BAGHDAD – After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein stayed in Baghdad until he saw "the city was about to fall." Months later, he was caught hiding at the same farm where he had fled in 1959 after taking part in an attempt to kill the country's prime minister.

Unclassified FBI interviews conducted during his incarceration at a U.S. detention center offered new details Thursday about the late Iraqi dictator's life on the run – both before and after he was ousted.

Hussein was captured by American soldiers on Dec. 13, 2003, just over eight months after his regime was toppled by a U.S.-led invasion. An Iraqi tribunal convicted him of crimes against humanity, and he was hanged at the end of 2006.

He said he was never in the Baghdad neighborhood that was bombed on March 19, 2003, in an attempt to kill him at the start of the war. The U.S. military had received a tip that he was hiding there.

Hussein made his last public appearance in Azamiyah on April 9, 2003, the day a bronze statue of him was brought down in a central Baghdad square in what became the defining image of his overthrow.

But, he said, he stayed in Baghdad until April 10 or 11, when "it appeared that the city was about to fall."

Then he fled the capital, gradually dismissing bodyguards along the way to avoid attracting attention, telling them they had done their duty.

The new details were among more than 100 pages of notes written by George Piro, an FBI special agent who interviewed Hussein after he was found huddling in a "spider hole" on a farm near his hometown of Tikrit, 80 miles north of Baghdad.

The notes of the FBI interviews were made public Wednesday by the National Security Archive, a nongovernmental research institute.

Hussein said the farm was where he took refuge after participating 44 years earlier in a failed assassination attempt against then-Prime Minister Abdul-Karim Qassim.

Hussein denied the widespread belief that he used body doubles to avoid detection.

Instead, he said, he evaded enemies by using the telephone just twice in more than a decade and constantly moving from one dwelling to another. He communicated mainly through couriers or met personally with officials.

In interviews between February and June 2004, Hussein also told Piro that he falsely allowed the world to believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction because he feared revealing his weakness to Iran, which Iraq fought in a ruinous, eight-year war in the 1980s that involved chemical weapons.

Hussein denied having unconventional weapons before the U.S. invasion but refused to allow U.N. inspectors to search his country from 1998 until 2002. The inspectors returned to the weapons hunt in November 2002 but still complained that Iraq was not cooperating.

"By God, if I had such weapons, I would have used them in the fight against the United States," he told Piro.

Then-President George W. Bush justified the invasion of Iraq in large part on the assertion that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and could provide them to terrorists. No such weapons have been found.

Hussein told Piro he had "miscalculated" Bush's intentions and expected only a limited U.S. attack, which he said Iraq could have absorbed.

In the interviews, Hussein dismissed Osama bin Laden as a "zealot" and said he never met the al-Qaeda leader. He said the Iraqi government did not cooperate with the terrorist group against the U.S.

Kim Gamel,

The Associated Press

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