Iraqi scientist gave CIA information that should have prevented war

Saad Tawfiq told his handlers that Saddam had shut down wmd program
By Agence France Presse (AFP)

The Daily Star, February 05, 2008

AMMAN: When Saad Tawfiq watched then-US Secretary of state Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations on February 5, 2003, he shed bitter tears as he realized he had risked his life and those of his loved ones for nothing. As one of Saddam Hussein's most gifted engineers, Tawfiq knew that the Iraqi dictator had shut down his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs in 1995 - and he had told his handlers in US intelligence just that.

And yet here was Powell - Tawfiq's television was able to receive international news through a link pirated from Saddam's spies next door - waving a vial of white powder and telling the UN Security Council a story about Iraqi germ labs.

"When I saw Colin Powell, I started crying - immediately. I knew I had tried and lost," Tawfiq told AFP five years later in the Jordanian capital, Amman.

Now in his 50s, a round-faced man with a small moustache and lively eyes behind delicate spectacles, Tawfiq described how the CIA set up an elaborate operation to recruit Iraqi weapons scientists and then ignored the results.

From the end of 2002 the US spy agency had sources inside Iraq's weapons plants telling them clearly what the whole world now knows - that Saddam had ended efforts to produce weapons of mass destruction.

Continued . . .