-Caveat Lector-
from:
http://www.aci.net/kalliste/
----
Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin
Grabbe</A>
Iraq vs. Iran vs. US
Iraq Defector Says Saddam Was Close to A-Bomb
Lt. Col. Rick Francona & the blonde CIA man.
After escaping from Baghdad in 1994, Iraq's chief nuclear weapons scientist
thought his quest for freedom was over when he offered to tell the Central
Intelligence Agency everything he knew about Saddam Hussein's weapons program
in exchange for asylum.
But in the satellite telephone call the CIA said it wasn't interested,
forcing Khidhir Hamza on a desperate flight from Kurdish-controlled northern
Iraq that took him to Turkey, Libya, Tunisia and Hungary. Finally, after
Hamza turned up at the U.S. Embassy in Budapest in 1995, the CIA realized its
mistake, began debriefing Hamza and smuggled his family out of Baghdad.
"I held secrets no one outside Iraq, and only a handful of people inside the
country, could know," Hamza writes in a new book co-authored with journalist
Jeff Stein, "Saddam's Bombmaker: the Terrifying Inside Story of the Iraqi
Nuclear and Biological Weapons Agenda." "Not even the aggressive U.N.
inspectors . . . knew what we still had and 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."
Speaking on Thursday to nonproliferation experts at the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace, Hamza said Saddam Hussein probably possesses a
crude, two- to three-kiloton atomic bomb and could conceivably begin limited
bomb production within two to three years if international sanctions are
lifted.
Later, in an interview, Hamza said that he had long ago forgiven CIA
officials for the way in which "they rebuffed and even ridiculed my pleas for
help in 1994," as he puts it in his book.
"They did redeem themselves," Hamza said. "They went through a large
operation to save my family, with a five-man planning team here and a
nine-man team in the north of Iraq. They saved my family's lives
literally--they all would have been killed. For me, that's a lot. That's
everything."
The CIA does not agree that Iraq possesses a crude nuclear weapon. "We don't
believe they have the fissile material required for a nuclear weapon," said
one senior U.S. official, noting that Hamza has been away from the Iraqi
program for six years. "Nor do we believe they currently have the
infrastructure to build a nuclear weapon."
But the agency does not minimize what Hamza has contributed to its
understanding of Iraq's nuclear capabilities. "He is viewed as valuable," the
official said, "and his insights have been valuable."
Now living in Virginia with his wife and three sons, Hamza, 61, received a
master's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his
doctorate in nuclear physics from Florida State University. He was teaching
at a small college in Georgia in 1970 when he was ordered home to work in
Iraq's fledgling atomic energy program.
By 1985, he had become Saddam Hussein's personal nuclear weapons adviser,
charged with directing a crash program to make Iraq a nuclear power. The
country had 25 kilograms of bomb-grade uranium from a French-built reactor,
Hamza writes, and volumes of nuclear weapons technology from the World War II
Manhattan Project that produced the first U.S. atomic bomb. Hamza discovered
the declassified Manhattan Project reports on a dusty shelf in Baghdad, a
gift, he writes, from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in 1956.
But by 1994, with Iraq close to enriching its own uranium through diffusion
technology, Hamza plotted his escape and soon found himself at the
headquarters of the opposition Iraqi National Congress in Kurdish-controlled
northern Iraq, talking on a secure, satellite telephone to CIA officers
10,000 miles away in Langley, Va.
"I wasn't a low-level official," Hamza writes. "I had designed Saddam's bomb.
That should be easy enough for them to confirm. I also knew about the
chemical and biological programs."
But after 15 or 20 minutes, Hamza came to believe his long-distance
debriefers had never heard of him and knew little about Iraq's bomb program,
headquartered at Al-Atheer. Hamza writes that a CIA officer chuckled at the
notion of a weapons plant at Al-Atheer and closed the door on his only
demand: asylum.
Warren Marik, a former CIA case officer who was present at CIA headquarters
at the time of the call, said Friday that he was "appalled" at the way his
colleagues dismissed Hamza. "They blew him off, and you don't do that to a
walk-in," Marik said.
Marik said part of Hamza's problem lay in the fact that his call had come
through Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi National Congress leader who had by then
fallen out of favor with the agency. But Marik also faults Hamza for being
testy and demanding with the CIA officers and refusing to give them enough
information to establish his bona fides.
In any event, the CIA knew Hamza's name a year later, when he showed up at
the U.S. Embassy in Budapest. Part of the difference then, Marik said, was
that Hamza's approach had been coordinated through a different Iraqi
opposition group, the Iraqi National Accord, which had much closer ties to
Langley.
"In fact, with every passing hour of my arrival in Germany, where I was first
debriefed, the attitude of the CIA grew more trusting, friendly and
respectful," Hamza writes.
Once they had flown him back to Washington, Hamza called his oldest son,
Firas, in Baghdad and set the CIA's exfiltration plan in motion.
Soon enough, a deranged-looking beggar--actually a Kurdish smuggler working
for the CIA--approached Firas Hamza in a Baghdad coffee shop, whispered his
name and signaled him to walk outside onto the street.
The Kurd handed Firas Hamza a letter from his father and told him to bring
his mother and younger brothers the following day to Mosul, north of Baghdad.
>From there, the Kurd drove Hamza's family over the mountains to the
Kurdish-controlled north of Iraq, where they waited in a safe house to be
evacuated.
The team of CIA operatives had more than a little experience in Iraq. One key
player, Air Force Lt. Col. Rick Francona, a career intelligence officer on
assignment to the CIA, was fluent in Arabic and had served during the Persian
Gulf War as Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf Jr.'s chief interpreter.
Hamza re-creates the scene in his book, describing how Francona "and his
sidekick, a tall blond CIA man," burst through the door of the safe house
where his wife and sons sat nervously biding their time.
"Firas jumped up in glee.
" 'Who are you guys?' " he asked.
"The CIA man smiled.
" 'We're not from around here,' he cracked."
Washington Post, November 5, 2000
-----
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