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The hunt for a WMD
Going door to door, looking for the ezzis
Nailing down the timing is easy. We show the video to a former Iraqi Army general who says there's no doubt that the man holding the file is Habbush, confirming the impressions of our interpreters and the businessman.
On the tape Abdul Wahab refers to Habbush as the "director of the apparatus," a reference to Mukhabarat, the Iraqi intelligence service. Habbush took office in 1999, so the conversation took place no earlier than that year.
Our next step is to try to find the men shown on the tape or those named in their discussion.
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
What's in the cylinder? Nasir's revelation
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.
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.
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Stolen, sold, or hidden by the Iraqi government? |
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