by emptywheel
Summary: Mahdi Obeidi, the Iraqi nuclear scientist who dug up nuclear plans and prototypes from his rose garden, was one of the few successes of the post-war weapons hunt. But his story includes a number of suspicious details that suggest his story was every bit as manipulated as the rest of the WMD story. In this post, I use several versions to piece together what we know about Obeidi's experience after the war. In a future post, I will look more closely at some of the suspicious details.
On June 25, 2003--just as Congress was beginning to make a stink about prewar intelligence and the day before Tenet testified to Congress about why there were no WMDs in Iraq--the incredible story of Mahdi Obeidi broke in the US press. Administration officials hailed the story of a top Iraqi nuclear scientist who had buried a nuclear centrifuge and blueprints under his rose bushes to preserve them for the time when Saddam would reconstitute his nuclear program.
Yes, rose bushes.
The fact that this scientist had hidden his tools for preservation proved, Administration officials said, that Saddam was waiting for the time when he could restart his nuclear program. And the hidden materials meant the nuclear threat was dire, American officials said, because Saddam could jump start his program with minimal financial or temporal investment.
The story is as close as the Administration ever came to proving their claims that Saddam was trying to reconstitute his nuclear program.
But there are some funky things about Obeidi’s story. Or should I say stories.
Who Is Mahdi Obeidi?
There are some things about which there is no dispute. Mahdi Obeidi (also transcribed Ubaydi or Ubeidy) was in charge of Saddam’s centrifuge program. Since the centrifuge performed the critical step of enriching uranium, Obeidi would have a significant role if Saddam ever tried to reconstitute his nuclear program.
Here is how the WaPo, in a story I'll return to, described Mahdi Obeidi:
When Iraqi leaders decided to try to master the difficult feat of enriching uranium for nuclear weapons, they turned to well-respected Iraqi nuclear scientist Mahdi Obeidi. For inspiration, Obeidi in turn looked to the world's leading experts in enrichment technology: the United States and Europe.
Obeidi ... learned about emerging technologies for enriching uranium during a 1975 visit to the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico. In the 1980s, Obeidi led efforts to build gas centrifuges for uranium enrichment, using designs and expertise bought from German businessmen.
Iraq ultimately used a combination of technologies to produce the fissile material needed for nuclear weapons. Designs for the equipment were never surrendered to U.N. inspectors after the Gulf War, and are believed to still exist in Iraq, along with the practical know-how acquired by Obeidi through years of trial and error.
Although Obeidi's current role in Iraqi weapons research is unknown, some experts on Iraq's nuclear program believe his knowledge would be critical to any current efforts to build an Iraqi bomb. "Iraq probably could not start a centrifuge [enrichment] program without him," said Albright, the former weapons inspector.
The article, as we will see, has some problems of its own. But by all accounts Mahdi Obeidi was considered critical to the success of Saddam's nuclear enrichment program.
How Did the US Find Obeidi and What Did They Do with Him?
So how did it happen that Obeidi ended up digging his centrifuge from under his rose bush and handing it over to US intelligence? It's not clear. There's a lot of confusion about how he was found by the Americans, when he was found, and what happened to him after they found him.
CNN June 2003
CNN first broke Obeidi’s story. But they broke it at a time when the US had Obeidi in some kind of custody; and CNN acceded to US requests to hold the story and conceal Obeidi’s location. So the story is at least partially sanctioned by the government. CNN also tells increasingly detailed versions of the story, so the first version only reveals the scoop of the centrifuge, while the second version offers more details of what happened to Obeidi, including details of his arrest.
Neither version of the story says anything about Obeidi's actions during the war. Instead, they start from the moment CNN says he first started cooperating with the CIA and turned over the centrifuge--on June 1. Two days later, Army troops raided his house. CNN suggests that only then did Obeidi contact David Albright.
Fortunately for Obeidi, he was able to reach the only American he really knew, David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector whom he had met -- and lied to -- many times during U.N. inspections in the 1990s.
And after Obeidi contacted Albright, he contacted CNN, without the knowledge of the US government.
Obeidi then contacted CNN. A day after U.S. officials learned he had spoken to CNN, Obeidi and his family were whisked out of Iraq by the CIA.
Once the CIA found out Obeidi had contacted CNN, the story goes, the CIA brought
him to the US. Wait a second. CNN doesn’t say the CIA brought Obeidi to the US. They say
only that Obeidi had been removed from Iraq—they don’t reveal his
whereabouts. CNN also includes a picture of Obeidi next to a picture of materials
they say they saw in Virginia. Given those details, you might think
he was in the US. But you’d be wrong.
As I said, this story bears distinct signs of government influence. Like some Judy Miller stories and the NSA intercept story, for example, CNN admits they’ve held this story at the request of the Administration.
CNN had this story last week but made a decision to withhold it at the request of the U.S. government, which cited safety and national security concerns.
The U.S. government told CNN the security and safety issues have been dealt with and there is no risk now in telling the story fully.
So coincidentally, CNN ends up “breaking” the story the day before George Tenet has to go to Congress to explain why the US hasn’t found any WMDs in Iraq.
WaPo August 2003
By August 2003, the WaPo's Bart Gellman tells a slightly different story. Gellman says Obeidi waited two weeks for Americans to come find him. When they didn't, Obeidi contacted David Albright, whom he had known as an antagonist at the IAEA (it's significant that Albright was one of the experts who first discredited the aluminum tube theory the administration was trying to sell). On May 1, Albright contacted DOD, but "was rebuffed." Then, on May 7, Albright found a contact at CIA to take an interest. The WaPo's telling of what happened from that point until Obeidi's release contains some gaps:
The first meeting with the CIA, on May 17, did not go well. Obeidi wanted assurance of asylum in the United States. The interviewers were noncommittal and appeared to know little about Obeidi or the centrifuge program, according to interviews with Albright and contemporaneous notes he provided in July.
On June 2, Obeidi led investigators to his rose garden. There they dug up a cache he had buried 12 years before and kept from U.N. inspectors: about 200 blueprints of gas centrifuge components, 180 documents describing their use and samples of a few sensitive parts. The parts amounted to far less than one complete centrifuge, and nothing like the thousands required for a cascade of the spinning devices to enrich uranium, but the material showed what nearly all outside experts believed -- that Iraq had preserved its nuclear knowledge base.
The next day, U.S. Special Forces burst into Obeidi's home and arrested him -- a misunderstanding, the CIA later explained. Shortly after Obeidi's release, on June 17, the CIA made public his identity and described the rose garden cache as proof that Iraq had the secret nuclear program that the Bush administration alleged.
How did Obeidi's relationship with the CIA go from bad to good, such that he was willing to reveal the centrifuge? And why did the "misunderstanding" take 15 days to clear up, until Obeidi was “released”? Why did it take CIA three weeks from the time Obeidi turned the centrifuge over and another week from the time Obeidi went to CNN before they publicized the find?
So far, this is based on David Albright's version of the story. The WaPo suggests some answers to these question when it presents Obeidi's side of the story. Obeidi, it seems, had expected to be debriefed by an American peer--a knowledgeable scientist. Instead, he got "Joe," the CIA hack who had succeeded in pushing the “tubes as centrifuge” story within the CIA. There were two problems with "Joe." He didn't know what he was talking about--he didn't have the expertise to understand what Obeidi was saying. And, "Joe" refused to hear what Obeidi was saying.
An engineer with expertise in export controls, Joe made his reputation at the CIA as the strongest proponent of the theory that Iraq's controversial aluminum tubes were part of a resurgent centrifuge program. The CIA asked that Joe's last name be withheld to protect his safety.
In his interviews, Obeidi did not tell Joe what he wanted to hear, U.S. government officials said.
[snip]
Joe sent dispatches to Washington over the summer accusing Obeidi of holding back the truth, according to a U.S. official who read one. The Iraqi scientist, fearful of his safety after being named in public, moved with his family to a CIA safe house in Kuwait. For months, he remained in limbo.
"They're just in a conflict of interest," Albright said in a July interview, speaking of Joe and other CIA analysts. "Their bosses are [still] saying the tubes are for centrifuges."
By summer's end, under unknown circumstances, Obeidi received permission to bring his family to an East Coast suburb in the United States
This WaPo article develops the story a bit. It fills in the details at the beginning somewhat—Obeidi waiting for the Americans for two weeks, and finally giving up and calling Albright. And explains what happened during the summer—with Joe challenging Obeidi, perhaps holding Obeidi in custody in Kuwait until something resolved the problem in late summer.
Significantly, neither Obeidi nor Albright are willing to offer more details.
He declined through intermediaries to be interviewed, and a government official asked that his location not be published. Albright, who hopes to employ Obeidi at his Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, is no longer willing to discuss the case.
ISIS December 2003
Albright was unwilling to discuss the case in August, but by December, he provides more details of his own side of the story. Most of the details explain how “Joe” tried to coerce Obeidi to tell the story “Joe” wanted told—that there were parallel centrifuge development programs, and that the tubes were intended for one of these centrifuge programs.
The CIA analysts’ preconceived belief that the tubes were for centrifuges further complicated an already difficult situation. These analysts had a tendency to mistrust Obeidi and were unprepared to accept what Obeidi said about the tubes or a lack of a significant centrifuge program. Although the CIA was far better positioned to obtain the cooperation of Iraqi scientists than the Pentagon, in the end, it was in a conflict of interest when it came to Obeidi.
This conflict was demonstrated to me when I learned that Joe was apparently the main centrifuge expert the CIA sent to interview Obeidi and make judgments about his veracity. Joe told Obeidi that he was the one who sold the idea about the tubes being for centrifuges. Obeidi was convinced that Joe remained a firm believer in the tubes being for centrifuges. The CIA appeared determined to prove the existence of a significant and active gas centrifuge program rather than evaluating the new post-war evidence objectively. Because of the controversy about the aluminum tubes, Joe’s personal involvement in this sensitive operation was questionable.
The information that Obeidi provided the CIA appears to have created a serious problem to those advocating the essential role of the aluminum tubes in a reconstituted Iraqi gas centrifuge program. In what can only be described as self-serving, CIA officials incorrectly represented Obeidi’s comments and his past role in the pre-1991 gas centrifuge program.
This echoes, somewhat, one of the bullet points in the CIA statement announcing the Obeidi discovery. The CIA claims (a claim the Duelfer report later drops) that Obeidi hid these documents as part of an organized program to reconstitute Iraq’s nuclear program.
Dr. Ubaydi told us that these items, blue prints and key centrifuge pieces, represented a complete template for what would be needed to rebuild a centrifuge uranium enrichment program. He also claimed this concealment was part of a secret, high-level plan to reconstitute the nuclear weapons program once sanctions ended.
In any case, in his article Albright also elaborates on his own role in protecting Obeidi.
Obeidi’s case became public in late June 2003 because of the CIA’s refusal to remove him from Iraq, CIA analysts’ attacks on his veracity, and their statements that the US government was going to release publicly a portion of the information Obeidi provided. Impending CNN television reports, which I initiated, broke an apparent impasse in the US government, and Obeidi and his family were quickly moved out of Iraq.
In other words, the government may have had some influence on the CNN story, but Albright claims he was the one to initiate contact with CNN, and he seems to say he pre-empted the government's own release of information. Nevertheless, Albright makes it clear, a good deal of the CNN story was spin offered by “Joe” and David Kay.
When CNN interviewed CIA officials at Langley in June about Obeidi, these officials gave a version of events that differed sharply with what Obeidi recounted. CNN interviewed a CIA official named “Mike” about Obeidi in June. The interview never showed Mike’s front, but a viewer identified him as Joe.
Joe claimed that Obeidi received one of four sets of centrifuge documents and had actually seen the other three sets. Thus, Joe said that Obeidi was one of four people who took a set of documents and hid them. Kay repeated to CNN what Joe said, adding that Obeidi was the source of this information. Kay said that Obeidi claimed not to have known who took these three sets, or where the documents may be located, but Kay added they were exploring how his memory can be improved. Obeidi told me repeatedly that he never made these statements to his interrogators.
Joe and Kay also falsely characterized Iraq’s pre-1991 Beams-type, aluminum-rotor centrifuge program to CNN.
Between Albright and Gellman, we get a pretty good idea of what happened to Obeidi after he made contact with the CIA. The CIA wanted him to confirm the stories they told to get us into the war, but Obeidi refused to do so. And as a result, his asylum in the US was delayed.
But Albright and Gellman still don’t explain why, when one of Saddam’s top nuclear scientists was desperately trying to make contact with US forces, it took two months before he made contact.
MoJo September 2005
In the September/October 2005 Mother Jones magazine, the guy who co-wrote Obeidi's book, The Bomb in my Garden, provides answers to some of those questions. Kurt Pitzer says he found Obeidi by pure chance in the days just after the fall of Baghdad (which would have been around April 15).
I MET THE MASTERMIND of Saddam Hussein's former nuclear centrifuge program outside the Palestine Hotel in Baghdada few days after U.S. troops took over the city in 2003.
[snip]
He said his name was Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, and he showed me a printout of a prewar Washington Post story in which he was named as one of the Iraqi weapons scientists whom the U.S. government had very much wanted to interview.
[snip]
Minutes earlier he had approached a photographer friend of mine on the street, saying he wanted to reach out to Washington with some important information about Saddam's nuclear program. It was a desperate move. He had tried contacting U.S. troops, but they had rebuffed him and threatened him with arrest if he showed up again. Now he wanted to know if I could use my satellite phone to help him.
Pitzer goes home and calls David Albright at Obeidi’s request and confirms that Obeidi is legit. This starts a month-long process in which Pitzer tries to help Obeidi find a way to guarantee his family’s safety. Sometime during this process—before Obeidi makes contact with the Americans—Obeidi reveals his stash to Pitzer.
So we waited. A dapper 59-year-old, Obeidi arrived every day to greet me wearing an elegant abiyaa robe. When he felt especially nervous, we met in clandestine locations: by lamplight at my translator's home or in the courtyard of an Iraqi acquaintance. At other times, we sat on plastic lawn chairs in his garden, trying to figure out how he could avoid arrest by U.S. troops, as his wife and daughters served us cookies and tea. Every now and again, he would drop hints about the secrets he wanted to reveal.
Then one day, he gestured toward a spot in the garden. Buried under the lotus tree next to his rosebushes a few feet from where we sat, he said, was the core of Saddam's nuclear quest: blueprints and prototype pieces for building centrifuges to enrich uranium to bomb grade. Twelve years earlier, he had buried them on orders from Saddam's son Qusay -- presumably, he said, to use them to restart a bomb program someday.
Obeidi dug up the cache a few days later. When he showed me the four prototypes, his hands shook. The machine parts looked alien, like pieces of a futuristic motorcycle, most of them small enough to fit inside a briefcase. He explained that these components and the three-foot-high stack of diagrams were still immensely valuable -- and immensely dangerous. They represented the core knowledge it would take to jump-start a covert bomb program, anywhere in the world.
Finally, after a month of seemingly daily attempts to contact someone who could arrange an asylum deal, Pitzer and Obeidi made contact (via unnamed third parties) with the DIA and the CIA. Pitzer supplies some of the same details of the conflict between Obeidi and the Americans as Gellman and Albright, but suggests further that there is a conflict between DIA and CIA.
More than a month after our first meeting, our satellite phone calls had failed to produce any kind of safe-haven offer from Washington. Operatives from the Defense Intelligence Agency as well as the CIA had tracked Obeidi down through third parties, summoned him to their respective headquarters, and demanded that he surrender all he knew. The DIA agents threatened to imprison him, he told me, and then asked that he not speak to anyone at the CIA; soon afterward, the CIA sent armed agents to his home and took away a sample of his documents, promising to safeguard his family.
Then, early on the morning of June 3, 2003, more than a dozen soldiers jumped over Obeidi's garden wall, kicked in his front door, and put him and his family facedown on their living room floor at gunpoint. Obeidi's wife and children watched as he was handcuffed and put in a Humvee. Evidently, the Army had finally caught wind of Obeidi's significance -- and, just as evidently, the troops knew nothing of their own intelligence agencies' contacts with him.
Obeidi escaped the fate of his former boss [Amer al-Saadi, who was imprisoned for two years] when the CIA intervened with the Army and got him released. Knowing that he was a marked man, he decided that his only hope was to go public. He consented to an interview with CNN, and soon afterward the CIA whisked him and his family off to Kuwait, where he underwent weeks of interrogations.
Summary
Pitzer, then, fills in most of the story from the time the war broke out until Obeidi was arrested on June 3. There are still some significant discrepancies, which I will examine more closely in the next installment and which begin to appear in a timeline of the stories. Download obeidi_timeline.doc But for now, here’s what we know of Obeidi’s experience.
Obeidi tried to contact the Americans on his own. Failing that, around mid-April 2003, he randomly reached out to Pitzer, who not only had a satellite phone, but seems to have been willing to drop everything for a month to try to help Obeidi. Using Pitzer’s phone, Obeidi called Albright, who then began to call Americans on Obeidi’s behalf. Either through Albright’s efforts or through the intercession of unnamed third parties, Obeidi finally made contact first with the DIA, then with the CIA, around mid-May 2003. It’s not clear when Obeidi started “cooperating” with the CIA (the relationship was definitely troubled at first), but on June 2, he reveals the centrifuge. And the following day (all stories seem to agree about this), Obeidi is arrested in his home by Special Forces. Something gets him freed from captivity—either Obeidi’s or Albright’s contacts with CNN, or the intercession of CIA. Some time in the first half of June (presumably as part of his release, but this is not made clear by anyone), Obeidi is moved to a safe house in Kuwait. Perhaps the US government wanted to wait until Obeidi settled at this safehouse; whatever the reason, they ask CNN to wait a week, from June 17 until June 25, before the network breaks Obeidi’s story. Throughout the rest of the summer, Obeidi is questioned in Kuwait and, it appears, pressured to back up CIA interpretations about the aluminum tubes and other nuclear evidence. Finally, sometime in August, Obeidi is brought to the US and given asylum.
Wow. Untidy! Looking forward to Pt 2.
Posted by: jonnybutter | December 30, 2005 at 18:34
Iraqi Scientist: American soldier, American soldier, I am secret mastermind of Saddam’s centrifuge program! Look, I have Washington Post articles to prove it.
American soldier: Buzz off, dude. We'll hang you upside down in chains if you don't stop bothering us.
All wars are insane, but some wars are more insane than others.
Posted by: Garrett | December 30, 2005 at 20:06
EW, Great breakdown. God, everything they told us was propaganda {feigned surprise}. Reminds me of the psy ops program which was sold as a popular upswell to tear down saddams statue. Anyone remember that? The first link is to the army admitting it created the propaganda, the other two links to how the media helped push the fake story with more bullshit.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0703-02.htm
http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~condrey/RHE306/liberation/baghdad.html
http://www.thememoryhole.org/media/evening-standard-crowd.htm
Cheers!
Posted by: wtmesq | December 31, 2005 at 00:41
Garrett
Yup, that's about the idea.
But then, how did someone living in a totalitarian dictatorship get an article from the WaPo?
Posted by: emptywheel | December 31, 2005 at 08:33