Saddam Hussein To strengthen his own position within the government, Qasim created an alliance with the Iraqi Communist Party, which was opposed to any notion of pan-Arabism. Later that year, the Ba'ath Party leadership was planning to assassinate Qasim. Saddam was a leading member of the operation. At the time, the Ba'ath Party was more of an ideological experiment than a strong anti-government fighting machine. The majority of its members were either educated professionals or students, and Saddam fit the bill. The choice of Saddam was, according to historian Con Coughlin, "hardly surprising". The idea of assassinating Qasim may have been Nasser's,
Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda link allegations of a cooperative relationship between Saddam's government and Al Qaeda." The study also found "some evidence that there were no operational links" between the two entities. During the Interrogation of Saddam Hussein in the first half of 2004, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Special Agent George Piro had a series of 25 face-to-face meetings with Saddam Hussein, while he was held as a prisoner of war at the United States' military detention facility at Baghdad International Airport. The reports Piro filed during the interrogation process were declassified and released in 2009 under a U.S. Freedom of Information Act request. Hussein