An Iraqi scientist who defected to the United States has publicly described for the first time the inner workings of Iraq’s three-decade effort to build a nuclear bomb.
The scientist, Khidhir Abdul Abas Hamza, said that before he fled Iraq in 1994 he helped train a cadre of young scientists who, working with more senior scientists involved in other projects, would be capable of quickly resuming Iraq’s atomic weapons program if the United Nations cuts back on its inspections and, ultimately, lifts economic sanctions.
Hamza is the highest-ranking scientist ever to defect from Baghdad, and his comments, in nearly 10 hours of interviews, come as a new confrontation is building over whether Baghdad has dismantled its chemical, nuclear and biological programs.
Iraq has in recent days refused to cooperate further with UN weapons inspectors, and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright reiterated Friday that Baghdad must resume full cooperation or risk a military strike, The Associated Press reported.
In the interviews, Hamza, 59, whose defection was an important intelligence coup for the United States that nearly slipped through American fingers because of the CIA’s inattention, drew a chilling picture of life as an Iraqi scientist. He said his colleagues were lavishly rewarded for their successes and tortured by the secret police when they failed to deliver.
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He said Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was personally directed by Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s leader, since its inception 27 years ago. It was abetted, he said, by a host of Western companies, which sold Iraq sophisticated equipment as they “winked and laughed” at patently false cover stories.
On the eve of the Persian Gulf war in 1991, Hamza said, Iraq had completed all the research and testing needed for an atomic weapon and was feverishly trying to make at least one crude bomb using uranium from civilian reactors. This effort, Hamza said, could have produced a bomb in a few months, but it was disrupted by the allied bombing campaign.
Only after the war did U.S. intelligence officials learn that they had grossly underestimated Iraq’s nuclear program, which they had believed to be 10 years from producing a nuclear bomb.
Hamza’s defection to the United States and his subsequent debriefing by the CIA brought fresh details to light, including these:
Iraq’s peaceful nuclear power program, begun 30 years ago, was quickly turned into a cover for the secret bomb program, which went ahead even as Baghdad opened up its research reactors to Western inspection.
Israel’s intensive campaign in the 1970s and ’80s to stop Iraq from acquiring a bomb accomplished little. The 1981 Israeli bombing raid that destroyed Iraq’s French-built nuclear reactor prompted Hussein to drop the pretense of a peaceful atomic effort and to go “full steam” on a covert program to build a bomb.
Iraq took advantage of the United States’ open access to valuable scientific information. Hamza said that as a senior member of Iraq’s nuclear program, he spent time at American university libraries studying the latest scientific journals and technical accounts of America’s nuclear efforts.
Hamza, who intelligence officials said had been resettled in the U.S. by the CIA, said he was speaking out because he is frustrated that Hussein still is obstructing international inspections and deceiving the West. U.S. officials said they did not authorize or encourage Hamza to speak publicly, but they have confirmed many elements of his account.
Until now, Hamza’s defection has been a closely guarded secret. A 1995 article in The Sunday Times of London and a 1997 book by Andrew and Leslie Cockburn included detailed accounts of his alleged kidnapping and assassination by secret Iraqi agents.
In fact, his escape from Iraq is a remarkable spy yarn that almost went awry. According to former and current intelligence officials, the CIA initially rebuffed Hamza’s appeals to defect to the United States. He spent a year in Libya before the agency realized its mistake and agreed to resettle him and rescue his family from their home in downtown Baghdad.
Born in southern Iraq into a family of Shiite Muslims, Hamza graduated from Baghdad University and then studied physics in the early 1960s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Florida State University. After teaching briefly at Florida State and a small college in Georgia, Hamza returned home in 1970.
He became chairman of the physics department of Iraq’s tiny nuclear research center outside Baghdad and was approached a year later by two envoys from Hussein, who was then Iraq’s vice president but already its de facto ruler.
He said they asked him to help start a secret nuclear weapons program under the cover of an expanded civilian atomic energy program. Hamza said that though he had reservations about building a nuclear bomb, he was enticed by the promise of extra money and stature as well as the possibility that the civilian program might benefit.
In 1972, Hamza submitted Iraq’s first comprehensive plan for developing nuclear weapons to Hussein. The plan was quickly adopted, although Hussein rejected Hamza’s ambitious proposals for a separate nuclear city and lavish benefits for its scientists. The Iraqi leader, he said, “thought that a separate atomic city would be too tempting a target for Iraq’s enemies.”
Hussein tightened his grip over the growing nuclear program in 1974, Hamza said, secretly naming himself chairman of the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission–a fact that Iraq has denied to UN inspectors. He also began controlling every aspect of the scientists’ lives, ordering them to divorce foreign wives and marry Iraqi women, and requiring them to report any contact with foreigners.
Scientists ignored such orders at their peril. In January 1980, Hussein had Iraq’s most senior nuclear scientist, Jaafar D. Jaafar, jailed and tortured until he agreed to work on an enrichment program that would separate uranium particles and make bomb-grade fuel.
Hamza said he found it surprisingly easy to negotiate nuclear cooperation agreements with the former Soviet Union, India, Brazil, France and others to buy nuclear technology that could be used for bombs under peaceful cover.
“If you go with the money and some brains, it’s easy to acquire the stuff,” he said.
Among other things, Iraq bought a French reactor and an Italian fuel reprocessing facility, an IBM mainframe computer from the United States, and machine tools to make centrifuge components from the Swiss. In 1987 it almost bought for between $110 million and $120 million a complete foundry to forge uranium and other bomb-related components from Leybold and Degussa, two West German companies.
Hamza said the companies had offered to supply not only the foundry but, for $200 million, a complete installation that they promised could be built within months.
He said Hussein rejected the tempting offer mainly because he feared that such a large deal involving highly sensitive equipment would have tipped off Western intelligence that Iraq was transferring its bomb effort to a new site, known as Al Atheer.
Jorg Streitferdt, in-house counsel for Degussa AG, based in Frankfurt, Germany, which owned Leybold at the time, said the companies did sell some equipment that ended up in Iraq’s nuclear program, and were later subjected to a series of investigations, including a criminal inquiry by Germany.
He noted that Degussa was exonerated on the charges of selling vacuum furnaces to Iraq, largely because West Germany did not require export licenses at that time for such sales. Though Degussa executives suspected that Iraq might use the equipment for military purposes given the ongoing Iran-Iraq war, he said they did not know that Iraq wanted it for a nuclear program.
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