Saddam Hussein's classified biographer
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Saddam Hussein's classified biographer was John Kiriakou's first assignment at the CIA. Having joined in 1990 as an analyst in the Office of Leadership Analysis, his specific job was to write the classified biography of Saddam Hussein, or, as he puts it more bluntly elsewhere, to be "Saddam's intelligence community shrink."

The desk sat in what was called the political psychology division, and the brief covered not only Saddam personally but the Iraqi government, "I was the only one covering leadership analysis on the Iraqi leadership." He held it for seven or seven and a half years, including a tour overseas in the Middle East working Iraqi sanctions issues, before boredom drove him to the very unusual switch into counterterrorism operations, a move made possible by his being, quite literally, the only person in the CIA fluent in both Greek and Arabic.

The June assessment

On 30 June 1990 the CIA made the analytic judgement that Saddam was indeed going to invade Kuwait. The error was one of scale rather than intent: the agency believed he would cross the border by a few kilometres and take the southern tip of an oil field lying almost entirely within Iraqi territory.

What happened instead, on 2 August 1990, was that Saddam took the whole of Kuwait. The royal family fled to Saudi Arabia, an interim occupation governor was installed, and, in Kiriakou's summary, the Kuwaiti people mostly fled and "the ones that couldn't mostly died."

That was the morning Kiriakou found himself briefing the president in the Oval Office. He had come into the office at six that morning; his boss told him "don't take your jacket off, we're going to the White House." He was twenty-five, and had never been inside the building except as a tourist. A Marine escorted the two of them into the Oval Office, where the president, the vice-president, the national security adviser and the CIA director were waiting, wingback chairs for the first two, dining chairs for the other two, the couch for Kiriakou and his boss. "Well, now what do we do?" the president said, and everyone turned and looked at the twenty-five-year-old. "One day you're sitting in a college class and the next day you're in the Oval Office trying to think of how not to sound like an idiot when you're speaking to the president."

The desk next door

Kiriakou uses the geography of the office to make a point about how careers are made inside the agency. He sat within about eight feet of the analyst covering the Iranian government and, between them, the analyst handling the Saudi royal family. Around 1989,90, the Saudi analyst needed a royal family tree; the Iran analyst, who was "really into tech", took two days off, wrote a little program to build one, and the office gathered round to marvel at being able to see who was related to whom. He was given a five-hundred-dollar exceptional performance bonus. Today, Kiriakou says, that man is the number four ranking officer in the CIA, associate deputy director for technology, the officer liaising with Palantir, In-Q-Tel and the defence contractors.

Being the expert

The portfolio made Kiriakou, in his own description, the United States government's leading expert on Saddam Hussein's psychology. It also placed him at the centre of the argument that followed the war: many at the agency wanted to finish the job by finishing Saddam, while President Bush chose to leave him in place rather than destabilise the region, a decision whose consequences, Kiriakou says, ran all the way to the invasion of 2003.

See also

- Office of Leadership Analysis
- Saddam Hussein
- The Oval Office briefing of 2 August 1990
- Iraq WMD intelligence
- In-Q-Tel
- Palantir
