Hussein said he felt so vulnerable to the perceived threat from "fanatic" leaders in Tehran that he would have been prepared to seek a "security agreement with the United States to protect it [Iraq] from threats in the region."

President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq six years ago on the grounds that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed a threat to international security. Administration officials at the time also strongly suggested that Iraq had significant links to al-Qaeda, which launched the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

Hussein, who during the interviews was often defiant and boastful, at one point wistfully acknowledged that he should have permitted the United Nations to witness the destruction of Iraq's weapons stockpile after the first Persian Gulf War in 1991.

The FBI summaries of the interviews - 20 formal interrogations and five "casual conversations" in 2004 - were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive, an independent nongovernmental research institute, and posted on its Web site yesterday. The detailed accounts of the interviews were released with few deletions, though one, a last formal interview on May 1, 2004, was completely redacted.

Thomas Blanton, director of the archive, said he could conceive of no possible national security reason to keep Hussein's conversations with the FBI secret at this point. An FBI spokesman, Paul Bresson, said he could not immediately explain the reason for the redactions.

The 20 formal interviews took place in 2004, between Feb. 7 and May 1, followed by the casual conversations between May 10 and June 28. Hussein was later transferred to Iraqi custody, and hanged in November 2006.

The formal interviews covered Hussein's rise to power, the Kuwait invasion, and Hussein's crackdown on the Shiite uprising in extensive detail, while the subject of the weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda were raised in the casual conversations, after the formal interviews were completed. Blanton said this suggested that the FBI received new orders from Washington to delve into topics of intense interest to Bush administration officials.

The FBI spokesman could not immediately explain why those subjects were raised in the later casual meetings. In an interview last year on CBS's 60 Minutes, the agent who conducted the interviews - George Piro - said he purposely put Hussein's back against the wall to "psychologically to tell him that his back was against the wall," but he did not use coercive interrogation techniques because "it's against FBI policy." The interviews released yesterday do not suggest any use of coercive techniques.

During the interviews, Piro, who conducted the interview in Arabic, often appeared to challenge Hussein's accounting of events, citing facts that countered his recollections. He even forced Hussein to watch a graphic British documentary on his treatment of the Shiites, though that did not appear to shake him.

At one point, Hussein dismissed as a fantasy the many intelligence reports that he used a body double to elude assassination. "This is movie magic, not reality," he said with a laugh. Instead, he said, he had used a phone only twice since 1990 and rarely slept in the same location two days in a row.

Hussein's fear of Iran, which he said he considered a greater threat than the United States, featured prominently in the discussion over weapons of mass destruction. Iran and Iraq had fought a grinding eight-year war in the 1980s, and Hussein said he was convinced Iran was trying to annex southern Iraq - which is largely Shiite. "Saddam viewed the other countries in the Middle East as weak and could not defend themselves or Iraq from an attack from Iran," Piro recounted in his summary of a June 11, 2004, conversation.

"The threat from Iran was the major factor as to why he did not allow the return of U.N. inspectors," Piro wrote. "Saddam stated he was more concerned about Iran discovering Iraq's weaknesses and vulnerabilities than the repercussions of the United States for his refusal to allow U.N. inspectors back into Iraq."