By Douglas Pasternak and Stacey Schultz
Ever since United Nations weapons inspectors were pulled out of Iraq three years
ago, U.S. officials have been concerned
that Iraq has been reconstituting its programs of mass destruction. Those worries, combined with information that Iraq may
have been training al Qaeda terrorists, are
driving a handful of past and present U.S.
officials in Washington to advocate that
America attack Iraq next. And among the
most vocal of Iraq's critics is a former
Iraqi–Khidhir Hamza, the former head
of Iraq's nuclear weapons program.
Hamza, who defected to the United States
in 1995, believes that Iraq has been hard
at work trying to reconstruct its stalled nuclear bomb program. Even worse, he says, he is certain that Saddam Hussein has
been rebuilding Iraq's chemical and biological programs–a task far easier than
reconstituting the nuclear program.
Hamza's views appear to square with a
New York Times report in which an Iraqi
engineer and defector said he helped to
renovate secret sites for nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare work in Iraq as recently as a year ago.
Hamza attended graduate school in the
United States in the 1960s and rose to the
top of Iraq's nuclear program in 1987. The
biological weapons program was not under
his supervision, but he says that he knew
the essentials of the program and that
some of its equipment, like sprayers, was
stored at his facilities. He told U.S. News
that he deems it highly unlikely that Iraq
would have given any nuclear materials or
secrets to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network of terrorists. Those would be the
crown jewels of Iraq's military, which
would be obsessively guarded. He thinks
it is possible, however, that Iraq would
share some bioweaponry with terrorists.
He does not rule out the possibility that
Iraq could have developed the finely milled
anthrax seen in recent U.S. mailings, and
that an Iraqi agent could have slipped a
vial or packet of the deadly material to an
al Qaeda terrorist headed for the United
States. "You could put some anthrax in a
small, double-sealed bag," he said. "The
quantities involved (in the U.S. mailings)
are so small–only 10 grams or so, total."
Before the Gulf War, and before the U.N.
inspection regime that seized or destroyed
Iraq's nuclear, chemical, and biological
programs, Iraq had obtained anthrax cultures from American biological sample
purveyors, claiming they were needed for
medical research. Indeed, Hamza said, the
head of Iraq's biological programs, Nassir Hindawi, was trained at Mississippi
State University and would have leaned
toward using germs that he was familiar
with in the United States.
Hamza said that Iraq's biological warfare program would be very easy to reconstitute. United Nations inspectors were
most focused on finding and destroying
the computer-driven machine tools needed to build extraordinarily precise components for the atomic bomb program. But
equipment for a biological program could
be relatively crude–mainly fermenters,
dryers, and strainers. "You don't need computer-driven tools for biological weapons.
You don't need special buildings," he said.
"You can have a fermenter [for anthrax]
in the middle of the room and not even
need protection, if you design it right." Unlike a nuclear weapons program, the tools
needed to build a biological weapons program often have legitimate, dual-use, medical applications. As a result, it is often
hard to know how a fermenter, for instance, may be used. Even if the U.N. inspectors disabled or destroyed all of Iraq's
equipment being used for biological warfare, these devices could easily be produced again.
Hamza does not know whether Iraq ever
obtained the Ames strain of anthrax used
in the recent U.S. anthrax mailings. But if
it did, Hamza says, there is no way an Iraqi
scientist would have been able to hand
over the material to the al Qaeda network
or anyone else without official government
approval. If the anthrax in the attacks
originated in Iraq, says Hamza, the attacks would
have been authorized by Saddam and
his state security apparatus. Iraq's State
Security Office was brutal and efficient,
says Hamza. It ran security at all of the
laboratories involved in Iraq's weapons of
mass destruction program. "You can't
breathe without them knowing," says
Hamza. "Every lab has people watching
you." In order to ensure security at Iraq's
nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare
labs, the Iraqi security organization ran
its own vulnerability tests. In one instance,
recalls Hamza, they sneaked explosives
into a lab, then blamed the lab workers for
letting that happen. "There was hell to pay,"
he says. "Some people were tortured."
In a wide-ranging interview, Hamza also
discussed the following:
Dirty nukes. Iraq tested two radiological weapons in 1987 and 1988. Iraq was
engulfed in a war with Iran at the time and
wanted the option of using radiological
weapons to stop an Iranian advance. The
Iraqi radiological weapons tests were conducted at a chemical weapons test site west
of Baghdad. The explosive devices contained between 0.5 and 1 kilogram of irradiated zirconium oxide. But the results were poor. The radioactive material
did not spread far enough, and the degree
of radiation from the device was too weak
to cause immediate casualties. Iraq's radiological warfare program was subsequently terminated. "We wanted to stop
Iran," recalled Hamza. "We wanted a
nuclear yield."
Nuclear terror. Iraq spent more than a
decade and billions of dollars on its own
nuclear weapons program without, in the
end, developing a nuclear bomb. Hamza
does not believe a terrorist organization,
even one as well funded as al Qaeda, would
have the capability to develop a nuclear
weapon. The most likely place for a terrorist to acquire radioactive material to
construct a dirty bomb is in the United
States, at commercial nuclear power plants
or spent nuclear fuel sites, says Hamza. But he
does not believe this is likely. To cause significant damage, a truckload of radioactive material would be needed, says
Hamza, and even then the impact of a
radioactive weapon is not certain. "A terrorist wants immediate effects," he says.
"They are not interested in increased cancer [rates] 10 years away."
Big bomb. From August to November 1990, as the allies built up their forces
for the Gulf War, Hamza was ordered into
an intense effort to construct an atom
bomb. By November his Atomic Energy
Department had nearly completed a nuclear device. But, at about the size of a refrigerator, it was far too big to fit into
a missile warhead-and it lacked the core
of highly enriched uranium. Hamza and
his colleagues had 31 kilograms of uranium from their Osiraq reactor that had
been destroyed by Israeli bombers in 1981,
from which they could distill 18 kilograms
enriched enough to form the core. But they
also knew that any such move would set
off alarms at the International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitored Iraq's use of uranium, and that Iraq would be
stopped from developing any more enriched uranium. Thus, Iraq would be able
to build only one oversize bomb. Informed
of this, Hamza says, Saddam agreed to shift
to concentrating on using chemical and
biological weaponry to halt the allied forces
of Desert Storm.
Iraqi fears. Shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks, said Hamza, Saddam appointed 12 new military governors
and established military councils in Iraq's
provinces to prepare for a possible U.S.
military attack. Hamza believes that such
an attack on Iraq is warranted, because he
thinks Iraq will only become more dangerous as it rebuilds its military forces and weaponry.
Iran's nukes. Hamza believes there is
less to the current Iranian nuclear program than meets the eye. He notes that the Iranians have been buying equipment
for an atomic weapons program. But he
contends that Iran does not have enough
nuclear scientists and engineers to form
the basis of a serious nuclear program.
Most of those experts have left the country and not returned, says Hamza. "If you put their purchases together, they are a
nuclear bomb program," he says. "But they
don't have the scale, and they can't replicate." A Dec. 3, 2001, article in the New
Yorker magazine by Seymour Hersh ("The Iran Game") suggests that Iran is moving
ahead with its nuclear program. Hersh
wrote that the Russians, who have sold nuclear equipment to Iran for years, believed that Iran was incapable of developing a
nuclear weapon even with this high-tech
equipment because it lacked the necessary
knowledge base. But Hersh quotes one intelligence official who said the Iranian nuclear program has made some recent
strides and is moving ahead.
