The Twilight of the Bombs

by Richard Rhodes

  The goal of the Al-Atheer plant program is the design and manufacture of the mechanism which is composed of the following principal parts:

  Nuclear initiator (polonium-210 metal/beryllium)

  Core (enriched uranium metal)

  Reflector (natural uranium metal)

  Tamper (hardened iron)

  Explosive lenses (prepared by the Al-Qa’ Qa’ [Al Qaqaa] General Establishment)

  Electronic systems (triggering, control, and guidance)

  This list of parts described the spherical implosion bomb starting from the center of the device—the walnut-sized initiator of gold-plated polonium 210 and beryllium that, when crushed by an inward-moving detonation wave from the high explosives surrounding the core, would release a burst of neutrons to start the fission chain reaction at the moment when the core was fully compressed and supercritical—and moving outward through the highly enriched uranium core that surrounded the initiator: the natural uranium reflector shell, which would reflect neutrons back into the core; the hardened iron tamper, which would hold the explosion together through a few more exponential neutron generations (which would account for most of the bomb’s yield); the explosive lenses, which would compress the assembly; and the electronic systems connected to exploding-wire electric detonators that would ignite the thirty-two lenses with a simultaneity, as the document reported, “within time variations39 not exceeding 10 nanoseconds.” And if there was any question about the reality of the Iraqi effort, they could read that as of the date of the report, 11 November 1990, “20 detonation tests40 have been carried out by using explosive lenses which have been prepared at Al-Qa’ Qa’ general facility.”

  According to a reactor physicist, Imad Khadduri, who worked in the Iraqi bomb program, the incriminating documents had originally been removed from their files and loaded into a welded train car that avoided U.N. inspection by traveling up and down Iraq when the inspectors were in the country. As the IAEA team asked more and more questions, however, Khadduri writes, “our scientists requested to refer41 to the scientific and technical reports amassed during the ten years of activity. A fatal error was committed and the order was issued to return the project’s documents … to be deposited back again in their original location. That is where David Kay pounced on them in the early morning hours of [23] September 1991.”

  CUTAWAY OF IMPLOSION BOMB

  “You didn’t have to read Arabic to figure out you had gotten a hot document,” Kay told me.

  Gallucci was working elsewhere in the building when the documents were discovered, but he and Kay had radios. “We had two sets of radios,” Gallucci said, “one set that we were pretty sure the Iraqis were monitoring and another set which we were very confident that they couldn’t monitor. And at that point, the message came over the secure radio: ‘We found it.’ This was one of the best moments of my nonproliferation life.”

  Gallucci rushed downstairs and joined Kay. “We looked at the document. We went out into the parking lot with one of our more nuclear-weapons-knowledgeable people, but it didn’t take an expert to know what you were looking at. The schematics were just what you would want them to be, and so was everything else. These were nuclear-weapons designs and the status of the nuclear-weapons program. It was really terrific stuff.” Even with the Iraqis watching, Gallucci started to get excited. “Wow! Right? I had a big sign on my back that said, ‘Not Field-Capable.’ The guy we were with said, ‘Nothing here’ and threw it back in the box.”

  Kay took up the story. “So then the issue we faced was, how in the hell do we get it out? Because in those days you didn’t have the capability in the field of quickly scanning documents and getting them up on satellite, and the physical document we had was so important.” His solution was low-tech and effective:

  I had one inspector, a U.S. military officer, who had one of the worst cases of diarrhea I’d ever seen. I’d decided I had to send him out to be rehydrated—we couldn’t do that in the field. I was going to send him back to the Canal Hotel, which was our base in Baghdad. We had a Kiwi medical officer and a medical team with one of our four-by-fours rigged up as a medical vehicle. I told them we had a few documents that really had to get out. The great thing about the Kiwi medical staff is that they were all military. We probably violated the Geneva Conventions by using medical cover, but I literally had no other way to get the job done, and it was important to do. So they carried them back to the Canal Hotel along with the dehydrated inspector, and from the Canal Hotel they went out the same day to the Habanya airport. We had NATO pilots flying, Germans, a regular supply mission that went out at two p.m. It was good cover. And here’s the final piece of luck. As our guys were taking off, the Iraqis drove a fuel truck across the runway in a harassment move and—pilots are very cool—they barely cleared the truck.

  Back inside the Design Center, Kay, Gallucci, and the others continued searching and cataloging throughout the day. As they finished an inventory, they carried the boxes of documents out to their vehicles and bungee-corded them onto the roof racks. Fully loaded at 3:45, they attempted to leave, but the Iraqis barred their way. “The Iraqi security personnel,” Kay told me, “who in previous inspections had been around in the background, all overweight, always with a gun showing, stuffed into their waistbands—maybe there was a shortage of holsters?—were really starting to take control.” Around 4:30 the Iraqis began reviewing the documents that the team had removed. An hour later, Jaffar arrived. “It was the first time he’d ever shown up at a site while we were there. He said to me, ‘You’ve got to leave. We’re closing down the inspection.’ I protested. And then he said, ‘And we’ve got to have the documents back.’” Jaffar didn’t know that many of the documents had been filmed and many others marked as key documents and at least roughly inventoried, but that hardly protected the inspectors. “That was a very, very tense period,” Kay said. “There were a lot of Iraqi security and military personnel around him and we were unarmed. We informed New York via satellite radio and all that, but I finally said, ‘Look, we’re not going to die over this.’ They came in and very roughly cut the bungee cords and took the documents off the top and emptied the SUVs. It was pretty nasty.”

  After that tense day’s work, the inspectors drove back to the Al-Rashid, except for Kay, who had reports to file at the other hotel, the Canal, where UNSCOM had its offices and communications. “I didn’t get back to the Al-Rashid until around midnight,” Kay told me. “I had just gotten to sleep when someone pounded on the door. I looked at my watch and it was two a.m. The Iraqis were downstairs and wanted to see me. I got dressed and went downstairs and there was Sami Al-Araji, the deputy minister of industry. ‘We will give you your documents back now,’ he told me. So I had to roust a group of inspectors who were going to get rousted at five a.m. anyway to go with me to retrieve the documents. After we had them it took ten minutes to discover we didn’t get all of them back. I filed a protest, of course.”

  Short on sleep, Kay and his team hit the Petrochemical-3 Center at 6:20 a.m. on 24 September.42 “It was a sensitive facility,” Kay recalled, “because it had the personnel records for the bomb program. Personnel records allow you to identify who’s working where and what they might have been doing, so you can subject them to interviews. The Iraqis were tremendous bureaucrats, the best of British and Arabic training. So if they denied they had a program on, say, chemical enrichment, and you found guys whose personnel records said they worked in chemical enrichment, then …” The inspectors searched and photographed until just before eleven in the morning, when Araji arrived with a security squad and told them they had to give up the documents as well as their film and leave the building.

  “He said to me,” Kay said, “‘I have no control over this. You’ve got to get out of the building and no documents. We take all documents.’ So that was a tougher one.” Jaffar arrived at 12:30 to press the issue. “That’s when we dug in our heels. I said, ‘Well, you can force us out of the building, but we’re not givi
ng you the documents.’ I wish I’d been privy to the full Iraqi internal discussion at that point. Because there we were. They’d seized the documents from us the previous day. This time we were in the center of Baghdad. There was a hell of a protest going on back in New York about their behavior the day before. We had satellite communications. And they blew it. They delayed. They just told us, ‘You can go back to your hotel but you can’t take any documents.’ I said, ‘We’re not going back to the hotel, we’re staying here with the documents.’ They allowed the pressure to build and didn’t do anything.”

  Gallucci recalled how they protected the documents. “I don’t remember whose idea this was,” he said. “It might well have been David Kay’s. We told everybody to put the documents on their body someplace, so that it would be harder for the Iraqi authorities to take the documents without essentially stripping us. We thought they might not want to strip-search a U.N. team. We weren’t sure they wouldn’t do it, but we thought it would be less likely. As it turned out, we were correct. They asked for documents, but we wouldn’t give them up. So they told us that we would not be allowed to leave.” Forty-three men and one woman, their shirts and pants stuffed with documents, loaded into their bus and SUVs in a parking lot in downtown Baghdad that was soon ringed with Iraqi security forces, and settled down to wait. “And this began the parking lot tour,” Gallucci summarized, “which went on for four days. We slept, ate and sang songs and had a wonderful time. We celebrated at least one birthday in the parking lot. David Kay became a media star, and I was nothing but jealous.”

  They had the documents. They had their vehicles. They had water and MREs. And they had a satellite telephone that linked them to the outside world. “Ekéus called me on the satellite phone,” Kay told me. “He said, ‘CNN would like to talk to you. How do you feel about that?’ He made the right call; he left the decision where it belonged, with the people in the field, and I’ll always respect him for that. And I decided, yes, I’d talk to the media, because I was interested in keeping as much pressure as possible on the Iraqis—because I thought that was the only hope we had of getting out of there. I didn’t know whether it was very much of a hope, but it was all we had.”

  Kay did that first CNN interview and the world turned its attention to a parking lot in Baghdad, the coverage spreading from one time zone to the next. “Suddenly you could track the traffic as various newspapers and networks got the phone number. It was just continuous after that. We were continuously on, the dominant news story of the week. The phone became our lifeline. The Iraqis could have taken us down. We ran the phone on a Honda generator. Boy, Honda deserves credit, that generator ran continuously and never burped once. But the Iraqis could have gone in and smashed the satellite phone. I think they couldn’t figure out the consequences of us suddenly going off the air. A totalitarian regime doesn’t know how to deal with a free press. Suddenly the world is watching.”

  Not only the world. The U.S. Navy was watching from the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, on station in the Persian Gulf. “Apparently they’d prepared a strike package,” Kay recalled. “Thank God they never executed it, because we were smack in the middle of it. These were the days of less-than-precision-guided weapons. As a rescue operation, it would have been a bloody disaster.”

  The team members operating the office at the Canal Hotel sent over food. The Iraqis tried to inspect it, but they let it pass through. “The biggest problem in the parking lot was sanitation. There was one one-holer. That was the first inspection when I’d taken in a woman inspector, the first woman inspector in Iraq. She was actually CIA; her specialty was computer hacking. After a day the sanitation got to be pretty god-awful. The Iraqis came up and said, ‘We don’t like treating a woman like this. We’d be happy to let her go back to the hotel.’ I told them, ‘Don’t ask me. Ask her.’ They did, and she let out a string of profanity that really shocked them. She said, ‘I’m part of this goddamned team, I’m not leaving until Kay says we’re leaving.’”

  A CNN telephone interview with Kay found him emphasizing team spirit:

  We are currently in nighttime43 in Baghdad, coming up slightly after eight o’clock, and we’re pulling our inspection vehicles together in a circle so that we’ll have light during the night and preparing to settle down for the evening.… We’ve had no official contact with the Iraqis now for over four hours. Other U.N. colleagues in the city managed to bring in a supply of water, MREs and watermelon, fortunately, which greatly improves MREs. So we’re in adequate shape with regard to food and items, and in quite good spirits. This I should emphasize again is a very, very, good scene, very professional, very disciplined, and in quite high spirits at this time.

  Kay was determined to keep pressure on the Iraqis. He also had to keep his team occupied. “In a hostage situation you don’t want the pressure to be on the team—that’s a losing proposition. But you had to keep everyone busy because just sitting around waiting for something to happen that you have no control over is terribly demoralizing. So we continued to inventory documents and wrote up as much as we could about it. Bob Gallucci organized a football game using a water bottle44 stuffed with a paper bag. It was one of the weirdest passing contests Baghdad had ever seen. We also had to establish procedures where some of the team would be awake all the time. Both Bob and I were concerned that the Iraqis would move in when it was dark. Some guys were on knife’s edge, the Special Forces guys particularly. If someone had started shaking them in the middle of the night, there might be violence.”

  Gallucci would hint,45 in a talk he gave later, that the U.S. military was prepared to resume full-scale war in any case on the slightest provocation. The Bush administration had already concluded that the only long-term solution to the Iraq problem was to depose Saddam Hussein. All the arguments against regime change that Bush’s son and his son’s vice president would later ignore were brought to bear—by Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney in particular, of all people—against George H. W. Bush’s visceral urge to take Saddam down. “Even in the parking lot,” Gallucci said, “I had a sense that the threat of resuming [coalition] military operations was right there. I’m making up what was in the Iraqi minds, but I think it should have been there. It certainly was in my mind.” Kay said the number of Iraqi military personnel surrounding the parking lot increased on the second night to several hundred. If no assault followed, Iraqi concern for a large-scale American military reprisal may well have been the reason.

  On the second day of the standoff, Kay recalled, “a Winnebago camper pulled up right outside the parking-lot fence. This was an area where you couldn’t get through unless the Iraqi security personnel let you through. The windows were shielded so you couldn’t see inside. It sat there for about four hours. There was great speculation as to who was there. There were reports during the war that Saddam and his body doubles all traveled around in Winnebagos that way. He had six, ten, I forget what the number was of Winnebagos. There was a contest during the war to see how many Winnebagos the Air Force could bomb. I heard later that some people in the intelligence community thought they had signal intelligence from the parking lot indicating it was one of Saddam’s sons. We never knew. But the incident is indicative of what must have been a serious, high-level discussion about how to deal with us. They were doing all sorts of things. They had a protest outside the fence with people gesturing and shouting at us. It was a game. They were clearly trying to figure out what the rules were. They didn’t know them any more than we knew them.”

  Halfway through the four-day ordeal, at a moment when the satellite phone was briefly unoccupied, it rang. “The communications officer passed it to me,” Kay told me, “and it was this flat sort of Midlands English voice saying he was the satellite systems operator. He said, ‘We’ve noticed you’ve been on your telephone for something like twenty-three of the last twenty-four hours. We need a new credit-card number.’ He literally had no idea who we were or where we were. I said, ‘Well, two things. First, you�
��re not getting my credit-card number. But let me tell you where we are and what’s going on.’ Which I did. He was extraordinary. He said, ‘Eh, is there anything we can do to help you?’ I said, ‘Well, as a matter of fact …’ We were on the edge of the satellite’s coverage. So they moved the satellite. We had great coverage after that.”

  The satellite phone was in almost constant use partly because the team had organized a phone-home lottery. “The lottery determined the order you could use the phone to call anyone you wanted to call. And since the guys’ families lived in various time zones, they spent the rest of the day trading numbers so their call would match their home zones. Well, that kept them busy. Plus, calling home established that they were all right. If you know your family knows you’re okay, it’s a lot easier to endure. It’s lack of contact that makes it severe. The telephone was as valuable to us in that way as it was for media contact.”

  Finally, at five-thirty on the morning of 28 September, the Iraqis gave in. “The deal was, we would go through the documents with them. They were arguing that some of the documents had nothing to do with the nuke program and were too sensitive. We’d take the documents to the hotel and they could go through them with us. They could protest if they wanted to, and if I accepted their protest they could have the document back. If I didn’t, we kept it. Some of us had a chance to shower and shave before the document review started at eight a.m.; some of us didn’t. It went on for hours and hours, until seven o’clock that night, until they got tired of the game. There were a few documents that had no relevance that I agreed to give up.” And then it was over. Amazingly, the team ran another round of inspections the next day—searching a warehouse and several other government buildings—before departing Iraq for Bahrain on 30 September 1991.