Saddam's Bombmaker: The Daring Escape of the Man Who Built Iraq's Secret Weapon - Couverture souple

Stein, Jeff

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0743211359 ISBN 13 : 9780743211352

Editeur : Scribner, 2001

Synopsis

Book by Stein Jeff Hamza Khidhir

A propos du livre

Extrait :

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 jailed and savagely tortured. Saddam's other science adviser, a willowy genius named Jaffar Dhia Jaffar, beseeched the president to relent on his gifted colleague. He, too, was arrested. To give him a taste of what could come, Jaffar was strapped to a dungeon wall and forced to watch as other men were tortured. He recanted and returned to work.

I became his assistant. Needless to say, I was frightened. And my fear grew when Saddam named me his personal nuclear adviser and ordered me to design and build the bomb -- and fast. What an ironic reward, I often thought, for someone who had balked at dissecting a laboratory frog, who had shied away from hunting trips with my father.

Now I knew I had to get out. My application for a routine exit visa for my family was turned down, and for a time the security services placed me under tight surveillance. Eventually, I convinced the regime I was loyal, but when the intense scrutiny eased I began to think about an escape.

In 1990, I persuaded Saddam's erratic son-in-law Hussein Kamel to let me teach again and back off from the program into a role as a consultant. With Desert Storm looming, the crash program to build the bomb had been shelved, so I had little reason to fear the dungeons. I was still, moreover, the regime's ace in the hole. I knew how far the program had progressed. I knew where all the secret components of the program were. The calamity in Kuwait had forced the bomb program underground, but it was still creeping forward. Perhaps Saddam thought he could wait things out and then order me back into the program. Or maybe he didn't have any better ideas. But it was time for me to run.

We were headed north, the first step in a journey to freedom for those who couldn't get permission to travel -- virtually anyone of consequence. Under the so-called Operation Provide Comfort, the Allies had established a protected zone in the Kurdish area of northern Iraq, flying constant air patrols to ward off Saddam's helicopters and troops. Meanwhile, exile opposition groups, under the umbrella of the Iraqi National Congress, took advantage of the situation to establish a frontline headquarters. It was headed by Dr. Ahmad al-Chalabi, whom I'd known when we were students at MIT in the 1960s. I was counting on al-Chalabi remembering me.

The road to Mosul, capital of the Arabic north, was dusty and crumbling. For such a major thruway to be in such disrepair was a sign of the regime's twisted priorities. With billions spent on weapons, there was no money to m...

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Is Iraq only months away from developing a nuclear bomb? In 1994, after twenty years in Iraq's nuclear energy and weapons programme, Dr. Khidhir Hamza made a daring escape to warn the CIA of Saddam's nuclear progress... only to be turned away! Now Dr Hamza reveals in full the shocking story that Western officials have finally come to believe.
Among the book's revelations: Iraq already has biological weapons and is capable of completing a nuclear weapon within months if international sanctions are lifted; Western corporations and governments facilitated Iraq's nuclear programmme by putting profits ahead of security and averting their eyes as Saddam obtained his necessary nuclear technology; if threatened, Saddam has sworn to create a Doomsday scenario in the Middle East. And current sources within Iraq confirm that the author's frightening information is completely up to date.
As a former resident of the Presidential Palace, Hamza paints a vivid portrait of Saddam's women, his secret bank accounts, his fear of germs, and his impulsive torture and execution of close aids. The account of Hamza's escape and that of his family add to a compelling work that is impossible to put down.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Scribner
• Date d'édition: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0743211359
• ISBN 13: 9780743211352
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 352