Newsgroup: it.cultura.storia
Titolo: Iraqi scientist gave CIA information that should have prevented war

Iraqi scientist gave CIA information that should have prevented war
AMMAN: When Saad Tawfiq watched then-US Secretary of state Colin Powell's
presentation to the United Nations on February 5, 2003, he shed bitter
tears as he realized he had risked his life and those of his loved ones
for nothing. As one of Saddam Hussein's most gifted engineers, Tawfiq knew
that the Iraqi dictator had shut down his nuclear, chemical and biological
weapons programs in 1995 - and he had told his handlers in US intelligence
just that.
And yet here was Powell - Tawfiq's television was able to receive
international news through a link pirated from Saddam's spies next door -
waving a vial of white powder and telling the UN Security Council a story
about Iraqi germ labs.
"When I saw Colin Powell, I started crying - immediately. I knew I had
tried and lost," Tawfiq told AFP five years later in the Jordanian
capital, Amman.
Now in his 50s, a round-faced man with a small moustache and lively eyes
behind delicate spectacles, Tawfiq described how the CIA set up an
elaborate operation to recruit Iraqi weapons scientists and then ignored
the results.
From the end of 2002 the US spy agency had sources inside Iraq's weapons
plants telling them clearly what the whole world now knows - that Saddam
had ended efforts to produce weapons of mass destruction.
Nevertheless, in March 2003 the United States and Britain invaded Iraq to
disarm Saddam of this non-existent arsenal and in the process triggered
the effective collapse of the Iraqi state, plunging it into chaos and
bringing hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Tawfiq's role in this drama began in June 2002 with calls from his sister
Sawsan, a doctor who lives with her husband Ali in Moreland Hills, a
pleasant suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, in the Midwest of the United States.
"Our Abu Mahmouds are putting pressure on me," she told him, using the
nickname they shared for Tawfiq's secret police minder as a makeshift code
for the US intelligent agent who had contacted her, "Chris."  
"Chris was very nice, very polite," Sawsan, a small energetic woman, told
AFP. 
Chris wanted Sawsan's help to discover the status of Saddam's weapons
program and in particular his efforts to build a nuclear bomb.
She joined one of the most successful attempts by the CIA to penetrate
Saddam's Iraq, a program dreamed up by agency veteran Charlie Allen to
target Iraqi weapons technicians through their relatives.
The scientists were well known to the UN weapons inspectors who had been
keeping tabs on Iraq's arms plants since 1991, and the Americans were able
to draw up a list of 30 who had relatives in the United States. The
American relatives were to be sent to Iraq and ask about weapons.
"I was nervous, and we even discussed with Ali what to do if something
happened to me," Sawsan said. "It was a very emotional visit back home,
because I had not been there for years and I had not seen my brother for
years."  
Sawsan was right to be nervous. Saddam's notorious secret police dealt
with spies mercilessly. She was taking a risk with her life and that of
her brother, but was determined to help rid her original homeland of a
tyrant.
 
The CIA provided her with a detailed questionnaire about Iraq's weapons
programs. Fearing that she would forget it, Sawsan disguised it in
sketches and crosswords in a kind of homemade code.
Tawfiq picked his sister up from Baghdad's airport on September 9, 2002.
Her homecoming was emotional, but the pair had work to do. They met
secretly at night in the family garden and took walks together in the city.
The weapons engineer was astonished by the CIA's questions, which he
thought showed the depths of the agency's ignorance about country. 
"I went crazy. The questions were dumb. She was telling me: 'They know you
have a program,' and I was saying: 'There is nothing. Tell them there is
nothing, absolutely nothing. They have left us with nothing,'" Tawfiq
said. "She was taking notes. There were 20 major questions, and to all of
them the answer was: 'No, no, no ...' I kept swearing on the grave of my
mother."  
According to Tawfiq, Saddam Hussein gave the order to dismantle Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction programs in 1995, after his brother-in-law and
arms chief Hussein Kamel defected and briefed the UN inspectors.
"I was Saddam's scientist," Tawfiq declared, with an ironic smile. "In
1991 if you exposed something you were killed. In 1995 if you hid
something you were killed!" 
Sawsan dutifully gathered this information and returned to the United
States to pass it on to her handlers. But the CIA was unimpressed.
"Saad told me there was nothing left," she told AFP. "That everything had
been either destroyed or dismantled by the UN and the regime has abandoned
its nuclear program. And he begged me to explain all that back in the
States.
"I went back and I reported what he had told me in full detail. I even
went personally to Washington. In the beginning they listened to me but
then they told me that my brother was lying."
Of course Tawfiq and other colleagues approached by the CIA were telling
the truth, as the United States would discover after it had launched a
bloody war that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
Paul R. Pillar, the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Near East
and South Asia at the time of the operation to question Tawfiq, said
weapons scientists had not been ignored, but had been contradicted by
other sources.
"To the extent that the debriefings did not have more of an effect in
Washington, it probably was not because the effort came too late but
instead because there were other indications that seemed to contradict
what the individuals were saying, and that suggested Iraqi unconventional
weapons programs were continuing," he told AFP.
But as Saddam's scientist lamented five years later: "You don't have to
destroy a country for that." - AFP
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