Southern Baghdad: In a valley sculpted by man, between the palms and roses, lies a
vast marble and steel city known as Al-Tuwaitha.
In the suburbs about 18 miles South of the capital's suburbs, this city comprises
nearly 100 buildings – workshops, laboratories, cooling towers, nuclear reactors,
libraries and barracks – that belong to the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission.
Investigators on April 8 discovered that Al-Tuwaitha hides another city. This
underground nexus of labs, warehouses, and bomb proof offices was hidden from the
public and, perhaps, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors who combed
the site just two months ago, until the US Marine Corps combat engineers discovered
it three days ago.
Today, the Marines hold it against enemy counter-attacks.
So far, Marine nuclear and intelligence experts have discovered 14 buildings that
betray high levels of radiation. Some of the readings show nuclear residue too
deadly for human occupation.
A few hundred metres outside the complex, where peasants say the "missile water" is
stored in mammoth caverns, the Marine radiation detectors go "off the charts".
"It's amazing," said chief warrant officer Darrin Flick, the battalion's nuclear,
biological and chemical warfare specialist. "I went to the off-site storage
buildings, and the rad detector went off the charts. Then I opened the steel door,
and there were all these drums, many, many drums, of highly radioactive material."
To nuclear experts in the United States, the discovery of a subterranean complex is
highly interesting, perhaps the atomic "smoking gun" intelligence agencies have been
searching for as 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' unfolds.
Last fall, they say, the Central Intelligence Agency prodded international
inspectors to probe Al-Tuwaitha for weapons of mass destruction. The inspectors came
away with nothing.
"They went through that site multiple times, but did they go underground? I never
heard anything about that," said physicist David Albright, a former IAEA action team
inspector in Iraq from 1992 to 1997. Officials at the IAEA could not be reached for
comment.
"The Marines should be particularly careful because of those high readings. Three
hours at levels like that and people begin to vomit. That leads me to wonder, if the
readings are accurate, whether radioactive material was deliberately left there to
expose people to dangerous levels.
"You couldn't do scientific work in levels like that. You would die."
Albright hopes the Marines safeguard any documents they find and preserve the site
for analysis. That, say the combat engineers, is their mission.
Nestled in a bend in the Tigris River, Al-Tuwaitha was built in the early 1960s.
Nuclear experts believe the government began Iraq's nuclear weapons programme there
between 1972 and 1976. Satellite imagery shows dramatic expansion at the site in the
1970s, 1980s and 1990s, according to the Institute for Science and International
Security (ISIS).
Mindful of nuclear weapons inspectors, ISIS said the Iraqis developed methods to
thwart them when they visited Al-Tuwaitha.
"Iraq developed procedures to limit access to these buildings by IAEA inspectors,
who had a right to inspect the fuel fabrication facility. On days when the
inspectors were scheduled to visit, only the fuel fabrication rooms were open to
them. Usually, employees were told to take their rooms so that the inspectors did
not see an unusually large number of people," according to a 1999 report Albright
wrote with Corey Gay and Khidhir Hamza for ISIS.
Hamza, an Iraqi nuclear engineer who defected from Iraq in 1994, testified before
Congress last August that Iraq could have had nuclear weapons by 2005.
On April 9, Hamza expressed great surprise that the underground site could even
exist. The ground there is muddy and composed of clay, he said. The water table is
barely a foot and a half below the surface of the ground. During construction of one
of the former nuclear reactors there, French engineers spent a fortune pumping water
from the foundation area, only to see buildings crumble when the water was removed.
Hamza said the French built a reactor at Al-Tuwaitha that Israel destroyed in 1981.
The Russians built a reactor that was destroyed during the Gulf War. Both had the
muddy ground to contend with.
So the Marine's discovery makes the former atomic inspector wonder if the Iraqis
went to the colossal expense of pumping enough water to build the underground city,
because no reasonable inspector would think anything might be built underground
there.
"Nobody would expect it," Hamza said. "Nobody would think twice about going back
there."
Despite being destroyed twice by bombings, Al-Tuwaitha nevertheless grew to become
headquarters of the Iraqi nuclear programme, with several research reactors,
plutonium processors and uranium enrichment facilities bustling, according to the
Federation of American Scientists.
"The plutonium processing was dispersed on-site by the bombing in 1991," said
Michael Levi, the federation's director. "But the Iraqis started to rebuild it. And
they continued building there after 1998, when the Iraqis ended the inspections.
"I do not believe the latest round of inspections included anything underground, so
anything you find underground would be very suspicious. It sounds absolutely
amazing."
Outside the gates on April 9, children on donkeys dragged air conditioners from the
area, part of the ongoing looting of government offices, Iraqi Army forts and Baath
party headquarters.
The nuclear scientists, engineers and technicians, housed in a plush neighbourhood
near the campus, have run away, along with Baath party loyalists.
Farmers in rags drive the scientists' Mercedes and Land Rovers across Highway Six,
filled with looted colour televisions, silk rugs and Burberry suits.
That's where the Marines see the grand irony.
Amidst grinding poverty, where peasants eke an existence out of dust and river
water, the Saddam Hussein regime built a lavish atomic weapons program. In a nation
with some of the world's largest petroleum reserves, Saddam saw the need for nuclear
energy.
"It's going to take some very smart people a very long time to sift through
everything here," said Flick. "All this machinery. All this technology. They could
do a lot of very bad things with all of this."
The mayor of this high-tech city is, for now, captain John Seegar, a combat engineer
commander from Houston, Texas. He trudges up the 10-story hillocks hiding the campus
from the surrounding villages and, crossing near a demolished mud bunker, it all
opens up, gleaming and swaddled in roses.
"I've never seen anything like it, ever," said Seegar, who leads a company of combat
engineers turned into combat grunts. "How did the world miss all of this? Why
couldn't they see what was happening here?"
Seegar's biggest headache: Peasant looters, who keep cutting through the miles of
barbed wire, no longer electrified because the war killed the power. He cradles in
his arms blueprints in Arabic, showing recent construction, and maps in English,
detailing which buildings test radioactive. Next to each, Seegar's placed an
asterisk.
"Three weeks ago, the scientists seemed to have abandoned the complex," said
Seegar. "That's what the villagers say. The place was protected by the Special
Republic Guard, but they deserted it, too. Four days ago, everyone was gone. Then we
came."
For him, Al-Tuwaitha is like a crime scene, and the next detectives on the atomic
beat will be Army specialists.
Seegar promises to hold the nuclear site until international authorities can take
over. His men hunker down in sandbag bunkers, sleepless, gripping machine guns.
On April 9 night, they followed running gun and artillery battles on both sides of
the complex, fought by US Marines and soldiers against Iraqi Republican Guards and
Fedayeen terrorists.
In the deserted edifices of Iraqi science, there is the omnipresent Saddam.
Paintings show Saddam with scientists; Saddam with farmers; Saddam with soldiers. On
the walls, Saddam's face. In the scrub surrounding the guard bunkers, murals of
Saddam. There are books of Saddam sayings. Scientists' offices glitter with medals,
from Saddam.
The offices underground, under unlit signs warning of "gas/gaz", are stuffed with
videos and pictures, all showing how this complex was built, largely over the last
four years after formal international inspections ended. The Marines haven't even
mapped all the subterranean tunnels veining the site.
In an above ground library built like a fortress with a beautiful alabaster marble
now washed in dust and mud, the clocks stopped at 10 minutes until one. The stacks,
cool because of the marble, hold the scientific manuals, textbooks and published
papers for the Iraqi intelligentsia.
In the commanding general's study, goldfish still swim in a long tank, glittering
like the medals on his desk from Saddam.
"Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy for Scientific and Economic Development," a bulky
green tome published in 1975, leans against the general's wall, under a picture of
Saddam, whose Baath Party came to power four years later in a bloody coup.
On a mantle, folded under documents, a Christmas card never sent. On the front is a
dove, its wings the ellipses of the atom, tinged in orange, yellow and green. Under
it, a tiger, facing backward, its body a swirl of Arabic letters. Inside the
card, "Rights of Third World Peoples to Alternate Energy Sources for the Future
Development of their Environment and Culture."
The next page, "Let us Hope this New Year will be a Year of Peace and Justice and
with all Good Wishes for Christmas and the New Year." Signed, Iraqi Atomic Energy
Commission. Baghdad.
