In the Garden of Armageddon
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OBEIDI NOW LIVES with eight family members in a U.S. city that he asked me not to name. His son and three daughters are learning English and looking for jobs, and he occasionally gives talks to groups of government officials. He seems more relaxed than he did when I first met him, as though he is finally able to shed some of the fear and pressure of life in Baghdad. But the thought of his former colleagues still weighs heavily on his mind. One day as we were eating falafel from plastic plates in the food court near his new American home, sitting anonymously among the shoppers, he asked me why he was still the only Iraqi scientist whom the United States had seen fit to take out of harm's way.
"There are a number of people who could be brought here, at least temporarily, and make positive contributions to this society," he said. "These are very educated and skillful scientists. Surely this great nation could absorb a few more talented people."
During the 1990s, the International Atomic Energy Agency and other watchdog groups compiled lists of key participants in Saddam's WMD programs. The IAEA roll call alone included about 2,000 names. One of the few that has been made public is that of Dr. Faris Abdul Aziz, a mild-mannered engineer who oversaw a staff of more than 200 working on the nuclear centrifuge program. I met him in Obeidi's garden, and he told me that in the days after the invasion, he had gone to Saddam's former Republican Palace to offer cooperation to the U.S. military on behalf of himself and other top nuclear scientists. But U.S. officials only wanted to know if he knew where Saddam was hiding and where they might find WMD stockpiles. They never asked him back for another interview. Today, no one seems to know where he is. "We've been trying to get in touch with these guys for months," Albright says. "But by now they're probably so jaded and suspicious that they want nothing to do with the U.S."
An even greater concern is the flight risk posed by scientists one level down: the technicians who have precise, hands-on knowledge of how to manufacture WMD components. Their expertise is priceless, especially to a covert program looking for engineers who know how to put the pieces together. A source with close ties to intelligence on the issue recently told me of the case of a female scientist who worked in Saddam's centrifuge program, most likely Dr. Widad Hattam al-Jabbouri. In the 1980s, Jabbouri had mastered one of the most troublesome aspects of the uranium-enriching machine: the magnetic upper bearing that holds the centrifuge rotor as it spins at supersonic speeds. Her expertise on classified magnet technology was deep, and extremely valuable. "From what we have learned she has ended up at a university in Syria," the source said. "Apparently the Syrians basically set up a refuge for senior scientists, especially those with Baathist connections, who couldn't get any work in Iraq."
This does not necessarily mean that Jabbouri is working on a weapons program in Damascus. The Syrian government has stated that it has no nuclear program, despite the suspicions of many international experts. But her move to Syria underscores how loose a grasp the U.S. has on Iraq's WMD knowledge.
"The proliferation risk is higher than it was before, and a chaotic situation means this technology is going to spread," says Robert Baer, who spent 21 years as a case officer with the CIA in the Middle East. If the administration had been serious about neutralizing Saddam's weapons program, he says, "the troops would have been securing equipment at weapons sites as they invaded, and they would have been looking for scientists.... It tells you that this war had nothing to do with WMDs."
SHORTLY AFTER the invasion of Iraq, Anne Harrington, then the deputy director of the Proliferation Threat Reduction Office of the State Department's Non-Proliferation Bureau, began planning a trip to Iraq to meet former WMD scientists and help them get to work on rebuilding the country. Harrington had a legendary track record of working with scientists from the former Soviet Union. In 1997, she had cut through the red tape of diplomacy and sent an email directly to the head of the State Research Center for Virology and Biotechnology in Siberia. The contact led to increased U.S. government funds to help former Soviet bioweapons scientists apply for civilian projects at home rather than sell their expertise on the black market.
"Anne believed this was the most important thing to do," says Carl Phillips, a biological weapons expert from Texas Tech University who signed on to help Harrington in Iraq. "She believed in going over and putting our boots on the ground to find these people, and she was fearless."
Harrington and Phillips proposed a $20 million plan to reach out to scientists in Baghdad. Their plan didn't go over well with the Pentagon, which at that point controlled the interim government of Iraq; Phillips remembers being told that as a condition for going, they had to agree not to make a formal request for the $20 million.
Once they got to Baghdad, Harrington was aghast at the scale of the looting. Her $20 million would be a mere drop in the bucket. "You can't just put somebody in a lab," she notes. "Not when they don't have a microscope."
In the end, even Harrington's drop in the bucket evaporated -- never mind that the State Department had made an official announcement allocating the $20 million -- and Harrington and Phillips had to make do with $2 million scraped together from emergency funds. Albright says responsibility for the reversal lies with John Bolton, then the State Department's undersecretary for arms control and international security. "All of this was going to land on Bolton's desk," he notes. "And he was in the camp that thinks all these scientists are criminals." Other programs to help Iraqi scientists -- including a Department of Energy program coordinated through Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico -- have also come up short. "There are tens of thousands of scientists and engineers in need of a job," says Dr. Arian Pregenzer, a senior scientist at Sandia's Cooperative Monitoring Center. "We estimated it would be a $50-million-a-year project. That money has not materialized from anyplace."
Phillips ended up working on his own in Iraq, traveling in a civilian car to make contact with any WMD scientists he could find; so far, he's been able to set up a small center that employs eight former weapons researchers. Harrington, for her part, resigned from the State Department this past spring, partly in frustration over the lack of funds. "When the most we could squeeze out of the system was two $2 million grants," she says, "it made us sit back and scratch our heads a little bit and say, 'Didn't we go to war because they had people who could produce weapons of mass destruction?' It's a little difficult to square that circle."
Kurt Pitzer is a former commercial longline fisherman and relief worker who has reported from many of the world's turbulent regions, including the Balkans, the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He was embedded with the Army's 3rd Infantry Division during the invasion of Iraq, then jumped his embed as Baghdad fell. He met Dr. Mahdi Obeidi soon afterward and helped him go public with Saddam Hussein's remaining nuclear secrets. He and Obeidi cowrote The Bomb in My Garden: The Secrets of Saddam's Nuclear Mastermind, which will be published in paperback in September.
