The hunt for a WMD

He insists that all of his company's intake of HF has been monitored by UN inspectors, who visited the plant three times in the months before the war and several times during the 1990s.

What Rashid doesn't say is that it might have been easier for all concerned to accept the cylinder off the books. Recording the receipt of a Muthanna cylinder might have raised uncomfortable questions that would lead back to the Mukhabarat .

We remember the science director's comment, on the videotape, about using the National Monitoring Directorate as a conduit to the Arab Cleaning Establishment: "They won't bring the name of our apparatus into it." And as Manley, the former UN inspector, observes, "the Iraqis are good at keeping paperwork, but they are also good at keeping the paperwork that is required rather than that which is accurate."

Just as the trail seems to come to an end, Rashid raises our hopes again.

There is one more Muthanna cylinder we haven't seen, located in a scrap yard in front of the plant. He asks if we want to have a look.

We pile back into his pickup. Sure enough, in a field of more than a hundred empty HF containers, lies one more of the type in the photographs.

It is not the same cylinder.

Our cylinder may still be out there. It may have been put to some nefarious use. But from the available evidence, it appears the Iraqis followed a responsible course of action in the summer of 2000. Learning about a loose cylinder of HF, the Iraqi Mukhabarat mounted an operation to recover it. Then the officials disposed of the chemical - at least according to the intention stated on the videotape - by sending it to a soap factory. In other words, they dismantled this WMD.

That's how our story appears to Scott Ritter, who served as chief weapons inspector for the UN Special Commission in Iraq (UNSCOM) in the 1990s and who campaigned against the war. "The Mukhabarat appears to have done the right thing without getting their name involved," he says. "This is some of the hardest evidence that Iraq did not have a secret chemical weapons program."

Ewen Buchanan, spokesman for a team of UN inspectors that visited the country just before the war, says the Iraqis often sent banned chemicals to factories for disposal. He won't go as far as Mr. Ritter, but Mr. Buchanan does note that there were no weapons inspectors in Iraq at that time in 2000, so the tape offers a glimpse what the Iraqis did when the country wasn't subject to on-the-ground UN scrutiny.

"That's surprising - that they did the right thing without UNSCOM," he says.

Three men in the videotape:

Tahir Jalil Habbush - director of Iraqi intelligence service, Mukhabarat. Jack of Diamonds in US most-wanted deck.

Abdul Wahab - director of the scientific division of Iraqi intelligence service.

Salah Abed Nasir - factory owner, and informer for intelligence service.

Mentioned in the tape:

Muthanna State Establishment - Iraq's main chemical weapons development and manufacturing site.

National Monitoring Directorate - Iraqi agency that was liaison between the government and UN weapons inspectors.

Majed al-Ezzi - engineer arrested in sting operation set up by Iraqi intelligence; cousin of Abed Nasir's wife.

Walid al-Ezzi - Iraqi intelligence officer, who tells Ezzi family that it was Nasir, the informer, who got Majed arrested.

Found later:

Salah al-Ezzi - leader of the Ezzi tribe.

Zuhair Abed Rashid - acting director general of Arab Company for Detergent Chemicals aka Arab Cleaning Establishment.

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