How Saddam got weapons of mass destruction: Saddam Hussein's war machine is being built systematically to strike at the U.S. with new nuclear, biological and chemical weapons designed to kill millions

The credibility of the INC information was given a new boost in a White House report issued to buttress the president's U.N. speech. The section on Iraqi weapons programs began by citing Adnan Saeed al-Haideri, an Iraqi specialist who visited scores of clandestine weapons sites before defecting to the INC in November 2001. Al-Haideri had become Iraq's top authority in specialized epoxies used to seal minute cracks in concrete structures and clean rooms to prevent leaks that could give away their location. His skills made him an essential partner of Iraq's Special Security Organization, which used him to hide mini-production labs and storage facilities in private houses and other sites across Iraq.

When the CIA debriefed him in December 2001, al-Haideri identified 300 separate clandestine sites used by Iraq to hide biological and chemical weapons and nuclear materials. Some of the equipment was hidden in lead containers stored in fake wells lined with concrete. Al-Haideri said he was called in to seal cracks in the concrete because the Iraqis feared U.S. surveillance satellites would pick up the slightest radioactive emissions.

Al-Haideri's access to Iraq's best-kept secrets provided the United States with a "motherlode of intelligence," one source familiar with his debriefing tells INSIGHT. Iraq is so worried about what he told the CIA that a senior official took reporters in early August to a Baghdad site he claimed al-Haideri had identified as a biological-weapons production plant. Instead, the official claimed, it was a "livestock vaccination laboratory." Reporters were shown abandoned monitoring cameras installed by the United Nations. Dust-covered equipment and bottles littered the floor. Pointing to this "evidence," their Iraqi escort claimed that al-Haideri "is lying to the CIR" and was "motivated by our enemies."

Early this spring, intelligence analysts in Washington monitoring the progress of Iraq's nuclear-weapons programs were stunned when they discovered plans by a known Iraqi procurement front, al-Wasel & Babel, to purchase large quantities of special aluminum tubes for uranium-enrichment centrifuges. The procurement had been spread over a 14-month period, beginning in mid-2001.

The involvement of al-Wasel & Babel set off alarm bells. "This is a known front for the Iraqi intelligence services and their parallel procurement network controlled by Saddam Hussein's son Qusay," the former intelligence officer says. Some shipments quietly were intercepted en mute to Iraq, but a large number of the tubes slipped through, according to intelligence sources. Using these special aluminum tubes, Iraq now is believed to be operating a miniature uranium-enrichment "cascade" at a clandestine location, hermetically sealed to prevent telltale emissions.

Al-Wasel & Babel is a joint venture between the Lootah group in Dubai and the Rawame family, an Iraqi clan with dose ties to Saddam Hussein, that operates primarily out of Jordan. Their agent in Baghdad, Jamil al Hajaj, hand-delivers tasking messages from the regime to procurement agents operating outside of Iraq. Al-Wasel & Babel previously has been identified by U.S. intelligence as a conduit for clandestine purchases of Japanese fiber-optic cable through China. When INSIGHT called the group's commercial manager in the city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, a Pakistani named Sabr Montaz al-Qoreishi, we were told that al-Hajaj was arriving from Baghdad on Sept. 14.