SADDAM HUSSEIN likes corn chips, ping-pong and Ronald Reagan, and dreams of making a comeback in Iraq, even though he is reduced to washing his underpants in his prison sink, his American guards revealed yesterday.

Five returned Pennsylvania National Guardsmen who supervised Saddam in jail said that the accused war criminal writes poetry, chats about women and sometimes dances alone in his cell.

He gets Cuban cigars in Red Cross packages from his daughters in Jordan and shares them with his captors. He once told them a joke about three men and a sheep.

Convinced that he is still President, Saddam invited the soldiers to visit Iraq once he is acquitted and back in power, they told GQ magazine with permission from the US military. “I’ll show you all around my country; you are like sons to me,” he said. “It’s not beautiful now, but it will be when I’m back in charge.”

Jesse Dawson, 25, who left his job at a bottling plant to serve in Iraq, said: “He was a very bad man, but when we had him, he was also a broken man.”

His testimony reveals details about Saddam’s escape at the start of the war and his capture in a spiderhole near his hometown of Tikrit.

Saddam told his captors that when the bombing of Baghdad began, on March 20, 2003, he tried to flee his palace in a taxi, but the bombers attacked the palace to which he was fleeing.

“America, they dumb,” he told the soldiers. “They bomb wrong palace.”

He said that he took refuge in the spiderhole when he was warned that troops were close. Only one person knew that he was down there and he turned him in. “One day he said, ‘Do you know Judas?’ ” recalled Sean O’Shea, 19, who joined the National Guard to pay for a college education. “He compared himself to Jesus, how Judas told on Jesus. He was like, ‘That’s how it was for me’.”

The guardsmen were under orders not to initiate conversation but to be civil if he did so, without revealing any information about their personal lives. Although apprehensive at first, they soon warmed to Saddam, who greeted them in English.

Specialist O’Shea, who guarded him for 298 days, wrote in his diary: “Part of me wanted to punch him in the face. Another part wanted to know what was going on in his head.”

Saddam was a “clean freak” who scrubbed himself after shaking anyone’s hand (although waiting until the person left the cell) and cleaned his meal trays and all the plastic cutlery with baby wipes. “He had germophobia, or whatever,” Specialist Dawson said.

Saddam was under surveillance every second. When he went to the lavatory in his cell, he put a red plastic chair in front of him and draped it with a towel for privacy.

Once he slipped in the shower and had to be almost carried back to his cell, but the soldiers felt that he was “pretty solid for an old guy”. They were impressed by his refusal of a bullet-proof vest when bombs or artillery exploded near by. He insisted on having his drinks at room temperature and guzzled family-size bags of Doritos nacho chips. He liked Raisin Bran Crunch cereal, but implored his captors “No Froot Loops!” He saved bread and cereal so that he could feed the birds and ate petals from flowers he grew in the prison. Saddam would also share his poetry with the soldiers, often to their bemusement.

“It was always something like, ‘The sun and the sky and the stars’,” said Specialist Dawson. “And then he’d just sit there, all smiles, and you’re going, ‘Yeah! That’s great!’ ” “Sometimes, when he translated from the Arabic,” recalled Corporal Jonathan “Paco” Reese, 22, “it made no sense to us at all. It would be like, ‘There’s a blender in the street.’ And we’d be like, ‘Beautiful!’ “ Saddam disliked George Bush and his father, who each started a war against him. Speaking of the current President, he told his guards: “He knows I have nothing, no mass weapons. He knows he’ll never find them.”

He was fond of President Reagan and accepted President Clinton. “He’d always be like, ‘Bush is no good,’” Specialist Dawson said. “And then he’d be like, ‘Reagan? Reagan and me, good.’ ”

“And Clinton was all right. He’d say, ‘Cleeenton, he’s OK. The Bush father, son, no good.’” Corporal Reese said.

Toward the end of their assignment in March, however, Saddam was becoming less hostile to the Bushes. “He wanted to be friends with them,” Specialist O’Shea said. “Towards the end, he was saying that he doesn’t hold any hard feelings and he just wanted to talk to Bush, to make peace.”

“Right now, he is lying in his bed, reading. Today, (one of the officers) gave me an article on all of the mass graves and I realized how evil this guy is. But you wouldn’t be able to tell, the way he acts around us.”

“(SADDAM) gave me a cigar and asked me to sit with him. At first he was just saying that it was a lot better to have someone else to smoke and talk with. Then we started talking about the war a little bit which led him to telling me about his sons. He said when someone came to tell him about it, he was proud that they died for their country. As he was talking more about everything he lost, tears were in his eyes. I didn’t know what to say so I said ‘ Sorry for your losses’.”

Times Recommends

• Peter Moore’s family say they can smile again
• Ambition always comes before a fall
• Putin: Russia needs more weapons to counter US