The hunt for a WMD

On the tape, Nasir says he has served the Mukhabarat since 1982, and sounds eager to work abroad as a spy for Iraq. "We are all servants of Saddam Hussein," he tells Habbush, the intelligence chief.

In person, he quickly tells us that he has already been to see the US-led administration of Iraq in order to provide information about the former regime and its weapons. "I have a lot of information," he stresses. He serves us ice-cold Cokes.

Nasir's desire to play for the new team in town may explain his willingness to speak with us about the cylinder, a bit of information he says he has not shared with the Americans. He repeatedly tells us we are US intelligence agents, ignoring our protests.

He insists he acted properly in the affair of the cylinder "because it was stolen, it was in bad people's hands." He refuses to identify them - "I cannot say who it is or I will be assassinated the next day."

During our conversation, Nasir makes tantalizing references to a set of photographs of the cylinder. At first he balks at showing us, then changes his mind. He shuffles through a disorganized pile of snapshots in his desk and extracts half a dozen.

They depict the cylinder lying horizontally next to a brick wall, two words neatly stenciled on its side: hydrogen fluoride.

Bingo.

Hydrogen fluoride (HF) is a highly corrosive chemical that has a wide variety of industrial applications, including rust removal, petroleum refining, and cleaning porcelain teeth. It is also used in the production of the nerve agents sarin and cyclosarin - not, however, VX.

When UN weapons inspectors took over the Muthanna facility in the early 1990s they destroyed seven tons of HF, among many other proscribed materials.

Iraq was entitled to import HF during the period UN sanctions were in force, from 1991 until 2003, because of the chemical's utility in various peaceful industries. But the UN monitored the import and use of HF in Iraq, in an attempt to make sure that none of the chemical was diverted to military use.

"One cylinder of HF is of no military significance," says Ron Manley, a chemical engineer who headed UN efforts to destroy Iraq's chemical weapons capabilities in the early 1990s. But he says it might have been useful to the Iraqis in order to create a small quantity of nerve agent or to sharpen the skills of a weapons scientist. "They were short of a lot of key chemicals like [HF]," Mr. Manley says.

After eight long days of work in the Iraq summer heat we now know what was in the cylinder - not as "sexy" as nerve gas, as one WMD expert tells us, but still an illegal substance in the hands of the Iraqi intelligence service.

Where did it come from, we wonder, and what did the Mukhabarat do with it?

We finally track down Majed al-Ezzi in his easier-to-find Baghdad engineering office. He says what the tape says: a fellow engineer and one of the man's relatives had bought the cylinder at a scrap auction in 1996 believing it was empty and that it could be recycled for profit.

In 2000, the two men asked Majed's help in trying to "hand it over to the government without any problem," he recalls. Majed turned to Nasir because of his intelligence connections. In the end, the engineers and the relative wound up in a Mukhabarat prison for their trouble.

We ask Majed about trying to contact the fellow engineer and the relative who had made the actual purchase. "Don't push it," he says, warning us that forces loyal to Saddam Hussein don't want such matters made public. He too hints that we work for the US government.

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