TIME: Chasing a
Mirage
Monday, October 06, 2003
By NANCY GIBBS and MICHAEL WARE / BAGHDAD
The trader was actually sitting at home in Baghdad,
waiting. He knew it was only a matter of time before
the Americans came. It was just after curfew on the
night of June 22, ten weeks after Saddam Hussein's
fall, when he heard a helicopter overhead, the
humvees in the street outside, the knock at the door.
U.S. soldiers came rushing into the house, broke his
bed, searched everywhere, then put a blindfold on him
and drove him away.
He knew they would come because he knew what they
were looking for. He had worked for the import
section of Iraq's powerful Military Industrialization
Commission (MIC), essentially the state's
weapons-making organ, which owned hundreds of
factories, research centers--everything you needed if
you wanted to build an arsenal of chemical or
biological weapons. He spent much of his time in the
1980s buying tons of growth medium, which scientists
use to cultivate germs. "We were like traders." he
says. "The scientists would tell us what they wanted,
and we got it." After Gulf War I, he entertained a
steady stream of U.N. weapons inspectors wanting to
know what had happened to all that growth medium, how
had it been used, what was left.
But there wasn't much he could tell them, not that he
could prove, at least. Just before the war, he
recalls, the chiefs at the MIC had told people like
him involved in the weapons program to hand over some
of their documents and burn the rest. "They didn't
realize at that time the Americans would insist on
every single document," he says. "They thought the
[U.S.] attacks would come and that would be it." When
in the years after the war U.N. inspectors kept
demanding a paper trail, the superiors got nervous.
They "started asking us for the documents they had
told us to destroy. They were desperate. They even
offered to buy any documents we may have hidden."
Ten years and another war later, a new set of
interrogators is wondering what happened to Iraq's
bioweapons program. On the night of his arrest, the
Americans took him to a detention center at the
airport, where he was kept in a cell alone, given
plenty of water and military rations. Two pairs of
Western interrogators took turns asking questions,
sometimes through a translator, sometimes directly in
English or Arabic. "They asked me about the
importation of things like chemicals and about people
sent abroad for special missions. The essence of it
was, Are there any WMD?" They particularly focused on
the period after 1998, when U.N. inspectors left
Iraq. "Could any trade have happened without my
knowledge within the MIC, not just my section?" The
buyer says he had nothing of interest to tell the
interrogators; his group, he insists, had long ago
quit the weapons-of-mass-destruction business. As
they pressed him about what he purchased and for
whom, it seemed to him that "it was just like the
blind man clutching for someone's hand to hold."
After three days he was blindfolded, taken back into
the city and released.
The trader's story offers a glimpse into the
challenges faced by David Kay, a co-head of the Iraq
Survey Group, charged by the CIA with finding the WMD
the Bush Administration insists Iraq has. Kay is
expected to release a status report on his findings
soon, possibly this week. While stressing that the
account will not be the Survey Group's final word,
CIA spokesman Bill Harlow allows that it "won't rule
anything in or out." That remark seems a tacit
acknowledgment that the U.S., after nearly six months
of searching, has yet to find definitive evidence
that Saddam truly posed the kind of threat the White
House described in selling the war.
Bush Administration officials never anticipated this
predicament. They expected that WMD arsenals would be
uncovered quickly once the U.S. occupied Iraq. Since
then, Iraq has been scoured, and nearly every top
weapons scientist has been captured or interviewed.
That the investigators have found no hidden
stockpiles of VX gas or anthrax or intact gas
centrifuges suggests that it may be time to at least
entertain the possibility that Iraqi officials all
along were telling the truth when they said they no
longer had a WMD program.
Over the past three months, TIME has interviewed
Iraqi weapons scientists, middlemen and former
government officials. Saddam's henchmen all make
essentially the same claim: that Iraq's once massive
unconventional-weapons program was destroyed or
dismantled in the 1990s and never rebuilt; that
officials destroyed or never kept the documents that
would prove it; that the shell games Saddam played
with U.N. inspectors were designed to conceal his
progress on conventional weapons systems--missiles,
air defenses, radar--not biological or chemical
programs; and that even Saddam, a sucker for a new
gadget or invention or toxin, may not have known what
he actually had or, more to the point, didn't have.
It would be an irony almost too much to bear to
consider that he doomed his country to war because he
was intent on protecting weapons systems that didn't
exist in the first place.
These tales are tempting to dismiss as scripts
recited by practiced liars who had been deceiving the
world community for years. These sources may still be
too frightened of the possibility of Saddam's return
to power to tell his secrets. Or it could be that
Saddam reconstituted an illicit weapons program with
such secrecy that those who knew of past efforts were
left out of the loop. But the unanimity of these
sources' accounts can't be easily dismissed and at
the very least underscores the difficulty the U.S.
has in proving its case that Saddam was hoarding
unconventional arms.
Iraqi engineering professor Nabil al-Rawi remembers
being at a conference in Beirut on Feb. 5 and
watching on TV as U.S. Secretary of State Colin
Powell made a presentation to the U.N. laying out the
U.S. case that Iraq was pressing ahead with its
weapons programs. Conference participants from other
Arab countries grilled al-Rawi whether Powell's
charges were true. An exasperated al-Rawi tried to
reassure his counterparts that he and his teams had
abandoned their illegal programs years earlier. Did
they believe him? "I don't think so," he says.
Al-Rawi contends that he had been around long enough
to know what was what. He had worked on the Iraqi
nuclear program before the 1991 war and until the
fall of the regime was a senior member of the MIC. He
and a nuclear engineer whom TIME interviewed claim
that the nuclear-weapons program was not resumed
after the plants were destroyed by the U.S. in Gulf
War I. In his more recent work at the MIC, al-Rawi
had a perspective on the biological and chemical
programs as well. Those too, he insists, were shut
down in the early 1990s; the scientists transferred
to conventional military projects or civilian work.
Last November, al-Rawi says, he was asked by Abd
al-Tawab Mullah Huweish, head of the Ministry of
Industry and Military Industrialization, to give a
seminar--essentially career counseling--to MIC
scientists "on ways to attract funding for and shape
new research projects because there was no weapons
work for them."
Sa'ad Abd al-Kahar al-Rawi, a relation of Nabil's,
also thinks he would have known had Baghdad revived
its WMD efforts. A professor of economics, he was a
top financial adviser to the regime and knew the
government books well. He says he would have known if
money was disappearing into a black hole created by a
special weapons project. Similarly, Iraqi scientists
note that their community is small and tightly knit;
most of them studied together and worked together. If
a new, secret WMD program had started up, they argue,
certain core players who held the necessary expertise
would have had to be involved. Several scientists
told TIME that all their cohort is accounted for; no
one went underground. Iraq's premier scientists,
according to Nabil al-Rawi, moved on to other
things--teaching, water and power projects, producing
generic Viagra.
Many did continue developing military technology.
After 1991 Nabil al-Rawi worked on electrical
controls for unmanned drones and, most recently,
Stealth bomber--detection radar. Such projects were
meant to be hidden from U.N. inspectors, who, the
Iraqis have long asserted, were riddled with American
spies. The Furat facility just south of Baghdad was a
known nuclear site before the first Gulf War. Last
fall the White House released satellite photos
showing a new building at the site and suggested it
was designed for covert nuclear research. But al-Rawi
claims it was rebuilt to produce radar and
antiaircraft systems. When TIME visited the plant
this summer, there were signs of heavy bombing, but
the new building was intact--and carpeted inside with
documents in French, Russian, Arabic and English, all
having to do with radar equipment, frequencies and
trajectories.
In his U.N. presentation, powell asserted that the
Tariq State Establishment in Fallujah was designed to
develop chemical weapons. When TIME visited the site,
it was empty. U.N. inspectors visited the facility
six times from December 2002 to January 2003 and
reported that the chlorine plant that so concerned
the Americans "is currently inoperative." Nabil
al-Rawi says the hundreds of scientists who worked
there are now "doing other things."
Another site mentioned by the allies in the walk-up
to the war was the Amiriyah Serum and Vaccine
Institute, which both British intelligence and the
CIA suspected was part of a biological-warfare
program.
TIME visited the site in July to see the two recently
built warehouses that had raised those concerns. One
had been bombed, its door cascading with a mountain
of debris made up of burned and broken empty vials.
The intact other building was packed to the rafters
with boxes full of glassware and beakers. Pigeons
roost in the ceiling, their droppings and
feathers--some of it inches thick--caking the
cardboard towers. Nothing appears to have been moved
in a long time. U.S. intelligence officials declined
to tell TIME about Washington's postwar assessment of
the site.
So, why all the hide and seek if suspect facilities
did not contain incriminating evidence? The former
Minister of Industry and Minerals, Muyassar Raja
Shalah, cites national security: "The U.N.'s
accusations about hiding things were true," he says,
recalling charges that Iraqis hustled evidence out
the back door even as U.N. inspectors entered through
the front. "This was Iraq's right, because the U.N.
was searching for WMD in a lot of military
facilities, and of course we held a lot of military
secrets relating to the national security of Iraq in
these places. It was impossible to let a foreigner
have a look at these secrets."
Some analysts suspect that Saddam's game was a sly
form of deterrence: keep the U.S. and his neighbors
guessing about the extent of his arsenal to prevent a
pre-emptive attack. A bluff like that had worked for
him before: in 1991, during an uprising among Iraqi
Kurds in Kirkuk, soldiers inside helicopters dropped
a harmless white powder onto the rebels below,
terrifying them into thinking it was a chemical
attack. The Kurds retreated, and the uprising
collapsed. Hans Blix, head of the U.N. inspection
team that entered Iraq last November and left just
before the war, told Australian national radio two
weeks ago that "you can put up a sign on your door,
BEWARE OF THE DOG, without having a dog."
Pentagon officials were so certain before Gulf War II
that the Iraqis had outfitted their forces with
chemical weapons that U.S. soldiers storming toward
Baghdad wore their hot, heavy chemical weapons gear,
just in case. But a captain in Iraq's Special
Security Organization, the agency that was
responsible for, among other things, the security of
weapons sites, says no such arms were available.
"Trust me," he says, his eyes narrowed, as he sits in
a back-alley teahouse in Tikrit, "if we had them, we
would have used them, especially in the battle for
the airport. We wanted them but didn't have any."
Colonel Ali Jaffar Hussan al-Duri, a Republican Guard
armored-corps commander who fought in the Iran-Iraq
war and in both Gulf Wars, remembers the time when
Iraq's Chemical Corps was fear inspiring. "We were
much better at it than the Iranians," he says, who
are thought to have suffered as many as 80,000
casualties in chemical attacks. But after Gulf War I,
Saddam's son-in-law Hussein Kamal, who headed the
MIC, took the most talented Chemical Corps officers
with him, according to Hussan. After that, he claims,
the unit became a joke. "It should have been a
sensitive unit--it once was--but in the end that's
where we dumped our worst soldiers." Comments a
Republican Guard major of the Corps: "It had
nothing."
If that's true, what happened to the banned weapons
Iraq once possessed? In the inspections regime that
lasted from 1991 to 1998, the U.N. oversaw the
destruction of large stores of illicit arms. Some
documented inventories, however, were never
satisfactorily accounted for; these included tons of
chemical agents as well as stores of anthrax and VX
poison. The Iraqis eventually owned up to producing
these supplies but insisted that they had disposed of
much of them in 1991 when no one was looking and had
kept no records of the destruction. That made Blix
wonder. In an interview with TIME in February, he
described Iraq as "one of the best-organized regimes
in the Arab world" and noted "when they have had need
of something to show, then they have been able to do
so."
A former MIC official insists that this view is
mistaken. "In Iraq we don't write everything," he
says. The claim that Saddam would destroy his most
dangerous weapons of his own accord and not retain
the means to prove it seems a stretch. But a captain
in the Mukhabarat, the main Iraqi intelligence
service, says he was a witness to just such an
exercise. In July 1991, he says, he traveled into the
Nibai desert in a caravan of trucks carrying 25
missiles loaded with biological agents. First the
bulldozers took a week to bury them. It took three
more weeks to evacuate the area. Then the missiles
were exploded. No one kept any kind of documentation,
the captain says. "We just did it." This meant that
when weapons inspectors came demanding verification,
the Iraqis could not prove what or how much had been
destroyed.
Sa'ad al-Rawi contends that the men who carried out
such missions were junior level, sergeants and first
sergeants. "They are not educated men," he says. "You
order them to do something, they do it. When we had
to try to account for this, we tried to recall them
in 1997, but many had of course left the army and
were hard to find. And the ones we did find certainly
couldn't remember exactly how many missiles were
buried, nor what was in each of them."
That still leaves unanswered why the Iraqis would
have unilaterally destroyed their most potent arms.
One theory, advanced by the U.N., is that the regime
used these exercises as a cover for retaining a
fraction of their stores. The idea is that they would
destroy quantities of weapons (creating a disposal
site and eyewitnesses, if not written records) and
claim to have got rid of everything yet actually hold
on to some of it. The Mukhabarat captain concedes
that scientists kept small amounts of VX and mustard
gas for future experiments. "I saw it myself, several
times," he says.
Samir, a chemicals expert who worked for a branch of
the MIC called the National Monitoring Directorate,
says he knows of a case in which 14 artillery shells
filled with mustard gas were preserved out of a batch
of 250 slated for destruction. The main purpose of
keeping them, he says, was to test their
deterioration over time. The Iraqis handed over the
shells to the U.N. in 1997, claiming that they had
been mis-stored and recently discovered, an
explanation Samir says was a ruse. When four of the
shells were unsealed, tests found their contents to
be 97% pure. "The gas was perfect," says Samir.
Even if the Iraqis did destroy most of their illegal
weaponry in 1991, that does not mean they didn't
build up new stores. The notion that the bioweapons
program wound down in the 1990s is flatly rejected by
Richard Spertzel, who led the U.N. hunt for
biological weapons inside Iraq from 1994 to 1998. "We
were developing pretty good evidence of a continuing
program in '97 and '98," he says. Some U.N.
inspectors, disagree, saying they believe that there
was no further production after 1991. Spertzel says
an Iraqi scientist phoned him just this past April
and told him an "edict" went out from Saddam shortly
before the war ordering his biological-weapons teams
to destroy any remaining germ stockpiles.
That Saddam would have continued feverishly pursuing
weapons of every kind seems more in keeping with his
character than the idea that he gave up on them. The
Iraqi dictator was crazy for weapons, fascinated by
every new invention--and as a result was easily
conned by salesmen and officials offering the latest
device. Saddam apparently had high hopes for a bogus
product called red mercury, touted as an ingredient
for a handheld nuclear device. Large quantities of
the gelatinous red liquid were looted from Iraqi
stores after the war and are now being offered on the
black market.
Saddam's underlings appear to have invented weapons
programs and fabricated experiments to keep the
funding coming. The Mukhabarat captain says the
scamming went all the way to the top of the MIC to
its director, Huweish, who would appease Saddam with
every report, never telling him the truth about
failures or production levels and meanwhile siphoning
money from projects. "He would tell the President he
had invented a new missile for Stealth bombers but
hadn't. So Saddam would say, 'Make 20 missiles.' He
would make one and put the rest in his pocket," says
the captain. Colonel Hussan al-Duri, who spent
several years in the 1990s as an air-defense
inspector, saw similar cons. "Some projects were just
stealing money," he says. A scientist or officer
would say he needed $10 million to build a special
weapon. "They would produce great reports, but there
was never anything behind them."
If Saddam may not have known the true nature of his
own arsenal, it is no wonder that Western
intelligence services were picking up so many clues
about so many weapons systems. But it helps answer
one logical argument that the Administration has been
making ever since the weapons failed to appear after
the war ended: why, if Saddam had nothing to hide,
did he endure billions of dollars in sanctions and
ultimately prompt his own destruction? Perhaps
because even he was mistaken about what was really at
stake in this fight.
Whether the Iraqis had actual stores of
unconventional weapons, Spertzel argues, is beside
the point. He finds it credible that Iraq converted
many of its weapons factories to civilian uses.
Baghdad's official policy from 1995, he notes, was
that facilities that were not building weapons had to
be self-supporting. But, he adds, "they would be
available when called upon" to return to armsmaking.
Spertzel thinks the focus on finding a 55-gal. drum
of poison is misplaced. "The concern that many of us
always had was not that they were producing great
quantities of stuff but that the program was
continuing--they were refining techniques and making
a better product. That's all part of an offensive
program." Absent a smoking gun, the Administration
may have to fall back on means and motive. That's
always, however, a tougher case to prove.
--With
reporting by Mark Thompson and Timothy J.
Burger/Washington