Odyssey of Frustration

The pace of work by Team 3 picked up as U.S. forces advanced, but not its progress. Some of the American combat units had been issued pocket-sized guides from the Pentagon to help soldiers and Marines turn up leads. Titled the "WMD Facility, Equipment and Munitions Identification Handbook," the guide offered descriptions and color pictures of the whole range of weapons programs that the Bush administration suspected Iraq still maintained. The theory was that otherwise untrained ground troops could serve as spotters. Encountering something suspicious, a soldier could pull out his handbook and compare what he saw to a centrifuge cascade, a pressurized sprayer, a freeze dryer, fermenter or vacuum pump. This was the origin of the April 1 report of Frog missiles with chemical warheads that were said to be parked under a tree. They were not Frogs, and not chemically armed. Another day brought "suspicious glass globes," filled, as it turned out, with cleaning fluid. A drum of foul-smelling liquid revealed itself as used motor oil.

Team 3 employed a pair of Fox reconnaissance vehicles, sealed against the outside air and equipped to detect any chemical warfare agent. Army Spec. Tanya Cowley, who drove one, said she frequently "set up for an over-watch" during early missions to warn the team of danger. "That's our mission," she said. "Check for gas, chemicals, vapors." Encountering none, Team 3 eventually stopped bringing the Fox along.

One intriguing tip came on April 6. Human intelligence -- the team did not know its origin -- described a chemical vault that Iraqi officials had buried in a schoolyard. Allison's team reached the Aziziyah middle school for girls and spent a full day and night watching excavators dig. "All we did is, we tore up some poor kids' playground," Lt. Shaun Gordon, Team 3's operations officer, recalled recently. Marine engineers found a geometry text in the dirt. The vault remained a mirage.

On April 10, the day after Hussein's statue tumbled out of its boots on Firdaus Square in Baghdad, Allison was dispatched to two of Iraq's most important nuclear sites. One was called the Tuwaitha Yellowcake Storage Facility, where the International Atomic Energy Agency keeps track of tons of natural and partially enriched uranium. Close by stood the forbidding berm walls of the Baghdad Nuclear Research Center, where Israel bombed the Osirak reactor in 1981 and the United States bombed a Russian-built reactor 10 years later. Between them, the two facilities entombed most of Iraq's former nuclear weapons program.

Just that morning, according to U.S. and U.N. sources, the Vienna-based IAEA had sent an urgent message to Washington. The twin complexes at Tuwaitha, the message said, were "at the top of the list" of nuclear sites requiring protection of U.S. and British forces.

A Marine engineering company had found the sites abandoned a few days earlier. The captain in command reported looters to be roaming the compounds. Allison's task was to measure the radiation hazard.

"We couldn't get close because we were receiving too high a dose" of radiation, Allison recalled. But the team found disturbing signs, even from a distance. The door to a major storage building, one of three known jointly as Location C, stood wide open.

Deal's personal dosimeter warned him to leave the scene, but first he shot a few seconds of videotape, by reaching his hand with the camera around the doorframe. The jerky images showed office debris strewn alongside scores of buried drums. Those drums, and others nearby, were supposed to contain 3,896 pounds of partially enriched uranium and more than 94 tons of yellowcake, or natural ore.

Looters had plainly been inside. At a minimum, they had exposed themselves and their families to grave health risks. More ominously, they might have taken some nuclear materials with them.

"There were also containers of what looked like medical isotopes on the ground," Allison said. "We backed off because we didn't have the capability to deal with radiation that high."

Before Team 3 could complete its survey, Allison received a "frago" -- a fragmentary order -- to leave at once. Tuwaitha was at the center of an unresolved dispute between the Bush administration and the IAEA, which monitors compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and Bush's advisers were divided among themselves. Until it had clear instructions, the headquarters for U.S. ground forces in Iraq wanted nothing to do with the site.

Standing under the desert sun with an Iridium satellite telephone at his ear, Allison raised his voice in angry protest at orders to leave the nuclear center unprotected. Eventually his superiors agreed to allow Marines to stay. Allison's report later that day said that even so "the maneuver commander did not have sufficient forces to secure both sites."