 "Photo: Carlos Guerra")
Saddam Hussein's interrogator, FBI Agent George Piro, visited the George Bush Presidential Library Friday to discuss his seven-month-long interrogation.
To Hussein, Piro was Mr. George and he was "Mr. Saddam." During those months, Piro learned that there were two sides to the former president and dictator of Iraq.
"There was the dictator side that we all knew and recognized from his actions and from his conduct and then there was the human side of Saddam," Piro said. "The human side was somewhat surprising to me. I have to tell you, he was very normal, very charming, very charismatic. He had a great sense of humor."
Junior Rebecca Sams found that the examining Hussein as a person stuck out the most.
"I was completely in awe of his views of Saddam as a person, and his view of how to get into Saddam's mind. Honestly, I don't know that I would have been able to deal with [Saddam] as a person. That is bound to take a lot, and I respect [Piro] for that," the management major said.
When Piro told his mother that he shared her home-baked cookies with the former dictator of Iraq, she hit him. It was Hussein's 68th birthday that year, a former national holiday in Iraq. Piro said he wanted Hussein to realize that Iraqis no longer celebrated it.
"We wanted him to realize that [the Iraqi people no longer loved him], and almost feel depressed, at the reality of the situation," said the former police officer.
The goal was to identify Hussein's vulnerabilities by implementing psychological techniques, rather than physical force. Cookies were not the only method the FBI team implemented to ascertain Hussein's secrets.
They showed Hussein video of Iraqis dragging and defacing his statue on Baghdad streets. They showed him pictures of the murders he had committed, including an image of chemical warfare victims lying murdered on the ground. Piro said that Hussein knowingly ordered and rationalized these deaths.
It is estimated that 5,000 women, children and elderly were killed because they could not escape Hussein's chemical attack.
"He told me that he cared more about what people thought about him in 500 or 1000 years than they did that day. In his mind, he was going to go down in history," Piro said. "There was no regret and no remorse during that entire seven months."
Hussein's age and family were used as methods to uncover Hussein's vulnerabilities.
"His sons were a great gauge at how the FBI agents] were doing in the interrogation," Piro said. "When I first asked him about his sons, he painted them as heroes as martyrs."
"I knew we were doing well when I was really pressing him on his two sons and he finally said, 'George stop, you're giving me a headache. You don't get to pick your kids; you're stuck with what you get."
Prior to Hussein's capture, his sons were killed by U.S. forces in a raid. Uday Hussein, Hussein's heir, was an alleged rapist, torturer and convicted murderer.
Eventually, Piro and Hussein discussed U.S. intelligence issues, including weapons of mass destruction. Piro said that Hussein deliberately let the world think Iraq had weapons of mass destruction to protect his country from the main threat, Iranian invasion.
"He had isolated himself. He knew how we collected our intelligence, because he was our alley in 1980 and shared our intelligence. He allowed his generals and political leaders to believe that he still had that capability and that would be projected off to the rest of the world."
What Hussein did not predict was Bush's decision to invade Iraq.
"He admitted that he miscalculated President Bush … He expected us to carry off another aerial strike as we did in 1998 under Desert Fox," Piro said. "He knew he could survive that, and that's what he was counting on."
Former President George Bush was among the guests in the crowded auditorium.
"George's work in revealing Saddam's secrets was probably one of the top accomplishments of the agency in the last 100 years," Bush said.
Jamie Wheeler, a junior chemistry major, viewed Piro's investigation as an important historical event.
"I think it's really wonderful that we were able to come and hear about this monumental period in history, and hear from someone who was right there experiencing it," Wheeler said.
While others praised Piro's accomplishment, Piro credited his FBI team for the mission's success.
"This was a very unique and historic event. It's not every day that we get to interrogate a former head of state knowing that we have really impacted our national security for so many years," Piro said. "Yet, for me, it's just another example of what the FBI does on a daily basis."
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