(CNSNews.com) - John Nixon, the CIA analyst who interrogated Saddam Hussein after he was captured in 2003, says one of the surprising things he discovered in questioning the deposed Iraqi dictator was that Saddam--who was a Sunni Muslim--believed that Sunni Islamic extremism was a greater threat to his regime than Iran, the United States or his own nation’s Shiite majority.

Nixon discussed this in his new book—“Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein”—and in an interview with CNSNews.com.

“Saddam thought that Sunni fundamentalism was a greater threat to his regime than were Iraq’s majority Shiites or even the Iranians,” Nixon writes.

“Saddam, like many of the regions leaders, had risen to power at a time when Arab nationalism was ascendant,” writes Nixon. “But now it was on the wane, supplanted by Islamic fundamentalism as the animating impulse of the region. Saddam believed this would bring nothing but trouble.”

In discussing his book with CNSNews.com, Nixon said discovring Saddam's fear of Sunni Islamic extremism had been a surprise.

"In all the years I had spent analyzing Saddam," Nixon wrote, "I never thought he was fearful of Wahhabi or Salafists, Sunni Muslims who strictly adhere to the teachings of Muhammad in the Koran and the Hadith, a collection of Muhammad's utterances recorded by one of his companions."

Nixon told CNSNews.com that he believed that if Saddam had not been removed from power he would have stopped the Sunni Islamic extremists from rising up in Iraq.

“It is my belief,” Nixon said, “that a Saddam who was left in power would have continued to have rooted these people out and not have permitted their rise. Maybe they would have challenged him at some point, but I don’t think they would have been successful.”

Saddam's fear of Islamic extremism, Nixon also said, was one of the surprises discovered during the interrogation of Saddam.

“Getting back to this issue of one of the surprises that we found: One of the things that we really didn’t understand fully was Saddam’s own fear of Islamic extremism,” said Nixon.

“I hate to use the term fear,” Nixon said, “because Saddam really wasn’t a fearful guy, but he did keep his eye very closely on this community and was very good at rooting them out because he knew what a threat [they were].

“More than the United States, more than Iran, he thought that this was the real threat to his regime,” said Nixon.

It was within this context that Saddam interpreted al Qaida’s 9/11 attacks on the United States, Nixon reports.

“He never fully grasped the impact of 9/11, which he saw as something that might bring Iraq and the United States closer together,” Nixon writes.

“Since the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington were the work of Islamic extremists, Saddam thought the United States would need his secular government to help fight the scourge of Wahhabist militancy,” writes Nixon.

In his interview with CNSNews.com, Nixon says Saddam conveyed his belief that in the wake of the 9/11 attacks the United States would see a shared interest with his Iraqi regime in opposing Islamic extremism.

“The United States has got to see—with all of its money, and all its power, and all its intelligence—has got to see that he had nothing to do with it,” Nixon said, describing Saddam’s point of view. “And that the people who were involved in 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia, and Egypt and the Emirates and that these were Wahhabists and that these people threatened him as well as now the United States.”

Nonetheless, Nixon notes, Saddam was a ruthless dictator who employed evil means, including murder, to secure and maintain his power in Iraq.

“The more you got to know him, the less you liked him,” Nixon said. “He was a thoroughly unlikable person.”

Here is the video and transcript of CNSNews.com’s interview with John Nixon:

Terry Jeffrey: Hi, welcome to this edition of Online Terry Jeffrey. Our guest today is John Nixon. John was a senior leadership analyst at the CIA from 1998 to 2011. For some of that time, he worked specifically on Iraq, where he did multiple tours. On his first tour in Iraq, he became the first representative of the U.S. government to interrogate the captured Saddam Hussein. Later, he briefed President George W. Bush on issues related to Iraq. He has now published a book—“Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein.”

John, thanks for coming in, I appreciate it.

John Nixon: Thank you for having me.

Jeffrey: Now, let me ask you, you were a senior leadership analyst at the CIA. What exactly does a leadership analyst do?

Nixon: A leadership analyst studies a particular individual and tries to sort of give policymakers in Washington an understanding for-- for lack of a better phrase--what makes this person tick. What are their life experiences? What are their shortcomings in political leadership? What are their strengths? Certainly, health issues get tossed into that, psychological issues get tossed into this as well. And, basically, it’s writing sort of a biography so that people, policymakers, will know about a world leader or world leaders that they are going to be encountering.

Jeffrey: So, when you started at the CIA in 1998, you went to work on the quote-unquote “Iraq Issue?”

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: And you were a leadership analyst right from the start?

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: So, your job right from the beginning, was take a look at Saddam Hussein?

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: And do as much as you can to find out who he is, what he believes in, what motivates him, what he wants to do?

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: And, so, when you are doing that what kind of materials do you look at. How do you form that picture of who this guy is?

Nixon: You become an all source analyst, is what we used to call it. You are looking at the open source material. But you are also looking at the classified information. You are also studying videotapes and pictures. And you are looking at anything that can give you an understanding of who this person is. And you are also looking for things like health issues because sometimes leaders try to hide the fact that they might not be doing well physically. And you are also looking at—like I said--pretty much anything that gives you information that will lead to a more-deeper analysis and understanding.

Jeffrey: So, some of it is public source material, and some of it is things that were covertly collected?

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: And the public sources would be like Middle Eastern media and Western media things?

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: And you would have people that would translate Arabic materials for you and you would go over?

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: There was a constant stream of this coming to you?

Nixon: There was a constant stream. But I would want to say also that you have to weight the evidence and pick out the things that you believe and discard the things that you find that might not be true.

Jeffrey: Now, there is this Senate Intelligence Committee report, looked back in 2004 at what went wrong in terms of intelligence collecting in Iraq. Here, specifically they are talking about collecting intelligence on the WMD program, not on Saddam Hussein as a leader.

But they say that after the UN weapons inspectors left in 1998, the U.S. didn’t have any human intelligence source collecting against the weapons of mass destruction and they also said that the lack of an official presence—that the U.S. did not have an official presence in Iraq—made it more difficult to understand what was going on there.

Nixon: I completely agree with those findings. One of the--as we were talking about before--one of the, I think, central lessons of this fiasco called Operation Iraqi Freedom is that if you don’t have a diplomatic, an official presence, in the country you are really just hamstringing yourself in terms of an ability to understand what is happening inside that country. And you are forced to then go to third parties to basically interpret events for you and feed you information and sometimes those third parties have an agenda that does not exactly mesh with your agenda. And they might try to get you to do something that wouldn’t necessarily be right.

Jeffrey: So, literally at that time when you started analyzing Saddam Hussein for the CIA, the United States government did not have people on the streets in Baghdad or anywhere else in Iraq, walking around, talking to people, just knowing what was going on, having a sense of the country?

Nixon: Right.

Jeffrey: It was all looking at it from thousands of miles away.

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: And some, I assume, and I know you can’t talk about classified stuff—

Nixon: Right.

Jeffrey: I assume there was electronic surveillance and things like that were done to try to make up for the fact, or substitute for the fact, that people were not on the ground?

Nixon: There was still collection across the board, particularly on Iraq. And that includes Humint, Sigint, anything you want to call it. However, there was not the collection that can be done when you have diplomats in a country who can then interact with members of the government and interact with people on the street, and interact with all sorts of individuals who can give you very, very interesting information. One of the really big differences, when we go back to the 1980s, and you look at the diplomatic reporting from Iraq when we had an embassy there, the reporting was very rich and it really gave you a good understanding and a good feel for what was happening inside the country. That was lacking the 1990s and into the early 2000s.

Jeffrey: We had diplomatic relations with Stalin’s Soviet Union, and during the 1980s under the Reagan administration we had diplomatic relations with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and someone may argue Stalin was evil, Saddam Hussein was evil, but is it prudent for the United States to have diplomatic relations even with evil regimes and have people on the ground?

Nixon: Well, I think you made the point better than I can. We’ve talked to bad people before and people we don’t like, but we talked to them. I think that the benefit of having people on the ground and being able to kind of find out information through that presence outweighs the moral problems that are raised by talking to bad people.

Jeffrey: So, you’re trying to do this analysis from a distance and find out for the United States government the best picture of who Saddam Hussein is.

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: So that policymakers can make decisions of how to deal with Saddam Hussein based on that understanding. When the U.S. was moving toward going to war in Iraq in 2002, did you have an opinion? What was your opinion about that?

Nixon: Well, having studied Saddam, I knew that he had basically removed much of the opposition to him and had almost made himself coup proof, and he also had kind of driven the country into the ground. This was a once very proud nation with lots of resources both human and natural. And it was a basket case. And so I thought at that time--and I also believed that he was moving towards weapons of mass destruction, which all the other analysts in my group as well as within the entire intelligence community believed. So, I thought, well if we are going to get rid of him, let’s get rid of him, and maybe we can put something in place that would help the Iraqi people.

Jeffrey: Did they believe that he was moving to try to develop weapons of mass destruction as opposed to that he had weapons stockpiled?

Nixon: Both.

Jeffrey: Both. Okay. That was just generally assumed in the intelligence community?

Nixon: Well, it was assumed based on a large body of reporting that seemed to—and when I say large, I mean a very large body of reporting—that seemed to be indicating that this was happening. There was countervailing reporting that said this wasn’t happening. But in terms of volume, the reporting that said he was far outweighed the stuff that was saying he wasn’t. And I never met anyone from the intelligence community of the United States as well as our allies who said: You know, maybe he doesn’t have them. Or, what if he doesn’t have them. It was: Oh, everybody took it as an article of faith that he had them or was moving towards them.

Jeffrey: Even though, as the Senate Intelligence Committee later reported, they didn’t have human intelligence sources on the ground probing that question?

Nixon: Yeah.

Jeffrey: How did it turn out that you actually ended up going to Iraq?

Nixon: Well, I was asked to—There was something we had in the Baghdad station called the HVT analyst. HVT1, which refers to High Value Target Number 1, and that was Saddam, he was the number one in the deck of cards, the ace of spades. And the HTV1 analysist had to come home and I was asked to go replace him. So, I went out there to go out and be that analyst who worked with the Special Forces to find leads to find Saddam Hussein. There was a lot of pressure coming from Washington to find Saddam, largely, because we hadn’t found Osama bin Laden, and we couldn’t have another instance where the leader escapes and is on the run.

Jeffrey: So, we invaded in March 2003. Saddam Hussein disappears from Baghdad. And then you are over there at what point?

Nixon: I came over there in October.

Jeffrey: Okay. So you are in October. Where were you living in Iraq?

Nixon: We were living in trailers in this compound right by the Republican Palace and we were living four to a trailer. It was horrible. It was not fun.

Jeffrey: Is this in the quote-unquote Green Zone?

Nixon: Yes, we were in the Green Zone, exactly. And it was—it made living in a dorm in college seem palatial.

Jeffrey: So, you are living there, and so you are one of the people trying to figure out where did Saddam go? How do we get him? And the Special Forces, they have people who are specifically waiting to go get him when you figure out where he is?

Nixon: Right, and they are looking at information just like we are. But, I mean, as an analyst, I’m looking at all sources of information and they are basing their information on the various raids that they are doing. And, so, we would meet every morning and go over last night’s raids, see what came out of it, and then I would go through the Sigint and the Humint and the open source and talk to them about it and then we would come up with an idea for where the next raid should be.

Jeffrey: Let me ask you this: Once Saddam fled Baghdad and he was gone and missing, did he exert any sort of political power or military power in Iraq or was that pretty much dissipated at that point?

Nixon: First of all, one of the great stories of this is when he fled Baghdad—Now, I asked him: When you fled Baghdad—And he said: I did not flee. I simply moved myself to continue the resistance. I said: Okay. But, when he fled Baghdad, one of the brilliant things about Saddam Hussein is that the man who everybody thought had the plan really had no plan. He just got in a car and went. And the genius of not having a plan is if you don’t have a plan then there is no one else who can kind of rat you out and say: Oh, this is what he is going to do. And he actually got through Army check points, which is even more interesting.

Jeffrey: In your book, you talk about his driver. This is the man who drove him out of Baghdad when he did not flee. Did that man give up Saddam Hussein?

Nixon: No. And he was polygraphed—which shows you how valuable a polygraph is. He was polygraphed and he passed. And I remember talking to him with my colleague, and I remember having this nagging feeling in my gut like this guy, there is something just not right about it. But his story seemed to check out, and it was not until after the capture and a few months later that we found out that the farm that Saddam fled to, where he was hiding, that the caretaker’s son was the driver’s best friend. And it was interesting because even though he could have made his life a lot better, he could have taken the reward and ratted him out, he didn’t. And he remained loyal to Saddam. And it was interesting because I brought up his name with Saddam and Saddam remained loyal to him. It was interesting to see that bond of loyalty because when Saddam didn’t think you were loyal he was more than happy to kind of sacrifice you.

Jeffrey: Right, even his own sons in law.

Nixon: Right. Exactly.

Jeffrey: So, literally, when the U.S. forces started bombing Baghdad, is that when Saddam left?

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: And he simply got in a car with this driver and they drove north?

Nixon: Well, actually. No, he didn’t. He was doing something I am prevented from disclosing for some strange reason—because it’s a great story. But he was doing something, and then he heard the bombs falling and he got in his car and went. It was a few days later--

Jeffrey: But he didn’t go to any specific hideout or a bunker or some place that would look good in a movie?

Nixon: No. It was almost comical to be quite honest with you. But a few days later—and this is this famous footage of him walking through the Al Mansur district of Baghdad and he is waving to people and he gets on top of a car, and he makes a speech, and then if you watch it, the driver of the car, that’s the guy, that’s the driver, and he gets in the car and that’s when they go. And they headed, I think, first to Ramadi.

There is a funny story in the book in which I say, apparently they stopped at a woman’s house and they wanted shelter for the night and the driver went up to the door and said: Please, the president of Iraq is in the car and he wants to stay here. And the women said: You know, it’s too late. Why are you coming here? I don’t accept callers after a certain time—and shut door on their face. That was sort of Saddam’s welcome to the new Iraq.

Jeffrey: And he did not try to say there? He just went on.

Nixon: No, he thought it was funny.

Jeffrey: You say they actually went through Army checkpoints? U.S. Army checkpoints? Saddam Hussein was in a vehicle with this guy that went through a U.S. Army checkpoint?

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: Why didn’t they catch him?

Nixon: I asked about that, and he wouldn’t--Saddam was very, very secretive and when it came to things like this he would just clam up and he just wouldn’t talk.

Jeffrey: You talk about his idea in the book about this belief that Saddam had body doubles. Was that true?

Nixon: One of the most persistent myths. To this day, people still believe, and still ask me about the body doubles. They never existed. And I think it was one of these things that just sprouted out of people’s fascination with Saddam and thinking that because there were so many people, so many of his guards looked like him because, of course, they were all from his tribe. But also I think Saddam sometimes himself encouraged this idea because it added to his mythology as an invincible man.

Jeffrey: Made him a bigger human being than he actually was.

Nixon: Exactly.

Jeffrey: So, you’re living in the Green Zone in a trailer in late 2003 and you are trying to find Saddam. When did you finally get an idea that he might be caught.

Nixon: It was about roughly a week before he got caught. All of a sudden, a number of raids had led the Special Forces onto the trail of one of Saddam’s key facilitators, a man by the name of Muhammad Ibrahim Umar al-Muslit, and he was a member of Saddam’s sort of extended family. And once we got on that trail, then it was just a matter of time until we got to Muhamad Ibrahim himself. And that was about a week later, six days later. And Muhammad Ibrahim broke very quickly. He said okay, you want me to—At first he tried to deny it. But then after about an hour of some negotiation he said: All right, I will take you to him.

Jeffrey: And they caught him.

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: And then when did you hear about it?

Nixon: Probably within about half an hour. Word filtered back to the station, to the Green Zone where the CIA station was, that Special Forces had picked somebody up and they thought it was Saddam but they were not sure and they wanted to bring him down for identification. And that’s where they asked me to go out to the airport and identify him.

Jeffrey: And how did you identify him?

Nixon: I was looking for tribal markings and I was looking for a bullet wound. I knew that Saddam had kind of a bad back, and I was looking to see if that maybe would be visible some way. And also Saddam had this sort of droop in his lip that was from a lifetime of smoking cigars. But having said all that—and I did check these things out, and I had a series of questions that I was going to ask the person--but having said all that, when the door opened and he was sitting there, I wanted to throw them all away because there was just no doubt in my mind who was sitting there. It was Saddam.

Jeffrey: It was not a body double?

Nixon: It was not a body double.

Jeffrey: But he did have the tribal markings?

Nixon: He did. He did. And he did have the bullet wound.

Jeffrey: He literally was tattooed on his hand

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: In a way that showed which tribe he belonged to?

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: And he had a bullet wound from trying to assassinate--

Nixon: Yes, President Abd al-Karim Qasim in 1959.

Jeffrey: And it was there. He was he proud of his wound?

Nixon: Yes, he told us that one of the reasons why he elevated so quickly in the Baath Party was because of the assassination attempt.

Jeffrey: Because he was a veteran of trying to kill a guy?

Nixon: And he was willing to do it. Whereas a lot of others wouldn’t have done that.

Jeffrey: So, you identify him. You know there is no question this is Saddam. How did it work out that you were the person who was going to be the first to question him? And how did you learn about that?

Nixon: Well, I think it was pretty well known within—Well, because I was the HVT1 analyst and my job was specific to working on finding Saddam. I think people knew that I knew a lot about Saddam and again this persistent idea of the body doubles. That somehow this might be an imposter who was going to fool us and going to make America look bad--

Jeffrey: So, it would be a brain double, too.

Nixon: Right. Exactly. And, so, I had to develop a list of questions that only Saddam could know. And I had about thirty or forty—I forget how many. And it was kind of a charade by this point because there was just no doubt. Sometimes something is staring you right in the face and it is what it is. And it was Saddam.

Jeffrey: So, but then as you start to, quote unquote, debrief Saddam, what was that process? And you were the principal person conversing with him?

Nixon: Yes. What I was just describing to you was the first night. And then we had about a week in which Washington had to make up its mind what it was going to do with the captured leader. I think that Washington was caught unawares and was actually, never expected to actually capture him alive. There had been a great deal of reporting saying that Saddam had suicide belts and that he was going to blow up anybody who came near him--even though our psychological evaluation of him had said that the last thing that Saddam is going to do is try to kill himself. This is a man who is a survivor. And, ironically, when Bin Laden was caught in 2011, in the media I remember hearing these reports about Bin Laden having these suicide belts. Again--

Jeffrey: And they killed Bin Laden.

Nixon: But the thing is, again, the psychological structure of Bin Laden is this man is a survivor. He’s not going to kill himself. That’s why he is on the run.

Jeffrey: So even though there is a concerted effort on to find Saddam and capture him, there wasn’t a systematic well-thought out plan on what to do in the aftermath of catching Saddam?

Nixon: Absolutely not. All of a sudden, Washington took about a week—and serious time was lost. One of the things when you are dealing with somebody who has been captured, it is called the shock of capture. Their whole thing has been changed. Their whole world has been turned upside down. You really want to get in there and ask them questions while they are a little disoriented by the change. And that was lost. That opportunity was lost.

Jeffrey: So, it was December 13, 2003 that they captured him?

Nixon: Yes, and we didn’t get started until the 20th.

Jeffrey: And that first night you described what you did, you identified him, had those questions. So, then for another seven days, what he is just sitting in a cell?

Nixon: Yeah, in fact he even said to one of his guards—or, no, he said to our interpreter. He said: Why isn’t anybody coming in to talk to me? I don’t understand this? And Pentagon, the CIA and the White House were trying to figure out who was going to get first crack at him. They were also wrestling with certain ideas of what are we going to do with him. How is he going to be tried? There was no functioning Iraqi government at the time and certainly the Bush administration wouldn’t have turned him over to the International Court of Justice. So I think that they were trying to wrestle with these issues, come to some conclusion on these issues.

Jeffrey: Unlike President Obama, they did not want to bring him to New York City and put him in a U.S. District Court.

Nixon: Yes, exactly. Probably because if they did, they would see that, a jury would see that, there was no reason to go to war in the first place and probably let him go free. But anyway, it was myself, it was a polygrapher, who was sort of a facilitator, a person who was going to sort of get conversation moving.

Jeffrey: He wasn’t hooked up to a lie detector machine, right?

Nixon: No. No. No. And an interpreter and Saddam. So, it was the four of us in the room.

Jeffrey: Did Saddam speak English at all?

Nixon: He understood English very well but he spoke very stunted English. He would say things like: Nice day. Sun shining.

Jeffrey: So, if you were talking with the other people in the room in English, he would probably have a general understanding about what you’re were saying?

Nixon: Oh, yes.

Jeffrey: Were these debriefing sessions recorded?

Nixon: No.

Jeffrey: No?

Nixon: No, they were not. The agency did not want to have to turn over—Well, it didn’t want any record recorded because it didn’t want to have to then be, turn this over to any sort of a court process because then that might establish the precedent of the agency being compelled to give evidence.

Jeffrey: But the intention was to deal with Saddam Hussein within the rules of the Geneva Convention?

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: This was a head of state who had been taken as a prisoner of war?

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: There was never—You weren’t going to torture him or anything?

Nixon: Well, actually, the head of the team that I was with—who didn’t come in the room with us, who always stayed outside—his first inclination was to use enhanced interrogation techniques. And, fortunately, that was kyboshed, put on the kybosh by Washington immediately.

Jeffrey: Enhanced interrogation, including?

Nixon: Well, they were going to kind of strip Saddam down and sort of throw water on him and just kind of start off like that and try to sort of disorient him and use other techniques.

Jeffrey: Not necessarily up to waterboarding?

Nixon: No. God, I hope not.

Jeffrey: But they did talk about some lower level enhanced interrogation techniques?

Nixon: Yeah, exactly.

Jeffrey: I think you write in the book that they were talking about making him naked and throwing cold water on him.

Nixon: Yeah, exactly. And the military who were in charge of his sort of care and feeding kept him in a room where it was very noisy all the time because they were always coming and going throughout the night. I used to think that that was by coincidence, but now I kind of think that they were doing a little bit of sleep deprivation of him. And on many occasions, Saddam would come in and he would just be like, you know, and falling asleep. And then they changed his cell and then we got a fully rested Saddam and that was quite different.

Jeffrey: But, so, when the CIA was, when you, were interrogating Saddam Hussein there was a sense that whatever he said could be used in a court of law, literally.

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: So, that there was a possibility the United States government itself might take him into a domestic court and prosecute him as a criminal?

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: And so that effected your ability to question him and the way you questioned him?

Nixon: Well, yes. I had this really surreal moment because we were trying to, we were obviously going to ask about very, very important issues, WMD being chief among them. And right before, or right around the time we got started, I remember I talked with a senior counsel from the CIA who had flown out from Washington and he said: Well, what has he said so far? And I said: Well, we just had one session with him and it was mostly atmospherics and so he hasn’t really said anything. And he said: Oh, good. I said: What do you mean? He said: Oh, no, we don’t want him to say anything because if he says anything then we have to turn it over to a court of law.

Jeffrey: That’s crazy.

Nixon: You’re telling me. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe my ears. I was like, why are we questioning him if we don’t want him to say anything.

Jeffrey: And this was ’03. So, we’re still seeing conflict in Iraq, but thirteen years ago there was a sense that maybe we don’t want to learn that much from Saddam Hussein because we may want to go into a legal process in a U.S. court?

Nixon: Right.

Jeffrey: That was the context in which they were thinking about it.

Nixon: Yeah.

Jeffrey: Okay. So, you had been an analyst. You had been the guy who was looking at who Saddam was and using every source you possibly could at the CIA to get a picture of him and explain through your briefing papers and so forth to policymakers who that guy was. When you finally were in Iraq and you confronted this guy, was he the guy you thought he was?

Nixon: I hate to give this wishy-washy answer but I am going to say yes and no. On the larger picture, on the larger arc of his career and of his regime, I think we got it right. But when you got to some of the more granular details about his life and, certainly, the regime itself there were many surprises and many things that we got wrong. And that I thought, it was really one of the most confounding things. And it was one of the first times where I really began to sort of question what we were doing.

Jeffrey: Well, let me ask you first, John, before you go to that about the big arc. You know, this guy obviously, he rose to power in Iraq as the leader of the Baath Party, but as an authoritarian.

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: He was a dictator.

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: And in maintaining his power, he would murder people. He would actually kill people en masse. I know you go into a lot of things in the book that we didn’t understand well and things we didn’t. But he would murder people?

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: Do you think he had his own sons-in-law killed, for example?

Nixon: Oh, yeah. Sure.

Jeffrey: And he used weapons of mass destruction in his war with Iran?

Nixon: Yes. And so did Iran.

Jeffrey: Right. This was an evil guy? I mean he wasn’t--

Nixon: Yes. Yes. I don’t want to be put in the position of defending him. The more you got to know him, the less you liked him. He was a thoroughly unlikable person. So, let me just say that as well.

Jeffrey: So, talk to us a little bit about when you say the more granular, when you learned more about the subtleties of who this person was at the time that he was taken capture that made you change your views a little bit.

Nixon: Well, one of the things that we learned was that near the end of his reign, Saddam had become very disengaged from running the government on a day to day basis. And this contradicted our, at least the CIA’s, estimation of him. We always thought of him as sort of this master manipulator and this person who was always pulling the strings and thinking two, and three, and four steps ahead. And nothing could be further from the truth. This was a guy who was writing a novel at the very end of his career, or his reign. And, in fact, a week before the U.S. Army arrives, he’s sending drafts of the novel to Tariq Aziz, the former foreign minister, and saying: Tariq, I want you to read this draft and let me know what you think. And that is not, that’s not the mark of a man who is getting ready, girding for war.

Jeffrey: What was his favorite novel?

Nixon: He loved “The Old Man and the Sea.” And I remember him saying to me: This is just about a man and a fishing line, and you learn so much from these so few things. He was also reading an Arabic translation of a Cliff Notes version of “Crime and Punishment” when he was in jail, which I thought was very fitting. And I remember him saying to me about that: This man Dostoyevsky, he has a wonderful insight into the human condition.

Jeffrey: So, this guy was a Hemingway fan and a Dostoyevsky fan?

Nixon: Yes. Yes.

Jeffrey: Now, you said he was writing a novel at the time. Had he already published a novel?

Nixon: Yes. He had actually published a novel. He had written a couple of novels, actually. But the most famous one was this “Zabiba and the King.” Most of the time, I would say, if you have a world leader who is writing novels while he’s still world leader, or the leader of a country, that these novels should be able to give you an insight into how this person thinks and you can learn things from that. But some of these novels were so bad, I am not sure that you could really get that from them.

Jeffrey: Those novels were actually published?

Nixon: They were translated by the CIA’s open-source center. And that’s where I read them, mostly in excerpt form. I didn’t get the full text. When he was captured he had 500 to 700 pages of a novel and also poetry that he was writing. Because he really thought of himself as a writer.

Jeffrey: So, the “Zabiba and the King” novel that was, the CIA translated that from published versions in Arabic in the Middle East. Anyone could read it?

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: And you didn’t think it gave much insight on who Saddam was?

Nixon: Well, if only in the sense that it was sort of Saddam’s exalted sense of his own self. It’s an heroic tale of sort of knights and daring-do Those are themes, I think, that really were in a lot of his written work--people leading a very noble cause. And as far as his poetry goes, he was one of the worst poets I think I’ve ever had the misfortune of reading. Even if you were trying to write bad poetry, I don’t think you could do it as badly as Saddam.

Jeffrey: So you paint this picture of this somewhat disengaged dictator.

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: Another you thing you point out in your book is how he kept himself safe, which a lot of that resolved around where he was from, and the tribe he was a member of, and his relatives. How important was that to his security and his ability to survive that long that he surrounded himself with a very select group of people who were his security?

Nixon: Absolutely, so important to his survival and to his continued leadership of the country. Saddam never really slept in the same place more than once or twice. During the first Gulf War, for example, he didn’t go to any of his palaces when we were bombing Baghdad. He would just go pick out a person’s home and just say: I would like to sleep here for the night. And they would say: Of course. Yes, Mr. President. And he had some very trusted people around him that had served him for a very long time. And one of the interesting things that he did on the eve of the war, just as he’s getting ready to leave Baghdad, is he switched out a lot of his hamiya, his personal guards, with new individuals--people who were still trusted but they weren’t well known to foreign intelligence services. And that was really one of the things that gave us so much trouble in terms of in trying to track him.

Jeffrey: So, some of the folks would have been physically recognized.

Nixon: Right.

Jeffrey: Like you knew the guy was the bodyguard, the driver, when you saw him in the CNN videotape, but a lot of them may have not had that kind exposure.

Nixon: Exactly.

Jeffrey: So we wouldn’t know who they were.

Jeffrey: So, you discovered this disengaged dictator. You know one of the things going on in Iraq and Syria today is we see the rise of the Islamic State, obviously.

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: Which actually descended from Zarqawi’s group.

Nixon: Right.

Jeffrey: So, it existed in a different form even then.

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: And you see the divide between a Shia-dominated government in Baghdad, and Islamic State has established its caliphate in part of the Sunni-dominated region. It really doesn’t have much going on in the south of Iraq, obviously. And this has spilled over into Syria. Some people want to have regime change in Damascus and get rid of Bashar al Assad. And you have, even to this moment, the Islamic State hanging on there. How much did the CIA brief our political leaders and how much did our political leaders understand the potential fracturing of that area of the world on sectarian lines prior to the invasion of Iraq?

Nixon: I don’t think they had any idea whatsoever that this was going to happen. And to be quite honest with you, I don’t think, at least when we are talking about the Bush administration, I don’t think they really cared. I think they really did believe that with Saddam gone from power it was going to be a new day and we would be welcomed as conquerors.

Jeffrey: And you think they believed that some kind of democratic or representative government could be established in Iraq?

Nixon: I think that they very much believed that. Getting back to this issue of one of the surprises that we found: One of the things that we really didn’t understand fully was Saddam’s own fear of Islamic extremism.

I hate to use the term fear because Saddam really wasn’t a fearful guy, but he did keep his eye very closely on this community and was very good at rooting them out because he knew what a threat--More than the United States, more than Iran, he thought that this was the real threat to his regime.

Jeffrey: I think a lot of people understand the Shia-Sunni divide in Iraq. There is a Shia majority population, Saddam was a Sunni from Tikrit, and he was leading a country that the majority population was a different Islamic sect than his own.

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: And he had an interest in suppressing them, obviously.

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: But what you say in the book is that he also, you say, it wasn’t just Sunni fundamentalist--it wasn’t just Muslim fundamentalists--it was Sunni fundamentalists, it was Wahhabi fundamentalists. It was precisely the ideology from which the Islamic State came up.

Nixon: Exactly, and it is my belief that a Saddam who was left in power would have continued to have rooted these people out and not have permitted their rise. Maybe they would have challenged him at some point, but I don’t think they would have been successful.

Jeffrey: An interesting question, you look at both Iraq and Syria--Syria, obviously, has much different demographics. There you have a Sunni majority, an Alawite leader, and now a Christian minority that is being targeted for genocide. In Iraq it was a Shia majority with a Sunni leader. But in both countries now you have the caliphate of the Islamic State and you have the rise of these jihadist Sunni Muslims. Do you think that, is there a way to contain that short of the sort of leader that Iraq and Syria were able to suppress that under?

Nixon: Well, I think if you want to defeat the Islamic State one of the things is you have to root out the causes that give rise to the Islamic State. You have to provide the people in these areas with stability and security. Now, it might be possible in Syria. In Iraq, I think it is going to be harder because the Shia-led government is not going to provide those things for the Sunni-led areas or the Sunni areas because they view the Sunnis with great concern because they feel that this is now an alienated minority, which they are, and that they are going to do whatever they can to take power back. And also Iran, their neighbor, does not want to have a Sunni-led Iraq again on its borders and a Sunni-led Iraq that will want to rebuild its military.

Jeffrey: So, Mosul, where you are continuing to have a battle to try to evict the Islamic State, is in a Sunni part of Iraq, and there are both Arabs and Kurd there?

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: And the government, which we are aiding in going into battle there, is dominated and controlled by Shiites.

Nixon: Yes, and one of the problems that we have right now in terms of retaking Mosul is that it is taking a very long time. And I think that the Baghdad government has made a mistake in underestimating just how dug in ISIS is and was. Also, one of the best of the Iraqi military, what are called the Golden Brigades, now they are called the Golden Divisions, are bearing the brunt of this fight and they have sustained massive casualties. Almost, maybe, I have heard between 40 and 50 percent. And they are not even near concluding this battle. And what I fear is, what I think is going to happen, is that they are going to eventually retake Mosul, but that this really well-equipped and well-trained element of the Iraqi military is going to be decimated. So that we’ll be left with an Iraqi military that really is substandard, which then serves Iran’s needs.

Jeffrey: And may be more dominated by Shiite militia.

Nixon: Right. Exactly.

Jeffrey: In Colin Powell’s speech which he gave at the U.N. Security Council making the case for going into Iraq, he cited the weapons of mass destruction but he also cited Zarqawi and Zarqawi’s presence in Iraq at that time. My understanding is Zarqawi originally was a Palestinian Jordanian?

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: And he had spent time in Afghanistan.

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: And then he ends up in Iraq. But during the time that Saddam was in power—Well, did you have a sense there was any kind of cooperation there?

Nixon: No, absolutely not.

Jeffrey: What was Saddam’s view toward Zarqawi?

Nixon: When we asked him about Zarqawi, his reaction was basically: He’s become, he’s come here when he knew that you guys were taking over. You’ve created the vacuum in which he now operates by removing me. This man was not a problem when--

Jeffrey: Saddam actually thought that?

Nixon: Yeah.

Jeffrey: But did Saddam try to target him and get rid of him before we came in, or he just didn’t view him as a threat?

Nixon: Zarqawi was not really that well known, I think, in Baghdad, was not really seen as a threat. I think that if Saddam had known of him, and, certainly, if Zarqawi had the same profile in, say, 2002, that he had in 2006, 2005, I think that would have been a different story. But he was probably seen just as a local trouble-maker and I think Saddam also had other things that he was working on.

Jeffrey: And, so, your view is because Saddam viewed Zarqawi’s ideology as a threat--

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: Then that was a threat. So, at least on that level, as evil as Saddam was, the U.S. and Saddam had a shared interest?

Nixon: Yes.

Jeffrey: Now, John, looking forward--

Nixon: And, if I can: That’s one of the really strange things that comes out of the debriefing process, which is that Saddam--9/11, this calamitous event in our history--Saddam takes a completely different view of 9/11 from the way the Bush administration sees it.

Saddam sees 9/11 as almost a relief because he thinks that the United States has got to see—with all of its money, and all its power, and all its intelligence—has got to see that he had nothing to do with it. And that the people who were involved in 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia, and Egypt and the Emirates and that these were Wahhabists and that these people threatened him as well as now the United States. And yet the Bush administration takes the complete opposite tact, which is: Let’s find linkages to Saddam Hussein and see if he is involved in this.

Jeffrey: But you, as a CIA analyst, who was responsible for trying to get that picture of Saddam, when you are sitting there in Northern Virginia trying to decipher from all those sources you were talking about, you didn’t have that sense of him? Or did you? The sense that he saw the Sunni extremists as a real threat to him—

Nixon: No, we didn’t have that sense. In fact, we thought at the time that Saddam--We saw the Sunni community in Iraq as monolithic with Saddam at the top. And that he had the Sunnis basically under his thumb and that he was able to kind of manipulate the community because, by showing them that, look, if you ever try to do anything against me, you remove me, and the Persians are going to take over. And that was sort of one of his big leverage points. That and also he was very good to the Sunni community, especially the tribal elders. He was always dishing out money and cars and showing them great respect. His tribal strategy was something that was very successful. And, eventually, Prime Minister Maliki, did the same thing in 2007, 2008, 2009.

Jeffrey: So, now, thirteen years later, fourteen years later, we have these horrible things taking place in Iraq and Syria. It really doesn’t look like there is any near-time solution. If you were advising people in political office today who had the authority to make decisions about what we do, what would you like to see them do?

Nixon: I would say that this is not something that you can ignore, but it’s also not something that I think we want to send 500,000 troops in to settle. These are things that have to be settled locally. But we have to put pressure on some of the other countries in the region to seek a greater peace. And one of the things I think we have to do--and I know that this will be unpopular with some people--but we have to end our estrangement with Iran. I would say that one of the most important things that we could do—First of all, we have to accept certain realities in the Middle East today. One of those realities is that Bashar al Assad is probably here to stay. And as unfortunate as that is and as barbarous a person as he has become, it’s reality. And, as far as Iran goes: Iran, if they are not part of the solution, they are going to be part of the problem. And for 37 years they have been nothing but a problem for us, unless we were doing something that they agreed with like taking Saddam out, taking the Taliban out, something like that. Fighting Saddam in the first Gulf War. We have to end this estrangement and we have to be able to talk to them and we should have a presence in that country, and I think if we do that then we have an opportunity to maybe tamp down some of the tensions, especially some of the sectarian tensions.

Jeffrey: Or allow it to be organically be tamped down by the rising indigenous authority there. Let me ask you about this, John, the ideology that Zarqawi embraced and I don’t know how different it is from the Iranians—But, for example, they’ve spelt it out: You talk about the fact that Saddam came from Salah ad-Din Province. Salah ad-Din was a hero of his. Salah ad-Din was the Muslim who took back Jerusalem. And Zawahiri, the top guy now in al Qaida, has said that what he wants to see as a result of what’s going on in Syria is someone to unite the Arab world, surrounding Israel, and then eventually go back and take back the Temple Mount. Do you see that as the ideology of al Qaida, or of Zarqawi, of the Islamic State? Is that what they want to do?

Nixon: I think there are differing view on what—and that’s one of the things I think that these jihadists, and these extremists, are trying to wrestle with, because what Zawahiri wants might not be what al Baghdadi wants with ISIS. And certainly they have had differing opinions on what constitutes a caliphate and when the caliphate should be declared. But it is a virulent ideology no matter how you slice it and the best way, I think, to fight this ideology is to, A, lower tensions in the region, and also, I think, basically, begin a process by which you can get buy in and bring stability through various countries.

Jeffrey: So, if Assad is fighting the Islamic State, which he obviously is, in that sense he has a shared interest with the United States.

Nixon: Yeah.

Jeffrey: We may have a lot of contrary interests. In your view, do the Iranians have that same vision—

Nixon: Of fighting like—

Jeffrey: Of trying to unify that part of the world and eventually going after Jerusalem?

Nixon: Well, I think there’s first things first when it comes to Iran. First thing first, it might be Iran does feel threatened by ISIS and these people are their enemies. So, I think that Iran has a vested interest in getting rid of these extremists. Now, the problem with Iran though is it that it has spread its influence throughout the region after the removal of Saddam. You now have, and some people call it a Shia Crescent, I am not so sure it is. But it has spread its tentacles and its influence into Syria and into Lebanon, which you already had had, but I think that it’s consolidated some of this influence now and that is troubling. And I think it is all the more reason for why you have to come to some sort of, not an agreement, but some sort of a way of sort of settling your differences and being able to interact with one another rather than maintain this Cold War that we’ve got with Iran, that’s been going on, and doesn’t serve our interests.

Jeffrey: So, the U.S. would have a better chance of thwarting whatever it is Iran might like to do that is contrary to our interests if we had better relations with them?

Nixon: I hate to use this example, but it is sort of like that line in The Godfather, when he says: I keep my friends close and my enemies closer.

Jeffrey: So, you would open up an embassy in Tehran, send diplomats over there?

Nixon: Absolutely.

Jeffrey: We should have had them in Baghdad seventeen years ago?

Nixon: Absolutely. We could have saved ourselves not only the lives of many young men and women, but we could have saved ourselves a lot of money and a lot of heartache, and also we could have saved our reputation.