Saddam's Microbiologist Couldn't Say No

B A G H D A D, April 29 -- Iraqi microbiologist Nassir Hindawi says he had little choice when Saddam Hussein asked him to help develop biological weapons, including anthrax and botulinum toxin, in 1986.

"We have to work as we are ordered, as soldiers do in a battlefield. You cannot say no," Dr. Hindawi explains.

In Baghdad this week under the protection of Iraqi opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi, Hindawi spent several days conferring with American weapons experts, including representatives of a U.S. Mobile Exploitation Team (MET), one of two units now hunting for evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

After more than a decade of deception, Hindawi is now free to cooperate with American investigators — and to own up to the role he played in arming Saddam. Though he says he "couldn't imagine" what would have happened to him had he ignored orders, Hindawi admits that he feared for his family, and the inconceivable consequences they could have faced for his defiance.

"It's obvious when I talk to him and when I listen to him that he is deeply troubled by what he felt he had to do," New York Times reporter Judith Miller told ABCNEWS. "I don't know what kind of pressure he was under at the time."

Made to Lie?

Hindawi, now 61, first began work for Saddam in the midst of the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, when he was asked to research and supervise the production of anthrax and botulinum toxin. "At the beginning, we were trying to produce something that could be a defensive weapon," Hindawi says. "We had no idea of where and when to use it."

Permitted to leave the weapons program in 1989, Hindawi was nonetheless called back as a biological weapons consultant in the wake of the first Gulf War, when U.N. weapons inspectors initially arrived in Iraq. Officials at Iraq's National Monitoring Directorate — the Iraqi office intended to deal with inspections — coached him and other scientists, many of them his former students, on how to lie to inspectors.

"The whole talk was around ways of answering" inspectors' questions, Hindawi recalls. "Meeting at the National Monitoring Office, they would agree on what to say."