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Declassified: Untold Stories of American Spies

Eric Maddox was featured on this eight-part CNN Original Series. Each episode features a newly declassified mission told first-hand by the agents who lived it, providing viewers with unprecedented access to the riveting and secret world of espionage.

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The key to the Iraq War’s biggest triumph wasn’t firepower or technology or ‘enhanced’ interrogation. It was more personal than that.

Eric Maddox is famously known as the man whose investigatory techniques were most responsible for the 2003 capture of Saddam Hussein in war-torn Iraq. But he is much more than that. Let’s dig beneath the surface to discover the core of this warrior’s incomparable life-force.

A U.S. Veteran that helped with the capture of Saddam Hussein shares insight into the process of tracking down the warlord. Eric Maddox contributed greatly to the interrogation process that led to the capture of Saddam Hussein.

“The prisoners weren’t opening up,” Maddox said. “I told myself, ‘If I am going to get these prisoners to open up, I’ve got to find a way to connect with them, to communicate with them.’”

“You’re Muhammad Ibrahim,” I said numbly, without even considering my words. “I’ve been waiting to meet you.”

He said something in Arabic. The guard outside the cell door translated for me. “He says that you are the interrogator in the blue shirt.”

Iraq’s government had just been overturned when a U.S. Army staff sergeant stepped into an interrogation room. He faced a prisoner in Iraq. The year was 2003; it was December, five years ago. And as the interrogator recounts it, he began the conversation this way.

Hosted by former U.S. Congressman Mike Rogers, also the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, each episode features a newly declassified mission told first-hand by the agents who lived it, providing viewers with unprecedented access to the riveting and secret world of espionage.

“Mission: Black List #1” was released Dec. 13, 2008, to coincide with the fifth anniversary of Saddam Hussein”s capture. Prior to this, the real story of the manhunt, and the personnel involved had not been revealed to the public. In the book, Staff Sergeant Eric Maddox pulls back the curtain to reveal a detailed, day-by-day account of the five-month, comprehensive search for Saddam.

“As a military interrogator in the Iraqi backwater of Tikrit, Maddox was forced to develop his own methods of getting information from the locals after the techniques he’d learned in the army failed miserably.

But by going against what the military had taught him, Maddox secured the ultimate success and got the information that led U.S. troops to capture Hussein in December 2003.”

“In May 2013, Maddox keynoted a Young President’s Organization (YPO) event at the Charles F. Knight Executive Education & Conference Center (an event attended by the dean). He recounted the five-month period in 2003 when he – as part of the Joint Special Operations Task Force – conducted more than 300 interrogations in Iraq, zeroing in on Hussein’s inner circle. Just hours before he left the country, Maddox pinpointed Hussein’s location in Takrit. The official announcement shocked the world: “Ladies and gentlemen, we got him!”

(CNN)Mind games can be stealthy weapons. Perhaps no one knows this better than Eric Maddox.

Today, Maddox is an independent business consultant. But more than a decade ago, he was the U.S. Army interrogator who used mind games to find the most sought-after fugitive of the Iraq War — Saddam Hussein.

In 2003, U.S. forces had invaded Iraq…..

WASHINGTON – He is the man who tracked down the Ace of Spades: Saddam Hussein, the top card in the U.S. military’s deck of cards, found crouching like a mole in a darkened spider hole under a trap door at the back of a farm in Tikrit.

For the first time since the Army’s 4th Infantry Division captured Saddam in a dramatic raid on Dec. 13, 2003, the U.S. intelligence officer who hunted him down has come forward with his story.