Saddam's Secrets Read online

  Eventually he ordered most of the papers, plans, schematic drawings, formulation details, and other data relating to WMDs production to be destroyed, but he wasn’t worried in the least. In fact, he authorized our engineers and scientists to show the inspectors everything that had been destroyed, and to make it clear that all these plans had been shredded and burned. He could do this without any fear of detection because he also knew that every scrap of information was in the minds of his scientists and researchers, letter by letter, line by line, because they had memorized every word. And he knew that, sooner or later, they could reproduce those plans and begin all over again.

  The Nuclear Industry

  The evidence of Saddam’s nuclear and chemical weapons programs from the 1970s onward, from reliable sources inside and outside of Iraq, is overwhelming—so much so that it’s difficult to understand why so many people in the West have been unwilling to acknowledge the fact that WMDs were not only a fact of life in Iraq for more than thirty years but they were Saddam’s obsession. Dr. Khidir Hamza reveals in his book, Saddam’s Bomb Maker, that German scientists created the chemicals that Saddam used on the Kurds at Anfal. Later it was German, French, and Russian scientists who helped the Iraqi engineers begin the process of enriching uranium for nuclear weapons.

  Dr. Hamza was one of the scientists trained in the West who was brought back by Saddam to head up the Iraqi nuclear weapons program. Between 1970 and 1987, he served as a top research scientist and adviser to the prime minister. At that point he took over as head of our entire nuclear weapons program. With his help, Saddam was able to buy enriched uranium from both France and Russia, and German companies supplied parts and tools for the weapons programs. He had also negotiated with France and Russia for nuclear reactors, including the French-built Osiraq plant.

  The Osiraq reactor was the best-known nuclear installation in Iraq. It was a forty megawatt light-water nuclear reactor housed at the Al Tuwaitha Nuclear Center, located about eleven miles southeast of Baghdad. This facility was designed and built by French engineers, who supplied at least 27.5 pounds of 93-percent Uranium-235 to fuel the reactor. The French called this type of reactor the “Osiris,” for the Egyptian god of the dead. But the Al Tuwaitha plant was renamed “Osiraq” to incorporate the name of the country. Saddam, however, preferred to call it the Tammuz 1 reactor, using the Arabic word for July, which was the month the Baath Party seized power in 1968, and again in 1979, when he became president. When that reactor was destroyed by Israeli F-16s in 1981, it made headlines around the world.

  The Al Tuwaitha Center also included several research reactors, plutonium-separation and waste-processing operations, a uranium metallurgy shop, a laboratory for neutron initiator development, and several labs for a variety of different methods of uranium enrichment. Records of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) state that all the nuclear fuel stored at this site was removed and destroyed under supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). One would have to be incredibly naïve, however, to believe that Saddam would have allowed all of this material to be destroyed.

  In addition to the Osiraq reactor, UNSCOM also reports that there were dozens of known active WMD production facilities in operation during the 1990s. Al Tarmiya was the main site for electromagnetic isotope separation, which was part of the overall program for uranium enrichment. Much of the equipment there was disassembled and hidden from inspectors. The Al Atheer Centre was the primary facility for nuclear weapons development and testing. Activities at this site included uranium casting and metallurgy, core assembly, explosive lens assembly, and detonics testing.

  A high-explosives test bunker near the Al Atheer site was used for hydrodynamic experiments. The buildings and bunkers were destroyed under IAEA and UNSCOM supervision in 1992, but plans, schematics, and other materials from these facilities were removed long before the inspectors ever arrived. And the list of nuclear labs goes on from there. The Al Furat lab was used for design, assembly, and testing of gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment. Al Jesira was a factory for production of uranium dioxide, uranium tetrachloride, and uranium hexaflouride.

  The Akashat mine produced uranium ore. A similar facility at Al Qaim produced refined yellow cake uranium ore. Rashidiya was a facility for centrifuge design and testing; the Al Sharqat reactor site, which was still under construction when coalition forces attacked in 1991, was going to be the second of Saddam’s Tammuz reactors. In addition, scientists had completed the Petrochemical-3 Centre, which housed the Iraqi nuclear weapons design team. When inspectors examined this facility in September 1991, they recovered thousands of files and documents that described in detail the scope and nature of Saddam’s nuclear weapons programs.

  The Chinese Connection

  More recently, I learned from a close family member of a high-ranking Iraqi official that Saddam made arrangements in August 1990 to acquire nuclear weapons directly from a group of nuclear scientists in China. After the invasion of Kuwait, Saddam realized that scrutiny of his weapons programs was going to be much too intense for Iraq to continue nuclear development, and it would have been next to impossible to maintain secrecy. So he made a deal to pay the Chinese scientists $100 million to manufacture weapons for him.

  However, when the chief accountant of the Ministry of Military Industrialization tried to transfer the first payment of $5 million from an account at the Rafidan Bank, Al Riyadh Branch, on August 4, 1990, he discovered that the transaction was being blocked on orders from America—this was apparently being done in anticipation of the beginning of the first Gulf War. After several failed attempts to transfer the funds by wire, it was decided that a courier would come to collect the money.

  According to a report that I have seen, the courier arrived in Baghdad on October 15, 1990. He took the $5 million in cash and returned to China the same way he had come. I don’t know what happened to the money or the relationship after the Gulf War, but I certainly believe that Saddam would have continued to pursue those arrangements throughout the 1990s, using a portion of the more than $11 billion he received through the Oil-for-Food program. To insure the secrecy of those plans, however, Saddam simply eliminated anyone with detailed knowledge of them, including the accountant who had managed the transfer. That man died of cancer in 1994, but suspecting that his disease was no accident, he revealed the details of those transactions to a family member before his death, and that individual subsequently related his story to me.

  Underlying all of Saddam’s secret operations was a foundation of fraud and corruption. According to the report of the Independent Inquiry Committee of the United Nations, headed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, released in October 2005, more than 2,200 companies participating in the United Nations’ Oil-for-Food program paid at least $1.8 billion in kickbacks to Saddam. More than sixty-six countries were involved, and manipulation of oil profits in violation of the sanctions agreements helped to increase Saddam’s personal wealth by as much as $11 billion.

  In another highly acclaimed book called The Bomb in My Garden, published in 2004, Dr. Mahdi Obeidi describes his work on the centrifuge programs in Iraq. Obeidi served as director of the Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization, which was the weapons development arm of the Iraqi government. At one point he had in his own possession all the records of the nuclear enrichment programs in Iraq as well as extensive documentation on the entire history of Saddam’s WMDs programs—hidden in an oil drum buried in his back yard.

  Many of those documents were eventually turned over to the U.S. State Department and were reportedly the largest collection of evidence of Iraqi WMDs in the West. So there’s no lack of evidence that all of this had been going on in Iraq for more than three decades. But the question of how Saddam hid these weapons and equipment prior to and during the second Gulf War involves another brilliant bit of deception.

  A Natural Disaster

  Saddam had ordered our weapons teams to hide the WMDs in places no m
ilitary commander or United Nations weapons inspector would expect to find them. So they hid them in schools, private homes, banks, business offices, and even on trucks that were kept constantly moving back and forth from one end of the country to the other. And then fate stepped in.

  On June 4, 2002, a three-mile-long irrigation dam, which had been drawing water from the Orontes River in the northwestern district of Zeyzoun, Syria, collapsed, inundating three small villages and destroying scores of homes. Many people and livestock were killed, and the flood waters covered an area of nearly forty square miles. As soon as word of the disaster was broadcast on television, help began arriving from all over the Middle East. The Red Crescent, which is the equivalent of the Red Cross in our area, brought in aid workers to set up shelters and render medical care.

  But when Syrian president Bashar al-Assad asked for help from Jordan and Iraq, Saddam knew what he would do. For him, the disaster in Syria was a gift, and there, posing as shipments of supplies and equipment sent from Iraq to aid the relief effort, were Iraq’s WMDs. Weapons and equipment were transferred both by land and by air. The only aircraft available at the time were one Boeing 747 jumbo jet and a group of Boeing 727s. But this turned out to be the perfect solution to Saddam’s problem. Who would suspect commercial airliners of carrying deadly toxins and contraband technology out of the country? So the planes were quickly reconfigured.

  All the passenger seats, galleys and toilets, storage compartments, and other related equipment that would be needed for civilian passengers were removed, and new flooring was installed, thus transforming the passenger planes into cargo planes. The airliners were then used for transporting hundreds of tons of chemicals, armaments, and other paraphernalia into Syria under the cover of a mission of mercy to help a stricken nation.

  Eventually there were fifty-six sorties. Commercial 747s and 727s moved these things out of the country. This was another of Saddam’s tricks. Instead of using military vehicles or aircraft which would have been apprehended and searched by coalition forces, Saddam’s agents had used the civilian airlines. He arranged for most of these shipments to be taken to Syria and handed over to ordnance specialists there who promised to hold everything for as long as necessary. Subsequently, I spoke at length to a former civilian airline captain who had detailed information about those flights. At the time he held an important position at Iraqi Airways, which is the commercial airline in Baghdad.

  Fraud and Corruption

  The plans for transferring these weapons were concocted by Ali and Ali. Our Ali was Ali Hussein al-Majid (Chemical Ali), and their Ali was General Abu Ali, who was a cousin of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. For once in the long history of belligerence between Iraq and Syria, there was complete agreement between them. They arranged for the operation to be conducted like a regular business deal, and everything was paid for, up-front and in cash. The tab for moving fifty-six sorties of highly dangerous contraband was enormous, but for Saddam it was worth every penny.

  In addition to the shipments that went by air, there were also truckloads of weapons, chemicals, and other supplies that were taken into Syria at that time. These weren’t government vehicles or military equipment but large cargo trucks and eighteen-wheelers made to look like ordinary commercial operators. Saddam was convinced that commercial trucks could pass right through security checkpoints on the borders without raising alarms, and they did, without drawing the attention of American and international satellite observers. Another source has reported that even ambulances were used to carry weapons and equipment across the border.

  To keep all these illegal transfers under wraps, the two Ali’s worked through a false company called SES. This company played a key role in transporting equipment back and forth between Syria and Iraq, as well as in smuggling many former government officials out of Iraq prior to and immediately after the U.S. invasion in March 2003. These are the same people who had previously organized the illegal sale of oil, natural gas, gasoline, sulfate, and other resources produced in Iraq to countries in the region, defying United Nations sanctions.

  And also it’s the same company that brokered the sale of weapons and equipment to Saddam while Iraq was under sanctions. This part, at least, is not news. A major story broke in the Los Angeles Times on December 30, 2003, confirming Syria’s role in undermining sanctions—names, dates, and places were given. The CIA and the State Department were aware of all this and more, but the Syrian role in ferrying WMDs out of Iraq has not previously been confirmed. My own knowledge of these transfers doesn’t come from any of the published reports but from a man who was actually involved in the transfers—a civilian pilot who witnessed the commercial 747 going back and forth between Syria and Iraq at that time. And he has confirmed for me that it happened just this way.

  On July 28, 2005, members of a congressional committee and the Bush administration were informed about some aspects of these dealings. Daniel Glaser, assistant secretary monitoring terrorism funding at the U.S. Treasury Department, reported that the American government was conducting further investigations into the dealings of SES. “On June 9, 2005,” Glaser stated in his testimony before a House of Representatives subcommittee, “we also designated two associated Syrian individuals, General Zuhayr Shalish and Asif Shalish, and a related asset, the Syria-based SES International Corporation, for their support to senior officials of the former Iraqi regime.”

  SES, Glaser reported, had acted falsely as the “end-user for the former Iraqi regime” and had managed and directed Saddam’s acquisition of arms and munitions, which was a violation of the sanctions agreement. What Glaser did not say, however, was that this same organization also managed the transfer of WMDs out of Iraq in 2002 and 2003, and that they had transported high-ranking members of Saddam’s cabinet out of the country into Syria, before they could be apprehended by coalition forces. But these are the facts.

  Aid and Comfort

  Between the end of the first Gulf War and the beginning of the Oil-for-Food program in 1996, Saddam was robbing the people of Iraq and building a vast network of international collaborators to help him circumvent the military and economic sanctions that had been placed on him by America and the United Nations. He had many covert partners in these operations, but it wasn’t until the first large transfers of capital under the Oil-for-Food program came through that the Iraqi president was able to put all these plans into action.

  During the twelve years between the first and second Gulf Wars, Saddam accumulated billions in unauthorized currency and credits, and most of that money came through or because of the Oil-for-Food program. As a socialist country, we didn’t have an income tax or corporation tax in Iraq. As I’ve indicated in previous chapters, bribery had become an art form, and even the police and medical professions had been corrupted. But it wasn’t until the United Nations began paying Saddam for oil and monitoring trade agreements that he was able to return to business as usual with certain client nations. After that Saddam was able to accumulate the funds to expand his wealth and pursue his favorite hobby of deceiving the world about WMDs.

  Saddam was brilliant at this, and his ability to lie, cheat, and deceive carried over into all his business tactics. Contracts for food, clothing, furniture, paper products, and every other essential purchased abroad provided him with the perfect opportunity to exploit the system, by demanding bribes and kickbacks, or by disguising his purchases of armaments and banned technologies as something other than what they were. Shiploads of goods from Russia and France labeled in shipping manifests as “replacement parts” or “factory equipment” were, in fact, missile-guidance systems, rocket engines, and even the barrels of antiaircraft guns.

  Government officials, under orders from Saddam, would use oil certificates as cash to purchase goods and services to rebuild and restore the regime, but seldom to benefit the people for whom the Oil-for-Food relief effort had supposedly been designed. The United Nations gave Saddam a mechanism that allowed him to bribe, steal, coerce, and
smuggle whatever he wanted, and in the process he was able to amass billions of dollars worth of weapons, weapons components, and the raw materials to manufacture whatever he wanted.

  Saddam instinctively understood how to take advantage of the $64-billion Oil-for-Food program. His personal wealth in 2003 was estimated to exceed $10 billion. Most of that had been stolen from the people over the past thirty years. But he also pocketed at least $1.8 billion through kickbacks, bribes, and illegal commissions in his dealings with suppliers under the U.N. program. In addition, he was able to collect another $8.4 billion through the direct smuggling operations he set up and supervised between 1996 and 2003.

  Whenever his operations were threatened, Saddam took advantage of his old propaganda tricks to create a diversion. When he expelled U.N. weapons inspectors in December 1998, for example, he claimed that there was political bias against him and that the inspectors were breaking their own rules in the selection of sites. On many occasions he would orchestrate vocal confrontations with the inspection teams, entirely for the sake of the media. It wasn’t until November 2002, with the threat of war hanging over our heads, that Saddam finally allowed the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) back in.

  As part of the armistice signed by Gen. Sultan Hashim at Safwan in 1991, Saddam was required to sign both the international Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) and the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). Unfortunately, both conventions were weak, and neither agreement provided strong incentives or a monitoring apparatus to guarantee compliance with the terms of the documents. And for someone like Saddam, that meant no compliance at all. It was a loophole he was only too glad to exploit.

  Toward Reconciliation

  In June 2004, Demetrius Perricos, who serves as president of UNMOVIC, confirmed these and many other facts in a report to the United Nations Security Council. He made it clear that Saddam had smuggled WMDs out of Iraq before, during, and after the war. In his report, Perricos provided evidence that documents recovered in Jordan, Turkey, and as far away as the Netherlands revealed that thousands of tons of biological warheads had been shipped out of Iraq to other countries in the Middle East. And along with chemical and biological components there were nuclear reactor vessels and fermenters for preparing chemical and biological warheads.