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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: NickSE who wrote (71666)	2/5/2003 11:39:43 PM
From: NickSE	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Khidhir Hamza, Blowing the Whistle on Saddam Hussein By Richard Leiby, Thursday, February 6, 2003; Page C01 washingtonpost.com Married 32 years, the nuclear physicist and his wife share a typical brick-and-siding home in Northern Virginia, with a big-screen TV in the family room and a bowl of cashews beckoning on the coffee table. A photomontage shows their three sons, dark-haired, handsome and grown. Here's the family on a vacation at Luray Caverns. Something's missing, though. Where are the wedding pictures? The cute childhood photographs? All left behind in Baghdad, says Khidhir Hamza, the highest- ranking government scientist to escape from Iraq and live to tell the tale. To take a family album risks being found out as a defector, and death: "You must bring along nothing that could implicate you," he says. Hamza, 64, has only old passports to document his previous life. One bears a treasured date stamp: Sept. 15, 1995, the day he made it to the United States. Anybody who wonders why Iraqi scientists have not been cooperating with United Nations inspectors, or how instrumental they are in concealing banned weapons programs, need only consult Hamza. For nearly 20 years he worked to arm the Iraqi regime with atomic weapons, while Hussein denied to the world that he wanted the Bomb. Two years ago he published a book about the Faustian bargain he struck as Hussein's "personal nuclear adviser." Its title is "Saddam's Bombmaker," and Hamza says on the opening page, "I am lucky to be alive." [...] Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, coupled with his demand for a "crash program" aimed at nuking Israel, ultimately pushed Hamza over the edge. "That told us we were really working in a lunatic asylum," he says. He eased himself out of the nuclear program, took a university job, and grew rich as an insider in Iraq's stock market. He escaped alone, leaving his family vulnerable for several months, but eventually a CIA "exfiltration" team helped to smuggle them into the Kurdish-ruled north. "My tortuous journey had a happy ending," Hamza writes. "But I left behind scores of unhappy Iraqi scientists. . . . Most of them, I am sure, would like to get out. It is the civilized world's urgent duty to help them." [...]