Scientist defection plans pose difficulties

When a senior Iraqi delegation arrived in New York on May 1 to finish plans for the resumption of UN inspections in Iraq, a key member of the team was missing.

Jaafar Dhia Jaafar, widely regarded as the father of Iraq's secret nuclear weapons programme, had been held up by American officials at the U.S. embassy in Amman, Jordan, and questioned for several hours before he was given a visa.

The British-trained physicist had been "singled out for interrogation'' by U.S. officials in Jordan and would not be arriving until the following day, Iraq's Foreign Minister Naji Sabri said in the opening meeting with a UN delegation.

Iraqi diplomats subsequently told UN officials that U.S. officials also offered money to Jaafar and other Iraqi officials in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade them to defect, according to Iraqi and Western diplomats.

The disclosure suggests that Washington may have already begun an aggressive campaign to identify key Iraqi officials for defection several months before UN inspectors arrived in Iraq to question Iraq's weapons experts. In recent weeks, the United State has stepped up efforts to encourage new defections, demanding that weapons inspectors invite Iraqi scientists for interviews abroad, where they will be provided with an opportunity to request political asylum.

Information about the alleged defection effort in May came originally from Iraqi officials, who have a stake in portraying American as a disruptive force in the inspections process.

Still, the Iraqis complained about it at the time - before the issue became so highly charged - and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan took the claims seriously enough to change the venue of the next round of talks to Vienna.

While the Iraqi claims that the United States had targeted several officials for defection have been generally known, until now their names were unpublicised. In addition to Jaafar, the diplomatic sources said, the Americans also targeted Lt-Gen Amer Al Saadi, a senior adviser to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein who was also instrumental in developing Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programmes.

The third individual approached by Washington was Mehdi Labidi, a mid-level technical expert, according to a report Tuesday by the London-based Arab language newspaper Asharq Al Awsat. The newspaper, citing Iraqi officials, reported that U.S. intelligence agents had repeatedly phoned Iraqi officials at their hotels in New York and sought to lure them into defecting with a case filled with cash.

A Bush administration official declined to comment, saying "we don't comment on intelligence matters.'' A CIA spokesman also declined comment.

The Bush administration, which succeeded in persuading two Iraqi diplomats at Baghdad's UN mission to defect in the summer of 2001, has argued that well-placed defectors are the key to unearthing fresh insights into Iraq's secret weapons programme. The CIA has a programme aimed at encouraging such defections.

But Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, has expressed concern about the UN running a defector programme. He has said that the United States has yet to come up with ideas for how the international organisation can select Iraqi scientists and their families and take them out of the country for interviews.

The defection of Jaafar would have constituted the most significant intelligence coup on Iraq's weapons programme since Lt- Gen Hussein Kamal Hassan, who headed up Iraq's secret weapons programme, fled Iraq in 1995, prompting the government to hand over millions of pages of secret documents related to its banned weapons programme. A former deputy to Kamal, Jaafar had been at the centre of Iraq's secret effort to develop nuclear weapons for more than twenty years. A trusted member of Saddam Hussain's inner circle, he would have likely been a pivotal figure in any recent efforts to restart the programme.

"He's extremely significant. He knows more than anybody else because he is trusted by the top level and he was very involved in all the different programmes'' in the nuclear field, said David Albright, a former UN nuclear weapons inspector who heads the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS). "He also should have known about all the chemical, biological and missile programmes.''

The May episode led to an appeal from the Iraqi government to Annan to hold future meetings on weapons inspections in Geneva or Vienna . But the Iraqi government did not go public with the outlines of the story until June, after Washington ordered the expulsion of an Iraqi diplomat in New York - Abdul Rahman I.K. Saad - on the grounds that he was recruiting American citizens to spy for Iraq.

Iraq's UN ambassador Moham-med Al Douri told reporters that Washington was simply retaliating because Baghdad had lodged a complaint with the UN over American "harassment'' of three members of the Iraqi delegation, whom he declined to identify.

@Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service