I cut him off sharply. “Do not forget,” I said, “that you and your colleagues were cheating the IAEA for many years, so you have no credibility.”
Saddam Hussein’s chief scientific adviser, General Amir al-Sa’adi, who had been designated our primary counterpart, tried to cool things down. “Well,” he said, with the trace of a smile, “it was not really cheating; it was subterfuge.”
As it turned out, Jaffar was in a foul mood because he had arrived in New York without his luggage, which meant he could not look his best. He was certain that this was an intimidation stunt by U.S. intelligence agents, who had been pursuing all the senior Iraqi scientists. Both al-Sa’adi and Jaffar told me that whenever they traveled outside Iraq, they were approached by Western intelligence operatives trying to recruit them.
The distrust persisted as the inspections got under way, and our interactions with Iraqi officials remained strained, in part because assessing the extent of Iraq’s cooperation was never straightforward. First, it was colored by a history of deception, which made us view their declarations and actions with skepticism. On multiple occasions, Blix and I stated that we still needed to be convinced Iraq had come forward with all available information about its past WMD programs. After I made one such statement, al-Sa’adi said I had given him stomach cramps, because he could not produce information he didn’t have. The IAEA, he insisted, needed to believe what the Iraqis were saying. But of course our experience prior to the 1991 Gulf War did not inspire confidence. We could not simply take them at their word.
Second, our Iraqi counterparts were hamstrung by a horribly authoritarian and overly centralized system. This naturally slowed their decision making and responsiveness and made them appear less than transparent. Neither al-Sa’adi nor General Husam Amin, the head of Iraq’s UN-interface group, could take any decision independently, without consultation. Nor could they speak candidly about Saddam Hussein or the regime. Whatever they thought privately, they knew the consequences of saying anything negative and knew that every conversation was bugged.
Naji Sabri, the Iraqi foreign minister, seemed to take a calculated backseat attitude when it came to the inspections. He was unfailingly pleasant but detached. He invariably invited us to dinner at the end of our visits to Baghdad. When we attempted to engage him on matters of consequence, however, his answers were always carefully noncommittal.[5]
Sabri’s detachment contrasted sharply with the demeanor of the Iraqi vice president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, who clearly was following the inspection process closely. In our first meeting with him, at the vice presidential headquarters, on January 20, 2003, he was somber and formal, wearing his military uniform and carrying a sidearm. Just the three of us were present, plus an interpreter. Ramadan was aggressive from the outset. He told us that our inspectors were stirring up unnecessary trouble, adding fuel to the fire of international suspicion rather than resolving issues. He accused us of not being objective in our approach. It was more or less a rant, attacking the entire inspection process.
I answered him bluntly, shifting into Arabic so he could not mistake my tone or meaning. “We are here to help you,” I said, “but frankly only if you are willing to help yourselves. You need to show cooperation, and you need to show transparency, because these issues are not going to be resolved if you are not proactive.” I mentioned the way that some of the Iraqi administration had repeatedly attacked the UN inspectors as undercover agents. “Just to label UN inspectors as spies,” I told him, “is not in any way helping your case.”
To my surprise, Ramadan began to cool down. I believe he grasped the essence of what I was saying: first, that our role, and that of our inspectors, was not driven by a personal vendetta, but by the responsibility for carrying out an international mandate; and second, that cooperation on their part was the only way out of the mess they were in.[6]
This remained my stance throughout the process, although my nationality and heritage created expectations of a different kind of posture. Early on, I often got the feeling that the Arab world—and many Westerners—expected me, as an Egyptian Arab and a Muslim, to show bias in favor of Iraq. Of course, I also heard that I was being tough on Iraq to prove my lack of bias. My only bias was that of an international civil servant: an insistence on independence, professionalism, and treating all parties with equal respect. The Iraqis soon learned that I was not going to perform any special favors for them, nor was I biased against them. Although I ultimately received grudging acknowledgment of my objectivity from most quarters, my name and ethnicity were nonetheless used repeatedly as a means of insinuating that I was prejudiced in my judgments.
And worse. My staunch impartiality might have been the prompt for a number of curious encounters. On our first visit to Baghdad after the resumption of inspections, in November 2002, a man called me at the hotel, on my room phone. He told me he was a lawyer and said he wanted to leave the country. He wanted to know whether Blix or I could help him. I told him that this was not our business, that we were there to focus on the inspections. He thanked me and hung up.
On my next visit, the phone rang again. This time it was a woman. She said she was a Kurd working with the United Nations in Kurdistan and claimed she had a problem with her contract. “I’m sitting down by the hotel pool now,” she said. “I think you could help me if I could explain more. Could you meet me?” I told her that I could not see her, but that she could write to me. Not surprisingly, I never heard from her again.
On still another occasion, I was approached by Foreign Minister Sabri himself. He drew me aside to ask whether I had family or friends who might be interested in commercial transactions in the Iraqi oil sector. If so, he said, I should let him know. The offer was later repeated to me by Iraq’s ambassador in New York, who said he was asking on behalf of the foreign minister. I made clear I wanted nothing to do with such an “opportunity.”
I believe these cases were setups, instigated by the Iraqi government, perhaps intended to try to blackmail or “gently persuade” me. Nobody else would have dared call me at the hotel; any local would have presumed, with good reason, that the rooms and the telephones were bugged.
Over the first two months of inspections, the IAEA made solid progress reestablishing its understanding of Iraq’s nuclear capabilities. The bulk of our inspections were at state-run or private industrial facilities, research centers, and universities—focusing on locations where we knew Iraq had maintained significant technical capabilities in the past, or on new locations suggested by the analysis of open-source information, or on facilities that were identified through satellite imagery as having been modified or constructed since 1998. The inspections were carried out without prior notification to Iraq.
Agency inspectors also combed the country in more general ways, using a variety of tools. Tracking the environmental “signature” of radioactive materials, we resumed monitoring Iraq’s rivers, canals, and lakes to detect the presence of key radioisotopes. We collected samples from locations across Iraq, which were taken to IAEA laboratories for analysis. We conducted extensive radiation surveys using sensitive car-borne and handheld instruments, scanning industrial sites and additional areas for nuclear and other radioactive material. We interviewed many Iraqi scientists, managers, and technicians—primarily in their places of work during unannounced inspections—to glean any information about past and present programs.
5
It was later claimed (by
6
Ramadan was later placed on the U.S. list of most-wanted Iraqis. He was captured in August 2003 and executed in March 2007.