INSIDE THE IRAQI NUCLEAR PROGRAM
A HIGH-RANKING NUCLEAR
SCIENTIST TELLS ALL
By: Sherrie Gossett*
Part
1: Beginnings
Author’s
Note:
The debate
over
Dr. Imad Khadduri was a top scientist involved
in Iraq's nuclear program from 1968 until the end of 1998, when he was able to
escape. He now serves as a network administrator in
It
was on a mild autumn evening in 1968 that Imad
Khadduri first received the invitation that would change his life. Sitting in
an open-air café near the
Khadduri was intrigued: "I was not aware that the Russians had built a two
Mega Watt research reactor at Tuwaitha, twenty
kilometers east of
After taking a
look at the research projects underway, Khadduri joined his former high school
colleagues who were working with several International Atomic
Energy Agency (IAEA) sponsored scientists in the group.
The
Ghazi Darwish, a prominent chemist, directed the meetings of the
Nuclear Research Center (NRC), whose membership numbered around 120.
Khadduri recalls
the meetings, which included scientific lectures and managerial planning, as
having an atmosphere "fragrant with enthusiasm, drive and high
hopes."
Early in the
summer of 1969, after spending several months doing research, Khadduri decided
it was time to complete his PhD.
He then planned
to return to the
A turn of events
would mean that Khadduri would resume his studies in
Young
scholar in Britain
During a
Mikdashi had followed his PhD supervisor’s transfer to the
"Why don’t
you stay here at the
The next day,
Khadduri met with Dr. T. Derek Beynon, lecturer in
the Reactor Physics Group in the (then) Department of Physics and Astronomy at
the
Dr. Beynon was particularly impressed with a letter of
recommendation from Jafar Dhia
Jafar that Khadduri was carrying in his coat pocket.
Beynon explained that Jafar had
finished his PhD at the same Physics and Astronomy Department four years ago,
and had made a lasting impression with his completion of a PhD thesis in
minimum time. The subject? Strong
nuclear interactions.
A year later, Jafar, who was at that time was the head of the Physics
Department at the Nuclear Research Institute and a member of the top level
Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission, was offered a job at the Physics Department at
the University of Birmingham, by Professor Burcham,
the Head of the Physics and Astronomy Department.
Jafar instead returned to
Khadduri was
quickly accepted into the
Four Iraqi
students were enrolled for the Reactor Technology Masters course in 1969: Tariq al-Hamami, Abdallah Kendoush, Riyadh Yahya Zaki and Khadduri, all on
Iraqi government scholarships.
Khadduri wound up
the sole choice of the university to continue on to a PhD, which he earned in
December 1973.
Peaceful
nuclear research
Khadduri then
rejoined the
On the same day, Khalid Said, a PhD physicist who had studied in the
England, had also started his work there and was immediately assigned to be the
head of the Nuclear Research Center, reportedly due to his prominent Ba’athist status.
Khadduri had
severed his own party connection in 1962.
Muyasser al-Mallah, a fellow
Eager to focus on
research rather than administration, Khadduri joined Mansoor
Ammar and Muqdam Ali in the
Reactor Department.
It was at a
scientific conference later that year (1974) that Khadduri would discover the
detectors he worked on in
He immediately
proposed a project to search for uranium in
Khalid Said approved, and provided Omran
Mousa -a "faithful and devoted" driver, a
vehicle, communication equipment, official papers, soldiers and finance.
A Bedouin guide
later joined the entourage, as it ventured into more remote terrain.
Searching
for uranium in the mountains
Khadduri
began his search in the northeast mountains near the Iranian border, close to a
Kurdish village called Hero.
"I would
have 50 soldiers spread around in a circular formation, with me at the center,
fanning along with me as I planted the [detectors]," he recalls. "The
yellow uranium ore was even visible on the surface."
The group then
headed south and spent several months in the barren desert of Jil, on the Iraqi-Saudi border Siroor
Mirza, the head of the geology department at the
Nuclear Research Institute, accompanied Khadduri’s
entourage and provided detailed maps indicating possible uranium deposits in
the middle of the desert.
Later, near the city of al-Qaim near the Syrian
border Khadduri and company "struck it rich."
The results of
preliminary tests indicated heavy uranium concentrations near an area called Akashat.
A city then arose
around a phosphate production plant that was built there.
One of the
plant’s buildings was for the extraction of uranium ore in the form of
yellowcake.
"The
extracted by-product would later be transported by rail north to the al-Jazeera nuclear site, near
There, a
processing plant was located, which required yellowcake as feed material in
order to produce pure nuclear grade uranium dioxide, which in turn was
chlorinated to produce uranium tetrachloride.
This was the
"feed material" for the "Baghdatrons"
-a name derived from Calutron (which in turn derives
from the contraction of
The "Baghdatrons" were central parts of a machine process
used primarily for production of
Many months
later, Khadduri returned to the
Jafar
returns
At
the urging of Khalid Said, Khadduri wrote a letter to
Jafar Dhia Jafar, urging him to return to
Jafar was still working in
He agreed to quit
his post at CERN, return to
The first Iraqi
International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy was held in
Khadduri, who was
in charge of the reactor technology sector, oversaw the evaluation of the
submitted papers and allotted the time for them.
His attention was
immediately drawn to Yehya al-Meshad,
Egyptian nuclear reactor scientist, whose expertise in nuclear reactor
technology and gift for expressing complex principles with clarity was
evidenced in ten papers submitted for the conference.
Al-Meshad was on sabbatical leave from
He subsequently
won a 2-year contract, which ended in1977 -at which point he was hired by the
Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission and became a prime mover in the program.
Meanwhile,
Malcolm Scott suggested that the Iraqis start a one-year Reactor Technology
Master of Science course based on the material that he had developed for his
course at
Scott said that
he would be willing to accept any graduate student of the course, for a PhD
program at
Coordinating with
the
"The
students were completely under our guidance at the Nuclear Research Institute,
but their degrees would be conferred by the Physics Department at the
Dabbling
with critical mass
"I also
engaged [al-Meshad] in developing a computer program,
or code, to calculate the burn-up of the reactor’s nuclear fuel instead of
depending on the simplified hand calculated formulas that were left to us by
the Russians," Khadduri said.
"Our code
and calculations opened up the possibility of calculating critical mass, the
correct density at which a highly enriched uranium 235 sphere would undergo a
self-sustaining chain reaction; this could become a reactor, if controlled, and
an atomic bomb, if uncontrolled."
The duo’s work on
code yielded yet another co-authored report: CORELOAD: A Computer Code for Calculating the Evolution of the
Operation History of the IRT-2000 Reactor.
Khalid Said and Jafar Dhia Jafar were supportive of the
efforts.
Implosion
scenarios
Khadduri and Yehya al-Meshad also started
dabbling with different "implosion scenarios" that would start with a
smaller spherical sphere of uranium but would increase its density to a
critical value.
"This fissioning process is rapidly repeated, in a very short
time, in a self-sustained chain reaction. The bomb explodes, releasing intense
amounts of energy and radioactive fission products, "said Khadduri.
Khadduri’s and al-Meshad’s
calculations matched the experimental results carried out in the forties for
the Manhattan Project, and were then written up in report No. NR-14: The Use
of Multigroup Transport Method for Criticality
Calculations of Some Fast Spherical Assemblies.
Plutonium
239
Having mastered
the tools for calculating the burn-up rate of the nuclear fuel in the reactor Jafar and Khadduri then jointly carry out a detailed
calculation on the possible production of weapons grade fissionable plutonium
239 from the operation of the Russian reactor’s fuel –"a long shot"
according to Khadduri.
Plutonium 239
constitutes the core of another type of atomic bomb.
"With our
low power research reactor, it would have taken decades to obtain the required
amount of nuclear weapon grade plutonium," states Khadduri, "The
relevance of the work, however, was the knowledge of the required
calculations."
Those
calculations would form yet another Khadduri nuclear report: The Possible Production of Pu239 from the IRT-5000
Reactor, co-authored with Jafar.
Power generating plant
The Iraqi team
visited several nuclear power plants in
Khadduri was part
of the team that met with and negotiated with the suppliers’ delegations.
Negotiations with
Mitsubishi at their headquarters in
"We were
nearing the end of it, when…Mr. Ito, the head of the Japanese delegation,
excused himself after [someone whispered] in his ear. He went out for five
minutes, and returned to declare the end of the negotiations," said
Khadduri.
Westinghouse,
American supplier for nuclear fuel for most Western and Japanese nuclear power
stations, had just called to refuse supply of nuclear fuel to
The scientists
would soon head to
Photos
copyrighted and supplied by Dr. Imad Khadduri
Next up -
Part 2: Assasination in
* * * * * *
Note: Dr. Khadduri's new book, titled Iraq's Nuclear
Mirage: Memoirs and Delusions should be available in American
bookstores at the end of December.
The author has
agreed to ship copies out himself to Etherzone
readers who want to obtain a copy of the book now. Signed copies are also
available and inquiries should be directed to Dr. Khadduri via his website: Iraq’s Nuclear Mirage.
Part 2:
Hurtling towards the bomb
Author’s
Note:
The debate
over
Dr. Imad Khadduri was a top scientist involved in Iraq's
nuclear program from 1968 until the end of 1998, when he was able to escape. He
now serves as a network administrator in
In 1974, a top
level Iraqi government delegation, lead by Saddam Hussein, arrived in
The delegation
was headed by Abdul Razzak al-Sashimi (known as Chouqi) and consisted of Jafar
Dhia Jafar, Hussain al-Sharastani and Humam Abdul Khaliq
Al-Sharastani, a prominent chemist, was later tortured,
jailed, and pressured to help build an Iraqi nuclear bomb. He managed to escape
from
Abdul Razzak al-Hashimi was nicknamed Chouqi, because of his propensity for generating
sheer chaos. The term is a derivative of the slang Chouqqa,
which refers to a large ’breaker’ marble used to ‘shoot’ and scatter smaller
marbles in every direction.
An entourage of
Iraqi chefs and special firewood were flown to
The visit became
known as the "Masgoof Visit."
By 1976, a $300
million deal had been completed for two reactors—one a 40 Megawatt (MW) reactor
that the French dubbed OSIRIS and a smaller reactor called
OSIRIS was a
relatively large research reactor and
The designs for
the reactors were to be prepared at Saclay Nuclear
Research Institute near
The French later
referred to the entire project as OSIRAK.
The
training for the operation of the two reactors (and on the six experimental
rigs that were the prime reason for buying them), was to be held at
Mahdi Shukur Ghali
Obeidi, a solid state materials scientist, was in
charge of putting together the scientific and engineering team. In early 1980,
about 60 scientists, engineers and technicians were sent to the research center
at Saclay to take an accelerated French language
course followed by a year of training on the operation of the two reactors and
the six experimental rigs.
Mahdi was later assigned to head the centrifugal
enrichment process team in the eighties. This is the same Mahdi
Obeidi, who at the end of June 2003, led Americans
troops to some hidden documents and centrifugal parts buried under a rosebush
in his back yard. Little media
play was given in the US to Obeidi’s accompanying
statement indicating Iraq had not rebuilt its nuclear weapons program after
1991.
In
The French had
suddenly switched the type of the nuclear fuel that would be used in the two
reactors. Instead of the 80% enriched cylindrical elements, specified three
years earlier in the purchase contract, the Iraqis were stunned to hear they
would instead be getting an 18% "caramel" type fuel.
In fact as soon
as the initial contract had been signed, the French immediately started to
design the 18% ‘caramel’ fuel.
The low enriched
"caramel" fuel was designed solely for the
Assasination in
"The Mossad, smashed Yehya’s head with
a copper rod as he entered his hotel room in
"The only
witness, a French woman, was ‘mysteriously’ run over by a car and killed a few
days later. "
The date was June
13, 1980.
Adding to the
mounting difficulties, Khadduri had criticized some of the Ba’ath
party team members for their incompetence.
His criticism
soon reached
Khadduri was
ordered to return to
It was the first
of several clashes between Khadduri and Saddam’s political-military
-intelligence network, which would eventually make Khadduri’s
escape from
Basil al-Saati along with a few loyal party members escorted
Khadduri, his wife, and their three-month old daughter Yamama to the airport,
following at close range in order to prevent any defection.
Khadduri returned
to the
Not one to waste
time, he started translating it into Arabic.
Khadduri
continued this self-imposed intellectual regimen until what he calls the
"genuine start" of the Iraqi nuclear weapons program, which he dates
to September 3, 1981.
Towards
the Nuclear bomb
In early 1981,
unknown to Khadduri at the time, events were already in motion behind the
scenes concerning the "fumbling goal" of obtaining a nuclear bomb,
even as the Iraqi government began harassing some of the country’s top
scientists.
Hussain al-Shahrastani, the
brilliant chemist who went to
After Hussain’s arrest, Jafar appealed
to Chouqi in his defense.
True to his
nickname, Chouqi then rushed to Saddam and made false
accusations against Jafar.
Saddam ordered
the house arrest of Jafar in January 1980
In 1981, after
hearing of Jafar’s arrest, Khadduri began to visit
and comfort Jafar’s distraught mother. She had been
confiding in Khadduri’s father, who was her medical
doctor.
Humam Abdul Khaliq, head of the
Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission, called Khadduri to his office: "If you do
not stop visiting Jafar’s mother, they will fry
onions on your ass", he warned.
Khadduri
disregarded the warning.
Years of Iraqi
scientific endeavor came to an end on the evening of June 7, 1981 when
"We heard
the blasts and ran to the rooftops. We could see the cloud plumes even tens of
kilometers away," Khadduri recalls, calling the act
"belligerent."
He describes
Hurtling
towards the bomb
Saddam took the
political decision to initiate a full-fledged weapons program immediately
afterwards, according to Khadduri.
This meant the
dispersed team had to be resurrected and reunited.
Jafar had to be released from jail. Chafing and humiliated
from the experience, Jafar was slow to agree to the
plan.
"I believe
that he wrote, while still interned, several technical reports on the matter to
Saddam to that effect," Khadduri said.
Jafar was then released and arrived at the
Khadduri was soon
called for, leaving his library sanctuary behind.
Basil al-Qaisy , (Khadduri’s childhood
friend who had initially invited him into the atomic program,) Munqith al-Qaisy, Munqith al-Bakir, Zuhair al-Chalabi, Nabil Karnik, Imad
Ilyia and a few others were called into a meeting
with Jafar.
"Department
3000"
At first, the
secret organization that Jafar set up for the nuclear
weapons program was called "Department 3000, Research and
Development."
All the
departments were still carrying on with peaceful nuclear research under the watchful
eyes of the IAEA -except for Department 3000.
Covert
purchases, overt gleaning
Advancement was
fueled by an abundance of publicly available American research materials and
the ease with which covert procurements were made.
He also cut a
deal on the west coast to obtain two lasers needed for experiments in uranium
enrichment.
The lasers were
picked up at the
Khadduri soon
moved to a small planning group that was working directly with Jafar on the nuclear weapons program
Part of the
planning was the assignment of scientists and engineers to attend relevant and
worthwhile conferences and symposiums abroad in order obtain needed
information.
At the end of
1983, he was transferred to the nuclear electric power plant project, which was
put on a higher priority level, under the direction of Khalid
Said.
In the winter of
1987, Khadduri attended a high-level meeting chaired by Humam
Abdul Khaliq, the Head of the Iraqi Atomic Energy
Commission, in which the top priorities were outlined.
Khadduri left the
meeting with the realization that the nuclear electric power plant project was
no longer a priority and was instead to become a façade for the IAEA to focus
on and follow, while the real nuclear weapons program would remain undetected,
advancing rapidly.
"What had
actually transpired at the time was a crucial turning point in the Iraqi
nuclear weapons program. I was not aware then of a shake up that happened
behind the scenes," Khadduri recalls.
The
secret PC3
The shake up was
instigated by a letter by Khidir Hamza
sent early in 1987 to Saddam Hussein.
Khadduri notes
that Khidir Hamza, referred
to in the west by his self-given title, "Saddam’s Bomb Maker," had
either failed in his assignment to make progress with the gaseous diffusion
enrichment process or had coveted Jafar’s position as
head of the program. Khadduri leans towards the former theory, noting Hamza’a alleged lack of leadership skills.
"He was a
loner, only adept at working on his theoretical ‘three-body’ problem for more
than two decades. He did not have the charisma or the courage to lead a team.
His distaste of any experimental scientific work provided a focal point for
many humorous puns."
Hamza had written an inflammatory report to Saddam Hussein
accusing Jafar of procrastination and wasting
resources.
Saddam was
furious and demanded an explanation.
Jafar’s administrative load was soon lightened with the
arrival of Dhafir Selbi,
the previous head of the administration department at the Nuclear Research
center, and an old high school friend of Khadduri’s.
Selbi had been asked to join the top management team of
the nuclear weapons program, and he soon transformed the program by a thorough
restructuring.
Selbi, who refers to himself now
simply as "Haj, visitor to
breakthrough his "brainchild" and
"Perestroika."
Selbi used zumras, an Arabic metaphor for "teams" that
would be comprised of engineers and scientists, delegated by their various
scientific and engineering departments, to tackle specific design proposals.
Khadduri and Selbi explained that the zumra would work through and
materialize the designs through collective interactive thought encompassing all
related scientific and engineering activities.
This was in
radical contrast to the previous mode of work where the design was put forth by
one department, then shuffled back and forth between the various groups who
would just attach their notes individually, with no significant interaction.
The nuclear
weapons project in its entirety came to be known as the Petrochemical 3 (PC3)
project and in the summer of 1987, replacing "Department 3000."
The resulting restructuring
resulted in the following organization of the nuclear program:
Group 1: The centrifugal enrichment process, which was
assigned to Mahdi Shukur Ghali Obeidi. Several months
later, Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law, took
direct responsibility for that group.
Group 2: The PIG and TIG enrichment processes was assigned to
Jafar Dhia Jafar. [PIG and TIG would soon to be dropped
and replaced by the Electromagnetic Isotope Separation (EMIS) enrichment
process per Dhafir Selbi.
Group 3: The "administrative support" group that
would lighten Jafar’s administrative chores was
assigned to Dhafir Selbi.
This group was responsible for covert purchasing, the provision of scientific
and engineering information, the documentation of the
scientific reports, the mechanical and electrical manufacturing activities and
in a later stage the supervision of their design activities. Khadduri was
incorporated into that group in September of that year, 1987.
Group 4: Khidir Hamza
was asked to drop the diffusion process and was assigned to gather a team for
the design of the nuclear bomb. However, Khadduri reports that Hamza was soon kicked out after a few months and the
nuclear weapon design group was assigned instead to Khalid
Said.
As
previously reported by WND and Newsweek, United Nations documents
recording the debriefing of Hussein Kamel in
Said Kamal, "He worked with us, but he was useless and was
always looking for promotions. He consulted with me but could not deliver
anything."
The same document
indicates the UN concluded a document produced by Hamza
was a fake.
Khadduri said,
"There is not a single documented scientific report of any work by Khidir Hamza relating to critical
mass or a nuclear bomb in the archive of the
Hamza’s testimony to Congress on
Hussein
Kamel takes charge
In October 1987,Saddam appointed Hussein Kamel,
who was already the Head of the Military Industrialization Corporation (MIC) to
be in charge of Groups 2, 3, and 4.
In addition, Kamel took a direct and separate leadership of Group 1 that
was distanced from Groups 2, 3 and 4. Group 1 was to work on the centrifuge
enrichment process under the continued direction of Mahdi
Shukur Ghali Obeidi.
The activities of
these four groups would be made completely invisible from the International
Atomic Energy Agency.
In January 1989,
PC3 was established within the Ministry of Industry and Military
Industrialization (MIMI) under Hussein Kamel and
included the whole of the Iraqi national nuclear program (enrichment and
weapons). Petrochemical 1 and Petrochemical 2 were established large-scale
refinery projects undertaken by MIMI during the eighties.
"In contrast
to Khidir Hamza’s false
claims, Jafar Dhia Jafar, Humam Abdul Khaliq and Dhafir Selbi, were, in my opinion, the true dynamic prime movers
of the nuclear weapons program," Khadduri said.
In 1987, with Khidir Hamza kicked out of the
role of the head of the weapon design team, Khalid
Said took over the role.
Dr. Said won't be
giving any testimony now about the nuclear program though. He died in a hail of
bullets after he failed to stop fast enough at an American checkpoint in
Meanwhile, Dr. Hamza is currently working for the
"Activity
3W"
Dhafir Selbi cancelled the work
on PIG and TIG enrichment research, deciding that the Electromagnetic Isotope
Separation (EMIS) method that employed huge magnets, referred to as Calutrons (or Baghdatrons) was
the best approach.
The EMIS method
was implemented during the World War II in the Manhattan Project to produce the
first American atomic bombs that were dropped on
The
decision was made to go forward with the enrichment process as fast as
possible.
Dhafir called for Khadduri the following day. "Jafar’s scientists are not doing their abc’s of scientific research," he complained.
"They are tiring a bit after six years and are not properly researching
published articles on their new assignment. I want you to flood them with
proper scientific and engineering information. I also want you to take hold
again of the documentation procedure. The scientific quality of some of our
reports that I have seen should have been thoroughly reviewed and reworked
before being approved and distributed." He assigned Khaddar one employee, Khawla. Khadduri then added Salam
Toma, a close friend, to his team. Khadduri now
headed Dhafir’s Activity 3W, in Group 3, labeled
Information and Documentation.
Information
avalanche
Khadduri
immediately headed to the large research library of the Iraqi Atomic Energy
Commission.
He soon found the
complete set of the
Khadduri quickly
set about pouring over the yearly indexes of the NSA trove, searching for
certain keywords: critical mass, Manhattan Project, Calutron,
critical assemblies.
Salam Toma and Khawla went to work digging through the volumes.
Two weeks later,
they brought had compiled more than fifty pages of relevant citations.
How many of the
cited works were already present in the library?
Almost
all -ninety six percent.
In one dusty box
that had not opened since the sixties Khadduri found the Manhattan Project
books and reports.
Over 160 patents
related to the Manhattan Project, were then obtained from the World
Intellectual Property Organization in
"It probably
cost us no more than $100," he remarked.
Next came the hunt for a microcard
reader.
Some of the key
documents were on microcard, a predecessor of the
microfiche and the microfilm.
One crucial and
important report, TID 5232 in Division 1,Volume 12 on
the "Chemical Processing Equipment: Electromagnetic Separation
Process" was on one of these microcards.
"Dhafir instructed me to find, hell or heaven, a microcard reader that can print the images, thirty years
after the demise of that technology," said Khadduri.
An Egyptian in
Due to Khadduri‘s efforts, four months later, by the end of 1987
the scientists and engineers had their hands full of critical scientific
information on the Calutron process.
They quickly set
to work on the "Baghdatron."
It was just the
beginning of the information avalanche though.
Since the
mid-seventies, Khadduri had been in charge of accessing Dialog -the world’s
first online information retrieval system - from the
Khadduri used a
special small isolated room on the outskirts of the
Some obstacles
still stood in the way. First, it was expensive to have an open line from
A station was set
up in
In order to
secure the supply of special books, reports and hard-to-get articles, Khadduri
saw to it that several accounts were opened with various information suppliers.
These included the British Lending Library, the
A positive report
was submitted by Jafar in the summer of 1990 to
Hussein Kamel on the remarkable progress Khadduri’s team made in securing, organizing and
disseminating large amounts of critical nuclear information .
Jafar proposed to make the benefits of Khadduri’s
research and archiving activities widely available.
Hussein Kamal approved of the idea and ordered Khadduri’s
department to go public, and serve all Iraqi ministries, research centers and
universities, free of charge.
It was the first
department from PC3 to become public. The new name of Khadduri’s
enterprise was the "Center for Specialized Information," part of the
Ministry of Industry.
Notra Trulock III,
knows all too well the pivotal role dissemination of American scientific data
played in the Iraqi nuclear weapons program. Trulock
is the former director of intelligence for the Department of Energy (DOE) in
the
According to Trulock the best reports on the Iraqi’s exploitation of US
nuclear weapons secrets were done within the DOE, but were suppressed by the
department’s arms controllers and have never seen the light of day.
"I had a
bootleg copy of one such report on the Iraqis’ acquisition of nuclear
information from the national labs, but I was never able to get it widely
distributed to the intelligence community," said Trulock.
An Energy Department intelligence officer told Trulock
that all existing copies of the report were destroyed after he left the
department.
Documentation
Khadduri had also
been set to work on proper documentation of the activities of PC3.
This included
insuring the scientific quality of research reports, and documenting reports
submitted by scientists and engineers after returning from abroad to attend
scientific conferences.
It also included
documenting covert purchases.
The originals
were kept in Building 61 at the Nuclear Research Center, which was the
Electronics Department under Basil al-Qaisi, Khadduri‘s childhood friend who had invited him into the
nuclear program in 1968.
The second set
was at the Trade Union building in front of al-Rasheed
Hotel, the location that was targeted by David Kay in September 1991.
The third
location was al-Hayat building, an intelligence
adjunct near the presidential palace. Hamid and a
staff of ten worked in the basement of building 61, to maintain the records,
making microfilm copies of the engineering drawings and producing the required
number of copies of the reports to be distributed to scientists and engineers.
Soon, the storm
clouds of war were gathering, and Khadduri’s team
rushed to copy the nuclear program reports onto optical disks and find an
appropriate place to hide the originals.
Next Up - Part III: War, reconstruction and escape.
Part
3: The gathering storm
Author’s
Note:
The debate
over
Dr.
Imad Khadduri was a top scientist involved in Iraq's
nuclear program from 1968 until the end of 1998, when he was able to escape. He
now serves as a network administrator in
As the threat of
Gulf War I approached, Khadduri and his staff hurriedly set about storing and
hiding the documents of the nuclear program.
In early 1990,
Khadduri chose Canon’s new CanoFile 150 as the means
of duplication - a scanning machine that could capture and store the image of
both sides of a scanned document on a high-capacity magneto-optical disc.
Khadduri ordered
two along with five empty disks. Canon’s representative offered the sixth disk,
which Khadduri kept for backup and which later play a critical part in hiding
documents from UN inspectors after Gulf War I.
The first CanoFile was shipped out of
With both devices
ready, and with war approaching, the whole documentation staff set to work
scanning and saving the 1600 reports that represented ten years of work and
development.
Khadduri saw to
it that the scanned documents were properly indexed.
Hiding
nuclear documents
Salam and Khadduri then went to the bazaar near al-Mustansiryah Street and bought three large aluminum trunks
to place the records in. A nearby German-built secondary technical school was
chosen as the hiding place.
Inside the school
they found the ideal hiding location: a windowless room that could only be
accessed by going through two other rooms.
This became the
place where the reports of the Iraqi nuclear weapons program were hidden.
Not trusting intelligence
and security staff, Khadduri recommended Selbi not
let them know the location of the trunks. Selbi
agreed.
Salam and Khadduri then carried out the delivery of the
trunks alone.
Heavy locks were
installed in all three rooms.
Dhafir got a set of keys, and Salam
and Khadduri kept the only other two sets.
Khadduri also
kept the magneto-optical disks that stored the 1600 reports of the secret PC3
program.
A week later, an
enraged Khadduri found a cardboard carton belatedly dumped on his desk with reports
from Khalid Said’s Group 4.
Said had stubbornly refused to adhere to Khadduri’s
strict documentation and indexing procedures, and had been allowed to make his
own arrangements, but had apparently failed to do so.
It was too late
to properly index the papers with those already locked away in the aluminum
trunks. Beside himself with anger, Khadduri sent Salam
to take the carton to the technical school. An upset Salam, just left the
cardboard box atop the trunks.
One year later,
David Kay would find the cardboard box, which would result on the destruction
of the al-Athir site by UNSCOM inspectors.
In the autumn of
1990, the research gurus of Khadduri’s Center for
Specialized Information set up shop at on the mezzanine floor of the Ministry
of Industry.
His deputy at
department 3W, Mashkoor Haidar,
took over the documentation responsibility for PC3. Mashkoor
and the staff of the documentation group in turn answered to Adil Fiadh.
Khadduri handed Mashkoor the keys to the three rooms where the aluminum trunks
were stored, but kept the magneto-optical disks.
Jafar demanded that Khadduri also hand over the disks to
Abdul Halim al-Hajjaj, Khalid Said’s associate.
Khadduri strongly
objected, not trusting anyone else to keep the data secure, but Jafar insisted.
"With a
broken heart, and spirit, I handed over the three full magneto optical disks to
Halim," he said.
Jafar was still looking for them seven years later.
The
gathering storm
With Gulf War I
hovering on the horizon, Khadduri, along with other select scientists and
executive members of the management team were assigned alternate living
quarters in the event of attack.
Khadduri took his
family to the city of
Khadduri heard
that not a single foreigner was employed in the construction due to its
secrecy.
"Most of the
portable trays of microfiche and catalogues were taken to our homes. We
dispersed the racks of microfilms in different locations so as not to suffer
from a single hit," Khadduri said, "At home, personal suitcases were
prepared, official personal
papers gathered and dozens of batteries were purchased,"
he recalls.
At dawn, with
electricity and telephone systems down the Khadduri family packed the two cars;
Niran’s and Imad’s
government assigned one, and then drove off to Sharqat
with his mother and Lisa, their dog.
Khadduri recalls
worrying about whether American "smart bombs" might accidentally
target and breach the Russian reactor at Tuwaitha,
releasing devastating radioactivity.
Bombs did fall on
Tuwaitha while the reactor was still operational,
Khadduri says.
"The
operators first fled the building when the bombs first fell close to them but
then returned, shut down the reactor and put a steel cover over the open pool
as the bombs exploded tens of meters from the building. Fortunately, that steel
cover was not breached neither was the concrete containment of the reactor
holding the water that cooled the reactor."
The Iraqi nuclear
weapons program stopped dead in its tracks that morning, and was never
rejuvenated, Khadduri said.
How close was
Khadduri’s summary:
"In total,
we were, in my estimate, about 10-20 percent of where we should have been had
Through the
war
The
Khadduri’s temporary home shook from shock waves that
they attributed to ammunition depots exploding miles away.
His
family made frequent use of a crude underground shelter that they dug in front
of the house.
Intermingled with
the hard times the scientist recalls fond memories:
Dhafir and his two brothers cooking fish, Masgoof style, in front of their house as war planes flew
overhead and bombs exploded in the distance; Niran
and Imad spending evenings playing cards with the
families of Sabah Abdul Noor
and Mahir Sarsam, two
senior scientists from Group 4 of the PC3 nuclear project.
Late at night,
Khadduri recalls, they would walk home with a lantern, shooing away stray dogs.
Khadduri’s family also received news of war casualties. A
housing complex belonging to al-Badir electrical
establishment, south of Sharqat near Samara, was
bombed by with a reported 50 women and children killed. Similar news reached
them of more civilian casualties in an attack on the Ishtar
housing complex near the
Rebellion
against Saddam
During the war,
Khadduri ventured into
Khadduri, fearing
a violent reaction of the Iraqi people to "our abject defeat,"
whispered to Sarsam, "Allah Yustir
(God protect us)!"
"Little had
I known of the
"Only a year
or two later did I learn of the extent of the brutal repression inflicted by
the Ba’athist stalwarts on the revolting people, the
heroic popular extent of the uprising, the extensive damage to the holy Moslem
shrines in Karbala and al-Najjaf
and the horrendous mass grave yards. "
Khadduri and his
friends also heard of anger at the Americans who had allowed the helicopters of
the Republican Guards to fly freely and participate in the repression.
"The Kurds
in the North, like the Arabs in the South, had naively believed Bush senior’s
call for an uprising, only to be let down, left unaided and be
slaughtered," Khadduri recalls.
"Coming down
from Sharqat, we saw some of the Republican Army’s
modern tanks heading north, unhindered, to quell the Kurdish uprising."
Seeing the
failure of the uprisings, and fearing a strengthened Saddam, Khadduri moved
swiftly to obtain up-to-date passports for his wife and children.
Khadduri himself
was forbidden to obtain a passport, since he was part of the nuclear team. The
only exceptions were for official business as approved by the Intelligence
Agency.
It was the first
step in a long and arduous ordeal of secretly escaping from
In the meantime,
numerous attempts to retire from government service were rejected by the Iraqi
government.
Rebuilding
Extensive damage
to the Iraqi infrastructure and subsequent rebuilding would occupy the nuclear
scientists and engineers for years.
During the war,
Khadduri learned
A week after the
war ended, Jafar gave Khadduri his first post-war
assignment.
He was to convene
an Electricity Rehabilitation Symposium in
A third of
Passing along a
highway south of Sharqat during the war, Khadduri
remembers seeing miles-high walls of fire from spilled oil engulfing the Baiji oil refinery plant.
Khadduri along
with other nuclear scientists and engineers later supervised the rebuilding of
oil refineries, which were up and running again within a few months as well.
In the summer of
1991, as the telecommunications infrastructure was being repaired, Khadduri
undertook an enterprise of his own initiative: networking all of the research centers
and universities throughout
Over a period of
two years, Khadduri and Ayad Muhaimid
used external Hayes modems, to network about sixty research centers and
universities with a telephone dial-up service allowing them access to the many
databases on CD-ROMs that were located at the Center for Specialized
Information in the Ministry of Industry in Baghdad.
Khadduri’s
research center back in business
At the same time
the electrical symposium was held, one week after the war ended, work had
resumed at the Center for Specialized Information.
Khadduri’s center had accumulated about twenty scientific and
engineering databases, including all five million
Additional
holdings included PhD theses abstracts extending back to 1864, and the
microfilm ‘treasure" of industrial and US military standards and
industrial catalogues.
"Within a
few months after the war, we would normally open our offices at eight in the
morning to a waiting line of twenty to thirty government engineers, students
and university researchers eager to get information, for free, for the
rehabilitation of their sectors or for writing their theses," Khadduri
said.
The center’s
staff also wrote their own computer program to distribute their monthly
salaries: "The department responsible for that in the now slowly
disintegrating PC3 was incapable of running their own program on the relocated
and dismembered mainframe computer," Khadduri explains.
Prison and
interrogation
As the UN
inspectors were beginning to arrive, a memo was written in April/May 1991 by Jafar Dhia Jafar
and Naman al-Niami, a top
level chemist in the nuclear weapons program, to Hussain
Kamal, outlining all of the nuclear sites.
The list was
submitted before the adoption of Resolution 687 (1991) by the United Nations
Security Council. Kamal ordered the disclosure of
selected activities and sites and the concealment of the others from the list –
notably the al-Athir weapon design center and its
activities.
Nuclear
scientists and engineers went to Jafar to ask for
access to their reports to aid in the UN interviewing process.
Jafar, at that time, was appointed Head of the MIC, under Hussain Kamal’s authority, in
return for having led the successful rebuilding of the electricity sector.
Jafar decided to hand over the contents of one
documentation center to the UN inspectors. These encompassed the reports of the
declared activities only.
In late summer of
1991, Jafar then gave a "fatal order" to Adil Fiadh to retrieve the hidden
documents and reports.
All of the
documents that had been hidden in the technical school, had been placed in a
train wagon -its doors then welded shut- that kept shuttling between Basra in
the south and Mosul in the north.
After Jafar’s order went out to return the documents, the train
car was halted and the welded doors pried open. The aluminum trunks, boxes of
microfiche of design drawings and the cardboard box containing the reports of
the undeclared activities of Group 4 (that were dumped on Khadduri‘s
desk at the last minute) were all returned to the documentation center at the
Labor Union building, next to the MIC building.
"Within a
few days later, the UN inspector David Kay and his colleagues unexpectedly
raided the Labor Union building and retrieved the documents, including the
cardboard box, leading to heated verbal exchanges and face-to- face
confrontation between David Kay and Jafar, which was
videotaped and broadcast," Khadduri recounts.
"A week
later, the inspectors raided the
Hussain Kamel suspected a security
leak, and immediately ordered the arrest of about twelve people connected with
documentation, including Adil Fiadh,
Mashkoor Haidar, and
Khadduri.
They were
individually interrogated by a committee headed by the Deputy Head of MIC, Amer al-Ubaidi -who later became
the Oil Minister in 1996 and was captured by US forces in May 2003.
The group was
incarcerated incommunicado for eighteen days at the Fao
Establishment building on
"Some of the
interned suffered psychologically, broke down and cried heavily, realizing that
our lives were at the whim of Hussain Kamel’s mood," Khadduri recalls.
After concluding
that no security breach had occurred, the interned were released after being
demoted, Khalid Said included.
Jafar was removed as director of MIC with Amer al-