EIGHTEEN months before he was hanged, Saddam Hussein told the FBI he allowed the world to believe he had weapons of mass destruction because he was worried about appearing weak to Iran, reports said yesterday.

According to declassified accounts of the FBI interviews released yesterday, the former Iraqi president said he felt so vulnerable to the perceived threat from "fanatic" leaders in Tehran that he would have been prepared to seek a "security agreement with the United States to protect (Iraq) from threats in the region".

The Washington Post reported that summaries of the FBI interviews underlined Saddam's fear of Iran. In the interviews, Saddam said he considered Tehran a greater threat than the US.

Iran and Iraq had fought an eight-year war in the 1980s, and Saddam was convinced Iran was trying to annex southern Iraq, which, like Iran, is largely Shia, the report said.

George Piro, the FBI agent who conducted the interviews, said: "Hussein viewed the other countries in the Middle East as weak and could not defend themselves or Iraq from an attack from Iran."

Former US president George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 after Saddam refused to comply with UN resolutions requiring UN weapons inspectors unfettered access to suspected WMDs production facilities.

"The threat from Iran was the major factor as to why he did not allow the return of UN inspectors," Mr Piro said.

"Hussein stated he was more concerned about Iran discovering Iraq's weaknesses and vulnerabilities than the repercussions of the United States for his refusal to allow UN inspectors back into Iraq."

The report said Saddam noted that Iran's weapons capabilities had increased dramatically while Iraq's weapons had been "eliminated by the UN sanctions", and that Iraq would have to reconstitute its weapons to deal with that threat if it could not reach a security agreement with the US.

In the FBI interviews, Saddam at one point acknowledged he should have permitted the UN to witness the destruction of Iraq's weapons stockpile after the 1991 Gulf War.

The FBI summaries of the interviews - 20 formal interrogations and five "casual conversations" in 2004 - were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive, an independent non-governmental research institute, and posted on its website yesterday, the paper said.

The detailed accounts of the interviews were released with few deletions, although one, a last formal interview on May 1, 2004, was completely redacted, the Post said. Thomas Blanton, director of the archive, told the paper he could conceive of no national security reason to keep Saddam's conversations secret. Paul Bresson, a bureau spokesman, told the paper he could not explain the reason for the redactions.

The 20 formal interviews took place between February 7 and May 1, followed by the casual conversations between May 10 and June 28. Saddam was later transferred to Iraqi custody and executed in December 2006.

The formal interviews covered in extensive detail Saddam's rise to power, the invasion of Kuwait and Saddam's crackdown on the Shia uprising, while the subject of Iraq's WMDs and links with al-Qa'ida and its leader, Osama bin Laden, were raised in the casual conversations, the report said.

Mr Blanton told the paper the FBI received orders from Washington to delve into topics of intense interest to Bush administration officials.

Mr Piro raised bin Laden in his last conversation with Saddam, but the information he yielded conflicted with the Bush administration's many efforts to link Iraq with the terrorist group, the report said.

Saddam said he had never met bin Laden and the two of them "did not have the same belief or vision".

Source: The Australian