The hunt for Saddam Hussein is coming to television in High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam, a new eight-part political thriller inspired by CIA analyst John Nixon’s memoir Debriefing the President. TNT will premiere the limited series on September 13, bringing one of the most consequential intelligence operations of the Iraq War to the screen.
Joel Kinnaman stars as Nixon, the CIA officer who became the first American intelligence operative to interrogate Saddam Hussein following the Iraqi leader’s capture in December 2003. Waleed Zuaiter, known for Baghdad Central, plays Hussein, setting up the series around the tense and psychologically charged meetings between the two men.
The drama follows the massive manhunt that unfolded after the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Hussein’s removal from power. With a $25 million bounty on his head, American forces and intelligence officers spent months searching for the former dictator before finally locating him near Tikrit.
But capturing Hussein was only the beginning. Nixon’s interrogation became a critical effort to understand the Iraqi regime, its weapons programs and the intelligence surrounding the search for weapons of mass destruction.
High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam looks set to focus less on conventional battlefield action and more on the intelligence war, political pressure and psychological confrontation surrounding Hussein’s capture.
With Kinnaman and Zuaiter at the center, the series promises a tense historical thriller built around one of the most extraordinary interrogations in recent American history.
