Hussein Kamel was a high level Iraqi official who defected to the United States in 1995. As the moving force behind Iraq’s WMD programs since the end of the Iran-Iraq War and a member of Qusayy’s concealment committee, Hussein Kamel also knew all about Iraq’s shell game with the U.N. inspectors. The regime decided to try to deflect blame onto Hussein Kamel himself and suddenly told Rolf Ekeus (the head of UNSCOM) that it had “discovered” that Hussein Kamel had been secretly hiding vast amounts of information about Iraq’s WMD program on his chicken farm near Habbaniyah.

When UNSCOM officials were taken there, they found 650,000 pages of text, photos, videos, microfilm, and microfiche relating to Iraq's WMD program in forty crates that had unmistakably been moved there within the last few days. Later, Hussein Kamel himself would provide considerable information to the inspectors. As a result, the inspectors realised for the first time that they had been duped. The inspectors learned not only that Iraq had an offensive BW program, but also had weaponized biological agents and loaded them into 166 bombs and 25 missile warheads for use during the Gulf War if the coalition marched into Baghdad.

For the inspectors, and for Ekeus personally, the information provided by Hussein Kamel and contained in the documents that Iraq hastily surrendered were a revelation. Before, Ekeus and most of the inspectors had believed their job was essentially done, and they had resented American pressure and claims that Iraq was still hiding proscribed materials. Ekeus and his inspectors would never trust the Iraqis again.

Sources:
Pollack, Kenneth. The Threatening Storm. New York: Random House Books, 2002.

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