes Nixon. “He was always answering questions with questions of his own and he would frequently demand to know why we had asked about a certain topic before he would give his answer.”

Nixon makes one pertinent observation, which suggests a characteristic in Saddam that is common to many dictators: the man knew a good deal about his own country and people, but next to nothing about the outside world. Thus he was baffled by American and allied responses to his 1990 invasion of Kuwait, and had prepared no credible military response to George W Bush and Tony Blair’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. Indeed, Nixon says that Saddam seemed amazingly ignorant about the course of the latter campaign. Before it unfolded, he had simply fantasised that the foreign interlopers would eventually go away, as they had so often done in the past.

His favourite book was The Old Man and the Sea

In December 2003, the doomed former dictator made one wise prediction, about the prospects of the American victors: “You are going to fail ... because you do not know the language, the history, and you do not understand the Arab mind.” He chuckled as he spoke of the fierce seasonal weather that afflicts his country and its people: “Next summer, when it is hot, they might revolt against you.” And so, of course, many Iraqis did.

Saddam was finally hanged three years later. The CIA was angry with Nixon for writing this book and redacted substantial passages. In truth, it is hard to see what damage its publication can inflict on America’s national security, but it certainly diminishes the reputation of the agency, because Nixon, its lead interrogator, emerges as such a mugwump.

Saddam, a wild beast brought to bay, is seen to more advantage in these pages than are his bumbling conquerors. Like many dictators, however, he will be remembered for the devastation he perpetrated, rather than for anything of the slightest interest that he said or thought.

Bantam Press £16.99 pp256