Hussein often denied U.S. assertions that he possessed banned weapons in defiance of U.N. resolutions, but for years he also persisted in making cryptic public statements to perpetuate the myth that he actually did have them. The Iraq Survey Group believes that he continued making those statements long after he had secretly ordered the destruction of his stockpiles.
Based on the interrogations, it appears that Hussein underestimated how seriously the United States took the weapons issue, and he believed it was vital to his own survival that the outside world -- especially Iran -- think he still had them.
It was a strategy, Hussein has told his FBI interrogators during the last 10 months, that was aimed primarily at bluffing Iraq's neighbor to the east.
"The Iranian threat was very, very, palpable to him, and he didn't want to be second to Iran, and he felt he had to deter them. So he wanted to create the impression that he had more than he did," Duelfer, the Iraq Survey Group head, told members of the Senate on Wednesday.
And, the man known for colossal miscalculations made perhaps his greatest strategic blunder by refusing to believe that President Bush would make good on threats to forcibly remove him from power.
"He kept trying to bargain or barter, and he had not realized the nature of the ground shift in the international community," Duelfer said. "That was Saddam's intelligence failure."
Captured in December hiding in a hole in northern Iraq, Hussein is imprisoned at Camp Cropper, a U.S.-run facility at Baghdad's fortified airport. He spends much of his days writing, reading and tending to a solitary tree inside a walled courtyard on the camp grounds.
Yet despite reports that Hussein is delusional and often engrossed in romance novels, the senior U.S. official said he had shown himself in recent interrogations by an FBI agent to be lucid and even capable of appearing charismatic.
Before the interrogations began, Duelfer tried to determine what incentive U.S. officials could offer the ex-dictator to get him to cooperate. In the end, they decided to appeal to Hussein's vanity.
"The only thing we could offer was an opportunity to help shape his legacy," the official recalled. They asked Hussein whether he wanted "to be remembered by what these characters are saying about you" -- referring to other captured Baathist officials who were talking to U.S. interrogators.
