In This Article
The Prologue
The Hunt
The Sleuth
The Defector
The Mysteries
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
and JUDITH MILLER
In a January day in 1995, Dr. Rod Barton, a United Nations weapons inspector
with a gambler's instinct, decided to try bluffing the Iraqis. Ever since
their defeat in the Persian Gulf war, they had steadfastly denied ever making
any kind of germ weapons, despite much evidence to the contrary.
Barton, a 46-year-old Australian biologist, did not have much in his hand
-- just two pieces of paper. The documents proved nothing but were provocative:
They showed that in the 1980s, Iraq had bought about 10 tons of nutrients
for growing germs, far more than needed for civilian work, from a British
company.
"That was all I had," Barton recalled in an interview. "Not a full house,
just two deuces. So I played them both."
Sitting across from four Iraqi generals and scientists in a windowless room
near the University of Baghdad, Barton laid the documents on the table. Did
these, he asked, help refresh the Iraqis' memories?
"They went ashen," he recalled.
That meeting marked a turning point. In the months that followed, Iraq dropped
its denials and grudgingly admitted that it had run an elaborate program
to produce germ weapons, eventually confessing that it had made enough deadly
microbes to kill all the people on earth several times over.
U.N. officials say these disclosures are still seriously incomplete, as does
Washington, which has come to the brink of military conflict with Baghdad
over the issue.
The U.N. inspectors are now poised to return to Iraq under an accord in which
Iraq has promised full cooperation. But the story of the seven-year hunt
for secret biological weapons, as recounted by U.S., U.N. and private experts,
suggests that the inspectors may have a rocky time. It also shows why they
believe that Baghdad is still hiding missiles and germ weapons, and the means
to make both.
Among the disclosures were these:
-- Just before the gulf war in 1991, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's son-in-law
began a crash military program intended to give Iraq the ability to wipe
out Israel's population with germ weapons, an Iraqi general told inspectors.
MiG fighters, each carrying 250 gallons of microbes, were to be flown by
remote control to release anthrax over Israel. One pilotless plane was
flight-tested with simulated germs just before the war began, but the attack
was never attempted.
-- The locations of more than 150 bombs and warheads built by the Iraqis
to dispense germs are a mystery, as are the whereabouts of a dozen special
nozzles that Iraq fashioned in the 1980s to spray germs from helicopters
and aircraft.
-- On nearly all recent missions, inspectors have found undeclared "dual
use" items like germ nutrients, growth tanks and concentrators, all of which
have legitimate uses but can also make deadly pathogens for biological warfare.
Today, despite progress in penetrating Iraqi secrecy, inspectors say they
remain uncertain about most of Saddam's facilities to wage biological warfare.
The inspectors have found traces of military germs and their seed stocks
but none of the thousands of gallons of biological agents that the Iraqis
made before the 1991 gulf war. Baghdad says it destroyed the older material
but offers no proof.
And the inspectors are unsure of the extent to which Iraq has solved the
technical challenges of delivering germs to targets -- a problem that bedeviled
other states experimenting with biological arms.
Finally, the U.N. inspectors have suspicions -- but no proof -- that Baghdad
is hiding germs and delivery systems. Their worries are based, in part, on
a chilling calculus of missing weapons: The United Nations can account for
only 25 of the 157 germ bombs that Iraq has acknowledged making for its air
force.
And inspectors have no idea of the whereabouts of some 25 germ warheads made
for missiles with a range of 400 miles; Baghdad says it destroyed them but,
again, offers no proof.
Richard Butler, chairman of the U.N. Special Commission charged with eliminating
such weapons, said in report after report that the uncertainties are disturbing
and legion. He recently told the Security Council that the 639-page document
that comprises Iraq's latest "full, final and complete" declaration, its
fifth to date, "fails to give a remotely credible account" of Baghdad's long
effort to make biological arms.
THE PROLOGUE:
Iraq Renounces Germ War, but ...
In the 1950s and '60s, the world's major armed forces experimented
widely with germ warfare. Eventually they concluded that the nightmarish
weapons were too repugnant and too difficult to use.
By 1972, the global threat of biological war seemed to recede
as Iraq joined the United States, the Soviet Union and more than 100 other
nations in signing the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. The accord
banned possession of deadly biological agents except for defensive work like
research into vaccines, detectors and protective gear.
But it was only a pledge. It had no formal means of enforcement
and plenty of room for activities that were ambiguous as to whether they
were defensive or offensive.
Indeed, Iraq's clandestine effort to acquire biological weapons,
some inspectors now suspect, actually began shortly after it lent its support
to the convention.
The allure was great. Unlike nuclear arms, dangerous germs are
cheap and easy to come by. Yet their effects on people are potentially just
as extensive and grim as those of a nuclear bomb, if slower to act. A microbe
that divides every 30 minutes can produce more than a billion descendants
in hours, and a bubbling vat of offspring in a week or so. Even a few can
be dangerous.
Anthrax, normally a disease of cattle and sheep, can kill a human
after exposure to less than 10,000 germs, all of which would fit comfortably
on the period at the end of this sentence. Signs of pulmonary anthrax infection
include high fever, labored breathing and vomiting. It is usually fatal within
two weeks. A vaccine can prevent the infection, and it can be treated with
huge doses of antibiotics if caught in its early stages.
U.S. military and intelligence officials in the 1980s gathered
much evidence that Iraq had developed a large program to build biological
arms, with the work focused on anthrax.
The West tried to block the effort. In 1988 the Iraqis ordered
a 1,325-gallon fermenter to grow germs from a Swiss company, Chemap, and
arranged to buy several more. But the United States and its allies persuaded
Switzerland to drop the sale, said Dr. Jonathan B. Tucker, a former federal
arms-control official who is now a germ-weapon expert at the Monterey Institute
of International Studies in California.
The perceived threat was so great that on the eve of the gulf
war, President George Bush warned Saddam that Iraq would pay a "terrible
price" if it used biological or chemical weapons.
But the intelligence about germ warfare was generally imprecise,
and as the U.S.-led coalition prepared for war after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait
in 1990, planners could identify only one potential germ factory in Iraq.
That site, Salman Pak, not far from Baghdad, was bombed in the gulf war.
Though only one factory was identified, the U.S. military started
a crash program to vaccinate as many troops as possible against anthrax and
opened a campaign to knock out refrigerated bunkers suspected of holding
biological arms. After the war, U.S. officials were embarrassed to find that
the suspicious bunkers held only conventional arms, sheltered from the desert
sun.
After losing the war, Saddam, as a condition of surrender, agreed
to declare within 15 days all his nuclear, chemical and biological arms and
the long-range missiles needed to deliver them, and then to destroy them
all.
The United Nations set up a group to make sure he kept his word.
Until it verified destruction of the weapons, Iraq was barred from selling
oil, virtually its sole source of foreign exchange.
Later, the United Nations relented a bit and allowed some oil
exports to pay for food and medicine and to make reparations to
Kuwait.
THE HUNT:
Hide and Seek In the Wilds
Dozens of science detectives, many with military backgrounds, were
assembled from several nations after the war to discover the truth about
the biological arms. The inspectors, men and women ranging in age from their
20s to their 60s, worked out of dingy, roach-and-rat-infested hotels in
Baghdad.
Their first foray was to Salman Pak, a town and military center
southeast of Baghdad on an isolated bend of the Tigris River. About 30 inspectors
with the commission, known as Unscom, went there in August 1991 because the
site was considered the heart of Iraq's germ-warfare complex.
Sheltered by high walls, air defenses and a military unit, the
installation had been bombed during the war, and inspectors were eager for
a close-up look at what remained.
They were shocked, inspectors recalled. Two weeks before the team's
arrival, the Iraqis had leveled much of the site, removing production gear,
demolishing two buildings and bulldozing the rubble. Piles of ashes and melted
binders suggested that the Iraqis had kindled bonfires of documents.
Iraqi officials insisted that research at the site was peaceful,
intended to develop vaccines and other protection against dread diseases.
But the investigators suspected the site had a military purpose,
and eventually found a chamber for dispersing germs on test subjects that
was big enough to hold "large primates, including the human primate," one
inspector recalled.
The Iraqis said the chamber had been used merely for testing the
effectiveness of vaccines on such animals as sheep, donkeys, monkeys and
dogs. But they had hauled the chamber to a garbage dump some 20 miles from
Salman Pak and then crushed it with a bulldozer, apparently trying to keep
it out of sight.
Tucker, of the Monterey Institute, a former Unscom member, said
the inspectors had detected "a pattern of circumstantial evidence" of germ-weapon
production at Salman Pak but had found no smoking gun.
While at Salman Pak, the Iraqis told the inspectors of another
plant at Al Hakam, a site an hour's drive southwest of Baghdad that sprawled
across seven square miles of isolated desert.
Filling some of the buildings at Al Hakam were mazes of pipes,
valves, pumps and stainless-steel tanks. The Iraqis said they were for making
animal feed and bacterial pesticide. But the buildings were spaced unusually
far apart and surrounded by barbed wire, dummy bunkers, air defenses and
many guard posts.
Again, the evidence was equivocal. The inspectors suspected much
but had no proof.
In May 1992, Baghdad finally gave the United Nations its first
"full, final and complete disclosure" about its germ program, a report in
which Baghdad denied having ever dabbled in any kind of biological arms and
called for the inspections and sanctions to end.
Though the germ team kept running into dead ends, their colleagues
seeking other types of weapons kept making breakthroughs. Inspectors seeking
chemical arms found arsenals full of nerve agents like tabun and sarin, tiny
amounts of which are lethal. And to their shock, nuclear teams found Iraq
had made considerable progress in building an atomic bomb.
The germ sleuthing from 1991 to 1994 was hindered, in part, by
the lack of a experienced professionals at headquarters in New York to direct
the effort: Three years after the gulf war, the headquarters still had no
full-time staff biologist.
But congressional investigators were zooming ahead. By early 1994,
they had learned that the American Type Culture Collection, a company in
Rockville, Md., that sells microbes to scientists, had shipped up to 36 stains
of 10 deadly pathogens to Iraq in the 1980s, doing so with government approval.
Some had come from Fort Detrick, Md., the Army's main center for defensive
germ research.
"I was horrified," recalled James J. Tuite III, a congressional
aide who tracked the shipments for Sen. Donald Riegle, D-Mich., then chairman
of the Senate Banking Committee. "These were clearly agents that could be
used for biological warfare." Arguably, they also had use in making vaccines,
though experts with access to intelligence data about Baghdad's ambitions
doubted that explanation.
THE SLEUTH:
Trying to Unravel A Tangle of Clues
In April 1994, under increasing pressure from the United Nations
to come up with something or drop the germ investigation, Unscom hired Dr.
Richard Spertzel, who soon became the head of the biological team.
A portly man of military bearing, Spertzel, then 61, had served
for nearly three decades in the Army before retiring in 1987 as a colonel.
For 21 years he had worked in the world of military germs, both defensive
and offensive, much of the time at Fort Detrick.
Spertzel brought valuable expertise. He belonged to a generation
that knew about germ weapons from personal experience, from the days when
the United States had made them and envisioned their use in war.
By all accounts, Spertzel re-energized the Iraq inquiry. He pored
over documents -- "the evidence was almost shouting out," he recalled --
and took his worries to Rolf Ekeus, the Swedish diplomat who then headed
the United Nations effort to eliminate Iraq's weapons systems.
Ekeus ordered new inspection teams into the Iraqi hinterlands.
But he also warned Spertzel that they had to find evidence of military germs
soon, or give Iraq a clean bill of health.
By November 1994, Spertzel and three other experts in Iraq were
interviewing and re-interviewing Iraqi scientists, picking apart their accounts
and analyzing statements and records for discrepancies.
The team included Dr. David Kelly, a former Oxford University
microbiologist; Barton, the Australian biologist, and Lt. Col. Hamish Killip,
of the British Royal Engineers. They came together in argumentative camaraderie,
at times calling themselves the Gang of Four.
The team soon uncovered a secretive Iraqi group known as the Technical
and Scientific Materials Import Division. Part of the Organization of Military
Industrialization, it appeared to focus on germ warfare; for instance, it
supplied Salman Pak. The inspectors immediately knew the discovery was
significant.
"We were all very awake," recalled Barton, who recently left the
U.N. commission.
With that high card, the team was able to conduct a very narrow,
pointed search for records. To aid its hunt, the commission wrote in December
1994 to a handful of nations seeking help in uncovering documents about sales
of biological materials to that Iraqi group.
One reply came from Israel, said two U.S. intelligence experts
familiar with the episode, confirming a recent account of it in The Times
of London. The Israelis provided key trade documents that helped illuminate
a central if seemingly mundane foundation of the Iraqi germ program -- microbial
food.
The nutrients that bacteriologists use to feed and breed germs
are known as growth media. A specialized blend of sugars, proteins and minerals
that keep microscopic life flourishing, growth media have many legitimate
uses in hospitals and clinics, mainly as a way to identify illnesses. For
instance, a swab from the back of a patient's throat is placed in a small
dish of diagnostic media, and the presence of disease germs is indicated
by the visible growth of bacterial colonies.
But Iraq was found to have been importing growth media by the
ton, enough for growing teeming hordes of germs and filling many hundreds
of biological weapons, if not thousands.
The intelligence experts and the London Times report said the
Israelis had documented exports in the 1980s to Iraq from Oxoid, a British
company. Israel, the experts said, provided two letters of credit that referred
to sales of about 10 tons of growth media to Iraq.
The documents were vital in building a case that Iraq had produced
biological weapons. The inspectors, who under U.N. rules cannot talk about
companies or countries other than Iraq, refused to discuss how the documents
were obtained but emphasized their importance.
"That clinched it," said Kelly, the former Oxford don.
Spertzel, the chief biological inspector, called it "breakthrough
information, frankly," adding, "It was conclusive enough to sit down with
Iraq and be very challenging."
Barton used the bank documents to play his bluff in January 1995
-- and it worked. Almost immediately, Baghdad acknowledged the purchases
and produced evidence that it had bought even more germ nutrients. All told,
from Iraq and other sources, the team eventually found that Iraq had imported
about 40 tons of growth media, roughly 30 times more than needed for any
conceivable civilian uses.
And where was it now?
Iraqi officials had an answer. It was for regional hospitals and
laboratories that were making vaccines and detecting diseases.
Spertzel asked Gabriele Kraatz-Wadsack, 44, a German member of
the team, to test that explanation. During March 1995, she and her team tracked
down the growth media at warehouses and pharmaceutical factories; much of
it turned out to be stored at Al Hakam, the big plant in the desert.
"But I could still only account for 22 to 23 tons," she recalled.
"That meant that more than 17 tons were missing."
Clearly, Baghdad had more explaining to do. Tensions rose. Eventually
the Iraqis said much of the growth media sent to hospitals had been destroyed
in riots after the 1991 war.
As the team kept up the pressure, the Iraqis panicked. The meetings
between Unscom members and the Iraqi officials turned into shouting matches.
"It was a free-for-all," Barton said.
The breakthrough came on July 1, 1995, at an evening session in
Baghdad. Dr. Rihab Taha, an acknowledged leader of Iraq's civilian germ effort,
made a huge admission. It came grudgingly, inspectors said, and with no direct
eye contact. Taha kept looking down at her notes as she spoke.
Yes, she said, almost in tears at the strain of the moment, Iraq
had produced a horde of germs for biological warfare.
An eerie quiet followed. Inspectors wanted to ask questions but
refrained.
"There was not a lot of discussion," Barton recalled. "None of
us thought we would hear a real confession."
The Iraqis acknowledged, among other things, that the factory
at Al Hakam had produced thousands of gallons of deadly anthrax and botulinum
toxin -- enough, in theory, to wipe out whole cities and even nations.
For the first time, the Iraqis had confessed to a military program
for making germs. But no more than that. They still denied having ever developed
weapons designed to release those germs over enemy
targets.
THE DEFECTOR:
A Breakthrough In a Chicken Coop
The overlord of the Organization of Military Industrialization
was Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamal, Saddam's son-in-law and the second most powerful
man in Iraq. He had risen from a lowly bodyguard to become director of Iraq's
advanced-weapons procurement program and reportedly had a personality almost
as swaggering and domineering as his father-in-law's, seeing himself as the
natural successor.
Al Hakam had been his pet project, the inspectors learned, a personal
triumph with which he planned to increase his prestige in the feuding family
that ruled Iraq. But now, in early July 1995, his subordinates had been forced
to reveal its dark purpose.
After Taha's dramatic admission, Iraq gave the U.N. team an ultimatum.
According to team members, the Iraqis demanded that the United Nations bring
all inspections to an end within a month. If not, the inspectors would have
to go. The Iraqi ambassador who delivered the message said he was speaking
on behalf of Kamal.
The inspectors replied that quick settlement was impossible given
the new questions swirling around the germ work.
Iraqi threats mounted, and the inspectors prepared to leave Baghdad,
some fearing for their safety.
"He was in an impossible situation," Barton said of Kamal. "He
had given us an absurd ultimatum."
Then, suddenly, everything changed.
Late on the evening of Aug. 7, 1995, Kamal defected to Jordan.
The move reportedly occurred after he had quarreled at a family dinner that
was called to discuss Iraq's worsening economy and security, and that ended
with shooting that left six bodyguards dead. After that he fled.
Inspectors said his flight was caused partly by their discovery
of his biological weapons program, which damaged his standing with the ruling
family.
Seeking to pre-empt any disclosures, Baghdad withdrew its ultimatum
and, on Aug. 20, presented a trove of documents that it said "the traitor
General Kamal," as they now called him, had hidden from the Iraqi
government.
To reinforce the accusations against the general, the handing
over of the documents took place at a shed on Kamal's chicken farm.
The documents ran to more that half a million pages, stored in
boxes and steel trunks. There was a single, small, wooden box of documents
about the biological-weapons program. Though far from complete, the papers
showed that Iraq had done nearly everything in its power to prepare and use
biological weapons.
In documents and additional admissions that year, Iraq said it
had taken these actions:
-- Set its germ policy in 1974, seeking to build a stockpile of
biological arms.
-- Did research on anthrax, botulinium toxin (which causes muscular
paralysis resulting in death), aflatoxin (which causes liver cancer),
tricothecene mycotoxins (which cause nausea, vomiting and diarrhea), wheat
cover smut (which ruins food grains), hemorrhagic conjunctivitis (which causes
extreme pain and temporary blindness) and rotavirus (which causes acute diarrhea
that can lead to death).
-- Field-tested germs in sprayers, 122-mm rockets, 155-millimeter
artillery shells, tanks dropped from jet fighters and LD-250 aerial bombs.
-- Began a crash program to speed germ development in August 1990,
just as it invaded Kuwait.
-- Built and loaded 25 germ warheads for Al Hussein missiles,
which have a range of 400 miles. Botulinum toxin went into 16 of them, anthrax
into 5 and aflatoxin into 4. The warheads were about 3 feet wide and 10 feet
long. It also filled bombs designated R-400, which hold 20 gallons each.
Botulinum toxin went into 100, anthrax into 50 and aflatoxin into 7.
-- Deployed these weapons in the opening days of the 1991 gulf
war at four locations, ready for use, and kept them there throughout the
war.
Iraq also said it had secretly destroyed all its biological agents
and weapons in May or June 1991. This was a violation of the surrender agreement,
and inspectors express serious doubts about the truth of that admission.
The date of the purported destruction was vague, Iraqi officials
said, because no one could remember exactly when the order was given and
no records were kept of the event.
After the defection of Kamal and the chicken-farm revelations,
the U.N. inspectors and the Iraqis involved in germ warfare forged closer
cooperation. Some inspectors feared that the honeymoon might not last, "so
we decided to collect as much information as possible," Barton said. "We
were vacuum cleaners."
In May 1996 the Iraqis, under U.N. supervision, began destroying
Al Hakam, cutting up machinery with torches, burying items in cement and
then dynamiting the rest of the plant. And the next month Iraq filed its
fourth "full, final and complete disclosure," only to have the inspectors
again dismiss it as sloppy lies.
U.N. officials eventually identified seven sites that had been
directly used to produce biological weapons, including Salman Pak and Al
Hakam.
In addition, the inspectors began monitoring universities, diagnostic
laboratories and research centers, and installations that made vaccines,
pharmaceuticals, beer and dairy products. All told, the United Nations was
keeping its eye on about 100 Iraq sites, most with civilian equipment that
could be turned to making germ weapons.
As for Kamal, he eventually returned to Iraq, repentant over his
defection. Days later, he and his family died from gunshot wounds. Reports
from Iraq said family members had turned on him. But the circumstances of
his death remain unclear.
THE MYSTERIES:
Germ-War Capacity Is Still an Enigma
Overlooking the East River in New York, on the 30th and 31st floors
of the U.N. building, is the inspectors' headquarters. The windowless conference
room, known as the Bunker, is constantly jammed these days. Cubicles are
packed with file cabinets and safes and documents. Wooden crates from the
chicken farm are visible atop cabinets, part of a mountain of evidence.
Over the years the United Nations commission, whose staff is drawn
from more than 30 different countries, has become a lightening rod for Iraqi
criticism. Its inspectors are routinely vilified by name in the
government-controlled press as spies. Some nations sympathetic to Iraq's
plight, including Russia, have complained that the inspectors are overly
aggressive and are taking too long. The inspectors, in response, have at
times fired back, discussing their work with the news media.
U.N. officials say the inspectors still differ over how to interpret
the evidence. Perhaps the most contentious issue is whether Iraq is now engaged
in germ procurement and production.
The Russians recently acknowledged holding talks with Iraq in
1995 about selling a huge plant to be installed at Al Hakam, and inspectors
say they have evidence of other buying discussions and sales.
Sprayers are an important part of the current mystery. Planes
flying over farms use pipes and nozzles to spray fine mists of liquid pesticides
on crops. The Iraqis, an inspector said, have admitted adapting at least
six sprayers to make a mist of germs that would rain down on enemies, and
importing parts for a dozen such conversions in all.
But the agricultural sprayers, he said, have disappeared. None
have been turned over to inspectors, and their whereabouts and status are
unknown -- whether lost or destroyed or ready to fly into action.
Are they a threat? Even if they exist, hidden by the Iraqi military,
their effective use is clouded by huge uncertainties, inspectors said. A
pilotless plane spraying 200 pounds of anthrax near a large city might kill
a up to million people -- if the winds were right, if no rain fell, if the
nozzles did not get clogged, if the particles were the right size, if the
population had no vaccinations, and so on.
Iraq tried to develop just such a weapon, using a sprayer of Iraqi
design. Barton said an Iraqi general had told inspectors that Baghdad had
tried just before the gulf war to develop the capability to wipe out out
most of Israel's population. MiG fighters were modified so they could be
flown over Israel by remote control to release a spray of anthrax from specially
modified fuel tanks.
"It would have caused massive casualties," he said, "if it was
workable."
That kind of hedge appears in many of the analyses about Iraqi
systems for dispensing germs, and it is a crucial unknown in assessing how
far Iraq progressed toward making effective biological arms. The problem
for the inspectors is that they have only limited information about how the
dispensing systems would perform in war.
The inspectors agree that unless they can go anywhere in Iraq
without notice to hunt for documents, scientists and equipment, the United
Nations can offer the world only a false sense of security.
There are doubts about whether the latest agreement, negotiated
over the weekend by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, provides sufficient
access. Under the accord, the inspectors can visit the "presidential sites"
that Iraq declared off-limits last fall. But they will be accompanied by
diplomats appointed by the Security Council, and they must honor Iraq's "national
security, sovereignty and dignity."
But while inspectors may disagree about what Iraq is doing now,
there is no disagreement about Baghdad's potential to develop biological
weapons.
"Most of us agree that if Unscom monitors left, the Iraqis could
start up a biological weapons program the next day," Barton said.
Worry about Iraq's potential has been reinforced by what most
inspectors agree is Baghdad's refusal in recent years to provide further
documents about its biological program. Few inspectors seem to believe Iraq's
assertions that most of the documents have been destroyed.
"Every little pencil they purchased has three requisition copies,"
Graatz-Wadsack said. "We've found documents in other programs going back
to the late 1950s. So I don't believe they destroyed their biological documents.
They have them hidden somewhere."
Inspectors see the missing documents as key to understanding the
true dimensions of Iraq's effort to make germ weapons, saying they might
provide a map to hidden plants, personnel and arms. The documents, inspectors
say, are also useful to Iraq because they are thought to form a blueprint
for resuming production of germ weapons.
Inspection teams may have been getting close to those records
when Iraq began refusing the United Nations access to some sites last October.
The inspectors also agree that as long as Iraq denies the inspectors access
and information, they may never be able to certify that Baghdad is harboring
no more germ weapons.
"I once asked: 'Is there an end game?' " Barton recalled. "We've
been lied to so many times, can we ever trust the Iraqis to tell us the
truth?"
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company