Missed Signals On WMD? (washingtonpost.com)

Jafar Dhia Jafar, who ran Iraq's nuclear program from 1982 on, revealed new details of his country's dealings with U.N. inspectors in a telephone interview yesterday from the United Arab Emirates, where he now lives. His interview was the first broad, on-the-record discussion of WMD issues by a top Iraqi scientist since the end of the war.

Jafar said Iraqis destroyed all stockpiles of chemical weapons -- including mustard gas, sarin, tabun and VX -- and biological weapons, including botulinum toxin, anthrax and aflatoxin. Some of the biological toxins had been weaponized in 1990, but never used, so the regime decided to conceal that program from U.N. inspectors, Jafar said. They also withheld some details of their nuclear program.

First hints of the Iraqi bioweapons program were made to U.N. chief inspector Rolf Ekeus in 1995, because the Iraqis knew that defectors had spoken of the program, Jafar said. A full accounting of the bioweapons that had been destroyed four years before came later in 1995, after the defection to Jordan of Hussein's son-in-law Hussein Kamel. Remaining aspects of the nuclear program were also disclosed to U.N. inspectors after Kamel defected, Jafar said.

As an example of the detailed information given to U.N. inspectors, Jafar cited 26 letters he provided between January and March 2003 to rebut allegations that Iraqis were continuing their nuclear weapons program. The letters, totaling 85 pages with 1,400 more as attachments, countered specific claims made in a Sept. 24, 2002, British intelligence dossier.

"The United Nations inspectors were on the ground. They were everywhere. They had access to all the documents," Jafar argued. "They knew the facts, and they should have said confidently that Iraq was free of weapons of mass destruction."

The intelligence failure in Iraq began with U.N. weapons inspectors, who gathered detailed evidence that Saddam Hussein had destroyed his weapons of mass destruction in 1991 but never presented those findings forcefully to the world.