From a Sunday NY Times article disclosing a classified U.S. military account of the Iraq War :
The Iraqi dictator was so secretive and kept information so compartmentalized that his top military leaders were stunned when he told them three months before the war that he had no weapons of mass destruction, and they were demoralized because they had counted on hidden stocks of poison gas or germ weapons for the nation’s defense.
Worth noting that even Saddam’s top military leaders were convinced he had WMD until shortly before the war.