From current issue of Scientific American
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May 12, 2003
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One Last Look
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Although United Nations weapons inspector Rocco Casagrande and his colleagues found no bioweapons in Iraq, they could sense that the government had not come clean
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The Saddam Center for Biotechnology on the campus of Baghdad University boasted a state-of-the-art facility, replete with surreptitiously imported equipment for amplifying tiny amounts of DNA and running tests with gels to determine protein sizes. "It looked like you were walking into a laboratory in one of the better-equipped U.S. institutions," remembers Rocco Casagrande, who began his trips as a United Nations inspector to various Iraqi facilities in mid-December 2002.
The lab was ideal for performing DNA amplification using the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to make countless copies of genes. Oddly, though, the only thing these expensive machines were being used for was genetic fingerprinting of goats involved in what the Iraqis said were in vitro fertilization experiments. Iraq does not suffer from problems with goat fertility. An infertile goat is eaten for dinner, not sent to an IVF clinic. Casagrande and the others took samples from the lab and combed through records on a computer hard disk, to no avail. No evidence of cloning genes for making bioweapons was found. They speculated that the facility could be used for human cloning, but in the end they never figured out its real purpose. This experience was not the only time during his three-month stay that Casagrande encountered projects that did not quite make sense. But neither did the biological weapons inspection team come across the anthrax, botulinum or any pathogen that had been part of the notorious program that the Iraqi government claimed was now defunct. Casagrande was one of about 10 U.S. representatives on the roughly 100-member team of nuclear, chemical, biological and missile inspectors, a contrast to the investigations in the 1990s, when many more of the officials were American. Every day the team received lists of sites to visit from U.N. headquarters in New York City. Some destinations were obvious, such as the biotechnology center; others were gleaned from intelligence reports. Once they arrived, a few inspectors conducted interviews while the rest looked for suspicious activity. Casagrande and his colleagues became familiar faces to Iraqis in the months immediately preceding the war. At night Iraqi television broadcast extensive coverage, identifying the inspectors by name and country of origin. Casagrande couldn't go into a restaurant or shop without being recognized. This 29-year-old--only a few years beyond a doctorate in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology--had the job of refitting the biological analysis laboratory used to test samples taken during its daily tours. U.N. inspectors had last operated the lab in 1998, before they were expelled from Iraq; in the interim, it had become a nesting place for pigeons. As a child growing up in a Philadelphia suburb, Casagrande was fascinated with both science and history. While doing his doctoral work, he became involved with the Harvard Sussex Program's Chemical and Biological Warfare Colloquium, led by Harvard University microbiologist Matthew Meselson, and realized that cultivating an expertise in biowarfare would serve as a means to combine his two interests. Before he left for Iraq, Casagrande was developing weapons biodetectors for Surface Logix, in Cambridge, Mass. The U.S. State Department took notice of Casagrande after he wrote articles for Nonproliferation Review and Bioscience chronicling the potential threat of biowarfare against crops and livestock. The government later recommended him for the U.N. post. (He is now employed by Abt Associates in Cambridge, setting up a homeland security consulting practice.) In Iraq, Casagrande was always aware that a positive result on any of the countless assays performed in the refurbished lab could reverberate around the world. "We tried not to think about what the implications were for what we might find," he says. "But we couldn't help but realize that this could be a turning point in history." The 20 or so members of the bioweapons team, one fifth of the total complement of inspectors, which also included chemical, missile and nuclear contingents, visited sites ranging from breweries to munitions facilities. The inspectors had been taught during training sessions in Geneva how mundane equipment for producing such routine items as beer or tomato sauce could also be employed for culturing anthrax or another bioweapons agent. Interviews often took on a surreal quality that reflected the deep-seated fear that gripped the populace. A simple question--"How long have you been head of this facility?"--could elicit a five-minute answer that never addressed the original query. Reactions could turn hostile. Casagrande recalls speaking with the head of an agricultural research center whose director accused him of being personally responsible for sanctions against the country. Technicians sometimes flatly disavowed the presence of certain microbes. In one instance, Casagrande had to reprimand a worker in a university lab who had refused to acknowledge possession of a strain of anthrax that was found by the inspectors (the strain could be used only for making a vaccine, not a bioweapon). Iraqi "minders" constantly tracked the inspectors and followed them everywhere. A certain warmth developed between the two groups. On a trip south of Baghdad the inspectors had to wait endlessly as the Iraqis fished in two bags of unmarked keys to enter 150 triple-padlocked cinderblock buildings that turned out to house just conventional ammunition. One minder told his charges that if an invasion ever came, it would be important to give the Iraqis three months' notice so that they would have enough time to open the bunkers. "It was actually a friendly relationship, but we understood they weren't our friends," Casagrande comments. Chumminess had its risks. An escort, whom the inspectors knew as Mr. Wa'ad, remarked to the team that he envied his relatives who had emigrated to the U.S. "He soon disappeared," Casagrande says. Some of the Iraqi scientists were eager to exchange information with outsiders and might launch into a discussion with Casagrande about bacterial indicators of soil health. He even met the infamous Rihab Taha, the former director of the country's biological weapons program, who related to the inspectors that she now spends her time caring for her children as a Baghdad homemaker. (Women headed about a third of the civilian laboratories visited.)
There were places the inspectors did not look. Bioweapons could have been secreted in off-limits religious sites. Iraq was, in fact, in the midst of a mosque-building boom, including the recently completed Mother of All Battles mosque, with minarets shaped to resemble Scud missiles. Also questionable was the discovery of a possible smallpox vaccination program. "It makes you wonder why someone in Iraq thought they needed to be vaccinated against smallpox," says Casagrande, who as a U.N. inspector chose not to offer an opinion about the U.S.-Iraq war. Despite the frustrations, Casagrande feels that the work was not wasted. The inspectors had their stay cut short. But information that they gathered might help in conducting follow-up investigations to unravel the extent of the regime's conjectured clandestine programs to cultivate anthrax, botulinum and other mass killers. After all, those supposed weapons stocks would be the after-the-fact basis for waging a war.
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