Saddam Hussein deputy leader in a union, and this would drive Saddam to obscurity. Saddam acted to secure his grip on power. He forced the ailing al-Bakr to resign on 16 July 1979, and formally assumed the presidency. Saddam convened an assembly of Ba'ath party leaders on 22 July 1979. During the assembly, which he ordered videotaped, Saddam claimed to have found a fifth column within the Ba'ath Party and directed Muhyi Abdel-Hussein to read out a confession and the names of 68 alleged co-conspirators. These members were labelled "disloyal" and were removed from the room one by one and taken into
Interrogation of Saddam Hussein a few FBI agents who spoke Arabic fluently. Saddam was led to believe that his interrogator was a high-ranking U.S. government official with direct access to U.S. President George W. Bush, when in reality he was in a relatively low-level position at the time. Piro discussed the interrogation process during an interview on the television news magazine "60 Minutes" in January 2008. In an official statement, a senior FBI official in Piro’s chain of command characterized the perceived success of their interrogation of Saddam Hussein as one of the agency's top accomplishments in its 100-year history. In 1957, at the