What ‘High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam’ Gets Right — and Where It Takes Liberties

Some stories refuse to stay on the page. The Hollywood Reporter’s Beyond the Book column explores what happens when books make the leap to screen and beyond — unpacking what stayed, changed, how it was done and why it matters with the creatives who made it. 

In 2016, former CIA analyst John Nixon published an unusually rare look into the operations of a U.S. mission that, for nearly a decade, many Americans had only understood largely through headlines. Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein, published in 2016 by Blue Rider Press, offered direct insight into the capture and interrogation of the Iraqi president and dictator, more than a decade after President George W. Bush deployed upwards of 250,000 troops to the West Asian country. 

Nixon would be part of the second round of analysts who went to Iraq, the result of “people starting to realize, as Saddam hadn’t been found, that we were going to be there longer than we originally thought. Some of the people that had gone over there needed to come back because they only signed up for, say, 90 days,” he recalls to The Hollywood Reporter. So he would volunteer, a choice that would lead to him becoming the first U.S. agent to directly interrogate the Iraqi leader. 

Nixon’s 240-page memoir details not only his life, but his role during the early, bloody months of that invasion, where the CIA and the Bush administration collaborated and diverged in their analysis of Hussein, and what those first conversations with the late Iraqi leader revealed — versus the public narratives coming out of the U.S. via the administration and its various defense and intelligence agencies. 

It would be a decade and a half before Nixon shared his experience on the page. But it would take significantly less time for Hollywood to latch on to it, with the rights to his memoir selling in 2017. The story was first imagined in 2018 by producers as a movie, before COVID scrambled the film industry pausing the project. 

“It was shortly after the pandemic was over that the producers came to me and said, ‘We think this would work really well as a mini or limited series,’” Nixon recalls, noting he had zero hesitations about the shift. “I had been thinking the same thing at that time in the back of my head. Everybody seemed to be turning towards streaming services. And watching the entire series now, I couldn’t be happier with the way it has turned out. It would have been a real challenge to get all that stuff into two hours.”

After an eight-year journey to the screen, the adaptation — created by Daniel Stiepleman and Jonathan Wakeham — has emerged as the eight-part TNT series High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam. Starring Joel Kinnaman as Nixon and Waleed Zuaiter as Hussein, the show traces Nixon’s navigation of the CIA, the Bush admin, the stories fed to the public, and the real yet hidden realities behind the capture of Hussein two years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The U.S. occupation eventually toppled Hussein’s almost 25-year regime, but it sparked a series of conflicts resulting in the direct and indirect deaths of at least several hundred thousand Iraqis while destabilizing the country and surrounding region for two decades.

Arriving 25 years after the 9/11 attacks, High Value Target may be one of the closest looks into the incitement and mechanization of the invasion, as well as the capabilities and limitations of one of the most powerful agencies within the American government. 

Ahead of debuting its first two hours this past Sunday, and Monday’s third episode, which ends in the capture of Hussein by U.S. forces, THR spoke to Nixon about what was behind his decision to tell this story, how he worked with Hollywood creatives past and present to bring it to the screen, the lessons learned from a deadly U.S. occupation, and how a scripted drama based on real-events — at times obscured from the American public by their own government — approaches adapting the truth.

You published your memoir 10 to 15 years after the inciting incident. How did you navigate what to share, what to tell, what to keep for a published accounting? 

My guiding principle in all of this was to tell the truth and not to have some sort of political spin or way of making any particular entity look better than another. I wanted to give an accurate accounting of what transpired and certainly the things that we [Hussein and Nixon] talked about. Some people think I’m far too critical of the agency in my book, but I have very mixed feelings about the agency. It was the best job I ever had. I got to do things that I couldn’t have done anywhere else. On the other hand, there were times when I found it was very stifling and frustrating. Dealing with some of the personalities could be very, very difficult. I put some of that in the book. But I wanted to mostly correct some of the things I had been hearing in the media about what Saddam said while he was in captivity because they were incorrect up to that point. Also, I wanted to give people a taste of what it’s like working for the CIA. Everybody has all these crazy ideas about what it is we can do and can’t do, and I thought that this would be something where a little honesty might be the best policy.

In what capacity were you involved in bringing this to the screen? How did you consult on this project? 

I worked very closely with Daniel Stiepleman. We had an initial session, which back then was Alexander Rodnyansky, Michael Kupisk, the first director, Ziad Doueiri, and Daniel. We met in Washington, and they asked me a lot of questions. Then we went through what the script was going to look like overall. That first script basically stayed, for the most part, intact. There were some changes over time, but usually they would contact me, and I would give them my thoughts. This is over a period of eight years, so there weren’t really any surprises in there for me. The script had gone through many revisions, as is usual in any sort of production, but it’s pretty close to the way that we started out. In the early drafts, some of it was very Saddam-centric, and over time they wanted to make me more of the central character. But it was really a matter of minor tweaks here and there. It wasn’t any major revision or a complete gutting of the script.

How accurately do you feel the series tells the story in your memoir but also your wider, general experience? 

When they started depicting my wife and her illness, that just blew me away. I wasn’t expecting that. It’s back at a time before the disease had taken over our lives, so it was very moving to watch. The interplay between me and Saddam was really well done. I did a lot of Zoom calls with Joel. I was there out in Cairo with him during some of the filming. He was like a sponge and had a zillion questions. With the time difference, he’d be going strong. I’d be [like] “No more. We can pick this up tomorrow.“ (Laughs.) But he was great. And Waleed — let me preface it by saying this: there are scenes where it’s clearly being dramatized. For example, Saddam didn’t yell a lot. He yells in this series, but he never really yelled a whole lot. He kept his cool because that was a losing-control thing. When I say goodbye to Saddam at the end, it didn’t exactly occur in the courtyard with the garden where he’s tending to his plant. 

But when I said those words, that’s what I said, and what he said to me was what he said. There was a little bit more to it, but the spirit is there. There’s a scene where Joel [as me] is talking to Saddam, and Waleed takes the hood that he has to wear when he’s leaving the cell, and he puts it on his lap, and starts folding it. I was like, “Yes, that is it exactly.” It gave me goosebumps watching it. Both the actors did a really great job. Rebecca Night, who plays my wife [Rebecca], and Lena Góra — Polly — were really great. The whole cast did a fabulous job. I really liked the Jerry character [Ewan Miller]. I think Jerry is a composite of people I knew out there. I spoke with one of the producers last night and told them what a great job [and] a triumph this has been. As Joel recently said, this was one of the most challenging film shoots he’s ever had, and when I was out there, it was a lot, but all told, it really came out well.

In the premiere, we see George W. Bush announce the invasion of Iraq in a scene likely similar to what was happening in homes around the country. How did that scene compare to your actual experience?

At that moment in time, in real life, I was at work. I had something called a PDB, President’s Daily Brief. I had a piece that was going to be given to the president the next day, which means you end up staying at the office well past midnight, usually until about two or three in the morning. So I was at work, as was the entire Iraq team. I would see them in the hallway. We were talking about it; it was a surreal moment, but there weren’t really too many surprises. From the analyst’s viewpoint, things went as we thought they would, even with the quickness of the war in the beginning. 

I think where we diverged from what the policymakers were expecting was that we had always said there was going to be a period of intense bloodletting, and once his government was no more, that was not going to be the end of things. That’s where the Bush administration and CIA analysts seemed to depart, and as it turned out, we were right. It was a moment in time where, when we look at things today, you had an administration that wanted to hear what it wanted to hear. It didn’t really believe anything that wasn’t part of its preconceived worldview, and that preconceived worldview was very off, very skewed. No matter what we tried to do, we couldn’t really get them to understand. Then we embarked on this war that lasted for years and years.

Watching that national address as a young person, I remember feeling, consciously for maybe the first time, that something bad was going to happen, as well as the fear that no one was going to stop it. In the first three episodes, we see some of that early back-and-forth between you, other agents, and the agency. Was there ever a feeling from within that this could be stopped?  

I think we had a general feeling that no matter what we said, this was going to happen, and so our job was to serve the President of the United States and give him support. This was the policy, the plan of action that he had decided upon, and despite our misgivings, we did our best to help him. We’re not a policy-prescriptive organization, and I, as an analyst, always tried to stay away from it whenever anybody would say to me, “Well, what do you think? What should we do?” I never felt comfortable with that question. I thought Saddam had driven the country into the ground. Iraq should be like the Switzerland of the Middle East, and yet it’s this basket case of a country, so maybe this is going to happen whether we like it or not. Maybe if it does happen, and they get new leadership, things can turn around. 

I could not have been more wrong. I really started to see that after the invasion happened, when the assassinations were taking place in Baghdad, and the violence didn’t seem to be subsiding, but was getting worse. That went throughout the summer, and that was around the time that I volunteered to go. I was told that I was going to be the HVT1 [High Value Target #1] analyst, part of the team that’s looking for where Saddam was. I was thrilled with that. This is exactly in my wheelhouse. This is exactly what I want to be doing over there. As I got there, I just saw things were getting worse, and how chaotic things were. I couldn’t believe that six, seven months down the road we were still dealing with some of these issues, and that it wasn’t getting better.

In the series, Joel Kinnaman narrates your development of those feelings. In real life, when did things change for you about going in?  

When I finally did get to meet Saddam. We caught him, and I had an initial session with him because I was brought out to identify and make sure that it was him. Then I found out we were going to debrief him, and I was going to be part of the team that was doing that. Over the course of that time, it was an eye-opening experience for me in the sense that I began to learn things that really called into question some of our justifications for the war. This was a process. It would be one thing if it stopped there, but it has gone on for me for the past 23 years because I still find him to be endlessly fascinating. 

I’m actually currently working on a biography of him. The thing is, the more I’ve learned about him, his career and life, especially the things that I didn’t know beforehand, I feel like we never really knew who this guy was. We had developed this caricature of a person that we believed to be true, and a lot of it was false. A lot of it was information fed to us by people knowing it was false, but trying to get us to adopt a course of action. There are a lot of things that never even entered my mind — that it could have been like this — and if I take all of those things, I come away looking at him in a very different manner today than I did back in 2000 or 2002.

Joel Kinnaman’s version of you talks about Iraq in a way we weren’t really hearing or seeing from U.S. public officials in 2003. You discuss a reckless approach to the invasion, doing harm to the country, its people, its infrastructure. There’s a line where you openly question whether there are weapons of mass destruction. How accurate is that portrayal to what you knew and felt at the time versus what the show needed to do to set up the narrative between you and Hussein? 

It’s fairly accurate. I was a believer in WMD, but I knew that the evidence was not necessarily overwhelming. It certainly wasn’t as overwhelming as the administration was making it out to be. But I was one of these people who was like, he used these weapons on his own, on the Kurds. He used this in the Iran-Iraq War, and so, therefore, there’s probably a good chance. Subsequently, I learned that these issues are so much more complex. It is not a black-and-white thing, and as I told President Bush to his face once, “This is a region that defies placing things in nice, neat boxes.” So I think that the arc of the story is accurate in the series. There’s a scene where I’m walking through Abu Ghraib, and there are things that are going on there that I was jolted by. I never saw anything like that. I did see questionable things; I did see things that made me say, “What the hell’s going on here?” Then when the story broke, I was like, “That’s what that meant.” So it’s an accurate depiction, if maybe a little dramatized. 

But the spirit is there, and by the end of my time there, and certainly by today, I would say that if you hear somebody saying, “Oh, well, he was going to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction program,” know one thing: there is absolutely no evidence for that whatsoever. Saddam told the CIA the same thing that he told the FBI, and the FBI has said, “He was going to reconstitute his weapons program.” We said, “No, he wasn’t. There is no evidence other than a statement he made where he said, ‘I will do what I have to do to protect my country.’” The FBI chose to interpret that as an incriminating statement, like if he were in a court of law. Whereas the CIA was like, “It’s a statement. It could mean anything.“ Quite frankly, Saddam said that about a lot of things. But when you actually look at what steps he was taking to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction program after the sanctions were lifted, there is absolutely zero evidence.

With Monday’s episode, the show gets into U.S. torture, something that was controversial even at the time it was happening. We not only see you push back against that, but what feels like maybe a tamer version of at least some of what was reported to be happening. Can you talk about how you helped inform the show’s illustration of CIA interrogation and frame the torture we see up to this point? 

In graduate school, I did some work on this issue, and when I found out that they were using something called “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,” and that these had been used in Afghanistan, I said to them, “What does that entail?” They told me. I said, “What? Torture doesn’t work.” And someone said, “Oh no, no, no! These things are very effective.” I’m like, if you start ripping out my fingernails, I’ll tell you anything you want to hear just to get you to stop. At one point, they said to me that they were going to use [these techniques] on Saddam — strip him naked, throw water on him, and do various other things. I was like, what? I said, “You can’t do that,” and they were like, “We’re going to do this.” I was instantly thinking I cannot be a part of this. Over the course of the next hour, I was struggling because I didn’t want to leave, but there was no way I was doing that. Fortunately, we got word that it wasn’t [happening]. He was going to be treated under Geneva Convention rules, and I was like, thank God. 

The way it’s depicted in the limited series, when I walk in and see Mohammed Ibrahim Omar al-Muzwit getting an electric charge to his back, I never saw anybody being treated in such a manner, but if I had, my reaction would have been the same as Joel’s in that scene. I did a lot of graduate work in Vietnam. Torture was used in those instances, and everything that I had read up until that point said that this tool does not work. So I was quite surprised when I learned the full extent of what was being done. I was even more surprised when I first got there and learned that they were using Abu Ghraib as a detention center, because Abu Ghraib was a symbol of the brutality and cruelty of the Saddam Hussein regime. We all knew it, and we all agreed about this in intelligence, so I could not believe that we were now identifying ourselves, the occupiers, with this building to the Iraqi public. This should have been the first building that was torn down, and instead we were using it to torture people. 

In episode three, we also see you and other members of a military team capture and identify Saddam. Can you talk about that sequence, as, like other parts of the series, is potentially one of the closest looks Americans will get to what happened there?

I was not there at the capture. I was at the Baghdad station, which was the CIA’s offices. But I was privy to what was happening that night. We were all sitting around waiting to hear. Earlier that day, I’d been following the fact that the CIA had been big advocates for going after the bodyguards and the people surrounding Saddam that he absolutely needed to have with him in order to survive and to remain on the run — Mohammed Ibrahim Muhammad Muslet, the guy who led them to Saddam; he was number one on our target list. So I knew what that whole chain of events was happening, and I was getting the download of what transpired that night. I wasn’t there, but I did talk to people who were there the next day, and that is accurate, very accurate. Other than the fact that I’m in it, it’s a very accurate depiction of what transpired.

New episodes of High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam will premiere on subsequent Sunday and Monday evenings at 9 p.m. ET/PT, with the finale on Sunday, October 4 on TNT.