A report in London's The Sunday Times newspaper said that Saddam, in prison in Baghdad, had refused all visits from his family and spoke only to Bushra Khalil, a Lebanese lawyer in her 40s who is now the only woman he meets.
Ms Khalil told the paper of an intimate five-hour interview she conducted with Saddam in his prison within the past few weeks, when he confided that he had no fear of death and appeared to have accepted his fate.
Saddam and seven co-defendants are expected to return to court today for the resumption of his trial on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity which has lasted almost seven months and will now hear the first defence witnesses.
Chief prosecutor Jaafar al-Mussawi said it would be for the court to decide how many of the expected 60 defence witnesses would be heard in the new session.
"It is up to authorities to decide if all the witnesses will be heard in this session," Mr Mussawi said.
Saddam and his co-defendants, including his half-brother and former head of intelligence Barzan al-Tikriti and former vice-president Taha Yassin Ramadan, are on trial for their lives for the murder of 148 Shi'ites from the village of Dujail in the mid-1980s.
In Iraq, hanging is the customary form of capital punishment.
At the end of a previous session, Saddam's lead lawyer, Khalil al-Dulaimi, submitted a list of witnesses for the defence that had been kept secret for their protection.
The coming session will be the 24th since the trial began on October 19, and a US official close to the proceedings said it was expected to finish in the second half of the year.
"I expect a verdict by the end of July or early August," the official said.
"I believe the defence will present its case now and the court will take a recess for about a month."
The past sessions have seen the presentation of documentary evidence linking the defendants to the killings, including audio recordings and signatures on orders for executions.
The trial has been marred by the murder of two defence lawyers and the January resignation of the first chief judge, who critics say failed to clamp down on Saddam and his outbursts within the court.
Ms Khalil is the only woman on the defence team.
She told The Sunday Times that she was taken from Baghdad airport to Saddam's secret prison in a van with blacked-out windows.
Saddam sat in a windowless hall with a guard in front of both entrances. A table and five chairs stood in the centre.
Ms Khalil said the deposed leader was in a resolute mood.
"If the invasion happened again I would stay in Iraq. I was right to stay in my country with my people," she says he told her.
After the Dujail trial, Saddam and six others are scheduled to face charges of genocide over the 1988 Anfal campaign that left an estimated 100,000 Kurds dead.
Preparations to restart the trial came as The Washington Post reported that Iraq's Interior Ministry had taken its first steps to rein in the Facilities Protection Service, a unit of 4000 building guards that US officials say has quietly grown into the Government's largest paramilitary force, with 145,000 armed men and no central command.
Interior Minister Bayan Jabr has accused the service of carrying out some of the killings widely attributed to death squads operating inside his ministry's police forces.
A senior US military official told the Post that he believed members of the protection service, along with private militias, were the chief culprits behind Iraq's death squads.
Paul Bremer, then US administrator of Iraq, signed an order establishing the service in 2003, aiming to free US troops from guarding Iraqi government property and preventing the kind of looting that erupted with the overthrow of Saddam.
A string of deadly attacks ripped through Baghdad and killed at least 12 people yesterday as Shi'ites in the volatile city of Baqouba discovered that six Shia shrines in their area had been bombed in another effort to set off sectarian violence.