Nuclear Scientist Surrenders

Saddam Hussein’s leading nuclear weapons scientist has surrendered outside Iraq, U.S. officials said Sunday, a day after his top scientific advisor gave himself up in Baghdad.

The surrenders of Jafar Jafar, who founded and led Iraq’s clandestine efforts to build a nuclear bomb, and Gen. Amir Saadi, a key figure in the development of chemical arms, means that U.S. interrogators now have access to the two most senior figures in Iraq’s programs to create weapons of mass destruction in the 1980s and ‘90s.

“These are very, very significant,” said a U.S. official. “They will have extremely valuable insights into where the bad stuff is, how they got it and where the other people are. The potential is there that these two guys can crack Saddam’s weapons programs for us.”

Before the war began, both scientists took part in high-level meetings in Baghdad with Hans Blix, the chief U.N. weapons inspector, and Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency. The Iraqis insisted at the time that Hussein’s government had long ago turned over or destroyed its illegal weapons, but Bush administration officials did not believe them.

U.S. officials hope that the scientists will reveal secrets of any Iraqi nuclear, chemical or biological weapons programs. President Bush has repeatedly cited the presence of illegal weapons in Iraq as justification for the war, but no such weapons have been used or found so far.

If the scientists do not provide the information, special Pentagon weapons “exploitation” teams will be forced to search as many as 3,000 sites they have identified in hopes of finding suspected weapons caches and the people and programs that produced them.

“I have absolute confidence that there are weapons of mass destruction inside this country,” Army Gen. Tommy Franks, head of U.S. Central Command, told Fox News on Sunday.

“Whether we will turn out at the end of the day to find them in one of the 2- or 3,000 sites we already know about, or whether ... one of these officials ... will tell us [about the site] ... I’m not sure,” Franks added.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said interrogation of weapons scientists will be the only way to find Iraq’s alleged weapons.

“We’re not going to find anything until we find people who tell us where the things are,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And we have that very high on our priority list, to find the people who know.”

Officials said the Bush administration may offer amnesty or other deals to Jafar and Saadi with the hope that they will not only cooperate but help arrange the surrenders of other Iraqi weapons scientists, engineers and technicians.

“We did it with Wernher von Braun,” a U.S. official said, referring to the German rocket engineer who helped pioneer the U.S. space program after he led 126 colleagues to the U.S. in “Operation Paperclip” in 1945. “These guys can get others to come in.”

Jafar is not in American custody, but U.S. intelligence officials met with him shortly after he turned himself in late last week to a Middle Eastern government that officials refused to identify.

“U.S. officials have had access to him and will continue to do so,” the American official said.

Jafar is not in Syria, the official added. The White House and the Pentagon have repeatedly warned Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government not to harbor Iraqi leaders, citing reports that members of Hussein’s regime, as well as key Iraqi bioweapons experts and other scientists, have slipped into Syria.

Neither Hussein nor most of his top political and military commanders are known to have been killed or taken prisoner in the war. But one of the deposed dictator’s half brothers, Watban Ibrahim Hasan, was captured by Iraqi tribesmen in northern Iraq and turned over to American forces, U.S. officials said Sunday. There were unconfirmed reports that he had been trying to cross into Syria.

Hasan is the five of spades in a deck of playing cards depicting the Pentagon’s most-wanted list of 52 Iraqi officials. But U.S. intelligence officials downplayed his importance Sunday, saying he was fired as Iraq’s interior minister in 1995 and was no longer considered a member of Hussein’s inner circle.

Jafar, however, was “always seen as the most important nuclear scientist” in Iraq and “probably the best scientist Iraq has ever produced,” said former nuclear weapons inspector David Albright, who met with Jafar in the mid-1990s when Albright worked in Iraq for the IAEA.

“He’s the guy who created the vast underground nuclear infrastructure,” Albright said. “He’s their top nuclear person and always has been.”

Albright described Jafar, a British- and Swiss-trained scientist, as “very smooth, very polished and very proud of his accomplishments.” He said Jafar even sought to gain nuclear secrets from the U.N. inspectors who interviewed him.

“He would probe us,” Albright said. “He would ask for classified information.”

Jafar told U.N. inspectors that he was jailed and tortured by Hussein’s government in the early 1980s. Upon his release, he said, he agreed to launch what soon became a multibillion-dollar program, known by the code word PC-3, to develop and build nuclear weapons.

He nearly succeeded. After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, IAEA inspectors and U.S. officials determined that Jafar’s team had worked out the engineering, electronics, diagnostics, metallurgy and high explosives needed to build a crude nuclear device.

Moreover, they concluded, after trying five methods to produce fissile material as fuel for a bomb, the Iraqi regime was only about a year away from producing enough enriched uranium in gas centrifuges for a workable bomb.

Western intelligence agencies tried to convince Jafar to defect or become an informant when he visited U.N. headquarters in New York or IAEA headquarters in Vienna in the late 1980s.

Jafar dropped out of sight after the 1991 war, former U.N. inspectors recall, but he reemerged in 1996 and became a key source for IAEA inspectors seeking to disarm Iraq under U.N. resolutions. They destroyed or dismantled Iraq’s entire nuclear weapons program by 1998, according to U.N. reports.

The White House repeatedly charged last fall that Hussein secretly reconstituted his nuclear weapons program after 1998. As evidence, they cited Iraq’s alleged covert efforts to procure high-strength aluminum tubes for gas centrifuges, as well as an alleged attempt to import 500 tons of uranium from the African country of Niger.

But IAEA teams that returned to Iraq last year challenged or refuted much of the evidence that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell presented to the U.N. Security Council in February. The IAEA said Iraq needed aluminum tubes for artillery rockets, and it said the documents from Niger were forged.

U.S. intelligence and military officials have been surprised and pleased that Iraqi forces did not launch any chemical or biological weapons against U.S. troops or Iraqi civilians during the war in Iraq.

But they are frustrated that no proof has yet been found to support Bush administration claims that Hussein had prepared vast stockpiles of nerve gases and blister agents, lethal viruses and other germ agents.