Regime’s Priority Was Blueprints, Not Arsenal, Defector Told U.N.

The phone rang as Swedish diplomat Rolf Ekeus hurriedly packed a suitcase for his flight to Jordan.

It was Tarik Aziz. The suave, usually unflappable Iraqi deputy prime minister was panicking.

“He was almost hysterical,” recalled Ekeus, who then headed the U.N. Special Commission, or UNSCOM, which tracked Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. “He said, ‘Please don’t go to Amman, come to Baghdad first!’ They were hoping to preempt what I was about to hear.”

It was August 1995, and a few days earlier a convoy of Mercedeses had sped out of Baghdad under cover of darkness and entered Jordan. Inside were Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel Majid, his brother Saddam and their families. Majid was married to Saddam Hussein’s daughter Raghad and was the father of his grandchildren. His brother Saddam was married to the Iraqi leader’s younger daughter Rana.

Majid oversaw the building and concealment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and now, disenchanted with the regime, he wanted to talk.

According to a transcript of his sessions with Ekeus released recently by the U.N., Majid said Iraq had built an impressive array of chemical and biological weapons, experimented with the Ebola virus and produced explosive shells that spread biotoxins. He then said that he had ordered all such weapons destroyed but that the plans and expertise to make them remained.

Ekeus, executive chairman of UNSCOM from 1991 to 1997, said many weapons were not destroyed at the time but he thinks Majid may have told what he believed was true. But Ekeus said he would not be surprised if U.S. forces in Iraq never found weapons of mass destruction.

“There should be a few drums or some old artillery shells lying in scrap heaps, but the Iraqis were focusing on production capabilities,” he said from Washington this week. “They had it down in cookbooks and on microfiche.... It was more important for them to preserve the method of creating these weapons.”

So as U.S. troops scour Iraq for vast weapons caches, Ekeus said, they may turn up just documents, many of which could have been destroyed or looted in the regime’s last days.

President Bush ratcheted down expectations this week when he said the weapons might have been destroyed by Iraq before allied forces could find them. And Hans Blix, the U.N.’s chief weapons inspector, lashed out at the U.S. and Britain on Tuesday, saying the evidence they used to make their case about Iraq’s banned weapons was “very, very shaky.” Several experts agree.

“I think it’s not only possible but likely that they won’t find any actual weapons,” said James Sutterlin, a distinguished fellow in U.N. studies at Yale University, who said inspectors had destroyed more than 80% of Iraq’s arsenal in the early 1990s.

“I have talked to people and they say, ‘So what if we don’t find any weapons of mass destruction? That’s an old story,’ ” he said. “That may be the feeling in this country, but it’s not true at the U.N. and around the world. It will discredit the U.S. and its intelligence capabilities.”

Miriam Rajkumar, an expert on the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction who is at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, also said the likelihood of finding weapons on the scale described by Bush and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell appears small.

Majid’s defection helped lay the groundwork for the war in Iraq. His descriptions of Iraq’s ambitious weapons program years ago put the nation squarely in the American bull’s-eye. It also rattled Iraq.

Before Ekeus interviewed the 43-year-old defector, he flew to Baghdad to hear Aziz out. Aziz, who surrendered to allied forces Thursday, insisted that Majid was a rogue operator.

“They gave out a tremendous amount of information and handed over an enormous amount of documents,” Ekeus said. “They said they found all these documents on [Majid’s] chicken farm. I didn’t believe that story at all. They were trying to undermine his usefulness to us.”

With the documents as a road map, inspectors destroyed many weapons facilities, but some things, such as biological agents that require little space, were never located. Years later, the Bush administration seized on the missing items to make its case that Iraq was concealing its weapons programs in violation of the 1991 agreement that ended the Persian Gulf War.

After his defection, Majid was living in Amman, the Jordanian capital, as a guest of the late King Hussein. American, British and Jordanian intelligence agents had all questioned Majid. Ekeus and his weapons inspectors came too.

In the transcript of one three-hour session, Majid said Iraq had put biological agents in fiberglass bombs and shells with timed fuses that exploded overhead, showering those beneath with deadly anthrax and botulism. They also had the nerve agents sarin and VX, as well as mustard gas. He talked about an Iraqi missile designed to fly nearly 2,000 miles. Throughout it all, Majid spoke with grudging respect for the inspectors.

“You should not underestimate yourself,” he told them in Amman. “You are very effective in Iraq.” Efforts to build long-range missile engines were stopped, he said, because “it was a losing battle” trying to get around inspectors.

“Not a single missile is left, but they had the blueprints and molds for production,” Majid said. “All blueprints for missiles are in a safe place.”

Despite efforts to acquire these weapons, Majid claimed that there had been no plans to use them against coalition forces during the Gulf War. “They realized if chemical weapons were used, retaliation would be nuclear,” he said.

Disillusionment with Saddam Hussein’s regime and family infighting, especially with Hussein’s thuggish son Uday, led Majid to leave Iraq. Those who knew him said he wanted to rule the country someday. He didn’t drink or fight and had little respect for the Hussein family members who did both in spades.

Iraqi exiles and Western governments promoted Majid as an alternative to Hussein. But no sooner had his star begun to rise than it started to fade. The visits stopped, the press no longer called, and Majid found himself alone in an empty palace.

“It became clear he had no clout in the exile community,” Ekeus said. “He was a man without a future.” Then came a summons from Hussein. He promised that if Majid returned with his family, all would be forgiven.

Given the Iraqi leader’s record of cruelty to anyone showing the slightest hint of disloyalty, it seems unbelievable that Majid would have accepted the offer. “I think he believed he could return and be given a thrashing by Saddam and that was it. After all, he was the father of Saddam’s grandchildren,” Ekeus said.

In February 1996, Majid and his brother bundled their families into cars and drove east through the Jordanian desert toward Iraq. Minutes after crossing the border, they were met by armed men who put the women and children in separate cars.

Exactly what happened next is unclear.

The Iraqi media said Majid and the other men in his family were attacked in their home by fellow tribesmen who felt dishonored by their defection. A shootout allegedly ensued, leaving Majid and his brother dead, along with several assailants.

Uday Hussein was rumored to have watched the whole thing. Later, it is said, he attended the funerals of the slain killers.