Iraqi soldiers on September 24, 1991, prevented one inspection team from removing documents related to the design of a nuclear weapon from the Nuclear Design Center in Baghdad by holding the inspectors in a parking lot for four days, before allowing them to depart with the documents.
Saddam's internal security forces also sought to intimidate Iraqi personnel familiar with the details of its illicit programs to deter them from passing information to the inspectors. If the Iraqi authorities discovered that government officials had been too cooperative with the inspectors, they harshly punished not only the whistleblower, but also his entire extended family. Former IAEA inspector David Kay recalled that disloyalty often was punished by death:
The first Iraqi defector after the war came out and gave us some basic information on the calutron process. He had staged his own death on the highway to Mosul, and he thought they would not find out that he was still alive and had defected. He had been out for less than two months when a journalist printed the story. His entire family down to second cousins were killed
Not surprisingly, few Iraqis chose to put their families at risk by providing information to the UNSCOM inspectors. According to official Iraqi documents seized by UNSCOM, 85 percent of the defectors from Iraq's scientific community chose not to contact Western governments
Under these conditions, UNSCOM's efforts to uproot Saddam's proscribed programs were a thankless, difficult, and potentially dangerous task. Given the fact that Iraq is bigger than the state of Texas and had extensive government-owned compounds often disguised as civilian industrial facilities, fertilizer plants, or other innocuous buildings, searching for Saddam's clandestine WMD programs was like searching for a needle located in one of hundreds of haystacks.
One Step Ahead. In addition to its shell game of storing contraband items in underground structures, wells, and houses in residential areas, Iraq also played a frustrating game of cat and mouse with inspectors, shuttling prohibited components from site to site. For example, on June 28, 1991, IAEA inspectors searching for calutrons used in Iraq's nuclear program were denied entrance to a military barracks at Abu Ghraib. With the aid of U.S. satellite intelligence, UNSCOM was able to track the movement of trucks transporting the calutrons to the Military Transport Command facility in Fallujah. The inspectors arrived just in time to see the Iraqis, who had been warned of their approach, trucking the calutrons away, leaving the inspectors to follow in hot pursuit.
As it became more sophisticated, Baghdad reportedly moved particularly sensitive documents and materials to new hiding places every 30 days to prevent defectors from giving useful intelligence on a timely basis to UNSCOM authorities.19 By the time defectors had left the country, established their bona fides with foreign intelligence agencies, and passed their information on to foreign governments to pass on to UNSCOM to act upon, the information was outdated.
