WASHINGTON - After confessing to slaughtering 180,000 Kurds and plotting to build a doomsday nuke, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was so upset when his FBI interrogator left for home that he cried like a baby.
FBI Special Agent George Piro whipped out two Cuban Cohibas - Saddam's favorite cigar - and they smoked on the patio behind his cell at Baghdad's airport.
"When we were saying bye, he started to tear up," Piro recalled in the new book "The Terrorist Watch: Inside the Desperate Race to Stop the Next Attack."
The self-effacing G-man was hardly surprised - he had spent nearly a year carefully becoming Saddam's best friend in a successful ploy to extract confessions from the notorious brute.
Piro's inside account of spending up to seven hours a day, every day, for eight months with Saddam is revealed in the new book by journalist Ronald Kessler.
Piro, then 36, began grilling Saddam in early 2004.
Instead of bright lights, loud music or waterboarding, the Beirut-born Arabic speaker - who immigrated to the U.S. as a teen - built a rapport with the dictator nabbed in a spider hole. He treated him with respect and took care of his every need.
On his birthday, Piro showed Saddam news clippings showing that Iraqis no longer celebrated the date. But then the agent gave him baklava Piro's Lebanese mother sent him in Baghdad.
They talked about sports and Saddam's pulp novels, and soon the despot was spilling his guts over thick cups of Folger's.
Saddam never used body doubles - as was widely believed - because no one could "play" him, Piro quoted Saddam as saying.
He admired Americans, particularly ex-Presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan - but loathed the two Bushes he fought wars with.
The "Butcher of Baghdad" also confessed he ordered Kurdish civilians gassed and slaughtered thousands more, their remains left in mass graves.
Until 9/11, Saddam thought UN sanctions would go away and he could make a nuclear bomb. His prewar weapons of mass destruction deceptions were a ruse to convince Iran - whom he feared - that he had an arsenal.
Kessler said Saddam trusted Piro more than his own monstrous sons Uday and Qusay, for whom he had little love before G.I.s gunned them down.
In more human moments, Saddam tried to hit on a "cute" American nurse. And despite praying and reading the Koran, he had a fondness for whiskey and cigars.
jmeek@nydailynews.com
