NOVEMBER2000
BOMBMAKER'S CONSCIENCE FINALLY FORCED HIM TO DEFECT
One of Florida State's physics grads
lived a hellish, though luxurious, life in Iraq until he decided
he was no longer willing to make bombs for Saddam Hussein.
Khidhir Hamza, a top student and grad assistant in FSU's physics
department from 1965 to 1969, had been ordered back to his homeland
of Iraq and put to work creating the big bomb for Saddam Hussein.
He did it, or almost. But finally. he decided he couldn't
bear to do it any longer. At great danger and with considerable
difficulty, he defected to the United States.
This month, the whole story - including multiple warnings about
Iraq's imminent bomb - comes out in Hamza's book, "Saddam's
Bombmaker," published by Scribners in New York.
In the late '60s, Hamza cruised around Tallahassee in a new Olds Cutlass, blaring Beach Boys 8-tracks. He was a happy foreign student blending in with the Americans, dating girls, shooting pool and swigging beer on West Tennessee Street when he wasn't teaching physics and working on his dissertation about nuclear reactions. His major professor was Steve Edwards, now dean of the faculties.
In Iraq, Hamza lived in the opulent Presidential Palace, drove a new Mercedes and earned twice the salary of a university professor, part of his reward for being Saddam's personal nuclear adviser. Slowly, for 20 years, he pieced together a nuclear bomb he hoped would never be used.
Now, living back in the United States with his family, Hamza tells about his career in Iraq's inner circle of top scientists and the harrowing saga of his escape from the dictator's grip in his book, written with a free-lance writer, Jeff Stein.
The book is a riveting page-turner about how Hamza lived with the terror of Saddam's rule that sent several of his recalcitrant colleagues to the dungeon. One was executed and many were beaten.
In the end, Hamza told all to the CIA, which finally helped bring him and his family to a life he says is much safer than what he endured in Iraq. Though he feels safer now, he does not reveal his phone number or the name of the city where he lives.
Hamza didn't set out to design Baghdad's nuclear bomb. After getting his Ph.D. from FSU, he was a physics professor at Fort Valley State College in Georgia, when he was yanked back to Iraq to pay off his student loan by working for its government.
When he was first sent back to Iraq, in the early 1970s, he describes that time as "those halcyon days before Saddam came to power, (when) Iraq and the United States were on friendly terms. (Saddam didn't take full power until 1979.) I was teaching at a small college in Georgia, perfectly acclimated to the land of hamburgers and wide highways, weekend dates and barbecues.
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HAMZA
"Then the roof fell in. Baghdad wanted something back
for the scholarship money it had advanced. They hinted none too
lightly that my father, who had cosigned the loan, would be held
responsible until I came back."
He was told his father might be tortured.
At first, he enthusiastically churned out ideas for what he hoped would be the peaceful development of nuclear energy in Iraq.
With the mission to build a nuclear bomb from scratch, he
started his work with books, papers and pencils at a dining room
table in a country with little technological know-how, just scientists
like Hamza with Ph.Ds.
What he really needed was a nuclear reactor that could make large
amounts of plutonium.
In the end, to his horror, he was ordered to build the bomb faster and faster.
Now, Hamza warns, Saddam is only months away from making a
bomb that works, and he's evil enough to use it.
In 1994, Hamza risked his life to escape scientific servitude
in Iraq, with Saddam's hit squads on his trail. Leaving his family
behind (counting on the CIA to bring his family out, which ultimately
happened), he stole away across three continents to tell the
United States about the inner workings of Iraq's nuclear arsenal,
only to be given the brush-off by the CIA.
Finally, the CIA listened to him and he lived to tell his story.
How he lived with himself as Saddam's chief bomb-maker went beyond fear.
"It was a wrenching decision and carried out under oppressive
circumstances," Hamza said.
He said he was also pacified by believing that the peace process
with Israel would go on for decades, and it would take that long
to perfect a nuclear device - long after Saddam had disappeared
from the scene.
"In retrospect, we did succeed in not delivering the
bomb at dangerous points in Iraq's various conflicts, but we
did build the infrastructure that still makes this a future possibility,"
he admitted "That's what bothers me now."
Hamza never wanted to return to Iraq after his American education.
He liked it here.
"I was happily becoming an American," he says of his years getting a master's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his doctorate in theoretical nuclear physics from FSU, which had just acquired an accelerator and was attracting a lot of students.
"I guess I can easily say that 1965 to 1969 were some of the best years of my life," Hamza recalled in an interview. "Tallahassee remains easily the most beautiful town I lived in. Foreigners then were few, and the town people treated us well and generously. FSU gave me a research assistantship on top of my Iraqi government stipend, so I lived well."
Tallahassee was a "pretty sleepy place compared to Boston, but a lot better than Baghdad," Hamza recalls in his book.
His fondest memories of Tallahassee were weekend parties at friends' apartments, and befriending the owners of a bar on West Tennessee Street that fed him thick ham sandwiches, taught him trick shots on the pool table and let him in on weekly poker games.
He was amazed that he, a Shiite Muslim from southern Iraq, was invited to high-stakes seven-card stud poker games at a huge estate on a nearby tobacco plantation, where he met "a group of pink-faced, oversized men in golfing pants who were happily chortling with one another and chomping on huge cigars."
"It was a game beyond my means," Hamza recalled in an interview. "But the easy life, the thick steaks you have to grill yourself and the pile of beer cans in ice buckets made listening to their stories very interesting."
Now, he said, he feels like a new American teaching his family to live as Americans.
"I taught my wife to cook steaks and pies and filled the household with gadgets," Hamza said. "My sons had no difficulty adjusting here, because of my emphasis on learning English at home and in schools in Iraq. My oldest son is now a successful computer consultant. No member of my family wants to go back now, even if Saddam is gone."
He's lost his land and house and cars in Iraq, worth millions.
"But I have no regrets for leaving," he said. "I won't be rich again, but somehow I feel better for the security of my family. The U.S. helped me extricate them out of Iraq and saved their lives in the process. I will always be grateful for that."