[Washington Post] Iraq's Arsenal Was Only on Paper (1 Viewer)

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Since Gulf War, Nonconventional Weapons Never Got Past the Planning Stage
By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 7, 2004; Page A01

BAGHDAD -- Of all Iraq's rocket scientists, none drew warier scrutiny abroad than Modher Sadeq-Saba Tamimi.
An engineering PhD known for outsized energy and gifts, Tamimi, 47, designed
and built a new short-range missile during Iraq's four-year hiatus from
United Nations arms inspections. Inspectors who returned in late 2002,
enforcing Security Council limits, ruled that the Al Samoud missile's range
was not quite short enough. The U.N. team crushed the missiles, bulldozed
them into a pit and entombed the wreckage in concrete. In one of three
interviews last month, Tamimi said "it was as if they were killing my sons."
But Tamimi had other brainchildren, and these stayed secret. Concealed at
some remove from his Karama Co. factory here were concept drawings and
computations for a family of much more capable missiles, designed to share
parts and features with the openly declared Al Samoud. The largest was meant to fly six times as far.

"This was hidden during the UNMOVIC visits," Tamimi said, referring to
inspectors from the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission.
Over a leisurely meal of lamb and sweet tea, he sketched diagrams. "It was
forbidden for us to reveal this information," he said.
Tamimi's covert work, which he recounted publicly for the first time in five
hours of interviews, offers fresh perspective on the question that led the
nation to war. Iraq flouted a legal duty to report the designs. The weapons
they depicted, however, did not exist. After years of development -- against
significant obstacles -- they might have taken form as nine-ton missiles. In
March they fit in Tamimi's pocket, on two digital compact discs.
The nine-month record of arms investigators since the fall of Baghdad
includes discoveries of other concealed arms research, most of it less
advanced. Iraq's former government engaged in abundant deception about its
ambitions and, in some cases, early steps to prepare for development or
production. Interviews here -- among Iraqi weaponeers and investigators from
the U.S. and British governments -- turned up unreported records, facilities
or materials that could have been used in unlawful weapons.
But investigators have found no support for the two main fears expressed in
London and Washington before the war: that Iraq had a hidden arsenal of old
weapons and built advanced programs for new ones. In public statements and
unauthorized interviews, investigators said they have discovered no work on
former germ-warfare agents such as anthrax bacteria, and no work on a new
designer pathogen -- combining pox virus and snake venom -- that led U.S.
scientists on a highly classified hunt for several months. The investigators
assess that Iraq did not, as charged in London and Washington, resume
production of its most lethal nerve agent, VX, or learn to make it last
longer in storage. And they have found the former nuclear weapons program,
described as a "grave and gathering danger" by President Bush and a "mortal
threat" by Vice President Cheney, in much the same shattered state left by
U.N. inspectors in the 1990s.

A review of available evidence, including some not known to coalition
investigators and some they have not made public, portrays a nonconventional
arms establishment that was far less capable than U.S. analysts judged
before the war. Leading figures in Iraqi science and industry, supported by
observations on the ground, described factories and institutes that were
thoroughly beaten down by 12 years of conflict, arms embargo and strangling
economic sanctions. The remnants of Iraq's biological, chemical and missile
infrastructures were riven by internal strife, bled by schemes for personal
gain and handicapped by deceit up and down lines of command. The broad
picture emerging from the investigation to date suggests that, whatever its
desire, Iraq did not possess the wherewithal to build a forbidden armory on
anything like the scale it had before the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
David Kay, who directs the weapons hunt on behalf of the Bush
administration, reported no discoveries last year of finished weapons, bulk
agents or ready-to-start production lines. Members of his Iraq Survey Group,
in unauthorized interviews, said the group holds out little prospect now of
such a find. Kay and his spokesman, who report to Director of Central
Intelligence George J. Tenet, declined to be interviewed.

Poxes and Professors
On Dec. 13, as a reporter waited to see the dean of Baghdad University's
College of Science, two poker-faced men strode into the anteroom. One was an
ex-Marine named Dan, clad in civilian clothes, body armor, a checkered Arab
scarf and a bandolier of eight spare magazines for his M-16 rifle. The other
identified himself to the receptionist only as Barry.
He asked to see the dean, Abdel Mehdi Taleb, immediately. Dan preceded Barry
into Taleb's office, weapon ready, then stood sentry outside.
According to Taleb, Barry asked -- once again -- about the work of
immunologist Alice Krikor Melconian. For months, Taleb said, the Americans
had sent scientists and intelligence officers to investigate the compact,
curly-haired chairman of the university's biotechnology department.
Three Iraqi scientists said U.S. investigators asserted they have reason to
believe Melconian ran a covert research facility, location unknown. In July,
colleagues said, Melconian emerged from her office with a burly American on
each arm and was placed into the back seat of a car with darkened windows.
U.S. investigators held her for 10 days in an open-air cell and then
released her.

Described by associates as shaken by her arrest, Melconian said she has done
no weapons research and knows of no secret labs. "I have never left the
university," she said. "I have nothing more to say about this. I do not want
to make any more trouble."

Like others on campus, and at a few elite institutes elsewhere, Melconian
remains under scrutiny in part because investigators deem her capable of
doing dangerous biological research. Investigators said they are casting a
wide net at Iraq's "centers of scientific excellence" in an effort to
confirm intelligence that is fragmentary and often lacks essential
particulars.

Kay's Iraq Survey Group, which has numbered up to 1,400 personnel from the
Defense Department, Energy Department national laboratories and intelligence
agencies, is looking for biological weapons far more dangerous than those of
Iraq's former arsenal. A U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, published in
October 2002, said "chances are even" that Iraqi weaponeers were working
with smallpox, one of history's mass killers. It also said Iraq "probably
has developed genetically engineered BW agents."
As the Associated Press first reported, a scientific assessment panel known
as Team Pox returned home in late July without finding reason to believe
Iraq possessed the variola virus, which causes smallpox. Even so, interviews
with Iraqi scientists led to a redoubled search for work on animal poxes,
harmless to humans but potentially useful as substitutes for smallpox in
weapons research.

Rihab Taha, the British-educated biologist known in the west as Dr. Germ,
has generally been described by U.S. officials as uncooperative in custody
since May 12. But according to one well-informed account of her debriefing,
she acknowledged receiving an order from superiors in 1990 to develop a
biological weapon based on a virus. That same year, a virologist who worked
for her, Hazem Ali, commenced research on camelpox.
If truthful and correctly recounted, Taha's statement exposed a
long-standing lie. Iraq's government denied offensive viral research. One
analyst familiar with the debriefing report, declining to be identified by
name or nationality, said investigators believe that Taha's remarks
demonstrate an intent to use smallpox, since camelpox resembles no other
human pathogen.

"Hearing that from the lips of the people involved is kind of like that
MasterCard commercial: 'Priceless,' " the analyst said.
There is no corresponding record, however, that Iraq had the capability or
made the effort to carry out such an intent.
Taha, according to the same debriefing account, said Iraq had no access to
smallpox. Ali's research halted after 45 days, with the August 1990 outbreak
of war in Kuwait, and did not resume. And Taha, like all those in custody,
continues to assert that biowar programs ceased entirely the following year.

 

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Chimeras, Science Fiction
More alarming even than Taha's statement, investigators said, were highly
classified indications that Iraq sought to produce a genetically altered
virus. Australian scientists reported in 2001 that an apparently innocent
change in mousepox DNA transformed the virus into a rampant killer of mice.
Investigators spent months probing for evidence that Iraq sought to master
the technique, then apply it to vaccinia -- a readily available virus used
to inoculate against smallpox -- and finally to smallpox itself.
Survey group scientists discovered no sign of pox research save at the
Baghdad College of Veterinary Medicine, which declared the work to U.N.
inspectors in 2002. Researchers there were manipulating the viruses that
cause goatpox and sheeppox, in well-documented efforts to develop vaccines.
U.S. investigators arrested Antoine Banna, the Cornell-trained dean, but
soon released him. Much the same result followed a probe of avian virus
research at the Ghazi Institute.
"It was legitimate research, but if they wanted to swing the other way they
had some of the wherewithal to do that," said an analyst apprised of the
results.

When investigators paid a call on Noria Ali, a genetic engineer who wears
the head cover and long robes of an observant Muslim, "they said they knew
there was [genetic] research on these viruses, and we had secret labs for
this work," Ali said.

Ali acknowledged a history that attracted suspicion. In 1990, she said,
Rihab Taha ordered her to build a genetic engineering lab at Iraq's
principal bioweapons research center. The Special Security Organization
warned her that "any person who talks about his work will be executed," Ali
said. But Iraq's invasion of Kuwait left the lab unfinished, an account
confirmed by U.S. and European experts.
"We could have done a lot in this lab, but the fact is that this lab never
existed," Ali said.

The survey group's most exotic line of investigation sought evidence that
Iraq tried to create a pathogen combining pox virus with cobra venom. A 1986
study in the Journal of Microbiology reported that fowlpox spread faster and
killed more chickens in the presence of venom extract. Investigators
received a secondhand report that Iraq sought to splice them together.
Such an artificial life form -- created by inserting genetic sequences from
one organism into another -- is called a "chimera," after the fire-breathing
monster of Greek mythology commingling lion, serpent and goat.
"They have asked about developing some kind of chimera, a pox with
snake-venom gene," said Ali Zaag, dean of the university's Institute for
Biotechnology. "You have seen our labs. For us, these capabilities are
science fiction."

Investigators also searched for what one of them termed "starter sets" of
pathogens, laboratory samples that could be used for later production. For
each suspected weapon, the investigators carried a supply of "labeled
antibodies," a classified technology used in field kits that resemble home
pregnancy tests. "We didn't find anything, so certainly not anything
engineered," a coalition scientist said.
Team Pox, as the group of investigators dubbed itself, eventually dropped
the chimera investigation.
"You've got to learn to walk before you start running," said a European
government scientist who studied Iraq's biological programs last year. "The
evidence we have about the virus program is they hadn't started to walk
yet."

Recently, Zaag said, the chimera hunt resumed. This time the investigators
are intelligence officers. Their approach, Zaag said, is "We'll give you a
few more days to reveal something, and then we'll have to take you."
Spokesmen for the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency declined requests
for interviews.

What 'the Traitor' Knew
Late last month, fresh evidence emerged on a very old question about Iraq's
illegal arms: Did the Baghdad government, as it said, rid itself of all the
biological arms it produced before 1991? The answer matters, because the
Bush administration's most concrete prewar assertions about Iraqi germ
weapons referred to stocks allegedly hidden from that old arsenal.
The new evidence appears to be a contemporary record, from inside the Iraqi
government, of a pivotal moment in Baghdad's long struggle to shield arms
programs from outside scrutiny. The document, written just after the
defection of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law on Aug. 8, 1995, anticipates the
collapse of cover stories for weapons that had yet to be disclosed. Read
alongside subsequent discoveries made by U.N. inspectors, the document
supports Iraq's claim that it destroyed all production stocks of lethal
pathogens before inspectors knew they existed.
The defection of Hussein Kamel was a turning point in the U.N.-imposed
disarmament of Iraq in the 1990s. Kamel, who had married one of Saddam
Hussein's daughters, Raghad, and controlled Baghdad's Military Industrial
Commission, told his Western debriefers about major programs in biological
and nuclear weaponry that had gone undetected or unconfirmed. Iraq was
forced to acknowledge what he exposed, but neither inspectors nor U.S.
officials were sure Kamel had told all there was to tell.
A handwritten Iraqi damage report, composed five days after the defection,
now suggests that Kamel left little or nothing out.
The author is Hossam Amin, then -- and until his April 27 arrest -- the head
of Iraq's National Monitoring Directorate. As liaison to the inspectors he
provided information and logistical support, but he also concealed the
government's remaining secrets.
Sufiyan Taha Mahmoud, who was private secretary to Amin in 1995, said in an
interview that Amin flew into a rage when he learned Kamel had slipped
across the border to Jordan. "It was as if he was hit with a hammer,"
Mahmoud said.
Five days later, Amin dispatched a six-page letter to the president's son
Qusay.
The person who provided a copy to The Washington Post had postwar access to
the presidential office where he said he found the original. Iraqis who know
Amin well and experienced government investigators from the United States
and Europe, who analyzed the document for this article, said they believe it
to be authentic. They cited handwriting, syntax, contemporary details and
annotations that match those of previous samples. Markings on the letter say
that Qusay read it, summarized it for his father and filed it with
presidential secretary Abed Hamid Mahmoud.
Just before his "sudden and regrettable flight and surrender to the bosom of
the enemy," Amin wrote, "the traitor Hussein Kamel" received a detailed
briefing on "the points of weakness and the points of strength" in Iraq's
concealment efforts.
Amin then listed, in numbered points, "the matters that are known to the
traitor and not declared" to U.N. inspectors.
Inspectors knew Iraq tried to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon, but not,
Amin wrote, about the "crash program" to fabricate a bomb with French
reactor fuel by 1991. They knew Iraq made biological toxins, but not that it
put them in Scud missile warheads. There were major facilities -- Dawrah
Foot and Mouth Disease Institute, a centrifuge factory in Rashdiya, and the
Al Atheer bomb-fabrication plant -- whose true purposes were unacknowledged
to inspectors.

Shortly after Amin sent the letter, Kamel's debriefings and subsequent
inspections exposed every item in Amin's catalogue.
Until now, Kamel's debriefers suspected that "maybe he decided to keep
something for himself," said Ali Shukri, a Jordanian military officer who
debriefed Kamel on behalf of the late King Hussein, speaking in an interview
in Amman. After reading Amin's letter in silence and then rereading it,
Shukri looked up and said Kamel had held back nothing.
The most significant point in Amin's letter, U.S. and European experts said,
is his unambiguous report that Iraq destroyed its entire inventory of
biological weapons. Amin reminded Qusay Hussein of the government's claim
that it possessed no such arms after 1990, then wrote that in truth
"destruction of the biological weapons agents took place in the summer of
1991."

It was those weapons to which Secretary of State Colin L. Powell referred in
the Security Council on Feb. 5 when he said, for example, that Iraq still
had an estimated 8,500 to 25,000 liters of anthrax bacteria.
Some things Amin's letter did not say may also be meaningful. If Iraq had
succeeded in spray-drying anthrax spores to extend their life and lethality,
that would have been among the most important secrets of its wide-ranging
weapons program. The letter did not speak of it. The letter also enumerated
Baghdad's nuclear secrets, but mentioned nothing to suggest Iraq
manufactured unknown parts of an "implosion device" to detonate uranium.
There was only one important thing, Amin said, that Hussein Kamel did not
know: some of the locations where Iraq hid its library of arms research.
That supports long-standing suspicions that Iraq held back portions of a
knowledge base that could speed revival of development and production one
day.

A U.S. intelligence official, who was provided with a copy of Amin's letter
for comment, said the government would not discuss it in detail. He said an
initial check of records "suggests that we have not previously seen the
letter." Without the original and an account of its origins, he said,
government analysts "cannot verify the authenticity of the letter." He
added, "It is plausible and, from a quick scan of it, presents no immediate
surprises."

 

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'The Stupid Army'
Thair Anwar Masraf, an affable project engineer, made an appointment last
summer to see an investigator from David Kay's survey group. He had
information, he said in an interview, that might help the Americans
interpret two trailer-mounted production plants found near Mosul in April
and May.
"I waited more than one hour in the Palestine Hotel," Masraf said. "He did
not show up."

Masraf watched with curiosity, in coming months, as the Bush administration
touted its discovery of mobile germ-weapon factories.
A joint study released May 28 by the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency
called the trailers "the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a
biological warfare program." Two days later, in Poland, President Bush
announced: "For those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing
devices or banned weapons, they're wrong. We found them."
When Iraqi engineers told investigators that the discovered trailers were
meant for hydrogen, the CIA dismissed the "cover story."
By July, with contrary evidence piling up, Kay described the trailer episode
as a "fiasco." He told BBC Television, which broadcast the tape Nov. 23: "I
think it was premature and embarrassing."
Even so, Kay's October report to Congress left the question unresolved. Kay
said he could not corroborate a mobile germ factory, but he restated the CIA
argument that the trailers were not "ideally suited" for hydrogen.
Had Masraf found Kay's investigator at the Palestine Hotel, he said he would
have explained that Iraq actually used such trailers to generate hydrogen
during the eight-year war with Iran. Masraf and his former supervisor at the
Saad Co. said Masraf managed a contract to refurbish some of the units
beginning in 1997.

According to the two men, Iraq bought mobile hydrogen generators from
Britain in 1982 and mounted them on trucks. The Republican Guard used one
type, Iraq's 2nd Army Corps another.
Iraqi artillery units relied on hydrogen-filled weather balloons to measure
wind and temperature, which affect targeting. Munqith Qaisi, then a senior
manager at Saad Co. and now its American-appointed director-general, said
the trailers used a chemical -- not biological -- process to make hydrogen
from methanol and demineralized water.
The feature that analysts found most suspicious in May -- the compression
and recapture of exhaust gases -- is a necessity, Masraf said, when gas is
the intended product.

In the late 1990s, the Republican Guard sent some of its trailers for
refurbishment at the Kindi Co. The 2nd Army Corps signed a similar contract
with Saad Co. Masraf said the first units were finished in 2001, including
the two discovered by coalition forces around Mosul.
Qaisi's account may also clear up an unexplained detail from the May 28
intelligence report: traces of urea in the reaction vessel aboard one of the
trailers. Qaisi said the vessels corroded badly because Iraqi troops
disregarded strict orders to use only demineralized water.
"The stupid army pissed in it, or used river water," he said.

Said's Last Experiment
On Thursday, Dec. 11, a rumpled man with a high, balding crown arrived late
for work at the University of Technology. In his unpainted office, about the
size of a family sedan, electrical fixtures drooped from cement walls.
Sabah Abdul Noor once moved among the nation's elites. He played a part in
the most ambitious undertaking of Iraqi industrial science: creation from
scratch, and largely in secret, of the wherewithal to design and manufacture
an atomic bomb. When the 1991 Gulf War intervened, an Iraqi bomb was --
informed estimates vary -- six months to two years from completion.
Abdul Noor watched as that multibillion-dollar enterprise was reduced to
slag under the cutting torches of U.N. inspectors, who arrived under
Security Council mandate after Iraq's defeat in Kuwait. Since the fall of
Saddam Hussein, Abdul Noor said, U.S. forces have been questioning him for
indications that the nuclear program was secretly revived.
"I have just come from such an interview," he said, apologizing for the
hour. "They didn't give names. They did not say where they were from. I am
kept as long as they wish to keep me."
What the Americans want to talk about, almost always, is Khalid Ibrahim
Said.

Until 1991, Said was going to be the man who built Iraq's atomic bomb. Other
leading figures were responsible for uranium enrichment. Said led the
team -- "PC-3, Group 4," in Iraq's cryptic organization chart -- that would
form 40 pounds of uranium into a working nuclear device. Abdul Noor was
Said's powder metallurgist.

Said died on April 8 when Marines opened fire on his moving car near a newly
established checkpoint. His loss grieved Kay's nuclear investigators, who
had many questions for him. When they came across Said's last experiment,
the late bomb designer moved to the center of their probe.
Said spent his final days in a warehouse filled with capacitors and powerful
magnets. He and his team were building what they described -- in a mandatory
disclosure to the International Atomic Energy Agency -- as a "linear
engine." The purpose, Iraq declared, was air defense.

The machine in Said's warehouse was more commonly known as a "rail gun." It
used electromagnetic pulses to accelerate a small object to very high speed.
When U.S. investigators arrived, they found the gun had been "shooting an
aluminum projectile at an aluminum target plate like the skin of an
airplane," said an analyst who reviewed their report. But rail gun
technology is thought to be decades from use in a practical weapon, and
investigators believed Said might have something else in mind.
Impact of an extremely high-velocity projectile in a target chamber, they
said, might be used to measure the behavior of materials under pressures
that compare to a nuclear implosion. Such "equation of state" experiments,
as physicists call them, could be applied to nuclear warhead design. When
the U.S. nuclear team looked closely at that question, however, it "saw no
evidence of equation of state work" with the rail gun, according to an
authoritative summary of the team's report.

A sad look crossed Abdul Noor's face when he tried to explain his bafflement
at suspicions that Iraq had secretly rebuilt -- "reconstituted," as the Bush
administration put it in the summer and fall of 2002 -- a nuclear weapons
program. He and his colleagues still know what they learned, Abdul Noor
said, but their material condition is incomparably worse than it was when
they began in 1987. "We would have had to start from less than zero," he
said, with thousands of irreplaceable tools banned from import. "The country
was cornered," he said. "We were boycotted. We were embargoed. The truth is,
we disintegrated."

Of his late friend Said, Abdul Noor said: "I don't know what was in his
heart. Probably he wanted to return to [nuclear weapons work] one day. That
is in the category of dreams."

A common view among investigators today is that Said had the motive but not
the means. One Western physicist who knew Said well said the rail gun
enabled Said to maintain his team and "hone their skills on diagnostics,
flash X-ray cameras, measuring very high speeds, and measuring impacts of
ramming things together." The physicist added, "It's basic science. There's
no relation to actual [bomb] design and fabrication."
Some investigators have yet to be convinced. They continue to look for
warhead research in the guise of the rail gun.

"Today they were asking me that again," Abdul Noor said. "I was not on the
same wavelength. I could see they were not pleased with me."

 

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Red on Red on Blue
There is another explanation for the rail gun, according to one man who
worked on it and does not want to be named. It was, he said, a deception
operation against Saddam Hussein.

Hussein resented U.S. air patrols over "no-fly zones" where Iraqi aircraft
were forbidden in northern and southern Iraq. After trying for years to
challenge the patrols, another Iraqi said, "we had yet to scratch the wing
of one American F-15."

Said gave the president an answer involving futuristic technology. He was a
good enough applied physicist to understand the long odds against success,
Said's anonymous colleague said, but the project earned him favor, prestige
and a substantial budget.

In every field of special weaponry, Iraqi designers and foreign
investigators said, such deceit was endemic. Program managers promised more
than they could deliver, or things they could not deliver at all, to advance
careers, preserve jobs or conduct intrigues against rivals. Sometimes they
did so from ignorance, failing to grasp the challenges they took on.
Lying to an absolute ruler was hazardous, Iraqi weaponeers said, but less so
in some cases than the alternatives. "No one will tell Saddam Hussein to his
face, 'I can't do this,' " said an Iraqi brigadier general who supervised
work on some of the technologies used in the rail gun.

David Kay's survey group has turned up other such cases. Analysts are
calling the phenomenon "red-on-red deception," after the U.S. practice of
using red to stand for enemy forces and blue to stand for friendly ones. In
some cases, they said, "red on red" amounted to "red on blue" -- because
Western intelligence collected the same false reports that fooled Hussein.
Sufiyan Taha Mahmoud, who worked for Iraq's National Monitoring Directorate
throughout its 12 years, said spurious programs also led to needless
conflict with U.N. arms inspectors.

"They couldn't build anything," Mahmoud said of overpromising weaponeers,
"but they had to hide the documents because they related to prohibited
activities."

Secrecy and a procurement system based on smuggling, Iraqi scientists said,
abetted those who inflated their reports.
George Healey, a Canadian nuclear physicist and longtime inspector in Iraq,
said entire programs were devised, or their design choices distorted, in
order to siphon funds.

"They had a system to graft money out of oil-for-food," he said, referring
to the U.N. program that supervised Iraqi exports and imports after 1991.
"What you had to have was a project -- the more expensive the better,
because the more you can buy, the more you can graft out of it. You'd have
difficulty believing how much that explains."

Intertwined with internal deception, many analysts now believe, was
deception aimed overseas. Hussein plainly hid actual programs over the
years, but Kay, among others, said it appears possible he also hinted at
programs that did not exist.

Hans Blix, who was executive chairman of UNMOVIC, the U.N. arms inspection
team, said in a telephone interview from Sweden that he has devoted much
thought to why Hussein might have exaggerated his arsenal. One explanation
that appeals to him: "You can put a sign on your door, 'Beware of the dog,'
without having a dog. They did not mind looking a little bit serious and a
little bit dangerous."

Defectors who sold false or exaggerated stories in Washington, Iraqi and
American experts said, layered on still another coat of deception.
"You end up with a Picasso-like drawing -- distorted," said Ali Zaag, the
Baghdad University biotechnologist.

'Long Pole in the Tent'
One line of thought in the survey group now, as it constructs a narrative of
the Iraqi threat, is that the Baghdad government set out to revive its
nonconventional programs in sequence. Instead of beginning with "weapons of
mass destruction" -- nuclear, biological or chemical -- Iraq began with the
means to deliver them .

"Missiles are very significant to us because they're the long pole in the
tent," Kay told "BBC Panorama." "They're the thing that takes the longest to
produce. . . . The Iraqis had started in late '99, 2000, to produce a family
of missiles that would have gotten to 1,000 kilometers [625 miles]."
Kay was referring to Tamimi's work, though the designer and details have not
been made public before. If reached, a 625-mile range would have menaced Tel
Aviv, Tehran, Istanbul, Riyadh, the world's richest oil fields and important
U.S. military installations from Turkey to the Persian Gulf.
When that might have happened -- or whether -- is difficult to forecast. Of
all Iraq's nascent programs, Tamimi's was among the most advanced. A closer
look at its prospects helps answer a question common to all four fields of
forbidden arms: Was the country capable of carrying out the presumed
intentions of its leader?

Tamimi is a man of robust self-esteem, but he expressed no confidence about
his long-range missile, which depended on clustering five engines in a
single stage. (An intermediate version called for two engines.) Western
missile experts, who suggested questions and reviewed answers from a
reporter in multiple rounds of interviews with Tamimi, emerged uncertain of
the timetable or outcome.

Their best estimate was that it would take six years -- if the missile
worked at all -- to reach a successful flight test. Tamimi would need less
time with major help from abroad, but considerably more if he had to conceal
the work from U.N. monitoring that persisted until the United States invaded
in March. U.S. government spokesmen declined to provide an estimate.
Tamimi "was the star" of Iraq's three rival rocket establishments, said a
French expert who has known him for years. Another European rocket scientist
said of Tamimi: "In our country he would be a very good design engineer."
But Tamimi lacked access to the modern tools and technical literature of his
profession. He left Czechoslovakia's Antonin Zapotecky Military Academy in
1984 with a doctorate degree and a collection of Russian rocketry texts now
entering their third decade in print. For the essential modeling of thrust,
flight qualities, trajectory and range, he relied on unsophisticated
software written in Baghdad. In an e-mail exchange, Tamimi expressed strong
curiosity about what the "more accurate modeling programs" of overseas
experts might show about his designs.

Tamimi faced challenges he had not encountered before, some of which he knew
about and others he did not. He knew he would have difficulty lashing
together multiple engines and igniting them at the same instant. "The main
problem was synchronization, which we hadn't solved yet," he said.
To fit multiple engines in an airframe based on the existing Al Samoud
missile, Tamimi's designs called for a flared missile that nearly doubled in
diameter -- from 760mm (30 inches) to 1500mm (59 inches) -- from top to
bottom. Foreign experts said the shape would produce enormous strains. "If
it didn't break up going up, it would most likely do so on reentry," said a
Western expert who did not want to be named, after submitting Tamimi's
sketches and descriptions to an evaluation team. "To avoid that, they would
have to develop some sort of separation system to abandon the wider bit, and
also master terminal guidance after the separation."

Tamimi said "we did not consider the problem of separation." For terminal
guidance, which steers a missile in its final approach to target, Tamimi
pinned his hope on Russian technology he did not have in hand.
In test flights, the Al Samoud missile never landed -- literally -- within a
mile of its target. In 2001, Tamimi obtained a small black-market supply of
precision Russian gyroscopes. He hoped they would increase the missile's
accuracy from about 1.5 miles to 500 yards. To increase accuracy still
further, he said "we were near success" in negotiating a contract -- he
would not say with whom -- for a complete Russian-built inertial navigation
system.

"He knew very well where he was going, especially in guidance and gyroscope
equipment," a foreign expert said.

An enormous problem for Tamimi's program, however, was that he designed it
to allow procurement of parts under cover of the openly declared Al Samoud.
When inspectors ruled the Al Samoud illegal and destroyed its production
lines in March, Tamimi said, he began to doubt the project's viability.
"Saddam Hussein ordered this work, but where would we get the materials?"
said an Iraqi general who declined to be named and who kept close tabs on
Tamimi's missile designs.

"This was the case in every field. People would
prepare reports under the order of Saddam Hussein and the supervision of the
people around Saddam Hussein. But it was not real."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company