The hunt for a WMD

Our talks with Majed and Nasir leave us with two theories about the origin of the cylinder. One explanation is that it emerged from Muthanna by accident. On the tape, Abdul Wahab explains what happened when Mukhabarat investigators went to look for the scrap dealer: "They didn't find him.... But his friends said that he bought it from an auction; the man from the Muthanna Establishment confirmed that he sold . . . in an open auction, empty containers of the same type. They said maybe it got out by mistake."

Says the former UN WMD chief Manley: "Given the state of the site and the size of the site" - the Muthanna State Establishment covers about nine square miles and was heavily bombed during the 1991 Gulf war - "it is not unlikely that a single cylinder could have gone amiss."

But Majed and Nasir each offer us the same alternative theory: The cylinder was removed from Muthanna at the instructions of the government, many years before the sting operation. It was common knowledge among Iraqi engineers, Majed says, that officials were asking workers in the mid-1990s to store documents and materials away from places that might be inspected or bombed, even items as cumbersome as a pressurized cylinder full of deadly gas.

The accounts of the two men enable us fix the time of the videotaped conversation: the summer of 2000.

But what did the Mukhabarat do with the cylinder after retrieving it?

Our best lead regarding its fate is the garbled videotape reference to the Arab Cleaning Establishment, which in Arabic is the name of an enterprise known in English as the Arab Company for Detergent Chemicals. Owned by a consortium of Arab governments - including Iraq's - it maintains a head office in Baghdad and a factory north of Tikrit that converts kerosene into a raw material for detergent.

We visit the plant unannounced. Zuhair Abed Rashid, acting director general of the company, cordially receives us into his wood-paneled office. A middle-aged geochemist with a genial, nothing-to-hide disposition, he listens as we explain what we would like to know.

Then he leads us outside, takes the wheel of a white, four-seater pickup, and gives us a tour.

The plant is a tangled forest of dun-colored vats, ladders, and pipes rising out of the dun-colored desert. Flares from the plant and a nearby refinery scar the summer sky with orange flames.

Mr. Rashid indicates the tanks that store kerosene and paraffin. Toward the back of the lot, near a chain-link fence, he points out scores of discarded cylinders of HF, which is used as a catalyst in the plant's chemical process. Some are blue, some gray, some off-white.

One cylinder looks almost identical to the grayish-white one in Nasir's photographs. We pull out the photos, hoping to find a match.

Rashid points out a dozen more just like it positioned next to the back fence. Even the stencil on the side - hydrogen fluoride - is the same as on the cylinder in the pictures. When filled, the cylinders each contain a little more than 1,500 pounds of HF.

We carefully compare the 13 cylinders with the photos. None match.

We return a few days later, to review some of the records in Rashid's office. He's certain that the cylinders he has shown us came from the Muthanna State Establishment in a shipment of more than 203 metric tons of HF the plant received in 1991. He denies ever receiving any more HF from the government, not a single cylinder in 2000 or later.

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