Saddam's Microbiologist Couldn't Say No

B A G H D A D, April 29, 2003 -- 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."

Officials, for example, ordered him to conceal how a factory he'd helped build could not only produce protein for animal feed, but could also be used to make anthrax. "I tried to convince the inspectors that nothing other than protein was produced at that center, but I was lying to them and they knew it," Hindawi recalls.

But some U.N. inspectors say they felt that Hindawi had, at times, hinted at Iraqi secrets otherwise left untold.

According to former inspector Richard Spertzel, Hindawi was "very hesitant in what he was saying he knew. He was trying to pass on information to us. Many times he disagreed with the official party line."

Protracting Anthrax

Hindawi claims that, despite working for Saddam, he tried to impede Iraqi progress toward biological weapons, withholding much of his knowledge and working as slowly as he could get away with.

But according to former inspector Spertzel, such stall tactics are questionable.

"It's not apparent to me that Dr. Hindawi or the program went slow, because they progressed very rapidly from 1986 to 1990 — from, apparently, a rebirth of their program to weaponization. That is a remarkable achievement by any standards. That is not slow progress."

And while Hindawi says that he never made dried or powdered anthrax — the agent's most dangerous form — his work on liquid anthrax could have provided others with the raw materials necessary for powder.

"There is a way, in my mind, how to dry such spores, but luckily I did not mention that method," Hindawi insists.

Even so, Spertzel notes, "Iraq's biological weapons program was compartmentalized, so that everybody didn't know what was going on. And Dr. Hindawi was not the head of the program. Who that person was, we have no idea."

Free to Tell the Truth

In 1997 Hindawi, deemed untrustworthy, was imprisoned for a year and a half, betrayed in part by Dr. Rihab Taha, a former student and subordinate in the biological weapons program, know in the West as "Dr. Germ."

When U.N. inspectors returned to Iraq last year, they were eager to talk to Hindawi alone, but Iraqi officials prevented it. They arrested Hindawi again this March, leaving him to spend the early weeks of the war in prison, until a coalition advance drove his captors from their post.

"I feel relieved for the first time in my life," Hindawi says. "I lived all of my life without practicing any words of freedom, without participating in any elections of any kind. We feel so happy, and can breathe easily, and thank god, and we can all say, 'God Bless America.'"

Yet despite these words, Hindawi still fears that, finally free to tell his story, Baath party members — whom he says are regrouping — could assassinate him for speaking out.

"People have been living in terrible fear here for so long that it's hard to stop being afraid," says Judith Miller. "It's hard to begin telling the truth."