The hunt for a WMD
A reporter traces a suspect Iraqi cylinder
We slide the videocassette into the VCR and step back to watch the black-and-white scene playing out on our Baghdad hotel TV set.
Three Iraqi men settle into cushioned chairs around a coffee table. A man with a file folder in his lap leans back and crosses a leg. "Is this the same subject again or a different one?" he demands.
The conversation meanders, before a thick-necked man with a small mouth answers.
"No, no sir, it's a different subject, this is about the canister that they were convinced was VX, about nerve gas."
As a European colleague and I watch the videotape, given to me by an Iraqi businessman, we try to control the mounting excitement of a potential scoop:
Is this evidence of Iraqi manufacturing - or perhaps dismantling - weapons of mass destruction?
The handwritten label on the cassette refers to the Iraqi intelligence service; we later confirm the man with the file folder is Tahir Jalil Habbush, its director. In the US card deck of most wanted Iraqis, he is the Jack of Diamonds.
As the video rolls, it's clear the three men are discussing a container of a chemical they knew they shouldn't have. "[It] will shake the nerves: This material is involved in the production of VX gas. And you know, sir, our international situation," says the man with the small mouth.
After that first viewing last month, we began a two-week investigation to determine the contents of the container - a pressurized cylinder about the size of a phone booth - and what the Iraqis did with it. The result is a tale about an often-frustrating search for the answers amid the bombings, curfews, and suspicions of Iraq under US occupation.
One Iraqi warns us not to dig too deep: "Saddam doesn't want anyone to know about this information." Then he adds: "Every day there are attacks, explosions." Three sources falsely surmise that my colleague and I are agents of the CIA; one smiles at our protests to the contrary.
Our hunt provides a window on the difficult work of United Nations inspectors in Iraq - and the US-led Iraq Survey Group, which is still trying to track down weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Looking for WMD is a sorry task: The physical evidence is elusive, many Iraqi sources have disappeared, and those who are around hardly seem paragons of trustworthiness.
This past April, as the war in Iraq came to its statue-toppling climax, an Iraqi businessman made some alarming discoveries about two houses in his neighborhood, Baghdad's posh Mansour district.
First, two of his children brought home a pair of Kalashnikov assault rifles they had taken from a villa near his house. Its rooms were full of guns, grenade launchers, and ammunition. It had been left open, the contents free for the taking.
Then the businessman and his family learned about another mystery villa, one that stored information: file cabinets, computers, heaps of reports. Starting on April 9 - the day Baghdad fell - men who were apparently Iraqi intelligence agents spent three days at the house. Neighbors wandered over to see them burning files, computer disks, and videotapes.
The guards stopped the businessman from purloining two videos as souvenirs, but one of his sons - an enterprising eight-year-old - managed to spirit a videotape, a half-dozen audiocassettes, and a fistful of photographic negatives out of the house. The audiocassettes were recordings of unremarkable international phone calls made to or from Iraq. The negatives depicted UN weapons inspectors at work.
