Search in Iraq Fails to Find Nuclear Threat

Joe sent dispatches to Washington over the summer accusing Obeidi of holding back the truth, according to a U.S. official who read one. The Iraqi scientist, fearful of his safety after being named in public, moved with his family to a CIA safe house in Kuwait. For months, he remained in limbo.

"They're just in a conflict of interest," Albright said in a July interview, speaking of Joe and other CIA analysts. "Their bosses are [still] saying the tubes are for centrifuges."

By summer's end, under unknown circumstances, Obeidi received permission to bring his family to an East Coast suburb in the United States. He declined through intermediaries to be interviewed, and a government official asked that his location not be published. Albright, who hopes to employ Obeidi at his Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, is no longer willing to discuss the case.

At Hussein's former palace complex in Abu Ghurayb, lush by Baghdad standards with two small artificial lakes, frustrated members of the nuclear search team by late spring began calling themselves the "book of the month club."

"There's a lot of guys over there read more novels than they will the rest of their lives," said a recently returned investigator, speaking on condition of anonymity. "You've got some bored people over there, big time."

Nuclear investigators had come with expectations set by Bush and Cheney, who gave rhetorical emphasis to Iraq's nuclear threat in their most compelling arguments for war. At least four times in the fall of 2002, the president and his advisers invoked the specter of a "mushroom cloud," and some of them, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, described Iraq's nuclear ambitions as a threat to the American homeland.

On the ground in Iraq, one investigator said, the nuclear investigation began as and remained "the least significant of the missions." The resources, personnel and operational pace of the nuclear team, he said, "were minuscule compared to chem and bio," a reference to chemical and biological weapons probes.

Fewer than one-tenth of 1 percent of the search personnel had nuclear assignments, about a dozen out of 1,500 at the peak strength of the Iraq Survey Group. In the immediate postwar period, investigators had about 600 leads in an "integrated master site list," of which the U.S. Central Command identified a "Top 19 WMD," for weapons of mass destruction. Only three of those were nuclear-related: Ash Shaykhili Nuclear Facility, the Baghdad New Nuclear Design Center and the Tahadi Nuclear Establishment.

"There really wasn't a need for our specialized area of work," Navy Cmdr. David Beckett said in a recent interview. In Iraq, Beckett commanded a group of nuclear-trained Special Forces known as the Direct Support Team. Now program manager for special nuclear programs at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Beckett said the aluminum tubes and machine tools cited in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate -- vacuum tubes, industrial magnets and balancing machines -- were "not a big focus" of his work in Iraq. He added, "To be honest, I've read more about that since I got back."

An administration official, defending the CIA's prewar analysis, said its message had been widely misunderstood. "The term 'reconstituting' means restoring to a former condition, a process often inferred to be short term," he said. "Based on reporting, however, Saddam clearly viewed it as a long-term process. So did the NIE."

Meekin, the Australian general who had principal responsibility for collecting Iraqi military technology, said his 500-member unit is disbanding, its work largely done. According to U.S. government officials, some of Kay's leading nuclear investigators have already left Iraq. Nuclear physicist William Domke, who ran the centrifuge investigation, returned last month to his intelligence post at the Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Jeffrey Bedell, Domke's counterpart at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, has also come home.

Domke and Bedell, according to people who know their work, confirmed their prewar analysis that the tubes were not suited for centrifuges and that Iraq had no program to use them as such. They had seen the tubes in December and January, on temporary assignment for the IAEA in Iraq. They were also principal authors of the Energy Department's dissent from the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002.