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Iraqi scientist gave CIA
information that should have prevented war
Saad Tawfiq told his handlers that Saddam had shut down
WMD
program
By Agence France Presse (AFP)
05/02/08 "Daily
Star" -- - -AMMAN: When Saad Tawfiq watched
then-US Secretary of state Colin Powell's presentation to the
United Nations on February 5, 2003, he shed bitter tears as he
realized he had risked his life and those of his loved ones for
nothing. As one of Saddam Hussein's most gifted engineers,
Tawfiq knew that the Iraqi dictator had shut down his nuclear,
chemical and biological weapons programs in 1995 - and he had
told his handlers in US intelligence just that.
And yet here was Powell - Tawfiq's television was able to
receive international news through a link pirated from Saddam's
spies next door - waving a vial of white powder and telling the
UN Security Council a story about Iraqi germ labs.
"When I saw Colin Powell, I started crying - immediately. I knew
I had tried and lost," Tawfiq told AFP five years later in the
Jordanian capital, Amman.
Now in his 50s, a round-faced man with a small moustache and
lively eyes behind delicate spectacles, Tawfiq described how the
CIA set up an elaborate operation to recruit Iraqi weapons
scientists and then ignored the results.
From the end of 2002 the US spy agency had sources inside Iraq's
weapons plants telling them clearly what the whole world now
knows - that Saddam had ended efforts to produce weapons of mass
destruction.
Nevertheless, in March 2003 the United States and Britain
invaded Iraq to disarm Saddam of this non-existent arsenal and
in the process triggered the effective collapse of the Iraqi
state, plunging it into chaos and bringing hundreds of thousands
of deaths.
Tawfiq's role in this drama began in June 2002 with calls from
his sister Sawsan, a doctor who lives with her husband Ali in
Moreland Hills, a pleasant suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, in the
Midwest of the United States.
"Our Abu Mahmouds are putting pressure on me," she told him,
using the nickname they shared for Tawfiq's secret police minder
as a makeshift code for the US intelligent agent who had
contacted her, "Chris."
"Chris was very nice, very polite," Sawsan, a small energetic
woman, told AFP.
Chris wanted Sawsan's help to discover the status of Saddam's
weapons program and in particular his efforts to build a nuclear
bomb.
She joined one of the most successful attempts by the CIA to
penetrate Saddam's Iraq, a program dreamed up by agency veteran
Charlie Allen to target Iraqi weapons technicians through their
relatives.
The scientists were well known to the UN weapons inspectors who
had been keeping tabs on Iraq's arms plants since 1991, and the
Americans were able to draw up a list of 30 who had relatives in
the United States. The American relatives were to be sent to
Iraq and ask about weapons.
"I was nervous, and we even discussed with Ali what to do if
something happened to me," Sawsan said. "It was a very emotional
visit back home, because I had not been there for years and I
had not seen my brother for years."
Sawsan was right to be nervous. Saddam's notorious secret police
dealt with spies mercilessly. She was taking a risk with her
life and that of her brother, but was determined to help rid her
original homeland of a tyrant.
The CIA provided her with a detailed questionnaire about Iraq's
weapons programs. Fearing that she would forget it, Sawsan
disguised it in sketches and crosswords in a kind of homemade
code.
Tawfiq picked his sister up from Baghdad's airport on September
9, 2002. Her homecoming was emotional, but the pair had work to
do. They met secretly at night in the family garden and took
walks together in the city.
The weapons engineer was astonished by the CIA's questions,
which he thought showed the depths of the agency's ignorance
about country.
"I went crazy. The questions were dumb. She was telling me:
'They know you have a program,' and I was saying: 'There is
nothing. Tell them there is nothing, absolutely nothing. They
have left us with nothing,'" Tawfiq said. "She was taking notes.
There were 20 major questions, and to all of them the answer
was: 'No, no, no ...' I kept swearing on the grave of my
mother."
According to Tawfiq, Saddam Hussein gave the order to dismantle
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs in 1995, after his
brother-in-law and arms chief Hussein Kamel defected and briefed
the UN inspectors.
"I was Saddam's scientist," Tawfiq declared, with an ironic
smile. "In 1991 if you exposed something you were killed. In
1995 if you hid something you were killed!"
Sawsan dutifully gathered this information and returned to the
United States to pass it on to her handlers. But the CIA was
unimpressed.
"Saad told me there was nothing left," she told AFP. "That
everything had been either destroyed or dismantled by the UN and
the regime has abandoned its nuclear program. And he begged me
to explain all that back in the States.
"I went back and I reported what he had told me in full detail.
I even went personally to Washington. In the beginning they
listened to me but then they told me that my brother was lying."
Of course Tawfiq and other colleagues approached by the CIA were
telling the truth, as the United States would discover after it
had launched a bloody war that has cost hundreds of thousands of
lives.
Paul R. Pillar, the CIA's national intelligence officer for the
Near East and South Asia at the time of the operation to
question Tawfiq, said weapons scientists had not been ignored,
but had been contradicted by other sources.
"To the extent that the debriefings did not have more of an
effect in Washington, it probably was not because the effort
came too late but instead because there were other indications
that seemed to contradict what the individuals were saying, and
that suggested Iraqi unconventional weapons programs were
continuing," he told AFP.
But as Saddam's scientist lamented five years later: "You don't
have to destroy a country for that." - AFP
Copyright © 2008, The Daily Star.
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