WASHINGTON — Shortly before the U.S. bombing and invasion of Iraq last year, Saddam Hussein gathered his top generals together to share what came to them as astonishing news: The weapons that the United States was launching a war to remove did not exist.
"There was plenty of surprise when Saddam said, 'Sorry guys, we don't have any' " weapons of mass destruction to use against the invading forces, a senior U.S. intelligence official said.
The unexpected peek inside Hussein's inner circle in the days and weeks before the regime was toppled comes in a report by the CIA's Iraq Survey Group released Wednesday, as well as from Senate testimony Wednesday by Charles A. Duelfer, head of the survey group, and from a briefing for reporters by an official familiar with the interrogations of Hussein and his aides.
The new accounts contradict many U.S. assumptions about relations between Hussein and his senior aides, as well as American views on what Hussein was doing and how he saw the outside world before the invasion.
For example, many in the U.S. intelligence community had believed that Hussein's sycophantic generals kept him in the dark about the state of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs -- that is, that the dictator was misled by associates who told him what he wanted to hear.
Far from being misinformed, the report says, Hussein was micromanaging Iraq's weapons policy himself and kept even his most loyal aides from gaining a clear picture of what was going on -- and, more important, not going on -- with the program.
"Saddam's centrality to the regime's political structure meant that he was the hub of Iraqi WMD policy and intent," the report concluded.
His paranoia and his fascination with science and technology "meant that control of WMD development and its deployment was never far from his touch," it said.
Although the interrogation reports may shed new light on Hussein's role, they also raise a question: If Hussein understood that he had no stockpiles of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, why did he limit the activities of the United Nations inside Iraq, violate U.N. Security Council resolutions and defy the outside world from the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991 until his regime was toppled in 2003?
