Saddam Hussein
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Saddam Hussein was the president of Iraq from 1979 until his overthrow in the 2003 U.S. invasion. He was the subject of John Kiriakou's CIA analytical portfolio from January 1990 onward, a portfolio Kiriakou describes by saying he became, at age 25, "Saddam Hussein's intelligence community biographer," working with psychologists and psychiatrists to write psychological profiles of Saddam, his sons, and his cabinet and military leadership. To be promoted to GS-15, Kiriakou says he had to write a National Intelligence Estimate in 1997 titled "Iraq: Saddam's Next 12 Months," concluding Saddam could threaten the Kurds, the Shia, Kuwait, or interfere with weapons inspectors; he says the estimate was coordinated across all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies in just four hours, versus the usual weeks, which he found shaming rather than impressive because it meant no new analysis had been offered, just the prior year's NIE with the date changed.

1990 invasion of Kuwait

On June 30, 1990, Kiriakou's analytical group published a paper predicting that Saddam would invade Kuwait. He did. On the morning of the invasion Kiriakou's boss met him at the office and said: "Don't take your jacket off, we're going to the White House." In the Oval Office Kiriakou, "the leading expert on Saddam Hussein, period", was the analyst present when President George H. W. Bush asked the room what to do. "Everybody turns and looks at me, and ... I was 25 years old, so it takes me a minute, but I said, 'Well, here's what we should expect Saddam's next steps to be.'"

Per Kiriakou, the invasion was triggered by U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie's pre-invasion meeting with Saddam, in which she delivered the State Department talking-points cable instructing her to communicate that the United States had "no position on inter-Arab disputes." Saddam, per Kiriakou, read that as a green light not for the seizure of the disputed Rumaila oil field, which Kiriakou says the U.S. expected, but for the conquest of the entire country. Kuwait fell in four hours.

Kiriakou traces the trigger to the Rumaila oil field, 99% inside Iraq, with only its southernmost 1% crossing into Kuwait, from which Kuwait had been "slant drilling" oil at a diagonal from the Iraqi side; Iraq caught them at it, atop long-standing claims that British-drawn Kuwait was really Iraq's "19th province." Kiriakou says Saddam's invasion was also motivated by nationalism and the desire for a legitimate deep-water port, since Iraq's only outlet, the Shatt al-Arab, is narrow enough that people swim across it.

After the 1991 war, Kiriakou says Egypt and Syria warned Washington not to overthrow Saddam, arguing it would only empower Iran, and threatened to quit the U.S.-led coalition if he were deposed; Bush accepted the advice and ended the war leaving Saddam in place, a decision Kiriakou says he opposed at the time but has since come to see as correct.

Kiriakou's retrospective on the 2003 war

> Saddam Hussein was obviously a very bad guy. He killed his own people, it was legendary. ... His sons might have even been worse than he was. ... That said, you know, we look at a lot of this hindsight 2020 ... it is arguably at best, and pretty much confirmed at worst, that it was actually better with Saddam in there. There's no question about it. Right? So 2 million people died.

Kiriakou believes the invasion was driven partly by a desire for revenge against Saddam for the 1993 attempt to assassinate George H.W. Bush in Kuwait, and by Israeli pressure to overthrow him at every opportunity, Israeli officials, he says, would beg the U.S. to attack Iraq at every meeting in Washington, just as they later begged the U.S. to attack Iran. He has put the motive even more bluntly elsewhere: asked what the true nature of the Iraq war was, he said, "I always believed it was revenge. From the first Gulf War. Daddy Bush to some Bush." He separately says Israel regarded Saddam as an existential threat and repeatedly urged the U.S. to attack Iraq, and that the invasion and Saddam's overthrow were good for Israeli interests following 9/11.

Kiriakou recalls telling a colleague, years before the invasion, that he could not continue a career built around Iraq sanctions policy because American policy toward Iraq was not going to change and the U.S. was not serious about removing Saddam, nor should it have been, he says, since doing so would itself have violated international law. He also says there was no connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda, noting Saddam was only barely a practicing Muslim and needed an aide to whisper the Hajj prayers to him during his pilgrimage, and that inside the CIA, the narrative pushed by Dick Cheney linking Saddam to 9/11 was known as "the big lie."

The May 2002 read-in

Per John Kiriakou, the decision to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein had already been formally made in May 2002, eleven months before the actual invasion. On Kiriakou's first day as executive assistant to the CIA Deputy Director for Operations, he signed six compartmented secrecy agreements and was read in: "Next year in February we're going to invade Iraq. We're going to overthrow Saddam Hussein. And we're going to open the largest Air Force Base in the world so that we can move all of our air assets out of Saudi Arabia and deprive Osama Bin Laden of the ability to say that we're polluting the land of the two holy mosques."

Kiriakou's reaction: "I was dumbfounded, and all I could even blurt out was, 'but we haven't caught Bin Laden yet.' And he said, 'Buddy, the decision's been made and the battle lines have been drawn.'" The pro-invasion bloc was the Office of the Vice President, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the National Security Council; the anti-invasion bloc was the CIA, the State Department, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The Iraq Operations Group flag incident

Per Kiriakou, in the lead-up to the invasion he went to pick up a briefing book from the chief of the CIA's Iraq Operations Group and found the chief at his desk with Crayola markers, designing a proposed new Iraqi flag, "using the colors of the Israeli flag." Kiriakou: "Don't you think the Iraqis should design the new Iraqi flag?" The chief: "I don't know, I thought I'd do it."

Kiriakou as Saddam's classified biographer

On his first assignment at the CIA, John Kiriakou was placed on the Iraq desk and became Saddam Hussein's classified biographer for the intelligence community, the only officer covering leadership analysis on the Iraqi leadership. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, the 25-year-old Kiriakou was taken to the Oval Office to brief the president; asked "Well, now what do we do?" he reported that Iraqi troops had crossed the border at 0200 and the royal family had fled to Saudi Arabia. This is the same briefing Kiriakou has described elsewhere as covering the Iraqi leader's state of mind.

Kiriakou says a security officer told him, on his first day as executive assistant to the Deputy Director for Operations, that the U.S. would invade Iraq the next year, overthrow Saddam, and open the world's largest air base in southern Iraq to move air assets out of Saudi Arabia, depriving Osama bin Laden of the claim that America was "polluting the land of the two holy mosques." He adds that so much internal propaganda cast Saddam as "the embodiment of evil" that officials genuinely expected U.S. troops to be welcomed as liberators.

Aftermath: al-Douri's natural death and an Iranian client state

Kiriakou says Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, Saddam's vice president, was the only senior figure from the regime to die a natural death of old age, having hidden out for years after the invasion. Whatever one thinks of Saddam, Kiriakou argues, he was the only Sunni bulwark against Iran and the only thing keeping Iran from dominating the Gulf; with his removal, he says, Iraq became for practical purposes an Iranian client state.

Kiriakou says it was a coincidence, not retaliation, that Saddam switched to selling oil in euros before his overthrow, since heavy international sanctions meant he was not selling much of anything to anybody legally by that point, a contrast, in Kiriakou's telling, with Muammar Gaddafi, whose overthrow he thinks may genuinely have been influenced by Gaddafi's move toward a gold-backed African currency after Gaddafi had voluntarily given up his nuclear and chemical weapons programs at Washington's request.

The mob-boss framework

John Kiriakou said on The Untold Stories in July 2026 that his own analytic framework, worked out over seven-and-a-half years as Saddam Hussein's classified CIA biographer in the office of leadership analysis, was that Saddam was best understood not as "crazy" but as a mob boss. "Crazy is just different", a category label he says people use as a substitute for policy disagreement. Saddam, on Kiriakou's rendering, was "extraordinarily quick to use violence" and applied a mob-boss's terror repertoire: cut out a critic's tongue and nail it to the front door of his house so "nobody in the neighbourhood was going to speak out"; move a popular general to a distant ambassadorship rather than allow the political threat to consolidate.

The stage-purge video

Kiriakou reaches for the freely available footage of the day Saddam took power as the single best summary of the leadership technique. Sitting on stage in a small theatre, cigar in hand, Saddam announced that "a plot against the revolution" had been uncovered among the assembled generals. One by one he read names; each general stood, protested his innocence, and was walked out by Saddam's brother Barzan Al-Tikriti to the sound of a gunshot. The pattern broke only when one named general jumped up and confessed to the (non-existent) plot outright. Roughly a dozen generals were killed that day. There had been no plot; the pattern of terror it produced, Kiriakou says, was the point: "it so cowed them that nobody dared to challenge Saddam."

The Umrah

Kiriakou uses one story as his standing proof that the claimed Saddam,al-Qaeda link was invented rather than merely overstated: he says he never encountered a CIA officer who believed in it, and that Osama bin Laden hated Saddam as much as he hated the United States. The story he tells is of Saddam travelling to Mecca with his vice president, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, to perform the Umrah, the minor pilgrimage, in 1988 or 1989. Saddam did not know the prayers, having never learned them. Al-Douri, who was devout, knelt behind him and whispered them quietly so that Saddam could say them more loudly and look as though he knew what he was doing. "There was nothing Muslim about Saddam Hussein."

Nothing Muslim about him

Kiriakou's account of why the CIA's Iraq and al-Qaeda specialists rejected the connection begins with Saddam's own religiosity. Everyone inside the agency who knew anything about Iraq, al-Qaeda and Islam "to a man would have said there's literally nothing Muslim about Saddam Hussein."

His illustration is the pilgrimage. Saddam famously made the umra, the minor pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, in either 1987 or 1988, travelling with the vice-president of Iraq, Izzat Ibrahim, a pious Sufi Muslim. Saddam did not know the prayers. When they went to the Kaaba to pray, Ibrahim knelt just behind him and whispered the prayers so that Saddam could repeat them aloud and appear to know what he was doing.

Kiriakou adds the other half of the argument: Osama bin Laden hated Saddam Hussein at least as much as he hated the United States. "There was no connection there."

The Sunni bulwark, and the analytic line

Kiriakou spent the first seven or eight years of his career as an analyst on Iraq, and describes Saddam, whatever anyone thought of him or his politics, as "literally the only Sunni bulwark against Iran." For a king of Bahrain, an emir of Kuwait or a king of Saudi Arabia with a small population and a fear of Iranian expansionism, the only protection was a Sunni leader in Iraq.

The agency's analytic line followed from that: Iraqis would probably be very happy to see Saddam go, but would also be very happy to see him replaced by a Sunni military junta, no clear person in charge, but a group of Sunni generals who would keep the Iranians off everybody's back while allowing some degree of freedom and respect for human rights. "And that never happened."

Kiriakou as his classified biographer

Saddam Hussein was the subject of John Kiriakou's first job at the CIA. Describing the leadership profiling work in 2026, he put it plainly: "My job at the agency when I first got hired was uh to be essentially Saddam Hussein's classified biographer for the intelligence community. His His classified psychological biographer." The output went to the president, vice president, national security advisor and the secretaries of state and defense before any meeting with a foreign leader, and was produced with "a team of psychiatrists, psychologists, and anthropologists."

See also

- Norman Schwarzkopf
- Kuwait oil fires
- Ali Hassan al-Majid
- 1993 Bush Kuwait assassination plot
- April Glaspie
- Uday Hussein
- Hussein Kamel
- George Tenet
- John Kiriakou
