US offering scientists from Iraq new jobs

WASHINGTON -- Fifteen months ago, the US government wanted to arrest and interrogate Jafar Dhia Jafar, the father of Iraq's nuclear program.

Now it wants to give him a job.

State Department officials have sent several messages through intermediaries to the particle physicist, letting him know that he has a chance to earn a healthy salary, a well-stocked research lab, and a place at the table of the new Iraq.

The overtures to Jafar, 61, who now lives in the United Arab Emirates, are part of a State Department push to hire unemployed Iraqi weapons scientists who US officials fear could pass their expertise in nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare to rogue regimes or terrorist groups.

Launched quietly in an unmarked villa outside the Green Zone in Baghdad, the US-funded Iraqi International Center for Science and Industry already employs about 60 scientists, half of whom were recently investigated or imprisoned on the orders of the US team that was searching for Saddam Hussein's stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

Although now it appears that Hussein's weapons programs withered away a decade ago, after the Gulf War, the scientists who worked on them are still a possible proliferation threat, according to State Department officials, who hope to engage as many as 500 former weapons scientists on reconstruction projects with various Iraqi ministries.

''Someone who knew 10 years ago how to produce chemical weapons against the Kurds still knows how, still has the recipe," said Anne Harrington, deputy director of the State Department's Office of Proliferation Threat Reduction. Harrington's team has been invited to brief Senator Richard G. Lugar, an Indiana Republican who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on the scientist recruitment program. Lugar has been a central player in the initiative to tighten controls over nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union.

The State Department has provided $2 million for the scientist program, which was modeled after a similar effort in Russia and the other former Soviet republics. The US-led occupation authority in Iraq also had earmarked $37 million, raised from Iraq oil sales, for other nonproliferation projects to be run by the Iraqi government.

US Undersecretary of State John Bolton has described the effort to employ the scientists as a ''race against time."

At least one Iraqi nuclear engineer told US officials he was approached by both insurgents and by Iranians who offered him substantial sums of money to work on their nuclear programs. Another Iraqi weapons scientist with a PhD in mechanical engineering is believed to have traveled to Tehran.

''Iran, Syria, or Al Qaeda would have high interest in these scientists," said David Albright, a former weapons inspector who in an effort separate from the new initiative has arranged jobs for some Iraqi weapons scientists in the United States. ''This is a far more difficult situation than Russia, and far more dangerous in the sense that these scientists could be killed or kidnapped far more easier than in Russia."

To persuade scientists not to sell their skills on the open market, the State Department program arranges for them to become consultants to Iraq's ministries, from the environment to the oil industry, and pays generous salaries. (The department won't say how much, but says that the rate is many times higher than the $100-per-month maximum the Coalition Provisional Authority is paying Iraqi government workers.) Other perks are expected to include access to satellite-based Internet, reconstruction of laboratories, assistance with research grants, possible venture capital funds, and travel opportunities such as an upcoming trip to the United States for eight former weapons scientists.

''It's not enough to pay a salary. You have to give them back their self-esteem as scientists," said Alex Dehgan, who ran the program in Iraq for the State Department under a fellowship with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. ''Obviously these guys had a lot of prestige and they had built up careers that had suddenly come to an end."

The program got off to a difficult start. Recruitment was a challenge, as many prospective scientists were in hiding in Iraq or elsewhere or were in prison, such as General Amir Saadi, once Hussein's liaison to UN weapons inspectors, who has reportedly been kept in solitary confinement since he surrendered in April 2003. The treatment of the imprisoned scientists sparked bitterness that continues to this day.

''We are not fools," said Imad Khadduri, a former Iraqi nuclear scientist who fled Iraq for Canada in 1998. ''They think we are simply puppets. The whole scientific infrastructure they have blown to pieces."

Building trust was not easy. State Department officials spent weeks trying woo one hostile scientist who was suspicious of their intentions, only to discover later that he had been arrested on the orders of the Iraqi Survey Group, the US-led team searching for weapons of mass destruction.

But, slowly, word-of-mouth contacts and countless cups of tea unearthed dozens of former weapons scientists in the country. Dehgan, a conservation biologist whose true love is studying lemurs, discovered a group of high-level former Ba'athist nuclear physicists quietly living in a neighborhood.

Over time, word spread and applications began pouring in. About 40 scientists even had to be turned down because they didn't have the necessary experience in producing biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons. Hussain Al-Shahristani, who spent more than a decade in Abu Ghraib prison because he refused to work on Hussein's project to build nuclear weapons, programs, was not offered a space at the US-funded center, but US officials say that was because he is not a weapons scientist.

A major challenge is battling the perception that Americans are rewarding scientists who once worked on Hussein's illicit programs.

''It is hard to deal with these scientists who you know have indirectly or directly contributed to the deaths of thousands of people," said one US-based official who has traveled to Iraq in connection with the program. ''But at the same time, they are really nice people . . . I think it is personally difficult to know what you know about some of these individuals, or what they might have worked on."

Citing attacks on Iraqis who work with Americans, the State Department has declined to identify the scientists involved in the project or those who sit on the project's 14-member scientific advisory council.

Farah Stockman can be reached at fstockman@globe.com