Most C.I.A. memoirs are terrible - defensive, jingoistic and worst of all, tedious. Others are doomed by the C.I.A.'s heavy-handed and mandatory censorship.
There are exceptions, and that list includes the refreshingly candid “Debriefing the President：The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein” by John Nixon.
Mr. Nixon, the first C.I.A. officer to interrogate Hussein after his capture in December 2003, reveals gobsmacking facts about that deposed Iraqi leader that raise new questions about why the United States bothered to invade Iraq to oust him. These details will likely appall Americans who have watched their nation's blood and treasure wasted in Iraq ever since.
More broadly, Mr. Nixon offers a stinging indictment of the C.I.A. and what he sees as the agency's dysfunctional process for providing intelligence to the president and other policy makers. The agency, he writes, is so eager to please the president - any president - that it will almost always give him the answers he wants to hear.
Mr. Nixon's book comes at an extraordinary moment, when President-elect Donald J. Trump is already at war with the C.I.A. He has attacked the C.I.A.'s assessment that Russia intervention in the 2016 presidential election to help his candidacy, and he has cited the agency's failures on prewar intelligence on Iraq as an example of how the C.I.A. is often wrong.
“Debriefing the President” will add fuel to the fire of the Trump-led criticism. It will also send a chilling warning to anyone counting on the C.I.A. to stand up to Mr. Trump once he is in office.
Mr. Nixon had been preparing for his interrogation of Hussein for years before he ever met him. Mr. Nixon, 55, did graduate work at New York University and Georgetown University. where he wrote about Hussein in his master's thesis. He joined the C.I.A. in 1998, and was immediately assigned to be a “leadership analyst” on Iraq, which meant that his job was the full-time study of Hussein.
Mr. Nixon was an analyst in Iraq when the United States military captured Hussein, and he was asked to identify him so the Americans could be certain they had the right man. Mr. Nixon confirmed Hussein's identity by checking for a tribal tattoo on the back of his right hand and a scar from a 1959 bullet wound.
Once he began debriefing Hussein, though, Mr. Nixon realized that much of what he thought he knew about him was wrong.
His most astonishing discovery was that by the time of the United States-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Hussein had turned over the day-to-day running of the Iraqi government to his aides and was spending most of his time writing a novel. Hussein described himself to Mr. Nixon as both president of Iraq and a writer, and complained to Mr. Nixon that the United States military had taken away his writing materials, preventing him from finishing his book. Hussein was certainly a brutal dictator, but the man described by Mr. Nixon was not on a mission to blow up the world, as George W. Bush's administration had claimed to justify the invasion.
“Was Saddam worth removing from power?” Mr. Nixon asks. “I can speak only for myself when I say that the answer must be no. Saddam was busy writing novels in 2003. He was no longer running the government.” Strikingly, Mr. Nixon says that the C.I.A. had some evidence that this was the case before the invasion, but that “it was never relayed to policy makers and emerged only after the war.” By 2003, Mr. Nixon writes, Hussein's disengagement meant that he “appeared to be as clueless about what was happening inside Iraq as his British and American enemies were.”
With Hussein increasingly detached, Mr. Nixon says that by 2003 Iraqi foreign policy decision-making had fallen to his lieutenants, led by the “unimaginative and combative” Iraqi vice president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, who repeatedly missed opportunities to break Iraq's international isolation.”
