The hunt for a WMD

Habbush is one of 13Iraqis on the US most wanted list who have not been killed or captured. Finding him seems unlikely. It appears just as daunting to try to locate the science director, Abdul Wahab; as a senior Iraqi intelligence official he is probably also in hiding.

That leaves the third man on the tape: Nasir, the informer and factory owner. It also seems possible to find two other men - Nasir's relatives by marriage - mentioned in the discussion.

Nasir had set up the sting operation to recover the cylinder, but one of the men who was arrested is his wife's cousin, an engineer named Majed al-Ezzi. Nasir tells the intelligence chief that he's being threatened by the Ezzi family and that Walid al-Ezzi - an officer in the intelligence service - has told the family that Nasir is responsible for getting Majed thrown in jail.

Ezzi is the name of a well known tribe in Iraq; we decide to try to tap into the clan's internal network.

In a city where vast sections have no telephone service, where the most recent phone directory is a decade old, and where there is no "information" operator, we employ the only means available: We start knocking on doors.

We ask around Baghdad for Ezzis, and ask them if they know of a Majed who was arrested by - or a Walid who worked for - the intelligence service. After several days, we have nothing. At times, our plan seems like driving around Germany just after World War II and asking people to help us find relatives who had been in the Gestapo. Increasingly disheartened, we drive an hour outside of Baghdad to a village called Tarmiya - the seat of the Ezzi tribe.

There we meet Salah al-Ezzi, an imposing man with a dark mustache and a tiny patch of beard just below his lower lip. The leader of the tribe, he greets us in his grassy garden as the skin-searing heat of another summer day begins to wane.

Finally, one of the pieces of the puzzle snaps into place.

Dr. Ezzi remembers Majed's "big problems" with the Iraqi intelligence service over the cylinder. "[Majed's] friend bought the stuff, but he didn't know it was harmful," he recalls. "He wanted to take it back to the government, but before they could do that, someone informed on them."

"Bingo," I mutter to our interpreter. He doesn't get the reference. But we all understand that the tape is real.

Majed and his friend were released, the doctor says, after the family proved that the cylinder was unwittingly purchased from a scrap dealer. He identifies the informer as Salah Abed Nasir - the third man on our tape - and gives us the location of Nasir's house in Baghdad. He also suggests a couple of ways to find Majed in the capital.

Because Walid was a Mukhabarat officer, tracing him is a different matter.

"We don't know where he is," Salah says. He also can't tell us whether the "stuff" in the cylinder was nerve gas or something else

We waste much of the next day trying to find Majed's electrical supply shop in Baghdad's main market. There are hundreds of such shops; we ask for Majed in dozens of them. We hear about one shopkeeper named Majed, but he is not our Majed al-Ezzi.

Parched, tired, and discouraged, we go in search of Nasir's house - a far easier task. We find it in a neighborhood of large homes and gardens hidden behind walls. One of his sons rides with us to show us the way to his father's factory.

We wait for a few minutes in the front office for Nasir to emerge from a back room. And then there he is - he of the thick neck and small mouth - a white-haired man who is fitter and more robust than he had seemed on the screen.

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