"Coll, an American journalist and author, fought a legal battle to gain access to a tranche of the material which is now the basis for his book, The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq.<p>It is a tale of mutual misunderstanding, often told from a western perspective but now, for the first time in depth, from Saddam’s idiosyncratic point of view. The Iraqi dictator believed the CIA to be all-knowing and all-powerful, so assumed George W Bush’s administration knew very well Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) left after Saddam ordered their destruction in the 1990s.<p>The threatening rhetoric coming out of Washington was just propaganda, Saddam concluded, as he kept up a pretense of possessing WMD to deter his enemies, Iran in particular.<p>“He was trying to signal his pride and his fear of humiliation and of vulnerability to both internal attacks and potentially external attacks,” Coll said.<p>In apparent moments of doubt, Saddam would occasionally buttonhole ministers to ask if they had hidden any remnants of the nuclear, chemical or biological programmes he started.<p>“Do we have any programmes going on that I don’t know about?” he demanded to know from his deputy prime minister in 1998. He was reassured that everything had been dismantled. "<p>Unbelievable!