Saddam's Man in Niger
HITCHENS, CHRISTOPHER
Saddam's Man in Niger What was the Iraqi regime's nuclear expert doing in Africa? by Christopher Hitchens Let us credit the Senate Intelligence Committee with almost getting the name right. On...
...The name of Zahawie was the original red flag that alerted British intelligence to the possibility of untoward Iraqi activity in West Africa, and thus precipitated the tip-off to Washington that ignited the dispute over evidence that still preoccupies us...
...It takes only a very little work to find that neither of these assumptions is a safe one...
...At no stage does the committee's report give even a hint of what the nature of this concern might have been, so I shall begin by filling in that huge blank...
...I asked him if he would put his reasons in writing, and here they are: One of my colleagues remembers Zahawie as Iraq's delegate to the IAEA General Conference during the years 1982-84...
...This only raises the same question in a different form...
...To summarize: The Senate report gives two versions of Zahawie's name without ever once mentioning his significant background...
...It offers little evidence and no argument in support of its conclusions...
...How does Wissam al-Zahawie himself answer the question: What is a diplomat so senior—with or without nuclear experience—doing on a mission to a country to which he is not accredited...
...It may have occurred to you to ask —as the committee resolutely does not ask itself—why it was that such a man was posted to the Holy See, and why Saddam Hussein's ambassador to the Vatican was sent to a small West African country in February 1999...
...His participation as leader of the Iraqi delegation to the 1995 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference merely confirms his standing as Iraq's top negotiator on nuclear weapons issues...
...weapons inspectors from Iraqi soil, and had in consequence suffered a December 1998 bombing from the Clinton administration...
...In other words, Zahawie was no ordinary diplomat, and his background was well known to those who study these things...
...Conclusive...
...It takes at face value his absurd claim about the supposedly innocent motive for his out-of-the-way trip...
...And what were Saddam Hussein and the Nige-rien president supposed to discuss if such a visit were to come off...
...But such argument is purely anachronistic: The story of Zahawie's visit was known, and had been passed on by London to Washington, well before the bogus document was circulated...
...One item on the agenda was the diplomatic and political fall-out of Israel's destruction of the Osirak reactor (a centerpiece of Iraq's nuclear weapons ambitions...
...On the nuclear issue, he stated to Hassan Fattah, then of Time magazine and now of the New York Times, that he did not know that Niger produced for export the only thing that it does produce for export, namely uranium "yellow-cake...
...And according to a new book entitled Shopping For Bombs, by the BBC's security correspondent Gordon Corera, another visitor to Niger in that very month of February 1999 was A.Q...
...He has given two answers...
...The notion that Niger was eager to pay "cash" for Iraqi oil is thus made even more dubious...
...The ISG [Iraq Survey Group] recovered a draft contract between Niger and Iraq supporting the purchase of crude oil by Niger in exchange for cash...
...According to documents recovered from Saddam Hussein's office, the president of Niger proposed himself for a visit to Iraq in June 1997 (thus incidentally proving that plans for such trips can be made without sending a Vatican-based ambassador several thousand miles from his base...
...If it was done chiefly for money, as the London Sunday Times has reported of two employees of the Niger embassy in Rome, it has had much the same effect...
...In a correspondence with Zahawie elicited by what I wrote about him in Slate, he has confirmed to me his participation in those nuclear-related conferences...
...Iraq has yellowcake of its own but had bought extra supplies from Niger as early as 1981: It might have seemed a propitious moment to resume contact with West Africa...
...The Senate Intelligence Committee does not even refer in a footnote to the findings of these inquiries...
...What currency, or medium of exchange, did it really have to offer in return...
...Since the war in Iraq began, two independent British inquiries have firmly reiterated that the original intelligence concerning Niger was sound, and has withstood careful scrutiny...
...Iraq had plenty of cash, as well as plenty of oil...
...The purpose of a visit to Niger by the Iraqi ambassador to the Vatican, Wissam al-Zahawie, was to invite the president of Niger to visit Iraq...
...So we can say with some assurance that Niger's authorities (so briefly and so leniently investigated by Joseph Wilson) seem to have given at least the impression of being open for business...
...Khan, whose black market in nuclear materials was then unknown outside a very small circle in his home country of Pakistan...
...to head the UNSCOM inspection team after the end of the first Gulf war, he is credited with uncovering, identifying, and destroying more covert Iraqi weaponry than had been taken out by the war itself...
...According to Mark Huband, the national security correspondent of the Financial Times, in an important front-page article he wrote on June 28, 2004, the consensus among European intelligence services was that Niger was attempting to deal in yellowcake with anyone it could find, from North Korea to Iran...
...The other visit involved disChristopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair...
...And this in turn raises the question: Was Niger willing to entertain offers from Iraq, or from anyone else, for what was and is its only valuable commodity...
...The price of goats...
...embargo on official flights to Baghdad, and to pay a personal visit there...
...cussions of a Nigerien oil purchase from Iraq...
...Niger is cash-poor to say the very least...
...Ambassador Rolf Ekeus is quite possibly the world's most distinguished international civil servant when it comes to questions of disarmament and nonproliferation...
...In 1999, Iraq's ambassador to the Holy See, Wissam Zahawie, traveled to Niger to invite the President of Niger to visit Iraq and, in 2001, a Nigerien minister visited Iraq to discuss purchasing petroleum...
...On pages 25-26 of its latest report appears the following: The head of Iraq's pre-1991 nuclear weapons program, Ja'far Diya' Ja'far, stated that after 1998, Iraq had two contacts with Niger and neither was regarding uranium...
...Ekeus remembers being met by Zahawie when he first arrived in Baghdad to begin Iraq's post-1991 disarmament, and being told by him that, having met in the past as diplomats, they were now enemies...
...And, on page 54 we read, under the heading "Conclusions": Iraq had two contacts with Niger after 1998, but neither involved the purchase of uranium...
...To begin with, we do not owe the information about Wissam al-Zahawie's visit to Ja'far Diya' Ja'far, and we have no good reason to think that "the head of Iraq's pre-1991 nuclear weapons program" would in any case have special knowledge about Saddam Hussein's diplomacy in 1999...
...Then there is the question of timing...
...In February 1999, when Zahawie's visit took place, Saddam Hussein had only just expelled the U.N...
...As Ekeus added to me in his letter: "A resident ambassador in Rome was ideally placed to undertake discreet and sensitive missions, especially as he was fully plugged into the intricacies of nuclear weapons diplomacy...
...Trying another tack, he now says that the purpose of his trip was to persuade Niger's president to break the U.N...
...Since the report does not trouble to supply any reasoning from the evidence to its conclusions, we are left to infer that there is nothing odd about Saddam Hussein's envoy (to the Vatican) paying a visit to Niger, and nothing unusual about Niger's desire to buy ("for cash") crude oil from a country under international sanctions that is much less close and convenient a source of oil than, say, its neighbors Nigeria and Algeria...
...It is unaware of the appearance of A.Q...
...When I first heard that it was Zahawie who had been to Niger," he told me, "I thought well, then, that's it...
...Finally, it's worth noting that even the announced purpose of the visit was to circumvent U.N...
...This claim I think we can safely describe as risibly untrue...
...So widely recognized was the quality of his performance that, when inspections were proposed again in 2000, even Kofi Annan proposed renominating him for the task...
...Well, in that year every other Iraqi embassy in Western Europe was closed, or downgraded to "interest section" level, and the Holy See was the only exception...
...If the forgery was intended as disinformation, it is one of the more successful such efforts on record...
...sanctions, if only on a small matter...
...The appointment of Ekeus was overruled by France and Russia, who insisted on Hans Blix...
...The next year, A.Q...
...This easily discredited fabrication has allowed many people to dismiss the whole case...
...Unless of course that diplomacy had something to do with nuclear matters...
...Khan was back in Niger's capital...
...Khan in the narrative...
...A founder of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, and a former ambassador of Sweden to the United Nations and to the United States, he has made the subject a lifelong specialty...
...Appointed by the U.N...
...It does not canvass the views of our allies, or of tried-and-tested experts like Ambassador Ekeus...
...He was the under-secretary of the foreign ministry selected by Baghdad to represent Iraq on the most sensitive issue, the question of Iraq's nuclear weapons ambitions...
...And it was never alleged in George W. Bush's famous 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq had actually inked a deal, only that it had "sought" to do so...
...The waters here have been slightly muddied by the production of a crudely forged document dated July 6, 2000, purporting to show Zahawie's seal on an actual agreement for the transfer of uranium...
...It accepts similarly bland assurances made by the government of Niger...
...Why send Iraq's only fully accredited European ambassador such a long way on such a mission...
...It is a minor disgrace, but a disgrace nevertheless...
...I might add that the experience also introduced Ekeus to what might be called the underside of Iraqi tactics on WMD: He was once offered a straight bribe of $2.5 million, to his face, by Saddam's deputy Tariq Aziz, and he took part in the debriefing of the Kamel brothers—Saddam's inlaws—when they defected from Iraq in 1995 with conclusive evidence of a state-run concealment program for WMD facilities...
...According to a diary of the journey kept by Khan's associate Abu Bakr Siddiqui and obtained by Corera, "Niger has big uranium deposits...
Vol. 12 • September 2006 • No. 2
