I think, disserving our country, was essentially allowing an endrun around American laws. And, I think that is one of the I think is one of the real problems and real tragedies with our export laws that they allow us, if you manipulate them correctly, or you circumvent them, you can-you can, while complying with the letter of the law, certainly not comply with the spirit of the law and certainly not with the requirements of being a good citizen and trying to protect national security.

But, I want to go back to 1991 because I can recall that after the war, we had a number of statements to the effect, the same effect as Dr. Milhollin has given us now, that we helped to built that military apparatus, and you heard in Congress a lot of resounding "Never again shall that happen." And yet, Dr. Hamza, in the 1990s, the mid 1990s after the war was over, you were involved in the continuing weapons program for Saddam Hussein, is that correct? And, that weapons program continued even though we had inspectors in the country. Is that right?

Dr. HAMZA. Yes, 1993, as I mentioned, for example, the diffusion process, the bottleneck which, in the diffusion process for uranium enrichment, was a barrier. It was completed in 1993 when the inspectors were there.

Mr. HUNTER. So again, now, it has been-the point has been made by several members. They have pulled out these charts that showed how much we seized, almost like the Mexican government showing how much cocaine has been stopped from delivery across the border, and what they don't show us is how much activity continued to go on. And so, what you are saying is the nuclear weapons program was continuing even while we were trotting out these seizures and announcing with great flourishes that certain facilities had been shut down.

Obviously, other facilities that we didn't know about were being opened up and were operating; is that right?

Dr. HAMZA. That is correct.

Mr. HUNTER. Well, then would you basically agree with-when we had two inspectors in here last week who told about their frustrations and their feeling that they made almost no progress. And, one of our members said, "Well, what depth of inspection do you need to be sure that you are really sanitizing that entire weapons complex." And, the answer was, "You need virtually an occupation of the country to be able to know that." Is that your

Dr. HAMZA. Yeah, that's correct, because in no other way can you really get around to know where things are and get your hand on them because somebody is carrying before you go there and picking things ahead of you. And, unless you have a force to really control this, what is going on, there is no way you can get your hand on serious.

Mr. HUNTER. Yeah. I think the person who was told two weeks ahead of time that an inspection team was going to be at a certain facility, and when they arrived, there were lots of nuclear weapons materials lying around and then he had to go explain that to Saddam Hussein. I would hate to be in his shoes at that point. It would be an act of gross negligence on the part of one of their governmental officials not-after they got the tip-off that the inspection team was coming, not to have moved the materials. So, it looks

like we are going through an exercise, which is totally symbolic in nature, to invite inspectors back in on the basis that somehow that is going to solve this problem.

Dr. HAMZA. How would it solve in the future? Suppose we solve it. We agree. I don't agree we are going to solve it now even. What is there cannot be found now. It is already organized in such a way it is impossible to find. But, suppose you did find it. Suppose inspectors can claim knowledge they don't have and can go in and take what is there. What guarantee do you have it is not going to put together, put back together again in the future and the whole program won't be rejuvenated and working in say two years from now, three years from now?

So, the whole thing depends on the will of the government. If the government is not willing to give this up, and it is not, for obvious reasons, throughout all the time and all the problem going everybody is going through, it lost hundreds of billions—well, I don't know, 100, 120 billion in oil revenues to keep the system.

So, what guarantee is there, with a government that accepted such a huge loss, not to allow the system to be dismantled, it will in the future somehow forget about it and drop this option and let everything go? What kind of guarantee anybody has? Would anybody be really ready to guarantee this?

Mr. HUNTER. Let me ask you another question. It has been mentioned that Saddam Hussein is-has, and you mentioned that he basically got his scientists together and said we must move out on a program and have a nuclear weapons program. Did he did you regularly get communications from Saddam Hussein or from his offices to the nuclear weapons community, to the scientists community?

Dr. HAMZA. I have just to make a point that Saddam founded all the WMD programs and the missile. He took over atomic energy personally, as chairman in 1973.

Mr. HUNTER. He took it over personally?

Dr. HAMZA. Personally. He ran all the WMD programs personally. He chose the administrators, he chose the staff, most of the senior staff. He also took away the financing of the WMD from the general government budget and made it into the revolutionary council budget, which is separate. So, he personally, because he runs the revolutionary council even when he was Vice President. The President never attended the meetings of the revolutionary council, so automatically as vice president, he became the chairman. So, the whole budget was appropriated by him. The actual personnel chosen was by him. The approval of the programs were by him from day one.

I mean, I went as a head of the Iraqi delegation to France in 1974 to purchase a reactor through his orders. He was my chairman then. And, we-when we suggested negotiating a nuclear cooperation treaty with the France, India, he went personally and signed them, in France and in India. So, you this is his own creation. The whole WMD program, in all its phases is his personal creation. And, he nurtured it personally and followed it personally. There is nothing in the world that would make him give it up. Mr. HUNTER. Did you have any conversations with him? Dr. HAMZA. Yes.

Mr. HUNTER. Tell me about the nuclear reactor that the Israelis destroyed in-was it 1982?

Dr. HAMZA. In 1981, June 1981.

Mr. HUNTER. Was that reactor devoted to the weapons program? Dr. HAMZA. That reactor was actually internationally supervised facility. We were Dr. Jaffer and I, the head of the nuclear program now there. We were actually planning on using it in some kind of arrangement to irradiate some extra uranium, which we have, and extract the plutonium out of that in a facility provided to us by the Italians. So, it was a slow, long-range process because the French were there. Inspectors will come every six months to inspect this facility. When the Israelis bombed out that reactor, true, it delayed our program for some time. But, it was a relief to Saddam. He just did not want everybody looking over our shoulder what we are doing and we are cheating with the extra time we can find.

He wanted a totally secret program, totally at our control. So when the Saudis offered to buy us another reactor, he refused. He took the money and diverted it into the enrichment program. He asked what alternative can we have to build our own system, and we told him it is enrichment. He jumped the staff from 400 working in the French reactor to 7,000 in 5 years. The budget raised from 400 million to 10 billion by the onset of the Gulf War.

Mr. HUNTER. To ten billion?

Dr. HAMZA. To ten billion, the cost of the program at the onset of the Gulf War. So, actually what we had, what we started with, which was a nuclear program to basically ongoing to make two or three nuclear weapons or four max, turned into a large entity, which is meant to produce a larger amount of nuclear weapons and turn Iraq into a serious nuclear power in the region.

Mr. HUNTER. And, in your estimation, we have heard a lot of estimates from U.N.-the U.N. analyses as to how close Iraq was to having a nuclear weapon at the time of the Gulf War. How far away were you at that time?

Dr. HAMZA. Actually, Ambassador Butler gave a very accurate estimate, which is six months.

Mr. HUNTER. You were about six months away?

Dr. HAMZA. Yeah, six months away.

Mr. HUNTER. And yet, the Western analyses before we had the war, the projections were that you were three to five years away. Dr. HAMZA. Yeah, exactly. And, that is

Mr. HUNTER. To what do you attribute that, because we have a lot of people we send to college and send to intelligence schools and are supposed to be great analysts of intelligence information, and yet they were totally off, obviously, with that estimate.

To what do you attribute that huge disparity between what we thought Saddam had and what you, as a member of his nuclear weapons program, say you really did have, which was a six month time table? I mean, that ended up making a lot of congressmen look like fools because the congressmen, some very prestigious congressmen, would get up on the Senate and House floor, and would talk about how we had three to five years and how we should have sanctions against Iraq and slowly they would come around. And yet when we got there, we had this six month timetable we were deal

ing with. To what do you attribute the gap between what we thought Iraq had, three to five-year program, and what they really had, which was six months to a nuclear weapon.

Dr. HAMZA. It is security, the huge security, which controlled the flow of information out of Iraq. The security was so tight and so brutal, even people who defected did not talk about the program. I heard a man who was in charge of the communication between the tests for the bomb, testing explosives, and the equipment in an underground facility. And, he defected.

And, we were terrified that at the time because security was hovering around us, how did you let him go and everybody was banging us all the time that actually Kamel said that is it. Everybody will know now. And, nobody knew because he didn't talk. He was afraid for his family. So, the security was so tight and so brutal and retribution, that anybody, even those who left, did not talk.

So, in the end, the flow of information is what deceived everybody. For example, during the Gulf War, you bombed only three seriously out of seven sites doing nuclear weapons. The nuclear weapon facility itself, of which this guy ran out, the one I just told you about, the communication engineer. Okay, this is the man who left, he knew this facility. The U.S. did not know about it. They did not bomb it.

So, the main nuclear weapons site was unknown. Three other sites were unknown. Out of seven sites, the U.S. bombed only three seriously and one was hit incidentally. This is control of information. This is security. Human intelligence is just not there. And, when you don't have it, there is no way you can tell what is going on down there.

Mr. HUNTER. What happened to the fissile material that you had at the time of the Gulf War?

Dr. HAMZA. It was French fuel actually, which was bomber grade. And, it was delivered to the inspectors. Some of the roads were chopped for an experimental reason, but-to experiment with extracting the uranium out of it. But most of it was-remained intact and all of it with the chopped pieces was delivered to the inspectors.

Mr. HUNTER. So, what you had at that time was confiscated and that is what set the Iraqi program back again was the war and the interruption of the program and the war.

Dr. HAMZA. Yes. The war and the six months was to make that one weapon. That was the estimate. It is not that a production facility would be on-line, no. It was not six months away. What would be in the six months is one nuclear weapon using the French fuel.

Mr. HUNTER. And, then you would have-the production line to make more weapons would have followed on after that.

Dr. HAMZA. Yeah. That was down the road, something like two, three years.

Mr. HUNTER. Dr. Milhollin, it is a great opportunity to have you here at the same time as Dr. Hamza, because you are able to-we are able to get some insight literally from the inside and also have your analytical capability at hand. What are your-do you have any observations having listened to Dr. Hamza and understand what was going on on the other side of this-of these technology

transfers and in any lessons for the United States that you think we should learn from this?

Dr. MILHOLLIN. Well, first I would like to say that I believe the reason for the difference in the estimates is that the intelligence community, giving the estimates of three to five years, assumed that the French fuel and some Russian fuel also in Iraq would not be diverted from international safeguards because they were being inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Mr. HUNTER. But, how often were they being inspected?
Dr. MILHOLLIN. Not often enough, obviously.

Mr. HUNTER. Dr. Hamza, how often?

Dr. HAMZA. Presumably every six months, but that is when it started. After the six months, we immediately got the order to

Mr. HUNTER. So, I mean, what do you have? You have Saddam Hussein's promise that he really, truly is not going to use it for a weapon.

Dr. MILHOLLIN. Well, one of the problems was the IAEA's rules. They had rules for what they called material balance areas. And, if you didn't have enough for a bomb in a particular area, then you didn't have to inspect it as often.

So, we had these inspections every six months because the agency took the position that you shouldn't add all the amounts up in the country. We learned after the war began that, in fact, Iraq had enough material for one bomb, but it was spread out at different locations. But, because of the IAEA rules, they weren't inspecting it every three weeks as they would have to do if it were all in one place.

So, we had a problem with the IAEA's own rules, that was only discovered after the war began. But again, I think the difference for the estimates, the difference in the estimates is the assumption that it would not be the-the material would not be diverted. I think if you asked the CIA how long it would take if the material was subverted, they would have had a different answer.

Dr. HAMZA. I have some comment on this. Actually, it is worse than this. The International Atomic Energy Agency, despite reports in Der Spiegel and other journals about the Germans providing us with the technology for uranium enrichment, declared Iraq to be clean in the area of nuclear weapons. So, the whole structure that was built around a destroyed reactor basically, the French reactor was destroyed and atomic energy kept growing. And, inspectors were there.

Nobody asked "What are these buildings doing here? There is no reactor. What are you working on?" So what was going on is a huge infrastructure built up to make nuclear weapons, and at the same time, the IAEA vouching for Iraq that Iraq is not working on nuclear weapons despite all kinds of reports being in the media about Iraq purchases and Iraq acquisition of nuclear technology, which is meant for nuclear weapons.

Mr. HUNTER. Is there a chance that there is right now an operating centrifuge facility in Iraq that we simply don't know about?

Dr. HAMZA. I believe, yes. I believe Iraq is now in the pilot plant stage for centrifuge production. I mean, it has some several units of centrifuge together. Of course, you need thousands to be in the production stage. But, I believe Iraq has several centrifuges right