Posted on 03/29/2003 9:09:27 AM PST by rface
Richard Seither was reading a newspaper yesterday morning aboard a New York train when a photograph caught his eye.
It was the familiar face of Huda Amash, who shared a laboratory with him 20 years ago when they were University of Missouri-Columbia graduate students. Surprised by the photo, Seither was shocked by its context. U.S. intelligence sources say Amash played a key role in helping Iraq manufacture biological weapons during the 1990s. On Thursday, Iraqi television showed Amash with Saddam Hussein.
Amash’s position and whereabouts also surprise retired MU Professor Olen Brown, who advised Seither and Amash as they pursued doctorates in microbiology. Brown and Seither yesterday said they saw nothing in Amash at the time to suggest the foreboding character that many view her as now.
"She never had any words against our country, but that was 20 years ago," Brown said.
Amash U.S. officials say Amash’s father was killed on Saddam’s orders. Brown and Seither recalled that Amash said her family fled Iraq after Saddam came to power. Amash earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Baghdad and a master’s degree at Texas Women’s University before coming to MU in 1979. Brown said that doctoral advisers and graduate students agree to a mentorship if each can benefit the other. Brown’s expertise is in the biology of oxygen, and Amash’s research examined how oxygen interacts with certain pharmaceuticals to produce therapeutic benefits and negative side effects.
For most of a span from 1981 to 1983, Seither said he was the only student who shared a lab with Amash. She was memorable for her affluence, he said. While most of his fellow graduate students appeared hard-pressed for money, Amash once entered the laboratory wearing a silver fox fur coat. Other times she wore expensive jewelry and other fine garments.
Seither said he was not impressed with Amash’s skill as a scientist. He said she had a tendency to not follow proper laboratory procedure and that he often questioned her scientific techniques.
"I felt that oftentimes she needed a lot of help to do her work and felt at times it was easy to be dumped on because she wasn’t capable of doing a lot of things," Seither said in a telephone interview from New York, where he’s a physician and associate director at a cancer treatment center. "She needed a lot of help."
Federal law bars MU from disclosing academic records to the public, but Brown remembered Amash as a student "performed normally and advanced through the program with good recommendations."
Brown said he had a typical student-mentor relationship. Once he had dinner at her University Terrace Apartment with her daughter, Zena, he said. Another time, Amash and her husband Ahmed brought Zena to dine in Brown’s home.
Neither Seither nor Brown recall Amash ever talking politics, although Brown said she did tell him of an outburst she made during an April 2, 1983, speech on campus about the Iraq-Iran war.
Campus police issued Amash a summons at the time for disturbing the peace. According to the police report, Amash, then pregnant with her second child, was in a crowd of 200. As someone spoke about Iran, Amash began yelling out until police escorted her away.
"She said she became disturbed at one of the speakers and she vocally said something, and that was against the rules," Brown said. Amash related the incident without any hint of shame or embarrassment, he said.
Columbia Municipal Court has no open record of the peace disturbance case.
Seither, 49, said he did not keep in touch with his lab mate after they received their doctorates in December 1983.
For a while, he said, Amash sent letters and Christmas cards, telling him the status of her family and what she was doing.
Brown said Amash once asked him to help revise an academic paper. Another time she wrote that she would return to America for cancer treatment. But that was years ago, he said.
Over the years, press reports have given only a vague outline of Amash’s ascension in the Iraqi government. She became a dean at the University of Baghdad and a member of the Iraqi Academy of Sciences. In the 1990s, she was cited in news articles and books as an authority on environmental damage in Iraq caused by Gulf War bombings.
In May 2001, she reportedly became the first woman to become a Baath Party committee member. That she might have aided Iraq’s biological weapons program reached the mainstream press late Thursday.
The London Times reported U.S. intelligence officials have dubbed the one-time MU student as "Mrs. Anthrax." The Sydney Morning Herald says United Nations inspectors called her "Dr. Germ."
Brown said news of his former students usually makes him proud but hearing what’s become of Amash has caused "distress."
"I don’t make any defense for her," Brown said. "I would have defended her 20 years ago, as far as I know. But from what happened in between and, specifically, what I have learned recently … it is extremely disturbing."
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Reach Nate Carlisle at (573) 815-1723 or
ncarlisle@tribmail.com.
Saddam Hussein's adviser studied at MU: Mrs. Anthrax from MIZZOU (Columbia, Missouri)
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