Before the 2003 invasion Khidhir Hamza was one of the leading Iraqis in America warning of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and advocating for war. He regularly appeared in the media. In 2001 he told PBS’s Frontline that Iraq only needed a nuclear core to build an atomic bomb. In 2002 he gave a presentation to the Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about Iraq’s nuclear weapons program. He told the latter that Iraq had enough uranium to build three bombs by 2005 if it was enriched. At the end of that year his claims were used in a speech by President George Bush as part of the public relations campaign to win support for the invasion. His story was first published in 2000 in Saddam’s Bombmaker, The Terrifying Inside Story Of The Iraqi Nuclear And Biological Weapons Agenda. He turned out to be a fraud.
Hamza made some bold claims about Iraq in his book. He said his sole purpose was to warn the West about Saddam’s nuclear bomb. He claimed in 1971 he was asked by the head of the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission and the director of the Nuclear Research Center to work on a nuclear program. He said he became the leader of the program and worked on it from 1972 to 1994 when he escaped Iraq and eventually made his way to the United States.
The first thing he did was go on a trip to America in the 1970s to try to buy lasers to enrich uranium. Later he told the CIA that he had succeeded in the diffusion method to make bomb grade uranium, and that Baghdad had enough of the material but had not weaponized it. He also said he developed a nuclear trigger to set off a bomb. That led to a working bomb prototype without the uranium but it was never tested. Work was halted during the Gulf War but then secretly restarted afterwards under the noses of the United Nations weapons inspectors. By 1993-94 when he left he wrote that there were 12,000 people attempting to build a bomb. It was that story that brought the author to the attention of the Bush administration and why it used him in its argument for war. The problem was almost everything he said was a lie.
Three people exposed Hamza. In 2002 a former UN inspectors told the media that after Hamza left Iraq he exaggerated his story.
Imad Khadduri who worked on the bomb program published a book in 2003 where he called Hamza’s claims fiction. He said in 1987 Hamza was involved in the program for a short time. His complaints about waste in the program led to four separate groups being formed to try different methods to enrich uranium. He was then placed in charge of building an explosive device to set off the bomb but quickly removed from his position.
In 2004 Mahdi Obeidi who was in charge of the centrifuge program to enrich uranium released his own tale. He also noted that Hamza only worked on the program for a little while before he was re-assigned.
If you read Saddam’s Bombmaker closely you can find gaping holes in his tale. First, in the 1970s when he tried to buy lasers in the U.S. Iraq hardly had any uranium to enrich and not enough for a bomb. Second, 1987 is when he wrote that he decided to get out of Iraq to expose Baghdad’s bomb program. By that time there was no enriched uranium and no process to make it, there was no working bomb, there was no delivery system. What was he going to tell the West? Saddam wanted a nuclear device but had nothing to show for it?
The most important problem with Hamza’s account is his escape from Iraq. In 1994 he wrote that he fled to Kurdistan where he contacted the CIA and refused to tell them anything until his family got out but they rejected him. His family’s safety was his major concern. So what did he do next? He went to Libya and worked at a university there and the government never came after him or threatened his family. He said that defectors had their relatives taken prisoner to try to force people back. He was the alleged head of Iraq’s nuclear bomb program who knew all the secrets and yet Baghdad didn’t seem to care he left.
His story gets worse because in 1995 the Sunday Times of London published a story that Hamza had defected, had documents showing that Iraq restarted its bomb program after the Gulf War, and that he might be dead. Hamza claimed his wife told the Iraqi authorities that he was alive and well in Libya. Hamza then talked with the Iraqi ambassador in Tripoli to try to resolve the issue. He even called his family back home several times. Again Saddam’s regime now knew where he was and did nothing. More than a year after he left Iraq he finally got this family out of the country. Nothing happened to them while he was gone. His explanation was that the Iraqi government was dysfunctional and so flooded with people fleeing that they just missed his case. The alleged head of the bomb program was just lost in the shuffle of defectors.
When you compare Bombmaker with the two other books by nuclear scientists you can figure out all the things he made up. In fact, sometimes he was taking credit for what others did. For one, he wrote that he found papers from the American Manhattan Project that built the first two nuclear bombs during World War II in the 1970s. In fact it was Mahdi Obeidi who did that in the 1980s. He said before the 1990 invasion of Kuwait Baghdad was only a few months away from having a bomb. At that time, Iraq didn’t have enough enriched uranium, didn’t have a device to set off the bomb, and didn’t have a delivery system. Hamza wrote that he solved the diffusion method to enrich uranium, except diffusion never worked and Iraq switched to centrifuges instead. Finally, the book says that the nuclear program was restarted after the Gulf War when it was completely dismantled by inspectors in 1991 and never worked on again.
The content of Hamza’s book is also very different from the other two nuclear scientists. The majority of their releases are about the work they did on the program. The acquiring of materials, the research they carried out, the scientific barriers they had to overcome, etc. The majority of Saddam’s Bombmaker is not about the bomb.
In fact, it’s a potpourri of wild claims about Saddam. Hamza wrote that once he was made the head of the bomb program people told him everything about weapons of mass destruction and secret programs. For instance he tells the story of an ex-psychology professor who was sent to East Germany for training to inject Shiite prisoners with poison so that they mysteriously died after release. If the government was going to kill them why release them? He claims that Saddam buried WMD along the Iraq-Kuwait border and these dumps were blown up by the Coalition during the Gulf War releasing the agents. That he said was the cause of the Gulf War syndrome amongst American soldiers and also made hundreds of Iraqis sick. Better yet Washington knew about this but did nothing about it because it didn’t want to deal with the issue. Another tall tale was that Baghdad trained PLO members to plant WMD in Kuwait and this was probably going to expand to other countries. The probable cause for these being included was to sell books and get the attention of the West.
Khidhir Hamza was one of many defectors who appeared in the 2000s pushing for war with Iraq. His story of being the former head of the nuclear bomb program got him plenty of press and access to the Bush administration. This was exactly the type of person and information the White House was looking for to push its case for invasion. Almost everything he wrote about in Saddam’s Bombmaker proved false. Yes, he did work on the nuclear program but his experience would actually show that Baghdad failed to build a bomb. That wouldn’t have gotten him his ten minutes of fame which appears to be the reason why he wrote his book in the first place.
Link to all of Musings On Iraq’s book reviews listed by topic
No comments:
Post a Comment