The Counter-deception Blog

Examples of deceptions and descriptions of techniques to detect them. This Blog encourages the awareness of deception in daily life and discussion of practical means to spot probable deceptions. Send your examples of deception and counter-deception to colonel_stech@yahoo.com.

Wednesday, December 01, 2004

 

"The Bomb in My Garden" Wasn't

Truth in book reading department. Obeidi’s memoir has been greatly abused by defenders of the White House claims on Iraq WMD intentions. The book’s title is itself, deceptive—there were no bombs in any gardens.

For example, this USNews editorial gist of the book is misleading (as is the editorial), but such highly selective quotesmanship and wholesale misrepresentation of this book are quite common:

Saddam's strategic objective was quite simple--to end the
sanctions so he could reconstitute his banned weapons programs. This has been
confirmed by Saddam's chief nuclear guru, Mahdi Obeidi, in a book called The
Bomb in My Garden. Under orders from Qusay Hussein, Obeidi buried a huge barrel
in his back garden that contained the components of an actual centrifuge for the
enrichment of uranium, in addition to printed instructions and other information
on the subject. Obeidi wrote in the New York Times, "Iraqi scientists had the
knowledge and the designs needed to jump-start the [nuclear weapons] program if
necessary. And there is no question that we could have done it so very
quickly."

By Mortimer B. Zuckerman “The real truth about Iraq” USNews.com
11/1/04
www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/041101/opinion/1edit.htm

October 31, 2004 NYTimes.com
'The Bomb in My Garden': Science Fiction
By JACOB HEILBRUNN

THE BOMB IN MY GARDENThe Secrets of Saddam's Nuclear Mastermind. By Mahdi Obeidi and Kurt Pitzer. 242 pp. John Wiley & Sons. $24.95.

MAHDI OBEIDI is an unusual penitent. A gifted Iraqi scientist, he led the effort to provide Saddam Hussein with a nuclear bomb. Now, in ''The Bomb in My Garden,'' written with Kurt Pitzer, an experienced journalist, Obeidi explains why he failed. His memoir is not an instructive guide to Iraq's quest for the bomb. It is an indispensable one. Expertly organized and packed with telling vignettes, it is never less than riveting. Not a member of Hussein's camarilla but in close contact with it, Obeidi draws on his experiences to depict a regime that became the premier consumer of its own propaganda. For from the beginning, it was clear that Iraq's bomb program was unlikely to succeed.
Obeidi, born in 1944, received much of his early scientific training in the United States. A talented mathematics student, he landed a five-year scholarship from the Ministry of Education for study at the Colorado School of Mines when he was 18. After earning a master's degree in petroleum-refining engineering, he returned to Iraq and joined the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission when it was set up. By 1976, he was in charge of materials research and, on a grant partly paid for by the United Nations, spent four months apprenticing in the Italian nuclear program. ''The Italians were very kind and allowed me almost unrestricted access to their facilities and reactor designs,'' he writes. He would discover similar kindness from scientists from a host of countries in coming years.
When Hussein seized power in 1979, Iraq pushed ahead even more aggressively with its nuclear program. Construction on a 40-megawatt French reactor at Tuwaitha was almost complete, but as the final components arrived, Obeidi noticed that the aluminum piping leading to the reactor was pitted. His warnings were ignored, the project went ahead and Saddam presented 20 automobiles to his top scientists. Obeidi didn't get one. He learned an ''enduring lesson that day,'' he says. ''It was taboo for a scientist to raise issues that were inconvenient to Saddam's government.'' Fortunately, in a daring raid on June 7, 1981, eight Israeli F-16 fighter jets bombed and destroyed the reactor.
The bombing prompted Hussein to embark on a more covert program. After Obeidi redeemed himself with a successful scientific experiment, Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, tapped him to head a program that relied on using a gas centrifuge to enrich uranium. No expense was spared: when the scientists complained about the poor quality of their meals, a courier arrived hours later with a sack of cash to hire a private caterer. But the regime's draconian demands for overnight results were counterproductive. After an oil centrifuge rotor the scientists were experimenting on cracked under extreme pressure because they hadn't carried out sufficient research, Obeidi profusely apologized to Kamel, who, he writes, ''only stared at me with a look of such menace that I instinctively took a step backward.''
Obeidi regrouped and focused on building a state-of-the-art magnetic centrifuge. The Reagan administration, then cozying up to Hussein as he battled Iran, turned a blind, or at least a sleepy, eye toward his nuclear ambitions. Obeidi went on a shopping spree, using a mixture of front companies, bribes and sheer charm, to procure the necessary parts, information and, above all, technical support. Within 18 months, Obeidi had created what he calls ''very likely the most efficient covert enrichment program in history.'' But nothing could propitiate his masters: during his sole meeting with Hussein, who, after silently staring at him in the eyes for two minutes, a juvenile trick he used to unnerve his interlocutors, inquired about actual results, Kamel interjected, ''Dr. Mahdi is a very humble man who hates to boast. He believes that results will be shown within the next few months.'' Outside, one of Hussein's advisers screamed at Obeidi: ''Why didn't you tell the president what he wanted to hear? . . . You should be more afraid to disappoint him now than to disappoint him later!''
Hussein's invasion of Kuwait finished off his nuclear program. As Iraq was relentlessly bombed, Obeidi, intent on saving the remnants of his work, was reduced to burying a copy of centrifuge designs and four components in his backyard near his favorite lotus tree.
It was an abrupt end to a program supposed to help restore Iraq to its past greatness. As United Nations inspectors swarmed across the country, Hussein went to great lengths to destroy his stocks of illegal weaponry and hide his projects. Once the United Nations established the oil-for-food program, Hussein was reluctant to jeopardize his black- market contracts by reviving his weapons programs and instead lived in a complete fantasy world about his military capabilities: even as war loomed, Obeidi says, ''the sense of denial was so great that as late as December, I was overseeing a 10-year development plan.''
Though Obeidi vividly portrays this phantasmagoric world, it's unclear how much credence we should place in his assertions that he proceeded only in the spirit of scientific inquiry and out of fear for his family's safety. Like almost everyone in Iraq, he presents himself as a victim of the regime, and his reflections about his complicity with it are at best perfunctory. Still, it would be a mistake to inquire too closely into his motives. Hussein's threats were hardly idle, and after the second gulf war, Obeidi voluntarily handed over the documents and parts he had secreted in his backyard to United States intelligence.
His small hoard revealed how little importance Hussein had come to attach to a program he once saw as the key to greatness. Had Hussein been less reckless, Obeidi might well have ended up as Iraq's version of Pakistan's A. Q. Khan, celebrated as a national hero for fashioning a nuclear bomb. Instead, Obeidi lives with his family in an undisclosed location in the United States and denounces the inexorable spread of the technology that he once tried to harness.

Jacob Heilbrunn writes editorials for The Los Angeles Times.

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