The hunt for a WMD
A reporter traces a suspect Iraqi cylinder
Page 1 of 3
We slide the videocassette into the VCR and step back to watch the black-and-white scene playing out on our Baghdad hotel TV set.
Three Iraqi men settle into cushioned chairs around a coffee table. A man with a file folder in his lap leans back and crosses a leg. "Is this the same subject again or a different one?" he demands.
The conversation meanders, before a thick-necked man with a small mouth answers.
"No, no sir, it's a different subject, this is about the canister that they were convinced was VX, about nerve gas."
As a European colleague and I watch the videotape, given to me by an Iraqi businessman, we try to control the mounting excitement of a potential scoop:
Is this evidence of Iraqi manufacturing - or perhaps dismantling - weapons of mass destruction?
The handwritten label on the cassette refers to the Iraqi intelligence service; we later confirm the man with the file folder is Tahir Jalil Habbush, its director. In the US card deck of most wanted Iraqis, he is the Jack of Diamonds.
As the video rolls, it's clear the three men are discussing a container of a chemical they knew they shouldn't have. "[It] will shake the nerves: This material is involved in the production of VX gas. And you know, sir, our international situation," says the man with the small mouth.
After that first viewing last month, we began a two-week investigation to determine the contents of the container - a pressurized cylinder about the size of a phone booth - and what the Iraqis did with it. The result is a tale about an often-frustrating search for the answers amid the bombings, curfews, and suspicions of Iraq under US occupation.
One Iraqi warns us not to dig too deep: "Saddam doesn't want anyone to know about this information." Then he adds: "Every day there are attacks, explosions." Three sources falsely surmise that my colleague and I are agents of the CIA; one smiles at our protests to the contrary.
Our hunt provides a window on the difficult work of United Nations inspectors in Iraq - and the US-led Iraq Survey Group, which is still trying to track down weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Looking for WMD is a sorry task: The physical evidence is elusive, many Iraqi sources have disappeared, and those who are around hardly seem paragons of trustworthiness.
Files, fires, and a 'liberated' videotape
This past April, as the war in Iraq came to its statue-toppling climax, an Iraqi businessman made some alarming discoveries about two houses in his neighborhood, Baghdad's posh Mansour district.
First, two of his children brought home a pair of Kalashnikov assault rifles they had taken from a villa near his house. Its rooms were full of guns, grenade launchers, and ammunition. It had been left open, the contents free for the taking.
Then the businessman and his family learned about another mystery villa, one that stored information: file cabinets, computers, heaps of reports. Starting on April 9 - the day Baghdad fell - men who were apparently Iraqi intelligence agents spent three days at the house. Neighbors wandered over to see them burning files, computer disks, and videotapes.
The guards stopped the businessman from purloining two videos as souvenirs, but one of his sons - an enterprising eight-year-old - managed to spirit a videotape, a half-dozen audiocassettes, and a fistful of photographic negatives out of the house. The audiocassettes were recordings of unremarkable international phone calls made to or from Iraq. The negatives depicted UN weapons inspectors at work.
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.
Iraqi spy chief: 'Was the stuff good?'
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.
Next:
Going door to door, looking for the ezzis | 1 |
2 |
3
|
RSS feed
