 Thank you for joining us. I'm Peter Bergen vice president near America We're lucky to have Steve Cole a former president of near America and also former dean of the Columbia journalism school and they Known to anybody in the national security security community as One of the great writers on American national security. He's one Pulitzer Prize for Ghost Wars of course and has written extensively about Afghanistan Pakistan Exxon and now Iraq in the Achilles Trap Saddam Hussein the CIA and the origins of America's invasion of Iraq So tentative to Steve who's gonna give us some of the kind of main pieces points to the book and then we'll have Q&A If you have a question, there is an app Slido put the question in there I will relate those questions to Steve and if you want to buy the book There's a button on the right hand side of your screen to buy the book Steve Thank you Peter and hello everyone that I can't see but I'm sure you're out there. It's good to be here. I'm speaking from London. I Will just try to introduce the framing of this inquiry and a little bit of the methodology because it's unusual and Then some of the main kind of themes. It's a It's a complicated story. It can't be summarized in 15 or 20 minutes But I'll try to lay a foundation for your questions and then respond to those so You know, we all lived probably everyone on this call lived through the trauma of The discovery after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that the principle thesis of the war that Saddam retained dangerous weapons of mass destruction and Needed to be disarmed that was based on false information about his WMD Program, and of course, we had national reckoning that lasted for years Politically polarized and all sorts of inquiries about how we got from 9-11 to the decision to invade And of course that from a journalist perspective that feels like well-traveled ground a lot of great work has been done about it from many perspectives But it always seemed to me and I'll explain why in a minute that there was another big question that had never really been addressed which was In addition to the American calculations that led to this kind of tragic war why Did Saddam Hussein Sacrifice his long reign in power and ultimately his life his son's lives For the sake of weapons that he didn't possess. What was his calculation? What was he thinking? and It turned out that the question is Answerable because Saddam tape recorded his leadership conversations as assiduously as Richard Nixon now the history of these materials from a public researchers perspective at least is a bit convoluted and I'll spare you the full story but I Became aware of them When I was working alongside Peter at New America and Peter was Doing research on al-Qaeda and there was a center the conflict record records research center that possessed interesting materials that have been collected from Afghanistan, I think primarily but elsewhere and About al-Qaeda and then I think through him I heard of the existence of these Saddam materials, which were also being Gradually released into this center, which was housed at NDU National Defense University Some years later in 2018 I was still harboring this question about the origins of the war from Saddam's perspective and I went looking for these materials thinking there might be a book in it and I discovered that they'd been withdrawn and that the center had been closed and There began a long journey to try to get a hold of these materials and the short version is that I collaborated with a Non-profit the reporters committee for freedom of the press to file a freedom of information act request with the Pentagon which holds the materials and Ultimately filed a lawsuit under FOIA Settled with the Justice Department and got a big batch of the materials. I also received a big Chunk from a PhD student of Princeton named Michael Brill who's a sort of unofficial archivist of what a fragments Substantial fragments of this archive It's a shame that this isn't publicly available because there really isn't any Sensitive information from a national security perspective in it and it is enormously valuable because it is such a rare meticulously documented case study of a dictatorship and of a dictator's mind and thinking in addition to the transcripts and the tapes there are Millions of pages of documents from his presidential office from his intelligence services and other sectors and scholars when they were available made You know insightful use of sections of them, but there's still so much more work to do in any event I use these materials to try to unpack through narrative investigative history and interviews with surviving members of Saddam's regime and unpublished Memoirs and or published memoirs in in the Arab world from participants in events interviews on the American side some kind of answer to this to this basic question and I Had an early interview with Charles Dulfer who was the leader of the Iraq survey group during its You know for the longest run and the author supervised the publication of their seminal report and Early on I had originally thought I would start the book in at Safwan the ceasefire Event that ended the Gulf War Which I attended as a Washington Post reporter I flew up on a helicopter behind General Schwartzkopf and I have vivid memories of that Sense of this being unfinished business and not really a surrender and something else but quite vivid I thought oh, that'd be a great place to start and after a couple of hours with Mr. Dulfer I was persuaded that I really needed to go back further in time to understand this and I Started thinking oh that's more work, but then I kept reading and I realized he was right So the book opens in 1979 and it's critical the 80s because that was a period of Collaboration of course undeclared collaboration between the United States and Saddam Hussein Saddam of course needlessly started a war with Iran in September of 1980 and Then in 1982 the Reagan administration through satellite surveillance detected that Iranian forces were Parallelously close to being able to break through Iraqi lines and drive on Baghdad overthrow Saddam Hussein Which was Ayatollah Khomeini's declared objective hanging from the nearest lamppost and then expand the already troubling Iranian revolution into Shia majority Iraq and To prevent that the administration dispatched a CIA officer named Thomas Twetton to Baghdad carrying Gifts as he called them satellite photographs of Iranian positions designed to equip Iraqi forces with the ice site to prevent this breakthrough and this turning point in the war and that began a long Collaboration that lasted till 1988 wasn't acknowledged at the time You know the outlines of it have been known, but the details are fascinating to dig into and I think I've brought some fresh Information and perspective to the record The fascinating thing about it is to see this collaboration with the CIA from Saddam's point of view because he was always suspicious about American motives he saw the world through a You know a dark lens of conspiracies and particularly believed that his own position Was under threat from a kind of permanent conspiracy involving the United States Israel Zionism in general he's a horrible anti-Semite and you know explicit racist about Judaism and he Saw American and Israeli collaboration as extending to Ayatollah Khomeini and he saw the Iranian Revolution as essentially an American Zionist project and he believed that this effort by the CIA to help him against Iran was suspect because Either these photos were doctored and designed to trap Iraqi forces Or he the Americans were providing the same pictures to the Iranians As generals essentially said you know boss We can't look over the mountain and the things that are in the photos are actually there and it's helpful So please keep the stuff coming but at meetings. He was constantly kind of questioning the context and then in November 1986 Comes an announcement in Washington of what we came to know as the Iran-Contra scandal and of course this was a Misguided attempt by the Reagan administration to free hostages held in Lebanon by Iranian proxies By collaborating with Israel to supply arms to Ayatollah Khomeini's regime and the announcement of this Scandal as it became criminal cases eventually because it involved a front in Nicaragua That's not important to our story But when it was announced it shocked Washington There's like a banner headline in the New York Times the next day people start resigning Prosecutors start mobilizing and all around the Arab world Allies Arab Sunni allies are stunned that the United States would have done something like this to empower Iran well, we have the tapes and The next morning over the next week the least surprised leader in the entire world Saddam Hussein Gathers with his colleagues and says I told you so, you know, I think there's literally one quote where he says Zionism Zionism How many times do I have to say this? It's what yeah, so anyway what's interesting over time is that his Satisfaction in being confirmed in his beliefs about the enemy's arrayed against him Stayed with him into the 90s and there are other tapes when he's discussing His choices about cooperation or non cooperation with the US or with the UN inspection regime And he refers back to the 80s he more or less says, you know, the things that were revealed in November 1986 Remember friends that is still the way the world is organized And so the narrative follows These developments it tracks the sort of inside story of the Iraqi nuclear program through the character of its Robert Oppenheimer Jafar Dia Jafar who I had the Opportunities interview in Dubai still alive in his 80s sharp as attack like a lot of theoretical physicists slightly intimidating in conversation, but we We connected I've at least covered nuclear weapons before so wasn't completely a fool and Then we opened a correspondence that informed the book. I think quite richly over the course of that side of the story and And then into the 90s and we can talk about this in the Q&A, but the the sort of mirroring of misunderstandings that developed during the inspection era You know, of course after the invasion of Kuwait and the expulsion of Iraqi forces by the coalition led by the United States in 1991 What we know now is that Saddam did something that's very hard to explain which is in the summer of 1991 He destroyed much of his inventory of WMD chemical weapons Prohibited missiles Tried to cover up or dismantle aspects of his dual use industries that supported biological weapons and nuclear weapons his his Substantial indigenous nuclear weapons program, which Jafar had overseen during the 80s and had which had gone undetected Until then it's also another shock that the world had to absorb that summer He so he ordered his son-in-law to basically get rid of as much as he physically could hide it or destroy it Destroyed a lot of stocks kept no records took no photographs did it chaotically you almost have this image of His son-in-law Hussein Kamal out in the desert in the dark of night You know pouring vats into the sand randomly without any record-keeping and then he misled inspectors for you for years about the history of the programs about what he had done He didn't come clean to his own generals about what he had actually done Now why did he handle his disarmament this way? I mean, there isn't really a fully satisfactory answer, but Partly he was hoping to wriggle out of sanctions that was his principal goal That would help him maintain power and give him options in the region And he thought that he needed to pass inspections in order to have a chance to wriggle out of sanctions So he wanted not to have a lot of stuff lying around that inspectors could find so that's why I think that was his principle Reason for ordering his son-in-law to do this In passing inspections His theory of the case was that he would do well enough They wouldn't find stuff and then maybe the French and the Soviets the Russians would help him out I Think also while he was inclined to trade disarmament for sanctions relief He wasn't willing to be humiliated in public and so the kind of Transparent disarmament that was required You know this sort of image of men in white coats and clipboards Standing systematically and watching the destruction of everything that he had built Just was unacceptable to him and he wasn't going to do it He'd rather go down in flames than be humiliated in front of the Arab world and the wider world and And so So he did this and sowed seeds of confusion and then the inspectors Understandably confused about what was believable and what wasn't and determined to try to carry out their mission to find the truth Intensified their their inspection methods and increasingly targeted the top of the regime thinking that his bodyguard essentially this a special security organization was The answer to the question of where was this stuff and the more they targeted his security apparatus the more his security apparatus reacted defensively and Created the impression that they were hiding something and they were hiding something, but it wasn't WMD They were hiding state secrets. They were hiding. They were trying to protect the president's security He was of course paranoid and for some reason Anyway, that takes you through the 90s and the last section of the book covers the period from 9 11 to 2003 and I've tried not to repeat the Narrative that is familiar to us in the US. Although some of it is necessary to include but to try to offer Saddam's perspective and I don't have time to go into all of it. I hope you'll read it It's it's my favorite part of the book even though in some ways that period is familiar the Saddam side of the story is not I mean one element of it is that we didn't understand that in his 60s, which he had now reached his 60s. He's still vigorous He had wasn't quite the same person as he had been he had become obsessed with writing novels He took much less interest probably to the reef relief of his generals in military affairs He was kind of a micromanager and entirely incompetent about military matters even though he considered himself a Successful general but he was spending a lot of time hand writing novels He wrote four in the period of several years there leading up to 2003 the last one He just barely got to the printer as the tanks rolled towards Baghdad and I talked to one of his editors Who You know recalled that when he first started sending over these longhand Arabic pages They would Tell him that I mean he would say would you correct my Arabic, you know send back notes and They took him seriously and they said, you know, he wrote like he spoke he's long Meandering sentences with a lot of digressions and parentheticals and so they would try to kind of break it up and make it more readable and Then they noticed that he would not take any of their suggestions They just turned back the way he wrote it and they after three or four times They just thought you know what maybe it would be safer not to correct him at all And so they just started sending them back the way they were handed to him And anyway, this was the kind of life that he was living in a period of greater isolation Greater paranoia fewer public appearances and we have now through these records that came out through the FOIA suit Pretty good almost week by week between my files and Michael's files We have a pretty good week by week account of his cabinet meetings what he was saying meetings with visitors He was completely oblivious to being in the crosshairs in the fall of 2001 He was still oblivious throughout 2002 was really only in 2003 that he started to get it and that's part of the reason why he was so ill-prepared when the invasion actually occurred But why don't I stop there Peter and We'll take questions a few questions for me and then we'll turn to the audience So the conflict records research center that you mentioned I mean my understanding is the budget for that place was like a million dollars, which is not even around panigan and Why it closed is sort of a puzzle It is a puzzle. I I mean there is this, you know There is an official explanation which has to do with budgetary reasons. I there was I don't remember the chronology of all of these You know debt default crises and and Budget sequesters that followed these kind of automatic cuts that were agreed during the late Obama administration under pressure from Congress over Fiscal issues, but in one of those cycles DoD Supposedly decided looking for haircuts everywhere that this was something that they could no longer afford And that's why it fell by the wayside the the materials were withdrawn They were digitized They were withdrawn and they were held still are held on a hard drive in a particular part of the Pentagon Which I was able to identify which at least made it easy to file a FOIA suit I don't know whether that is the full explanation. It is a puzzle. I mean there are other sensitivities around the records they They contain a lot of personally identified liable information that in the context of sectarian violence in them in the you know, 2015 period Could make people vulnerable. However The conflict records research center like many other academic repositories of such records had methodologies for Making sure that PII of non-public people wasn't disclosed and I can't I can't believe that was really the reason Yeah, it's it's a bit of a puzzle And zooming out. I mean it's interesting to me, you know, you're sitting in London and the shillcott inquiry generated. I think 6,000 pages of Investigation and to led by in part by Sir Lawrence Friedman It's I think 2 million words Um, obviously a very thorough accounting and the British at the end of the day were you know, they weren't the main event in the Iraq war And we in the united states have had really no Official inquiry. We've had fragments and not and your book obviously is going to be a big part of the actual history and current new america fellow Joe Rabin was the lead pan on the US army history of iraq, which is a very thorough accounting But obviously by its nature couldn't get into much into the politics or the intelligence relatively speaking So, I mean, it's kind of it's sort of strange that that probably the most important event in american history Since since 9 11 Sort of remains underexplored. I mean your book will go a long way to help But you know, why is it that we haven't had that reckoning? Politics I guess And uh, you know, there were Some initial inquiries. They were all constrained There was the senate intelligence inquiry, but I think It wasn't In the end a bipartisan effort fully It does put a lot of information on the record about the specific analytical kind of chronology Inside the ic making calls about wmd that were wrong But it's a it's a slice of the pie. There was the commission that was Specifically charged with identifying the way forward and not really excavating the past. You mentioned chill cut. I mean with With a graduate student at columbia I went through all of it looking for insights fresh insights Relevant to the chronology. I was trying to unpack and there were a lot about america What was so powerful about chill cut from a american historian's perspective is journalist perspective is that You know, the brits had access to all quarters of the bush administration between 9 11 and 2003 and They sent people into meetings at very interesting times with principles Connolly's rice. They had a lot of access to columbia. They went to the pentagon And of course, these folks wrote memoranda of conversations just capturing what was said and They wrote analytical cables back to their own government saying it looks like they're going this way or here's here's the divide with There is a lot to my eyes a lot of interesting fresh information about exactly when The bush administration Decided on x and y and what the tenor was within the administration Down the stretch there as they were trying to get that second resolution. I just It's very painful to read Because you know that car crashes at the end, but it's quite a quite an important record from an american perspective I I don't imagine at this point that Any inquiry on the u.s. Side will bring forward comparable documents. We're going to have to wait for Declassification and for yep for the u.s. Archival system to get its act together And of course the conclusion of the army history of the iraq war is that the sole winner was iran Which goes to many of the themes of your book And in a sense it's explains a lot about it's sort of the original sin that explains much that is going on today So I mean take us back to the To the 80s and you you mentioned this a little bit, but I mean sadaa must have felt pretty good about You know that he in his own mind he must have felt Yeah, the americans really need me because at the end of the day they just like the iranians a lot more than they just like me I mean that was the basic kind of was that his basic thinking? Yeah, I don't think he yes. I mean he felt That the gulf Arabs really needed him and that they were american allies and that would be one basis for him having a correct relationship with the united states What he really wanted was like a lot of middle powers He wanted not to have an unbalanced relationship with the superpowers said during the cold war He wanted he had relations with moscow, you know that were historical that involved arm supplies and other relations Yeah, I think even visited russia Perhaps twice. He never visited the united states The only european country he ever visited is france In what maybe yugoslavia? But in any event, um, he wanted balanced relations with the united states and Iran was important in that equation, but his principal way of thinking about His interests in america's ran through the through the gulf and he regarded the gulf arabs You know the saudi royal family the kawaii royal family the uae As with some contempt the the tapes are kind of unsparing. I think the feeling was mutual but in any event we have his tapes and He's constantly denigrating them because he felt not without justification that He was sort of their mercenary force during the 80s as he fought iran to a standstill They funded him and his people fought and died now He thought that he was seeking and attaining glory in the arab world. So good for him But when it was over, uh, he felt some resentment And he also thought that they were clients of the united states in some way that That was problematic from his perspective He didn't want the us policing shipping in the gulf or the oil economy that was flowing through the gulf And so it was complicated in that way But yes, he wanted balanced relations with the united states and at the peak of the collaboration sort of, you know late reagan early bush hw bush You know a lot of commerce was flowing and visitors from donald rumsfeld through a mid-level state department folks would come and see him senators Delegation led by bob dole visited him in early 1990 and you and every time the americans come into his office He sort of takes them over to the window and says you see those skyscrapers on the bagdad horizon You know french contractors built those and french architects I'd love to have more americans here and so the business was was real then and commerce was a motivation for accommodating Saddam both in london and washington in the late 80s even though he was gassing His own Kurdish population more or less in plain sight and people were overlooking it because it seemed like maybe this was Going to be a stable relationship, which it didn't turn out to be So a comment from the audience services from ambassador john negra ponty We cooperated with iraq beyond intelligence. I chaired the deputies committee at the nsc in 1988 when we approved ccc loans for iraqi purchase of u.s agricultural products Yeah, exactly. That was the kind of peak peak cooperation and there was this This um This italian bank with an atlanta branch that somehow hijacked the credits scheme and committed some massive fraud I forget Bnl. Yes. Yeah It was one of those stories that if you weren't assigned to it as a washington post reporter You were grateful because it just seemed like a giant headache But but the net effect was that it ghost You know improperly ghost this program that was already designed to to um Encourage agricultural exports, which would benefit the us and iraq and then there were other Streams of commerce. There were some restricted lists, but um, it was yeah, the idea was to lean forward Speaking of the washington post you of course were managing editor at a rather key moment all this And I remember when joby warwick wrote that big piece about basically he'd been embedded with the inspectors and they weren't finding anything And it was like you're so shocking. I mean, so what was yeah, you were you were the managing editor of the post And what was the reaction to that story and your involvement and uh, were you surprised or were you You kind of saw this one coming or I mean, yeah, I tried to be clinical about all these things like, you know What exactly do we know? What do we not know and try not to Get caught up in the emotions or the politics of these? It's hard to do that job if you're going to you know, try to forecast the future or or Think about it in political terms, but It so the clinical response is what the heck, uh, you know How did that happen and uh, and so and one of the first questions on my mind will then What what what what what was it on thinking and in fact in october 2003 I traveled to Baghdad On a reporting trip even though I was an editor. I could resign myself to do things in the field and And I went out there and I met David k who was the first, uh, iraq survey group leader and uh And I met some of his scientists who were on the investigative team and they had been dispatched of course to find the weapons And but by october, uh, it was clear that there weren't any likely to be found, um Not definitive, but the trend line was kind of Hard to hard to ignore and so they were pivoting from where are the weapons to why are there not any weapons and they were starting to interview detainees and volunteers from the former regime About kind of what was the intellectual history of this program and that program and what was saddam saying and thinking And I remember uh, and I quote him. I I've saw this in an old washington post story And I used it in the introduction of the book. In fact, I just met him again in london. He's still Still with us, uh, a british scientist who was on the team specialist in biological weapons and I met him in bagdad and he he said something to the effect of he's Saddam was then still at large He's sort of speaking to him tilting his eyes toward the sky talking to an imaginary saddam like what were you thinking? What what was so important that you had to put us through all of this? and uh And at the time david k's answer was well, he was bluffing it was a straightforward bluff He was trying to deter Iran that seemed like an appealing Proposition is not all wrong, but I think now you can see the complexity of it And it's a little too simple to say that he was just trying to preserve himself in power He did not want to show weakness and Iran was one factor in that Question for michael brill who you mentioned was very helpful in terms of the some of the archive that you used in the book Uh, brills question is really about the something that you dig into quite a lot in the book, which is the george hw assassination plot in kuwait, which for a long time was believed to be The real deal that you found what? Well, I found reason to be doubtful that it was the real deal. I can't close the case unfortunately, you know as a Um, I think I want to be true to the evidence, but I I think if I were a juror and the and it was a You know preponderance of the evidence um Standard and no question. I would say it didn't happen. Um, if it was beyond a reasonable doubt Had to deliberate a little bit, but essentially the short version is You'll recall that george hw bush after he was president in early 1993 visited kuwait at the invitation of the emir to be celebrated for liberating the country and restoring the family's sovereignty and he traveled with His son jeb and other cabinet officials. I think laura bush was on the trip george w was not Uh, they were feted at a great banquet. He gave some talks around kuwait city and they departed after several days And without incident nothing happened Something like a week later the kuwaitis announced that they had foiled an assassination plot against him during his visit and the principal evidence they cited was a vehicle bomb an suv bomb that they discovered said they discovered in a warehouse in kuwait city And they said it had been built by iraqi intelligence and dispatched to blow up hw Now the vehicle bomb was clearly a product of iraqi intelligence. I think the evidence is clear about that. Um, but Whether it was dispatched to kuwait city to blow up hw is another matter altogether because such bombs were discovered in iraqi embassies around the gulf Uh, and they had been placed there in the run-up to the kuwait war by iraqi intelligence and planning to use unconventional tactics And maybe just because they like to have vehicle bombs in their embassies along with their their weapons caches and so you know Is it possible? Is it likely that this warehouse? Bomb was placed there during the occupation of kuwait and not dispatched to specifically attack george hw bush Okay, so that's one question. Well, the answer to that from the kuwaitis was what we found the assassins And these were some hapless iraqi whiskey smokers who had been arrested and then confessed To having been dispatched by iraqi intelligence To find the vehicle bomb in the warehouse and then drive it and blow up hw. Well, they were the worst This is not day of the condor You know, the these guys had no idea what they were doing And the whole thing just the whole stories they told just didn't Really add up so sandy berger, uh, who was then deputy national security advisor as a lawyer Kind of reacted the way i'm reacting now. Come on. This is not real This is a this is a clever effort by the kuwaitis to further discredit Saddam Hussein in the eyes of the world And he didn't want to retaliate Eventually president clinton decided that he would though in a very limited way Fast forward to the new information. So I have what I have there's no reference really, uh, to the assassination There's one conversation in brazano to creedies memoir that references if it is not dispositive But um having talked to others, uh Who had access to the full harmony records? Um, you know, they did word searches because they were They thought that would be a real scoop from this material Like let's find the documents where he orders the assassination and they did all kinds of searches to try to find any Reference to such a plot in not just in saddam's Presidential office, but in the intelligence files that they had Not a thing Now you can't prove a negative As which is sort of the story of the wmd Disaster So, you know, I could be wrong to be sure but um, just telling you as a My vote on a preponderant standard would be it didn't happen I mean that was part of the issue about the invasion, of course, is that the only way you could prove that Anything was to invade the country. I mean, that was the Yeah Um, so this is a question from david sterban who helped put this event together The sedams thinkings and decisions around his wmd program And his dismantlement shape how he perceive reports regarding the w Wmd efforts of other states in the region Can you can you refute recently state that I mean the sedams experience of Having a wmd program and then dismantling it did that affect the way that he sort of saw? I mean what the iranians were doing with that program or Yeah, I mean there was this funny line that I that that I had forgotten from encountering david k in 2003 and he quoted I think it was tarak aziz as saying that sedam had told him Don't worry about the iranians if they ever get wmd the americans and the israelis will destroy them Which was kind of kind of you know classic sedam slightly half joking but kind of prescient um and so um He thought about the region primarily uh in reference to israel and he primarily saw Israel's a nuclear deterrent as something that the arab world needed to match and that he was going to do that on behalf of the arab world in fact, there's one line I don't remember if it's in a private recording or in a kind of Remarks that he was making to other leaders when he sort of says You know the west ought to actually give us a nuclear weapon to create cold war style deterrence with the israelis and that will make Conventional war less likely just as it has in europe you know not Insane except for the part about the worst giving the world a nuclear weapon But the point is that when he talked about why he wanted a weapon You know It was always he did understand the framework of mutually assured destruction deterrence Between the united states and soviet union at the height of the cold war He thought that deterrence worked pretty much and he thought that it could actually be stabilizing He certainly thought that it would protect his own regimes survival And so that kind of deterrence he wanted as well But there's no real record In reference to nuclear well, yeah, I guess you'd say there's he doesn't talk rashly about preemptive use of nuclear weapons He just wants to match israel's capability so that they won't consider attacking him other sort of broader lessons that we can apply today You know, obviously iran we haven't had diplomatic relations since 79 We have very little understanding of what kim jong-un is thinking except his public statements. I mean are the larger lessons to be drawn about the intelligence community and policymakers with these kind of very opaque regimes Yeah, I mean I you know, I'm a journalist historian I'm not a practitioner, but I can kind of empathize with the position of Practitioners a little bit and I guess My thinking about that is You know, perhaps shaped by my experience as a journalist, but I don't I think that the absence of contact between the united states and iraq between 1991 and 2003 was it was unhelpful would contact Have changed the course of events or to say but As a journalist, I've learned that all information is good information You have to work with unreliable sources. You have to work with difficult sources You have to talk to everybody you have to talk to people you don't like Otherwise, you're not going to understand what's really going on. You're not going to have your best chance to understand what's really going on and so then why are these You know, why are these Conversations so difficult to have I understand. Thank you, sweetie. Sorry for that intervention highly professional But You know domestic politics doesn't generally reward You know sort of conversations with adversaries That's domestic politics kind of tends to reinforce Narratives of demonization and confrontation toughness And of course sometimes that's necessary for deterrence and But I'm not talking about presidents picking up the phone talking to their counterparts or going off to Singapore to meet Kim Jong-un for no apparent reason necessarily but We didn't even have secret intelligence channels. We didn't have diplomatic channels There are professionals out there who are willing to to do the work and there's always an agenda to discuss and Even if you know or have a very high degree of conviction that nothing productive is going to come from those Contacts, you're still going to collect information. You wouldn't otherwise have And relationships can be established in the intelligence business. These are recruiting opportunities I mean, there's all kinds of reasons to maintain contact and I just You know, the It's not just domestic politics that makes it difficult But also our reliance very heavy reliance on sanctions regimes It seems to me because we're in the iraq case the main reason why we didn't develop channels even though iraq was anxious to open them Was because we were afraid we would weaken the coalition that was carrying out the very tough Multilateral sanctions that the UN Security Council had approved and you know in fairness if if the us is seen as having regular conversations engagement with a sanctions target and France or many other countries who are Partially cooperating with sanctions Only because of us pressure. They see that and then that gives them an out You know, so well, you know, you're engaging what we're going to take an independent course and break sanctions and So I can see why that incentive discourages it But to me the cost-benefit equation there doesn't make sense You would you are going to be much better off making smart decisions to defend american interests and national security if you have the kind of information That uh good channels back channels can can deliver What was um, this is a question from jay. What was sedams view of bin laden? I thought he was uh, uh fanatic and um, you know, he didn't have anything to do with him. He in the tapes after 9 11 He refers to al-qaeda only in passing I mean in the in the notes of conversations with visitors and you know and basically his thinking is that because he is opposed to such radical islamists and is a stalwart against the Shia version of such radicalism in iran that the americans will understand that this is actually a common interest and You know this the united states we know did reach out to bathast syria after 9 11 to seek cooperation against You know al-qaeda types and I think sedam Was aware of that and thought that he might be next in line to to get that kind of cooperation And Yeah, so he he's very dismissive of the fanatics As he more or less typically refers to them And sedam never visited the united states and um bin laden The one visit he had was pretty brief. Um, yeah, some seemed to share a In different ways of a complete misunderstanding of the united states Yeah, I mean sedam's principle misunderstanding of the united states Resulted from his anti-semitism and his acceptance of the most horny, you know sort of Theories about zionist influence in washington zionist lobby, you know, all presidents are not independent Architects of foreign policy. They just do what the zionists tell them He mocks bill clinton at robin's funeral, which he seems to be watching live on satellite tv for wearing a yamaka and he's He's just awful and he really sees things so narrowly and and It deprives him of his general shrewdness about power. So he is quite savvy about the way power is used the way it balances The way countries coerce and resist coercion He can be quite shrewd, but about this He this is the this was his principal confusion about the united states He can be kind of amusing when he's trying to figure out american democratic politics on these tapes because you know There's one meeting where where george w bush is elected in 2000 And he comes in he says comrade's very exciting will it's it's very clear The the theme of the day is the bushes are back. And what does that mean? It's good for oil business and then he starts talking about the relationship between the family and the oil business so forth But yeah, he's kind of like a cnn watcher. You can start to feel he is I mean, I think he was watching a lot of satellite television And he was he did get all of the international press sent to him in translation every day He was a very hard worker We don't have an exact record of what he read and watched But I think he's very very much a news consumer by the time you get to the satellite tv age And uh, yeah, so he's commenting on things. He gets confused. He gets confused about like monica lewinsky What is that about? I don't really understand. Um, there must be some story behind the story. It can't be what it seems He gets confused about the relationship between congress and the president. He's always asking his people like Can congress really stop the president from doing things? Yes, sir, it doesn't mean it's a well, it's complicated And he gets all this strain. Yeah, so anyway, there's a question here from john mccullough Um, what was the what was the role of mass protests in the u.s against the iraqi invasion? Was it Obviously it was it was not preventative. But was it constraining? I think it's interesting. Yes, uh, when you look back at, um The record that I was referring to earlier from chilcott and you see the sort of specificity of the conversations between You know, british national security advisors that there are national security advisor david manning and condoleezza rice and other conversations at the highest levels of the bush administration in the winter of 2002 and 2003 one theme that refers, of course You know blare is in jeopardy politically at home because the street protests in britain are an undeniable factor That constrain him and he's worried about he knows he needs a vote of On the war in parliament. He's worried worried about winning it There's a lot of previously well documented conversations between George w bush and blare and which bush says look, I don't want your government to fall over this war I'd rather go to war without you then have your government fall over it and blare says don't worry I appreciate that but i'm hanging in there. I think I can get there This is part of why there's such an emphasis on strategic communication on selling the war because blare needs it and then At a certain point there's a big controversy inside the bush administration around christmas 2002 over whether to go back to the um for a second resolution and famously Vice president cheney as opposed to that thinks we've already wasted enough time And that the legalities of a second resolution Because the first one wasn't explicit enough about war authorization Just don't matter to the united states, but they do matter to blare and blare makes it absolutely clear I can't do this unless I get a second resolution or at least that's what my people are telling me And over christmas kind of leaves the rice I don't we don't know kind of why she comes to this conclusion, but presumably it's george w bush's call She comes back in january and tells the brits. Okay, we've decided we agree with you but for our own reasons This is answering the question We think we haven't brought the public far enough along yet in explaining why this is necessary And we think that the un process will help us with that and that the credibility of a second resolution will strengthen our position now Did she really believe that I mean I take her at face value, but You know the public opinion polling in support of going after saddam was pretty robust at that point I think something like 75 of the american people seem to believe that saddam was responsible for 911 or had something to do with 911 and In any event, um, you know congress was not Standing in the middle of the road There was some politics But anyway, that's what she said and I found that quite striking and I thought okay, so you know, maybe the the bush administration was nervous and They there's no reference to street protests to be direct about the question There's no reference to feeling constrained by american Kind of restive popular opinion or people taking to the streets But there was a sense that the politics around the invasion was unfinished business and that they needed to work harder on it This is from an anonymous, uh, what about saddam's conversations with the fbi agent when he was in captivity that fbi agent Of course, it's george piero who spent Several months with saddam For many hours at a time What what light? Yeah, they're too. They're the other two records you can I read all of those. They're they're interesting. I'll tell I mean they And there's also, um, john nixon a cia leadership analyst I believe who had access to saddam during this time wrote a very useful memoir about it I found his memoir slightly more useful than the fbi transcripts, but they're both valuable And yeah, I mean, you know, you have to set it in the context of the time So it's he's captured the end of 2003 these conversations take place in the first year or so Of his captivity He's adjusting to the fact that he has that he's now a prisoner of war and that he's headed toward the gallows He's taking it all rather calmly And he's you know, he seems like very From You know, if you've been if he's been in your head as he was in mind for years And you're familiar with his voice and his attitude from the tapes when he was in power There isn't really a shift in his voicing and his attitude and his kind of conduct in these interviews he's You know, he's Full of pride and there are some subjects that he just won't talk about or he'll deflect or he'll just be kind of Cross about the questioning And then there are other areas where he'll he'll go on and on if you ask him So if you ask him about periods of history in in his own Kind of rise to power or his conduct of iraqi foreign affairs He he can be expansive He doesn't make any more Coherent consistent sense in these interviews than he does on the tapes, but sometimes he can say things that are interesting But if you ask him about wmd or you know, his support for terrorism or things like that And he'll just you know, he'd just Turn away and so it's a mixed picture. I think the the earlier records when he was in power. I found to be You know much more interesting though. You know, they have to be taken like all recordings with a grain of salt I mean one thing that you can clearly see in these meetings is that it's a performance for him You know, he's got a captive audience literally his cabinet For evolutionary command council like nobody ever interrupts him Except to say yes, we're great point boss And so he rambles on a lot, but some of the time he's he's speech making because he's recording in part so that his propagandist can Capture his wisdom and put it on the front page of state newspapers put it on the nightly broadcast and so forth. So these are not all these are not typically loose Conversations like the nixon tapes have this air of like the people in the room don't even remember They're being recorded. So they're just they're being quite authentic sometimes shockingly So there are moments like that with saddam, but they're usually under extreme pressure So that some of the tapes during the gulf war And before the gulf war have that more that kind of fractured Real conversation feel about them, but some of the rest is you know, you understand like he knows he's on a stage Is um, this is a question from jay is any of saddam's immediate family still alive and where are they? What are they doing currently if they are with still with us? Yeah, he has daughters who are alive in jordan Some of them have social media feeds that You can you can follow I haven't checked in on their social media feeds in the last, you know, nine months But last I looked they were around You know, they had vivid lives in jordan. They didn't seem to be living in poverty and Then there's there's always been a rumor that he had a son by his mistress stroke second wife And that he somehow slipped the radar and You know migrated someplace and maybe alive and well he certainly would be of an age to be in late midlife But I have no information about whether that is true Another question from the audience could saddam speak understand english or any other language besides arabic His english wasn't terrible. I think like a lot of English Learners who never lived in an environment where they had to speak it every day He understood english better than he spoke it, but he would drop uh english phrases into his conversations with You know his post were interlocketers for example This in the final three minutes we have left Steve. I mean you you obviously you knew the story pretty well before you started Right. I mean you sort of lived it as the managing editor of the washington post but What was the kind of surprise as you went through this 2000 hours of Of audio and you know millions of pages of documents and all of all these resources. What was the main surprise that you had? well, I mean I really I mean I The main it wasn't a surprise But I I discovered as I would have guessed that I really didn't understand the story at all And that there was a far more kind of complexity to saddam's rule than Then I appreciated That he ruled through terror. Yes. Um, but also through you know patronage and and gifts and that he was um You know, he maintained a lot of stable relationships in his life. He was not crazy. Uh, he was Cruel and he had grown up in very hard circumstances. He came of age as a political assassin He committed murder. I think you know, it's certainly before his 21st birthday so, um, you know, not your A typical political leader, but um but he managed, uh, his dictatorship with um, you know, real kind of nuance in an odd way and I found that Um helpful to me as a writer because he gave me something to work with You know, they say you shouldn't write biographies of people you don't like well, you know, you and I have long ago abandoned that Probably good advice, but Compared to Osama bin Laden who we both know, um as writers, um You know He has more dimension as just as uh, he's got a you know, he was an autodidact. He read very widely Yes, I mean famously he read about Stalin, but he also read about Nelson Mandela and And he read, you know literature. He wanted to be a novelist So he had uh, he was he was self made and crude and a peasant in a lot of ways But also, um, you know bright and bent on self-improvement in a funny way Well speaking of self-improvement, uh, everybody, please buy a copy of this book And uh, thank you very much Steve for joining us and uh, thank you and uh, thank you to the audience for joining us Thank you, Peter. Oh, it's great to be with you