The hunt for a WMD

In early August the businessman and I met for dinner - he was a friend whom I had met on other occasions. A few days later he gave me the videotape, suggesting that it might be worth investigating. He asked not to be identified.

The tape shows three men sitting in a white-carpeted, taupe-walled room that looks more like an office than a residence. The two cameras recording the meeting - a black-and-white one positioned overlooking the sitting area, a color one at end of the room - appear to have been hidden. No one acknowledges that the meeting is being videotaped.

Mr. Habbush, the Iraqi intelligence chief, is at the head of the low table, smoking a cigarette. The other participants are identified on the tape's label as Abdul Wahab, director of the scientific division of the intelligence service, and "citizen" Salah Abed Nasir. It emerges in the conversation that he is a factory owner who has worked for many years as an informer.

Initially, the three discuss a sting operation, conducted a few days earlier, to arrest men who were in possession of "the canister that they were convinced was VX" - a lethal nerve agent that Iraq used during its war with Iran during the 1980s.

Habbush: "Was the stuff good?"

Mr. Abdul Wahab: "Sir, the first test proved it came from the Muthanna Establishment, where they used to make chemical weapons..."

The Muthanna State Establishment was Iraq's main chemical weapons development and manufacturing site, located 60 miles outside Baghdad. UN inspectors controlled Muthanna in the early 1990s, destroying stocks of chemical weapons, the ingredients used in their production, and related facilities.

Abdul Wahab goes on to indicate that the intelligence service plans to sell the cylinder to the "Arab Cleaning Establishment" via the National Monitoring Directorate, an Iraqi agency initially formed in the early 1990s as a liaison between the government and UN inspectors. He seems confident that the transfer can be accomplished discreetly. The Monitoring Directorate "won't bring the name of our apparatus into it," he says.

The audio is garbled here; we can't be sure if we're getting the name of the Arab Cleaning Establishment exactly right. Is it a legitimate company or a cover for chemical weapons factory?

Abdul Wahab: "They [the National Monitoring Directorate] will take it [the cylinder] to them [the Arab Cleaning Establishment] and they will test it and if it's not expired, then it's OK, and they will work with it, for a sum we will agree on. If it's expired we won't be able to benefit from it."

To confirm the accuracy of what we're hearing, we employ four different interpreters - including one non-Iraqi - to get clear Arabic and English transcripts of the tape. Even so, we don't yet know what we have.

When did the conversation take place? What was inside the container? The informer's statements are confusing: "the canister they were convinced was VX" and "this material is involved in the production of VX". Which one was it?

We also wonder if the tape is a hoax or even a video of a training exercise.

Nailing down the timing is easy. We show the video to a former Iraqi Army general who says there's no doubt that the man holding the file is Habbush, confirming the impressions of our interpreters and the businessman.

On the tape Abdul Wahab refers to Habbush as the "director of the apparatus," a reference to Mukhabarat, the Iraqi intelligence service. Habbush took office in 1999, so the conversation took place no earlier than that year.

Our next step is to try to find the men shown on the tape or those named in their discussion.

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