Saddam's Bombmaker

The Terrifiying Inside Story of the Iraqi Nuclear and Biological Weapons

Jeff Stein, Khidhir Hamza

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9780743213479
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

The Iraqi scientist who designed Baghdad's nuclear bomb tells how he did it in secret with the cynical help of U.S., French, German, and British suppliers and experts, and kept it hidden from U.N. inspectors after the Gulf War. Today, he says, Saddam Hussein is only months away from making a workable bomb and has every intention of using it.
Don't tell me about the law. The law is anything I write on a scrap of paper."
­­Saddam Hussein In 1994, after twenty years developing Iraq's atomic weapon, Dr. Khidhir Hamza made a daring escape to warn the CIA of Saddam's nuclear ambitions...only to be ridiculed and turned away! After a harrowing journey across three continents with Iraqi agents on his trail, Hamza finally came in from the cold at the U.S. embassy in Hungary. Now he tells a frightening story that U.S. officials have finally come to believe: that Saddam is still feverishly at work on the bomb and, if pushed to the wall, will use it.
Dr. Hamza also presents a startling, unprecedented portrait of Saddam himself ­­ his drunken rages, his women, his fear of germs, and his cold-blooded murder of underlings. A former resident of the presidential palace, Hamza is the only defector who has lived to write a firsthand, intimate portrait of the Iraqi inner circle, its spies and hit men, and their brutal chief.
Saddam's Bombmaker is also a saga of one man's journey through the circles of hell. Educated at MIT and Florida State University, dedicated to a life of peaceful teaching in America, Dr. Hamza relates how the regime ordered him home, seduced him into a pampered life as an atomic energy official, and forced him to design a bomb. The price of refusal was torture.
As the father of the Iraqi bomb, Dr. Hamza designed a device from scratch with the help of World War Two­era blueprints from America's Los Alamos labs, all the while planning an escape. Privately, he and his colleagues believed they could procrastinate long enough to outlive Saddam. But the dictator outmaneuvered them, whipping the scientists into a crash program to build a crude bomb that could be dropped on Israel. Had U.S. and Allied forces not quickly mobilized for Desert Storm, Dr. Hamza relates, Saddam may well have succeeded; except for sufficient uranium, the device was ready. It still is.
Dr. Hamza's tale of his escape, his first bungled contact with CIA agents, and his flight abroad will keep readers turning pages toward a climax worthy of a well-crafted spy thriller.
Along the way, he reveals:

• The West's "don't ask, just sell" attitude toward Iraq's nuclear, chemical, and biological programs as long as it was fighting Iran.
  
• How Iraq tested biological and chemical weapons on human subjects.
  
• How the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) tried to recruit Dr. Hamza to make a bomb.
  
• Baghdad's secret program to break into U.S. and other foreign computer systems.

Saddam's Bombmaker is not only a shocking political and scientific exposé -- it is a riveting adventure tale.

CHAPTER ONE

ESCAPE

THE MOON was fading from the purple sky over Baghdad, a sign that the time had finally come. This was the day in August 1994 that I was leaving my family, slipping out of the country over the mountains in the north, and heading for the United States, where I could tell the West about Iraq’s nuclear bomb.

My wife, Souham, was weeping softly in the kitchen as she cooked breakfast. For weeks she had kept up a brave front, assuring me I was doing the right thing. But now that the moment had come, I knew what she was thinking: If my plan failed, she faced a future alone, a terrifying prospect for any woman in Iraq, but especially for one who had grown up an orphan. I struggled to control my guilt about leaving her behind, even temporarily.

We both knew, however, that we were out of options. Emigration was out of the question. For the last decade, no senior official had been permitted to leave. Blacklists at the borders had all of our names. Iraqi Airways had been grounded since the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Escaping together through the underground was next to impossible as well. A family racing toward the Kurdish frontier was sure to attract the suspicions of the guards at the roadblocks along the way.

As I dressed, I went through a mental checklist, wondering what I might have overlooked. I checked my pockets again for incriminating documents. Even a slip of paper could give me away. And if I were found out, I would quickly disappear into the dungeons, followed by my wife and three sons, all of us facing such inventive tortures that we would beg for our deaths.

The terror of Saddam’s regime knew no bounds. Two colleagues had been imprisoned for simply expressing doubts about the nuclear program. One was hung daily by his thumbs and beaten every day for ten years. The other, in a way, fared worse. He also was thrown into the dungeon and beaten, then other people were brought to his cell to be tortured in front of him.

Those who escaped were tracked down. Just the year before, Muayed Naji, an employee at our Atomic Energy Commission, managed to get to Jordan. After visiting the American embassy, he was gunned down on the street by two Iraqi operatives.

As I packed, my hands were clammy and my mouth went dry. Certainly Saddam would design a special regimen of suffering for me if I were caught trying to flee. I was his nuclear bombmaker. I held secrets no one outside Iraq, and only a handful of people inside the country, could know. I could tell the world about our secret work developing the device, our hidden research facilities, the technical equipment we obtained from Germany and other countries, about the twelve thousand nuclear workers we had successfully hidden by scattering them around the country. Not even the aggressive U.N. inspectors, now crawling all over Baghdad, knew what we still had or how dangerous the situation was. None of them knew that Saddam had been within a few months of completing the bomb when he invaded Kuwait. None knew of Saddam’s crash program to bypass a test and drop one on the Israelis if his survival were threatened—no matter that it guaranteed Iraq’s own incineration. Saddam couldn’t care less for anybody else. He planned to take all of us down with him.

This was the story I had to tell.

I finished dressing and made my way downstairs to the kitchen, where the Iraqi army officer who had arranged my escape was finishing breakfast. Adnan, in his thirties, was a Kurd, one of the famously independent people of the mountainous north, where smuggling was a way of life. With his sandy hair and blue eyes, however, he wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Left Bank cafe. As a Kurd, of course, his loathing for Saddam was almost genetically wired, but somehow he’d managed to keep his true allegiances under wraps while successfully operating an underground railway. Today I was his cargo to the frontier.

Sitting at the table was my friend Ali, who’d suffered the murders of both his father and a brother by the regime. For months, security agents had been harassing him for information on the whereabouts of another brother, who had gone underground and joined the Iraqi opposition in the north. In exchange for my paying his way, Ali would serve as my guide among the treacherous Iraqi exiles.

I looked around the kitchen. My eldest son, Firas, twenty-two, barely a man, was fighting off the jitters, smoking incessantly. His face was deathly pale. From the beginning, he had been a key part of the escape plan. He had contacted a go-between to get me out, and before that helped me concoct a cover story to explain my absence from the city: With windfall profits I’d earned from Baghdad’s stock market, I was starting a small business on the side in my hometown.

I’d actually earned a reputation as a savvy trader among the regime’s senior officials. Some of the stocks I’d bought multiplied ten and twenty times within months. There wasn’t any mystery about making a killing: I started with inside information, then invested in companies that imported food and essential goods like auto parts, figuring that Saddam would never relinquish his weapons of mass destruction, that confrontations with U.N. inspectors would continue, and so would the sanctions. The price of essential goods would stay high, along with the profits of the importers whose stock I bought. To me it was only common sense, but most Iraqis shied away from such investments, expecting that sanctions would be removed soon and the bottom would drop out of the import market. I made a small fortune—and, as it turned out, manufactured a credible cover story along the way.

Now Firas would take on his greatest responsibility, accompanying me partway to the north to make sure I was safely handed off to the next smuggler. When I saw him zip shut his bag and stand up, I knew he was ready.

We ran through the arrangements with my wife one last time. I would carry half of a torn Iraqi dinar note with me. The other half of the bill would remain with Firas. There would be a code word written on his half, known only by the two of us. Only when I arrived safely across the border would I write the matching code word on my half and hand it to the smuggler to take back. When my son got that, he would know I had landed all right.

Finally, at four A.M., there was nothing left to be done. I picked up my bags, set them by the door, turned and embraced my wife. As I held her in my arms, I could feel her tears flooding my cheek.

“Now, please, don’t worry,” I whispered.

She looked at me through puffy, reddened eyes and nodded uncertainly.

“Next year in Washington,” I joked feebly. “We made a good plan.”

And then it was time to go. As I walked down to the car, I could hear my thirteen-year-old boy Zayd crying just inside the door. “Is Daddy really going away?” he said.

I couldn’t turn around.

Outside, in the tropical heat, the street was deathly quiet. On the eastern horizon, a thin red line hinted at the baking desert ahead. If we had left earlier the ride would have been more comfortable, but traveling at night also invited closer inspection at the roadblocks. The night guards are more wary, tending to inspect cars more closely, looking for army deserters or insurgents.

But first we had to get out of my neighborhood safely. We scanned the quiet street. No patrols. A sentry box was just out of sight, at the corner of the main boulevard, near the houses of Saddam and the deputy prime minister. We piled into the car, drove quietly in the opposite direction, and with a few turns through the palm-laced streets, we were out of the neighborhood. By the time the sun splintered over the horizon, we were clearing the outskirts of Baghdad, safely on the road, we hoped, to freedom.

Behind us was the most prominent symbol of Saddam’s long and hideous rule: two huge, cast-iron forearms rising from the ground with crossed swords in their hands. Beneath them, in ghastly piles, were the helmets of thousands of Iranian soldiers killed in the Iran-Iraq war. As we drove off, the tips of the swords were visible above the rooftops, reminding us all of the death and destruction of so many years.

It never should have happened. I was happily becoming an American. Then the order came: Come back to Iraq, or else.

I’d enjoyed the dream of many Iraqi students in the 1960s by coming to America for college, in this case a master’s degree at MIT, followed by a Ph.D. in theoretical nuclear physics at Florida State University (which had just acquired an accelerator and was attracting a lot of students). In those halcyon years before Saddam came to power, Iraq and the United States were on fairly friendly terms. I was teaching at a small college in Georgia, perfectly acclimated to the land of hamburgers and wide highways, weekend dates and barbecues.

Then the roof fell in. Baghdad wanted something back for the scholarship money it had advanced. They wanted it in trade, by my taking a post at Atomic Energy (AE), and they hinted none too lightly that my father, who had cosigned the loan, would be held responsible until I came back.

When I returned in 1970, I was resigned to my predicament. I actually began bubbling with ideas and enthusiasm for the peaceful development of nuclear energy. In 1971, I was made chairman of the physics department at Atomic Energy, leapfrogging over many more senior colleagues. Later, I was put in charge of the computer committee, and purchased Iraq’s first mainframe from IBM. I also established a popular newsletter about the AEC, and then took charge of all its reports and publications. I was also on the board of the Iraqi Physics and Math Society, participating in panels on the introduction of modern math in the school curricula, and teaching graduate courses at a couple of universities. All in all, much to my surprise, I was having fun, making a good living, and along the way becoming perhaps Iraq’s best-known scientist.

Then they tightened the vise. Two senior appointees of Saddam, then Iraq’s fast-rising vice president, came to me with his instructions to lay the groundwork for an atomic bomb. Even though they framed their request in the most innocuous terms, my shock must have registered.

“We understand it can’t be done overnight,” one said soothingly. “In fact, we don’t have any completion date for an actual bomb in mind. We just want you to begin laying down the scientific and technological foundation for a project sometime in the future.”

The two officials offered other reasons to go forward with the program. First, Saddam wanted it. That alone was a sufficient reason to end the conversation right there. But the officials also warned that without Saddam’s backing, funds for all atomic energy programs would dry up, from research to nuclear medicine. I had to play along, they said, to keep the money flowing. Besides, they reassured me, making an atomic bomb would take twenty, thirty years. By the time we had a testable device, the entire situation could have changed. Who could predict that Saddam would still be around?

So we began. We dragged our feet from day one, taking more than a month alone just to craft our proposal. It promised only the creation of an infrastructure for a broad atomic energy program that could not conceivably develop a bomb for at least twenty years.

But we had underestimated Saddam. Armed with our blueprint, he quickly took over the atomic program, making himself chairman and replacing the top officials. Once in control, he stepped back and began pouring money into the effort.

For a time, however, it still didn’t seem too bad. The only unsettling facet of his control was the introduction of heavy security at AE, and even then he went to great lengths to rationalize it to us. After all the money he had poured into the program, we were in a forgiving mood.

But after Saddam became president in 1979, things changed. No longer satisfied with our leisurely pace, he began demanding concrete results. It was only later that we learned the reason: Saddam was planning to attack Iran, a country with four times the population of Iraq. If things went badly, he wanted the ultimate equalizer, a bomb that could vaporize an invading army or obliterate Teheran. And in the larger picture, he yearned for the same respect Israel got from its nuclear bombs.

Saddam reacted poorly to delay. Some of my colleagues were sent to jail to refresh their enthusiasm for the bomb. I was spared, probably because there was no one to replace me as head of the nuclear fuel division, where we planned to manufacture plutonium. But I nearly felt the ax. When I saw problems in our contract for the French-supplied reactor and refused to sign off on it, Saddam seethed with rage. Interpreting my action as an attempt to distance myself from responsibility, he immediately promoted to the position of personal adviser two scientists who did approve the contract.

They would soon enough regret it. In December 1979, the bespectacled Dr. Hussein al-Shahristani, an expert in neutron activation, made the mistake of challenging the bomb program to Saddam’s face. He was immediately jail...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Epigraph
• INTRODUCTION
• 1. Escape
• 2. Roots in the Sand
• 3. Going Home
• 4. The Secret
• 5. The Life of the Party
• 6. Crunch Time
• 7. Accidents Will Happen
• 8. Spies and Lies
• 9. The Inside Game
• 10. The Invisible Empire
• 11. Getting the Goods
• 12. The Winds of War
• 13. Aftermath
• 14. The Fugitive
• 15. In from the Cold
• Epilogue: End Game
• Appendix: Behind the Scenes with the Iraqi Nuclear Bomb
• Index