Hussein Kamel

Hussein Kamel al-Majid was a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein and the head of Iraq's Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization, which directed its missile, chemical, biological, and nuclear programs in the 1980s.¹

Procurement

The ministry bought machine tools and technology in Europe and the United States through a network of front companies run from London by Safa al-Habobi, whom Representative Henry B. Gonzalez described as "one of Hussein Kamil's former Secret Security Organization cronies." Its holding company, the Technology Development Group, bought the British toolmaker Matrix Churchill in 1987. The purchases were financed by the Atlanta branch of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro. When the branch manager, Christopher Drogoul, was indicted on February 28, 1991, with al-Habobi and three other Iraqi officials, Kamel and the Jordanian trader Wafai Dajani were named as co-conspirators and not charged.¹

Kamel held the nominal rank of lieutenant. "After Saddam Hussein himself, Hussein Kamel was regarded as the most powerful man in Iraq," and "the word was that Saddam trusted Hussein Kamel more than his own son." He controlled the Al-Arabi Trading Company of Baghdad, the owner of the London holding companies, which had a partnership with Gerald Bull's Space Research Corporation and paid for Bull's purchases with the Atlanta loans. The head of the chemical industry and of the missile and chemical weapons programs, Lieutenant General Amir al-Saadi, reported to him. In 1989 he received Drogoul in Baghdad, "offering him pomegranate juice and his gratitude for all that BNL was doing." When the Financial Times began printing articles on the bank he reprimanded the British ambassador.²

Defection

On the night of August 7, 1995, Kamel drove to Jordan with his brother Colonel Saddam Kamel and crates of documents. On August 20 the Iraqi government handed the United Nations Special Commission a store of papers, said to have been found on Kamel's chicken farm, that showed a crash program to build a nuclear weapon. On August 22 he was questioned in Amman by the commission's chairman, Rolf Ekeus, with Maurizio Zifferero of the International Atomic Energy Agency and Nikita Smidovich. The record of the interview, marked sensitive, was not published.³

"I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons," he told them. "All weapons, biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed." Asked by Smidovich whether weapons and agents had been destroyed, he said: "nothing remained." The destruction had followed the inspectors' visits: "You have important role in Iraq with this. You should not underestimate yourself. You are very effective in Iraq." Of the missiles: "not a single missile left but they had blueprints and molds for production." Of the nerve agent VX: "they put it in bombs during last days of the Iran-Iraq war. They were not used and the programme was terminated." He said of the government: "I can state publicly I will work against the regime."³

He returned to Baghdad with his brother in February 1996 and both were killed on February 23.³

2002 and 2003

Vice President Dick Cheney said on August 26, 2002, that Kamel's case "should serve as a reminder to all that we often learned more as the result of defections than we learned from the inspection regime itself." President George W. Bush said on October 7 that the defection had forced Iraq to admit producing more than 30,000 liters of anthrax. Secretary of State Colin Powell cited it before the Security Council on February 5, 2003, as the source of Iraq's admission of four tons of VX, and Prime Minister Tony Blair cited it in the House of Commons on February 25. The transcript of the Amman interview was obtained by Glen Rangwala of Cambridge University and reported by Newsweek in its issue of March 3.³