IT WAS a simple enough experiment, hardly groundbreaking, but the scientists could be certain that Saddam Hussein would not know that.
After working out how to extract a tiny amount of plutonium from radioactive waste, the atomic team drew up a long, self-congratulatory report detailing their big breakthrough on the road to building a nuclear bomb.
“They were seeking money from Saddam, so they told him things that weren’t true, things that exaggerated their capability,” Hamid el-Bahili, a professor of nuclear physics at the University of Baghdad, told
The Times. “They sent their report claiming they could produce huge amounts of plutonium and they were rewarded with cars and large sums of money, but all they had achieved was something a high school student could have done.”
The deception was no aberration. While weapons scientists admit that they largely failed in their attempt to conceal their activities from United Nations inspectors, many confess that they had considerably more success in another deception: hoodwinking their own leader over the extent of his weapons arsenal in an attempt to curry favour, win promotions or secure funds for programmes that never existed.
That systematic deception and the institutional chaos that allowed it to flourish may provide one explanation for why Western intelligence agencies appear to have got their facts so wrong over how much of a threat Saddam really posed.
In an interview with The New York Times yesterday, David Kay, the increasingly outspoken former weapons-hunter who resigned last week, spoke of a “vortex of corruption”, deception and disarray within Iraq that may have given rise to the perception that Saddam’s arsenal was far more advanced than it really was.
The new revelations followed his earlier assertion that, contrary to intelligence reports, Saddam had possessed no significant stockpiles of weapons or arms programmes since their destruction in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War. According to Dr Kay, after Saddam insisted on personally taking over the authorisation of large weapons projects in the late 1990s, scientists began to exploit the system to line their own pockets, presenting him with fanciful plans for arms developments and using the funds granted for their own purposes.
Whatever had remained of an effective weapons capability, Dr Kay said, was largely subsumed into corrupt money-making ventures by scientists exploiting Saddam’s ignorance of technical matters.
“The whole thing shifted from directed programmes to a corrupted process,” Dr Kay told The New York Times. “The regime was no longer in control; it was like a death spiral. Saddam was self- directing projects that were not vetted by anyone else. The scientists were able to fake programmes.”
Scientists in Baghdad told The Times in a series of interviews that the culture of deception went back years, getting worse when Saddam himself took over direct control of the programme.
At first, many programme supervisors exaggerated the progress that they had made under pressure from the authorities for results. Others did so to win promotions. Abdul Tawab Mullah Huwaish, the former head of the military industrial commission, was the man the scientists most commonly cited as the architect of the institutional deception. One chemical engineer said: “
Once he told Saddam that we were in the final stages of producing rocket fuel when the truth was we were only at the beginning. Then, to cover that up, we had to import 250 tonnes of rocket fuel from China, but he told Saddam that we had produced it ourselves.”
By 1998, with the departure of UN inspectors and leadership of the arms programmes taken over by Saddam, the deceptions grew easier and more lucrative. “Saddam was not an educated man, he was a country boy from Tikrit,” Dr el-Bahili said. “It was easy for scientists to pull the wool over his eyes by bombarding him with science.”
According to Dr Kay, the money-making ventures of venal weapons developers may well have played a role in convincing the world that Saddam’s arsenal was a threat.
At least one scientist involved in such a “programme” holds his bosses responsible for the consequences of that perception. “I believe that they are the real reason behind the destruction of Iraq because they told lies to the President,” he said.
What remains unclear is whether Saddam was taken in by the lies or whether he hurtled towards war on the basis of a bluff, knowing that his armoury was bare. “I believe it was a bit of both,” Dr el-Bahili said. “The scientists lied to Saddam and he lied to the world.”
