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The hunt for a WMD
Stolen, sold, or hidden by the Iraqi government?
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.
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.
A soap factory field of HF cylinders
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.
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.
Epilogue
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.
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