Printer Friendly Page

US strives to find Saddam's Dr. Strangeloves
Ed Blanche
The Daily Star
June 26, 2004

Amid widening fears that Al-Qaeda and its affiliates are striving to acquire weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and concern about another major terrorist attack on the United States before the November presidential election, the Americans are finally addressing a problem that they ignored for months after invading Iraq: keeping the scientists who built Saddam Hussein's secret weapons programs out of the clutches of terrorist organizations and rogue states.

John Bolton, the hawkish US under-secretary of state for arms control, says it's "a race against time."

The main target group comprises 400-500 scientists. The fear is that they could be lured into clandestine weapons programs that could threaten the United States and its allies. It's a problem that began when the Soviet Union imploded in 1991 and some unemployed military scientists went to the highest bidders, such as Iran and North Korea.

The US government paid the salaries of more than 22,000 former Soviet scientists who had worked on WMD projects. All told, the Cooperative Threat Reduction program has cost the US $400 million a year, or around $5 billion.

"The pattern we've seen is that scientists from the former Soviet Union, as the economy collapsed, were without a livelihood and they were offered big salaries in Iran and other places, and they took it," Bolton said. "We want to try to head that off in this case."

Some Iraqi scientists have already fled to Iran, Jordan, Syria or Sudan - possibly heading elsewhere - since the US-led invasion in March 2003, according to US and Iraqi officials. "There's a definite concern that some people have already gone astray," says Michael Roston of the Russian-American Nuclear Security Advisory Council.

Before the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration had not formulated any plans to deal with the estimated 25,000 scientists and technicians that Saddam had employed. Some were seen as possible war criminals, but no one in authority apparently foresaw the possibility of a postwar scientific exodus or the need to keep the Iraqi scientific community under control.

It was not until September 2003 that the administration seemed to become aware of the problem. At that time, Bolton put a new spin on the justification for invasion, saying that even if Saddam had not actually possessed WMD, as the White House had insisted, he still had scientists and engineers with the expertise to manufacture them at some point in the future.

"As long as that regime was in power, it was determined to get nuclear, chemical and biological weapons," Bolton argued.

Scores of people involved in Saddam's WMD programs were arrested by the US-led occupation forces and rigorously interrogated, but no weapons or even active programs to produce them have yet been uncovered. Only about a dozen of the detainees remain in custody, and they are believed to be linked mainly with the chemical and biological weapons Saddam actually used against Iran and against Iraq's Kurdish rebels in the late 1980s.

Some of those in custody were offered immunity from prosecution if they provided information of Saddam's clandestine programs. But that apparently was of no help in putting the Americans' CIA-military Iraq Survey Group (ISG), tasked with hunting down the ousted regime's WMD, any closer to their target.

John Negroponte, named US ambassador to Baghdad, told the UN Security Council recently, when he was still US ambassador to the world body, that some Iraqis were refusing to cooperate with the ISG, possibly out of fear of reprisals by Saddam loyalists. US officials say that many have let it be known that they feel they have been mistreated by the occupiers, particularly the 1,000-strong ISG, largely because of frustration at not uncovering any weapons programs.

But there is also the suspicion that some, possibly most, of these people fear that if they spill the beans on Saddam's programs they could be charged with war crimes.

Until just a few months ago there were not even any mechanisms in place for tracking or restraining Iraqi scientists, and there was clearly confusion about the whereabouts of some key figures. In November 2003, US officials involved in the hunt for WMD said that Dr. Modher Sadeq-Saba al-Tamimi, who headed Saddam's long-range missile program, had fled to Iran some time in June 2003. Tehran denied that he was in Iran.

Then on Dec. 15, Tamimi, who had studied in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War, appeared in Baghdad, saying he had never left, that he'd been meeting with British intelligence operatives, who gave him a military identification pass in July which acknowledged he was "cooperating" with occupation forces.

In November 2003, the State Department finally embarked on a $22 million program that involves paying stipends to up to 600 scientists, engineers and technicians who had worked on weapons projects. For scientists who were earning $8,000 a month under Saddam, with many side benefits, the $50 a month they are getting from the Americans is hardly enticing, although in Iraq at present that's almost big money. But there are other inducements.

As a first stage of the project, the Americans are encouraging the scientists to submit proposals for projects. Each submission will be awarded $450, a huge sum in Iraq. Some 9,000 scientific personnel have been hired by the newly established Science Ministry.

Alaa al-Saeed, who managed stockpiles of the deadly nerve agent VX during Saddam's rule and proved to be "very cooperative" with the Americans, has been placed in charge of many of them. Another 25,000 are being paid around $100 a month until the government comes up with a program for them. Others have returned to teaching.

Perhaps the Americans' decision to employ Saddam's former military and intelligence personnel to build a new security apparatus could sway some of these scientists and technicians to throw in their lot with the occupation forces. "Some of the most important people in America's ballistic missile programs in the 1950s were former Nazi scientists," said Roston of the Nuclear Advisory Council. "So if we could employ those people, then we shouldn't have a problem with the Iraqis."

But that could be a dangerous proposition. Several top scientists have been among the scores of Iraqi officials and intellectuals assassinated in recent months. One of the first victims was Falah Hussein, deputy dean of the college of sciences at Mustansiriya University, in May 2003. The assassins are probably diehard supporters of Saddam, but there are those who believe that Israel's Mossad intelligence service or the CIA, even Iranian intelligence, is bumping off Iraq's scientists to ensure that the country never rebuilds its programs. This has spooked the scientific community. Many are desperate to flee, which is just what the Americans don't want them to do.