WASHINGTON, July 2 The farm where Saddam Hussein hid from US forces before he was captured in December 2003 was familiar ground for the Iraqi dictator it was the same place, he told an FBI agent, where he sought refuge 44 years earlier after a failed attempt to kill the then-Iraqi president, Abdul Karim Qassem.

Saddam also told the US official that he had used telephones only twice in 14 years, and moved his locations daily.

Those details are among more than 100 pages of notes written by George Piro, a FBI special agent who interviewed Saddam. The notes of the FBI interviews were made public by the National Security Archive, a non-governmental research institute.

Saddam told Piro that instead of relying on phones, he communicated through the use of couriers or met his officials personally. “He was very aware of the United States' significant technological capabilities,” the agent wrote in notes after one interview.

The former Iraqi dictator was interviewed after his capture, which came nine months after the US and its allies invaded Iraq in March 2003. Saddam was executed by hanging on orders of the Iraqi government in December 2006.

In a series of interviews between February and June of 2004, Saddam 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, the neighbour he considered a bigger threat than the US.

Saddam denied having unconventional weapons before the US invasion of Iraq, but refused to allow UN inspectors to search his country from 1998 to 2002. The inspectors returned to the weapons hunt in November 2002 but still complained that Iraq wasn't cooperating.

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

In the interviews, Saddam also dismissed Osama bin Laden as a “zealot”, said he had never personally met the Al Qaeda leader and that the Iraqi government did not cooperate with the terrorist group against the US.—AP