Saddam conceals weapons well
By Khidhir Hamza
11/26/2002
usatoday.com
When United Nations inspectors begin their first weapons searches in Iraq in almost four years today, they will be confronted with a very difficult assignment that may determine whether we go to war with Saddam Hussein.
As the former head of Saddam's nuclear-weapons program, I am often asked what these inspectors should be looking for, where and what sorts of clever dodges they should expect.
What Hans Blix and his U.N. team will meet are Iraqi teams with a very sophisticated knowledge of how to cover their tracks. Their prowess in this regard could hamper the effectiveness of these inspections, as they did in the past.
It amazes me to hear some of the inspectors talk about the incompetence of Iraq's scientists and engineers. These are people who rebuilt all of Iraq's services — ranging from power stations to refineries to bridges — after the Gulf War. They seem uninformed because of Saddam's instructions. Back in 1973, when I was head of the physics department, which was involved in the planning of the nuclear-weapons program, and Saddam had taken over as Atomic Energy chairman, his words to us in a meeting were clear: "Pretend that you are not as well informed or as bright as you really are. A bright Iraqi is perceived as a danger to our enemies, but a mediocre one is not." That meant telling inspectors: "I don't understand the question, and I have no idea what this means."
We also got a lot of inadvertent help from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is also participating in the latest inspections. The IAEA had formed the International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Evaluation (INFCE) group to tell the world how nuclear-weapons programs are concealed. Its massive report, published around 1980, had a volume specifically dedicated to the telltale signs of weapons. The INFCE volume was must-reading for all Iraqi department heads. It was translated into Arabic and distributed free to all who might need the information. It was a handy how-to guide for throwing inspectors off course.
The report said that if a country is enriching uranium, it is using a lot of power, so inspectors should look for a large number of power cables going into an undeclared facility. So at our Tarmia uranium-enrichment facility, we hid all of our power cables underground.
It also said to look for a lot of heavy traffic from large trucks going into different plants because of the large amount of supplies required to sustain a weapons program. So we ran our trucking operations only at night.
Surour Mirza, our agent at the IAEA, who fronted as our science attaché in the Iraqi Embassy in Vienna, used to send us messages warning that any underground digging would alert U.S. satellites to our secret activities. So, we canceled all underground planning for future facilities.
Of course, Saddam has not been sitting tight waiting for the U.N. to act this time, either. Most of Iraq's leading scientists, who have faced inspectors in the past, have been officially transferred out of weapons-of-mass-destruction programs. The transfers are only on paper, but the ploy gives Saddam the opportunity for denial.
"This scientist left the project long ago, and he is in the private sector. We really don't know his address anymore," was a familiar answer about many scientists in the weapons programs during the last inspections. By making the scientist unavailable, the inspectors were denied information about parts of the weapons program.
The word out from the Gulf media is that Saddam has ordered all families of WMD senior workers be resettled in three high-security compounds. Thus, measures are already in place to make it difficult to interview scientists without Iraqi minders. Also, with his family in confinement, a scientist will be in no position to talk to an inspection team, which might leak information to Iraqi authorities.
The only way around this problem is to remove, in bulk, a predetermined group of scientists along with their families from Iraq and then start debriefing them abroad. But Blix already has said that he has a problem with taking scientists out of the country or talking to them without Iraqi minders.
With the U.N. bureaucracy taking over these inspections rather than weapons-lab scientists, we are back to where we were before the Gulf War. Then we had none of the gung-ho attitude of the teams that came in after the Gulf War.
This time, these are gentleman inspectors with none of the abrasive behavior of past inspectors. They will be patient, polite and reluctant to take a strong stand. They represent more of the European sentiment than the U.S. one. With Iraq regarded by Europe as a prize to be kept away from the Americans rather than a strategic danger, the teams are not likely to be aggressive in implementing the latest U.N. resolution. In fact, this past weekend, Blix made clear that their initial inspections in Iraq would be non-confrontational.
Still, if the past is any guide, Iraqis will make their job difficult. If an inspector arrived at a building, he would be faced with locked doors to all but the rooms he was supposed to go into. Though an inspector had the right to go into any room in the building, we never were asked to open a locked door. Thus our work on uranium enrichment was carried out inside buildings that were covered by the inspections, but we never worried about being discovered. In the past, Iraqis have had to be very heavy-handed before inspectors would cry foul.
The real test will be Dec. 8. Iraq already has denied it has any weapons of mass destruction. It has two ways to go: either continue the denial or admit to a token stockpile. The admission can be downplayed in many ways, including by explaining the possibility that someone forgot to report this or that weapon. The Russians and Europeans will be very understanding and protective. You can't go to war, they will say, based on a mistake. The man is coming clean; what else do Americans want?
The only problem is that Saddam will never come clean.
Tariq Aziz, Iraq's deputy prime minister, has declared that the United States intends to disarm Iraq first and attack it later. So there will be no real disarmament. If the United States accepts the situation with incremental demands for disarmament, then the game is over, and Saddam has won.
If the United States refuses to accept an inconclusive or tepid inspection report and goes into Iraq anyway, then all of the rogue states of the world will take notice and mend their ways.
The types of conflict we will face in the future will be determined now. Are rogue dictators allowed to amass weapons of mass destruction and get away with it? Every one of them is watching what will happen to Saddam.
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