Doctor Germ

SHE arrived here in a first-class seat on Iraqi Airlines from Baghdad during the autumn of 1979; a slight, anonymous 24-year-old, already vetted by Saddam Hussein's Iraqi intelligence services and with a secret plan that has transformed her into one of the most dangerous people in the world.

In Rihab Taha's suitcase were Armani suits and bundles of cash.

She was immediately able to pay for a taxi from Heathrow airport to the University of East Anglia in the cathedral town of Norwich, where for five years she lived in a tiny bedsit, studying microbiology and making herself an expert on germ weaponry.

Today there is no Iraqi scientist that UN weapon inspectors would love to speak to alone more than Taha. She put her English university training to uses for which it was never intended - to produce for the Iraqi regime a veritable torrent of deadly biotoxins, including anthrax, botulism, smallpox, gas gangrene and ricin. It is claimed her university course even allowed her to access restricted papers from Porton Down, the Government's biological warfare establishment, and leak their contents back to her masters in Baghdad.

Despite the Iraqi government's claim that Taha, nicknamed Dr Germ by inspectors, has now retired as the head of the regime's lethal biological weapons programme to become a housewife, intelligence sources on both sides of the Atlantic insist this is a preposterous lie. Not only is Iraq's germ warfare programme flourishing but the small figure, barely five feet tall, now slightly greying at 47, and with an eight-year-old daughter, is still firmly at its heart.

Last November Dr Hans Blix, the UN's chief weapons inspector, was given permission by a UN Security Council resolution to demand that Iraqi scientists and their families be removed from Iraq altogether so they could be interviewed in some safe third country. The inspectors have approached 11 of Saddam's top scientists and every one has refused to be interviewed without a minder by their side. Dr Germ would, said Dr Blix's UN Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission yesterday, be at the very top of that wish-list. If Taha could be persuaded to speak, she might have much to say, they admitted.

Rihab Taha is as discreet today as she was as a student at Norwich, where she was described as a "very ordinary" scientist and nondescript girl who would watch the BBC in her spare time and disappear to London on sudden trips - now believed to be for meetings with her Iraqi intelligence controller. No one suspected that the quiet girl, studying into the night on the third floor of the university's biological sciences building, was a terrorist in the making. Or that her flunking of research projects was a deliberate ploy to stay on at the university to continue her access to the Porton Down secrets.

TODAY Taha has friends in high places. She is married to General Amer Rashid - the Iraqi liaison man with the previous UN inspection team Unscom before its 1998 expulsion - and as such the chief architect of Saddam's elaborate schemes to hide his chemical, biological and nuclear weapons development programmes.

Like Taha, Rashid is said to be a fanatical Ba'ath Party loyalist, and he now serves as oil minister. If his wife was ever persuaded to step on Western soil she would face possible prosecution as a war criminal for her part in Saddam's machinery of terror.

In the late Eighties, and again in the mid-Nineties, Taha's weapons were tested on human beings - first on prisoners taken during the Iran-Iraq war, who were tied to poles in the desert and sprayed with a variety of lethal agents, and later on political detainees at Baghdad's notorious Abu Ghraib prison.

These claims were first made by the respected former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter (ironically now an outspoken opponent of war on Saddam).

Recently, say US sources, they received strong corroboration of his view from a scientist who defected from Saddam's regime. The inspectors also uncovered videos of goats and other animals being sealed in plastic cages, where they were exposed to biological agents and died agonising deaths.

The parts of this week's report by Dr Blix to the Security Council that dealt with biological weapons focused entirely on toxins and germ warfare programmes known to have existed before 1998, and not yet accounted for.

These include 8,500 litres of biological agents - much of it anthrax, and enough to kill millions - which Iraq says, without producing any evidence, it has destroyed. Also listed is 650kg of growth agent, which could produce another 5,000 litres of anthrax (to put the scale of this threat in perspective: the anthrax letters that killed five in the United States in 2001 had in total only a tiny pinch of this material).

However, Western intelligence agencies already have credible information about additional biological weapons, produced under Taha's auspices since the 1998 expulsion of Unscom, of which the Blix report makes no mention.

Probably the most significant relates to eight unmarked refrigerated Renault trucks - mobile bioweapons laboratories, which became operational at roughly the time of Unscom's departure. Tony Blair's dossier to Parliament last September made special mention of these trucks, and the difficulty of finding them.

LAST summer, in a Middle Eastern hotel room, I met the architect of the lorry plan - an Iraqi intelligence officer who has since defected, and was formerly attached to the Military Industrialisation Commission, the main body responsible for mass destruction weapons.

"It all started at a meeting towards the end of 1996," he said, chain smoking and visibly fearful of the possible consequences of what he was about to disclose.

"Some of us were invited to a brainstorming session: the whole point was to come up with ideas for labs which would be much harder for the UN to detect. Someone said we should put them in private houses or villas. I'd seen a milk and yoghurt truck earlier that day and it just came to me."

Chairing that meeting was Rihab Taha. Within days she had demonstrated her power within the Iraqi state by obtaining personal approval from Saddam to buy the trucks. The defector said he was deputed to make the purchase.

Another recent defector, specialist building contractor Adnan Saeed al Haideri, a former dollar millionaire who fled Iraq in 2001, has given American intelligence agencies details of other new bio- programmes. Before being removed to a safe house in Virginia he gave an interview to the New York Times, describing how he built special "clean rooms" for biological weapons manufacture beneath one of the main Baghdad hospitals - and a new, top-secret facility with elaborate air filtration equipment in the suburb of Waziriya.

Al Haideri, who also worked on chemical weapons plants and nuclear labs, said Saddam's biological programme was the most secret of all. His information is regarded as highly reliable. In the words of a senior Pentagon official: "Al Haideri is gold-dust - among the most important human sources to come out of Iraq in the last 10 years." Al Haideri had deep moral qualms about working on these deadly programmes. The evidence available suggests Rihab Taha has never suffered in this way.

When she came to Britain in 1979, she already had two degrees from Baghdad, and her wealthy style - heavy platinum jewellery and French designer jeans - betrayed the extent to which the regime held her in high regard.

BUT at university, where she was to spend most of her time on a PhD on crop disease, she gave no hint of her future illicit career. Dr John Turner, the biology department's head, used to invite her to his family home: he remembers that she always came with presents for his children, sometimes dates bought on her regular trips to Iraq. "She was an introverted, pleasant, extremely polite girl," says Dr Turner. "She was not a gifted student but was very hardworking. It's a great shock, like finding your daughter has gone and done something dreadful."

Taha gained her PhD in 1984 and told Dr Turner she was going to teach at the University of Baghdad.

In fact, she moved directly to a senior position in biological weapons production and research, eventually supervising hundreds at several facilities. Two of the most notorious were Salman Pak, on the Tigris south of Baghdad, and al Hakam, 80 miles to the west. UN reports from the Nineties set out in detail how she was repeatedly interrogated by the inspectors, and denied that any bio-weapons programmes existed.

The reality was that she was in charge of a terrifying range of initiatives.

The effects of anthrax - which causes severe flu-like symptoms and crushing chest pains before killing - and botulism, which causes paralysis before death, are relatively well-documented. Also in Taha's armoury were gas gangrene, a scourge of soldiers with untreated wounds from the First World War, in which the patient literally rots to death, and a bacteria which causes an extreme form of conjunctivitis with severe bleeding from the eyes.

According to the authoritative Jane's Intelligence Digest, Taha has a "unique knowledge of Iraq's bioweapons secrets". The truth about her activity only emerged when Unscom uncovered Iraq's vast purchases of biological growth agent in 1995, followed by the defection of Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel - who was later murdered.

When she was finally confronted with this evidence by the inspectors, recalls the former Unscom chief Rolf Ekeus: "She made a big scene, crying and slamming down her fists and running out the door and slamming that too. The other Iraqis looked at us like we were not gentlemen."

Before Kamel's defection, Taha claimed she was simply growing protein for chickens - despite her retinue of military guards and razor-wire fence.

A few months later, after Kamel had disclosed what really went on at al Hakam, inspector Gabrielle Kraatz-Wadsack visited her again. This time, she recalls, Taha finally confessed, describing how she organised the making of 8,000 litres of anthrax and 19,000 litres of Botulinum toxin.

"It was a strange feeling when she was admitting she did all the production," says Kraatz-Wadsack. "She was smiling, a nice person. You had the sense she was proud."

In 1998, just before the inspectors left, Taha gave a further glimpse into her mentality - and that of other servants of Saddam - to Richard Spertzel, the UN inspector in charge of the hunt for bio- weapons. Surely, said Dr Spertzel, she must know that he knew she was lying.

Taha paused for a moment. "But," she replied, "when you're told to lie it's not really lying."

Copyright 2003
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