Odyssey of Frustration

"I hope somebody has done something," Allison said, recounting the story some time afterward, "because a lot of that [material] is just laying around."

Tuwaitha was not Team 3's last brush with nuclear chaos. On April 24, two weeks later, Allison received orders to survey a warehouse holding the disabled machinery of Iraq's former nuclear weapons program. The Ash Shaykhili Nuclear Facility was a kind of boneyard for bombed reactor parts, broken vacuum pumps and heat exchangers and gas centrifuges rendered inoperable by U.N. inspectors.

Allison's assignment was to focus on an underground facility at the site. Whatever U.S. intelligence suspected there, sources in Washington said it was enough to place Ash Shaykhili in 11th place on the priority list of Iraqi weapons sites to be surveyed.

When Team 3 arrived, it found a nightmare unfolding.

The warehouses already had been "completely destroyed by looters, all burned up," Allison recalled. He saw charred pieces of what looked like equipment for electromagnetic isotope separation. A damaged glove box had been tossed in a scrap metal pile.

And the looters were not finished. Scores of civilians still swarmed the site, wrenching and cutting prizes away and loading them onto wheelbarrows, cars and trucks. They paid almost no attention to Allison's small team.

"There was no security anywhere to be seen," the team reported later that day. "Local civilians were in the process of looting and dismantling the facility when the team arrived, and remained during the entire exploitation. Site Survey Team 3 only had adequate security for force protection for team members."

Seated on a folding canvas chair, recalling the scene in an interview eight days afterward, Allison raised his eyebrows and shook his head.

"If there was something there" to reveal an undeclared Iraqi weapons program, he said, "it was long gone."

The fall of Baghdad April 9 brought U.S. forces to the center of Iraq's military-industrial establishment. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld predicted that would mark a turning point in the hunt, and it did. But the results brought a stunning deflation of hope.

By the second week of April, Team 3 no longer had to chase tips in the hinterlands. Based in the capital, and free to move, it drew assignments based on the best of U.S. intelligence.

Washington's master list of suspect sites numbered more than 900. But the catalog of serious prospects was succinct.

Central Command kept daily track of two key rosters. One was called simply, "Top 19 WMD." The other was "Top 68 Non-WMD." Sites on the second list were suspected of clandestine activities unrelated to weapons of mass destruction, such as support for terrorists.

To assemble the 19 top weapons sites, intelligence services had photographed and eavesdropped inside Iraq, interviewed defectors and sifted more than a million pages of documents. Analysts modeled the buildings, linking physical structures to research programs, resources and personnel over time.

Now the models could be tested. Team 3 and its counterparts drove into the sites and looked where they liked. What they found was far from what they expected. Most sites lay in ruins.

A comparison of Team 3's survey history with priority lists obtained from sources elsewhere shows that Allison and his team screened four of the Top 19 weapons sites -- one of which was Ash Shaykhili, the nuclear boneyard. "About every place we've been to," Allison said, "was trashed."

The Baghdad Research Complex, reached April 19, might have provided investigators with months or years of work. Adjacent to the University of Baghdad, the broad campus featured laboratories and office space for some of the disciplines most important to military science: applied chemistry, biological and nuclear engineering, aviation and space research. The site was so large, yet pillaged so comprehensively, that Team 3 picked over the bones for two days without a discovery. "On a scale of one to ten," Smith said, describing the looting, "it was an eight-plus."

Some of the damage appeared to be calculated, hinting at another explanation for the frustrated weapons hunt. Outside an alternative energy lab, Deal said he found computers and paper file boxes arranged in a stack and burned. "Looters are stealing computers," he said. "Why would they burn them?"

In a biology lab, the team found broken glassware and supplies but only bare mounts where work tables and ventilation hoods had been. "There's an obvious difference between looting and professional removal," Deal said.

Other intelligence leads among the Top 19 appeared to be simply errors.

One such site, the Malab Ashab Chemical Co., was suspected of concealing an underground store of weapons or their ingredients. Team 3 arrived on April 25 and found an Olympic swimming and diving complex. The Dhubbat Chemical Storage Site, another of the Top 19, turned out to be a factory for metal signs. Team 3 found thousands of license plates where looters had trampled them.

Intelligence also dispatched the team to a place it called the "Al Sald Suspected Chemical Site."

Its Christian owners called it Asriya Anis Arak. Acting director Janan Roger Lassow showered Allison and his men with hospitality, escorting them around the family-owned distillery and attempting to press them with gifts of arak, the company's anise-flavored liqueur. A tip on a secret cache of documents brought Team 3 to the doorstep of a man who admitted taking them from his chemistry lab. But he was only a frightened graduate student, anxious that looters might destroy his masters thesis, in progress. His subject was metallurgy, Gordon said afterward, and "apparently he wasn't very good at it. Our interpreter found some of his tests, and he scored about 30 percent."

Intelligence was supposed to have been better than this. British Wing Commander Sebastian Kendall, who has helped lead planning for the weapons hunt from the headquarters of U.S. and British land forces, said analysts had identified numerous sites at which they assessed there was "a high probability of finding a link to WMD." That comment was made in an interview on April 20, when the probabilities of finding such weapons were already dipping but had not yet crashed. "We started off with a list," he said. "It is true that the environment is changing based on reality."

Ten days after Kendall spoke, Allison slumped in a metal folding chair and gazed without pleasure at a computer display of his next assignment. He and Deal had taken a Humvee to 3rd Infantry Division headquarters for orders.

It had been days since the team had drawn a mission with any prospect of success. Nearly all the top weapons sites had been exhausted. Allison and his fellow team leaders were paying pro forma visits to buildings that had long since been swept clean by other Americans in the capital. The last of those visits, on April 27, had been especially galling: Team 3's "suspected WMD storage" assignment was a U.S. field artillery headquarters.

Allison looked up from the "target folder" on his screen and called to Deal, who was fashioning a coffee cup with a pocket knife and plastic bottle.

"They're trying to slip us non-WMD missions," Allison said.

Army Lt. Col. David Velasquez, the division's chemical officer, arrived just in time to overhear.

"They are WMD," he said.

"By whose definition?" Allison asked.

That was the nub of an argument that both men knew was taking place over their heads. Col. Timothy Madere, the nonconventional weapons officer for V Corps, wanted to use survey teams like Allison's to screen a broader universe of sites. Anything the teams turned up would be an improvement, Madere told colleagues, because no specific weapons leads were left.

"We are not getting the intelligence we need," said a V Corps officer who shares Madere's views, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Allison and his fellow team leaders, backed by the Pentagon agency that sent them, maintained that their weapons expertise did not qualify them to gather general intelligence.

"Here's the double-edged sword," Deal said irritably to Velasquez, who nodded in agreement. "We go, we don't know what we're looking for . . . and we miss it."

Allison pulled Velasquez aside. Deal took his commander's place at the computer. He began to read about "Possible SSO Facility Al Hayat" -- where, the next day, he would encounter the vacuum cleaners. He frowned.

"Is it a WMD facility?" Allison asked. "No, sir, the description is not WMD at all," Deal said. "Likely abandoned after [1998]. May be used by high ranking officials. Yadda yadda yadda. This is going to be a waste of time."

Normally affable, Allison stewed silently on the ride home. Many of his soldiers now said they were doing busy work, reduced to "checking the blocks" on an obsolete list. It was getting harder for him to disagree.

The next morning, over a breakfast of chicken and Mexican rice, he said, "If it doesn't set off our monitors, we can't do much. We don't have Arabic."

The language barrier loomed larger as time went on. If Team 3 had found vats of nerve agent, as its leaders once hoped, part of the mission could have been accomplished with instruments and technical expertise. But if the team had to look for subtler clues, it lacked the tools.

Around present-day Hilla, not far from Baghdad, archaeologists believe the Tower of Babel once stood. Team 3 is a Babel in miniature. Among its 25 men and women are Turkish, Spanish, Russian and Chinese speakers, but no one understands the local language.

At the suspected SSO facility on May 1 -- the stucco building with doors bolted tight -- the unusual sight of intact locks prompted team members to recheck their weapons. Someone hostile might still be inside.

"I can get to my pistol, but not easily," said Deal, who held the camera. "If you don't get them, I will, sir," Smith replied, the muzzle of his M-4 angled forward and down.

What they could not do was ask a question, should they find someone there. Yet they were supposed to ask questions under the guidelines for surveying a suspected secret police site such as this. One suggested query is, "Was there a lot of noise, such as people screaming?" Others ask about covered buses and unusual activity at night.

Anderson, the only team member learning Arabic, still does not have the ability to ask those questions. He has taught himself five phrases so far: "Good morning," "Good evening," "Drop your weapon," "That's dangerous," and "Keep away."

As Team 3 worked, it became evident more than once that even a passive reading knowledge would help.

On its way through one darkened corridor, the team reached an especially recalcitrant door. Sgt. Ivan Westrick, the team's explosive ordnance technician, swung the sledgehammer in a powerful arc that struck sparks with every blow, like flint on steel. A reporter later translated a snapshot of a sign across that door. It said, "No Smoking."

A longer announcement, in bold red and blue strokes, attracted the team's attention. The sign had been positioned in such a way that Saddam Hussein, gazing sternly off the canvas of a youthful portrait, appeared to be reading it. Anderson wondered briefly what it might say.

Had anyone known the answer then, the chamber of vacuum cleaners in the next corridor would have come as no surprise. Neither would the contents of the other sealed rooms: air conditioners, rolls of fabric, marble facing stones.

"Honorable Brother and Packer," the sign began. "Packaged goods cannot be returned after leaving the depot." The sign welcomed suggestions, apologized for delays, and thanked patrons for their cooperation. It concluded with a two-word signature: "STORAGE ADMINISTRATION."