By Allan Lengel
FBI agent George Piro says panic set in when he got a phone call from the bureau on Christmas Eve in 2003 saying that he’d been picked to interrogate Saddam Hussein on behalf of the FBI.
“It was terrifying to know that now I was going to be interrogating somebody that was on the world stage for so many years. It seemed such a significant responsibility on behalf of the FBI,” Piro, who retired last year from the FBI as head of the Miami office, tells Peter Bergen, CNN’s national security analyst. “I went to Barnes & Noble and bought two books on Saddam Hussein so I could start improving my understanding of who he was and all the things that were going to be important in developing an interrogation strategy.”
Piro, a Lebanese American who is now working on a book on his experience with the Iraqi dictator, tells Bergen he built a rapport with Hussein and eventually met with him five to seven hours a day; a couple of hours in the morning, a couple of hours in the afternoon and then a formal interrogation session or two a week.
“At my first meeting with Saddam, within 30 seconds, he knew two things about me. I told him my name was George Piro and that I was in charge, and he immediately said, ‘You’re Lebanese.’ I told him my parents were Lebanese, and then he said, ‘You’re Christian.’ I asked him if that was a problem, and he said absolutely not. He loved the Lebanese people. Lebanese people loved him. And I was like, ‘Well, great. We’re going to get along wonderfully.’ (Saddam was a Sunni Muslim, while most Iraqis are Shia Muslims.)”
Click here to read the full interview.
Watch a 2008 interview with Piro with 60 Minutes
