The World's Most Dangerous Man

Just last year, there was another rare success. A London company that supposedly specialized in exporting minihamburgers to the Middle East approached a San Marcos, Calif., electronics firm and inquired about buying high-energy capacitors that could be used to help detonate a nuclear explosion. What would a hamburger outfit want with capacitors like that, the company owner wondered. He quickly alerted a U.S. Customs agent in San Diego, who posed as an export manager for the firm and proceeded to negotiate the transaction with three Iraqi government engineers and two employes of the alleged hamburger firm, Euromac, Ltd. Earlier this year, the sting operation hit pay dirt. All five persons have been indicted in the U.S. and Britain, but the three Iraqis have vanished, and Hussein himself has since boasted publicly that Iraq has obtained the same type of capacitors from another source.

What makes all this weaponry especially frightening is the fact that Iraq is rapidly acquiring an impressive arsenal of missiles to deliver it. With help from West Germany, Austria and perhaps Brazil, Iraq is pursuing both solid and liquid-fueled missiles and is believed to have spent well over $1 billion on the program so far. A joint missile program with Egypt and Argentina has largely been abandoned, but Iraq has taken elements of the program, called Condor II, to upgrade the guidance and warhead technology on its existing al-Abbas and al-Husayn missiles. "The bottom line," says Michael Eisenstadt, a military analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, "is that the al-Abbas and al-Husayn will give Iraq the strategic deterrent capability that it needs."

Family ties. For this, Hussein can be given much of the credit. He chose his No.2 man wisely and placed him in charge of Iraq's Ministry of Industry and Military Industries. Hussein Kamil al-Majid is married to Saddam Hussein's daughter Ghard, and he supervised the expansion of the elite Republican Guard. A third man, Lt. Gen. Amer Hamoudi al-Saadi, has done a brilliant job overseeing Iraq's missile program. Both Kamil and al-Saadi have been wise, electing to build what can be built inside Iraq and buying the rest outside through front companies like the Euromac hamburger firm. "The Iraqis are doing the best job of any Third World country in collecting high tech in the military field," says Haifa University's Bar'am. "... Their fingerprints never appear."

Given the obvious dangers, it would seem imperative for the U.S. to try to impose whatever constraints it can on Saddam Hussein. But the Bush administration's view, in the words of John Kelly, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, is that "there is still a potentiality for positive alterations in Iraqi behavior." Others, in and out of the government, are not so sure. Some wonder about a potential attack on neighboring Kuwait, or on Saudi Arabia, if an attack on Israel does not come first. Others cite the brutality of the Hussein regime and ask why the U.S. does not take action to express its displeasure. "You accurately recite a chamber of horrors," Representative Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) told Assistant Secretary Kelly recently, "and then you sort of express the hope ... that Iraq under Saddam Hussein will turn in the direction of being a responsible and peace-loving member of the international community." What Iraq is, for the time being, is the most dangerous and destabilizing member. Here is a glimpse of how it got that way:

THE BANK

Following the tangled money trail

The trouble that Banca Nazionale Del Lavoro has seen is no small matter. Former BNL officials are the subject of a grand-jury inquiry in the U.S., while at headquarters in Rome the bank's chairman and director general have resigned. Ten employes at the BNL branch in Atlanta have been fired. A half-dozen lawsuits have been filed. Still, BNL would be just another bank in hot water except for the fact that the business that got it there has much to do with the way the government of Iraq pursues and pays for sensitive Western technology. In this case, the $3 billion in unauthorized loans and letters of credit BNL's Atlanta branch issued would have been a wonderfully discreet way to finance a weapons plant, but it didn't quite work out that way.