“The Last Confession: The
Truth about the Iraqi Nuclear Program”
By Dr Jafar
Dhia Jafar and Dr Numan Al-Niami
In Arabic, Published by the Centre for Arab Unity Studies,
(The English title is
stated as: Iraqi Weapons Mass Destruction (WMD): Fact and Fiction)
(Page 306)
Earlier Denials – Followed
by a Later Confession: Playing both sides of the coin
Dr Mahdi
Al-Obaidi, the person in charge of the centrifugal
enrichment process, had declared repeatedly that he had submitted the drawings
[for G1, G2 and G3 centrifugal separators purchased from German scientists in
1989 at a cost of one million US dollars] to the Special Republican Guards in
May, 1991 according to the orders of Hussain Kamil. If we were to believe this version of what happened
to these documents, then they should have been part of the documents [in the
chicken farm] that were handed over in total to the IAEA in August 1995 after
the escape of Hussain Kamil
to
Since 1995, several orders
were issued by the Presidential Palace to all former employees of the previous wmd programs to hand in all documents, drawings and
experimental data that had still remained in their possession to the National
Monitoring Office in order to deliver them to the IAEA inspectors. Mahdi Al-Obaidi consistently
declared to the Iraqi officials that he has no knowledge of the missing
documents and repeatedly signed all of the declarations that attested that
fact. He was interviewed by the IAEA inspectors in
March 2003 when he still insisted that he was not in possession of these
documents and did not know what happened to them.
However, in June of 2003, and
after the fall of Saddam, Mahdi Al-Obaidi contacted the CIA agents in Iraq and handed them 180
documents and 200 design drawings that he had hidden in his garden, claiming
that his hiding of them was on the orders of Qusai
Saddam Hussain and from Hussain
Kamil in 1991, both of whom were dead by then and
there is no way to verify his claim.
As nobody else had received
such instructions, including the two authors of this book (who were responsible
for the major and more sophisticated aspects of the former nuclear weapon
program and whom one would assume, if Mahdi Al-Obaidi’s claim is truthful, to have received similar orders
from Qusai or Hussain Kamil as they were in closer official proximity to them
than Mahdi Al-Obaidi), we
can only surmise that Mahdi Al-Obaidi’s
claim is a lie, and that he probably had hidden these documents in his garden
in order to garner favors from his superiors in case Saddam would decide to
rejuvenate the nuclear program at a later date and they would then only find Mahdi Al-Obaidi who would still
be holding such technical details. And as that eventuality did not materialize,
he grasped a more precious bounty (according to his inclinations) as he settled
along with his family in the
If Mahdi
Al-Obaid was truthful in his claim to have received
orders from Qusai and Hussain
Kamil in 1991, then he has violated the several other
orders issued by Saddam Hussain himself since 1995 to
deliver all such documents to the IAEA via the National Monitoring Office in
We had always trusted what Mahdi Al-Obaidi had told us, and
we had often asked him to add his signature to the letters and reports that we
submitted to the IAEA. By this action of his, and his lying, he has betrayed
the trust of his colleagues; and he has caused a great harm to Iraq by this
conduct of his, especially while realizing that the absence of these documents
was a main source of contention with the IAEA for many years as they insisted
that its resolution was still pending.
[The absence of these
particular documents was one of the last few minor points that the IAEA had
clung to, since 1995, in refusing to clear Iraq of its possession or
rejuvenation of its prior wmd programs, and hence
their ‘absence’ had contributed to the prolonging of the UN imposed economic
sanctions on Iraq and the devastating toll it took on the lives of the Iraqi
people]