By the time of the second Iraq inspection, from June 22 to July 4, 1991, the stage was set for drama. An intelligence agency had shared reconnaissance photographs with the IAEA showing a surge of Iraqi activity immediately after the departure of the first inspection team, in an area just outside the Tuwaitha site. A number of large metallic discs had been unearthed from where they apparently had been buried and taken to a new location.
Information had surfaced also about an alleged enrichment program the Iraqis had been conducting in secret, through a technique called electromagnetic isotope separation, or EMIS. This method used a machine called a calutron: a type of mass spectrometer positioned between oversize electromagnets, invented at the University of California. The process is not very efficient, and it consumes enormous amounts of electricity. Specialists with insight into the calutron program of the Manhattan Project[11] had evaluated the IAEA inspectors’ photographs and reports from the Tarmiya site and believed the evidence pointed to EMIS enrichment operations.
The Iraqis were continuing to deny that they had an undeclared uranium-enrichment program, so it was important to track down the equipment as evidence. Early on, the second inspection turned into a chase. The new location of the unearthed discs, which were suspected to be magnets for the EMIS process, was said to be a specific military camp. When the IAEA team arrived, as scheduled, they were denied access. Protests were made to the upper echelons of the Iraqi government, and three days later, access was authorized. By then, however, the equipment was gone.
Three days after that, the team received word of the new location: another large military camp. This time a group of IAEA inspectors showed up without warning. Admission was again refused at the gate. But two members of the team climbed the outside ladder of an adjacent water tower; from the top, they could see a convoy of trucks moving off from the rear exit of the camp. Two other members of the team gave chase in a UN vehicle, weaving chaotically through local markets until they could find the proper highway. Their persistence was rewarded: when they found the convoy, they discovered close to a hundred vehicles loaded with what appeared to be nuclear equipment, much of it not even covered in the haste to escape. Catching the Iraqis in this blatant attempt at concealment was a significant breakthrough.
In early July, Blix and I made a trip to Baghdad. We were part of a high-level delegation put together by the UN secretary-general, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar. The delegation was headed by Ekeus, much to Blix’s displeasure. Our goal was to pressure the Iraqi government to stop obstructing the inspection process and to come clean with a full declaration of its nuclear program.
Initially, the Iraqis continued their denial. The chairman of Iraq’s Atomic Energy Committee, Dr. Human Abdel Khaliq Ghaffour,[12] urged Blix and me to accept what the Iraqis were saying. Riding in the car together, he swore to us—despite the mounting evidence to the contrary—that Iraq had conducted no undeclared enrichment activities. Iraq’s nuclear program, he insisted, was entirely peaceful.
But international pressure was growing. The UN Security Council set a deadline, making clear they were ready to authorize additional action. Still another IAEA inspection team had arrived, ready to pursue new leads.
On July 7, the Iraqi authorities yielded, providing the IAEA with an extensive new list of equipment and its location. This new declaration covered not only EMIS enrichment, but also centrifuge and chemical enrichment activities and the reprocessing they had conducted to separate out a few grams of plutonium. The declaration also gave a list of manufacturing and support facilities. It revealed the existence of almost four hundred tons of non-enriched uranium, some of which had been imported from Brazil, Niger, and Portugal, but which had never previously been declared to the IAEA.
One scene from that visit stands out vividly. Blix and I had accompanied members of the inspection team, including both UNSCOM and IAEA personnel, to a location in the middle of the desert. The Iraqis were showing us what they claimed was calutron equipment they had destroyed and buried, to avoid detection. We were well into the Iraqi summer, and temperatures were through the roof; it was clear that our inspectors, measuring and cataloguing these huge chunks of metal, faced a grueling task.
Rather abruptly, David Kay[13]—a former mid-level manager in the IAEA’s Technical Cooperation Program, with little to no prior experience in safeguards inspection—decided that one of the senior Iraqi scientists should be interrogated on the spot. Raising his arm melodramatically, he shouted, “Let the investigation begin!” Blix and I were embarrassed. We promptly called Kay aside, to let him know that this was not the way we performed inspections. Our aim, in this case, was to work toward full cooperation on the part of the Iraqis. Intimidation and humiliation were not, in our view, useful tactics.
Kay’s appointment as an IAEA safeguards inspector was at that time a mystery to me. He had, to my knowledge, no scientific or technological expertise; his educational background was in international affairs. I knew him as a bright, courteous, and articulate person. But once the IAEA assigned him to its Iraq Action Team, he seemed to undergo a metamorphosis. We had traveled together to New York at the time that the implementation of Resolution 687 was under discussion. Without consulting me or letting me know, Kay had scheduled his own meetings with U.S. officials, a sharp and noticeable departure from normal IAEA practice.
In retrospect, it is quite possible that U.S. intelligence was working through Kay to pass along information, to be acted on by the IAEA’s Iraq Action Team. His assignment to the IAEA team was initially for administrative and managerial purposes, yet somehow he was asked to lead two of the more crucial inspections. Whether Blix or Zifferero knew of any ties Kay may have had to U.S. intelligence I do not know.
Kay’s inspection style—which even Robert Gallucci referred to as that of a “cowboy”[14]—was fortunately uncommon among the IAEA inspectorate, but the case was different with UNSCOM. On the same trip to the desert, I witnessed a senior Iraqi scientist weeping in frustration at the treatment he was receiving from an UNSCOM inspector who had accused him publicly of lying. Later, on the bus ride back from the desert, I took a look around. The bus was full of Americans. Many of them had come from U.S. national labs. They were highly qualified technically, but they had no clue about how to conduct international inspections or, for that matter, about the nuances of how to behave in different cultures. From their brash conversation, it was clear they believed that, having come to a defeated country, they had free rein to behave as they pleased.
I spoke to some of the people sitting next to me on the bus. I explained the basics of the IAEA’s approach: professionalism marked by tenacity and respect. I noted that this professionalism was characteristic of our inspectors and had been developed over years of experience. I was critical of UNSCOM’s abrasive behavior.
The result was stunning. A distorted version of the conversation was passed along and gained traction. Eventually, it made its way into the New Yorker, as a purportedly factual account in an article by Gary Milhollin, the director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Controclass="underline"
ElBaradei, fresh on the scene, embodied the tradition of the IAEA. Before an incredulous group of inspectors, he declared, as Kay recalls it, “The Iraqis do not have a uranium enrichment program. I know so, because they are my friends and they have told me that they don’t.” ElBaradei was wrong, of course. But he was following the line laid down by his IAEA superiors.[15]
12
Ghaffour would later become the Iraqi minister of higher education and scientific research.
13
David Kay would later be appointed by President Bush, in 2003, to head the Iraq Survey Group.