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Arms secrets revealed in spies' files Patrick Graham in Baghdad Sunday April 13, 2003 The Observer Iraqi intelligence agents were ordered to take files and computers with information about weapons of mass destruction home from their offices before United Nations weapons inspectors arrived late last year, say documents found at a security headquarters in Baghdad. The handwritten notes from a meeting between a departmental director and operatives on 23 September last year were in a red notebook I found lying on a desk at the surveillance centre of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, the Mukhabarat. Agents at a meeting on 18...

Cell of hell ... filthy blanket and pillow lie on the floor of a tiny cell SHOCKED British troops yesterday found a torture chamber used by Saddam Hussein’s brutal thugs. The filthy cells of a police station contained: A MEAT HOOK attached to the ceiling. THICK RUBBER HOSE on the floor — with no tap to connect it to. And worst of all . . . A LIVE CABLE attached to the mains and used for giving electric shocks. The grim find came when men of 40 Commando Royal Marines captured the Basra suburb of Abu Al Khasib after...

A SENIOR Baghdad official who feared for his life after helping to hide Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons was executed after he tried to flee the country, Iraqi sources revealed last week. Khalis Muhsin al-Tikriti, 35, had been working in the scientific department of the president’s office under the authority of the Special Security Organisation (SSO), headed by Qusay Hussein, Saddam’s younger son and political heir. Al-Tikriti, an engineer, had supervised an operation to bury a significant quantity of Saddam’s chemical weapons before United Nations weapons inspectors arrived last November. Some weapons were buried near the river Tigris in the Baji...

A report set to hit newsstands Monday documenting ties between Iraq's Mukhabarat intelligence service and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist organization is being called "a blockbuster" by former CIA Director James Woolsey. The New Yorker magazine report details cooperation between al Qaeda agents in Northern Iraq and intelligence operatives working for Saddam Hussein, Woolsey told CNN's "Late Edition," including: *Details of the ten-year-long working relationship between al Qaeda and Mukhabarat agents in attacks on the Kurdish minority. *Evidence that the Mukhabarat smuggled weapons into Afghanistan to help al Qaeda forces. *Accounts of al Qaeda refugees being brought into Iraq....

After surviving torture, another high-level defector has escaped Iraq. In this exclusive report, he details Saddam's progress toward truly frightening capabilities: "dirty" bombs that spew radioactivity, mobile bio-weapons facilities, and a new long-range ballistic missileBy David Rose January 2000: a chilly afternoon in Baghdad. At the downtown headquarters of Iraq’s Military Industrial Commission, the body responsible for arms development and purchase, its then chairman, General Amer al-Saadi, gathered 13 government officials around the boardroom table: scientists, soldiers, spies. More than a year had passed since the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, expelled the inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM),...