Chapter 4: The Hunt for WMD Doctor sawsan alhaddad was very busy when she received the strange phone call. She was so busy, and the call was so strange, that she wasn't quite certain whether to follow up. It was May 2002, and the caller said he was from the CIA and that he wanted to meet with her. He didn't sound crazy, but she wasn't sure. A quiet, petite, olive-skinned woman in her fifties, Sawsan wondered why a CIA officer who said he was calling from Pittsburgh would want to talk to an anesthesiologist in Cleveland. Curiosity finally got the better of her. Fear got to her, too; old fears of police and security men that had receded gradually over the last two decades, as she and her husband had built a wonderful new American life, with a beautiful daughter, in a plush and sprawling home, in one of Cleveland's most luxurious outer suburbs. Sawsan thought she had left her fears behind when she and her husband escaped from Iraq in 1979, lying to their bosses at the hospital in Baghdad about their plans for a brief vacation in London.

It was before anybody in America had given much thought to Saddam Hussein, back before the United States thought much about granting Iraqi exiles political asylum from a mad dictator. Eventually, they managed to rebuild their lives and become American citizens. Sawsan decided to check out the mysterious caller before agreeing to meet him. She found someone at the FBI's Cleveland field office who would listen to her story. Was there such a person in Pittsburgh working for the CIA? Sawsan was surprised when the FBI agent called her back. He had checked with FBI headquarters in Washington, and it turned out that the man in Pittsburgh was real, and the call was genuine. The CIA really did want to talk to Dr. Sawsan Alhaddad of the Cleveland Clinic.

So she finally agreed to meet with "Chris" from Pittsburgh. As Chris was trying to contact Sawsan Alhaddad, it was becoming clear that President Bush was determined to invade Iraq. In his 2002 State of the Union Address the previous January, Bush had warned of an "axis of evil," of which Iraq was one of only three members. Bush and his aides charged that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the United States because he possessed weapons of mass destruction and because his regime harbored terrorists. Saddam might use his weapons against America, or give them to terrorists to do the job instead. In either case, an attack with chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons would make September 11 look like child's play. It was a risk, George W. Bush said, that a post-9/11 United States was not willing to take.

Throughout that spring, the Bush administration had been steadily ratcheting up the rhetoric about the threat posed by terrorists, weapons of mass destruction -- and Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney went on television to say he was "almost certain" of more terrorist attacks on the United States, while Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced that it was only a matter of time before terrorists would get weapons of mass destruction from rogue states like Iraq. In late May, Bush spoke in Berlin, where he warned that once terrorists obtained chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons from countries like Iraq, "no inner voice of reason, no hint of conscience would prevent their use." With the war in Afghanistan winding down, George Bush's Washington was inexorably turning its attention toward Baghdad. Sawsan told Chris that it was not possible for her to meet with him right away. Her mother had come to Cleveland from Iraq for advanced treatment for colon cancer, and Sawsan had to care for her. Maybe they could talk later, she told the CIA man. In June, Sawsan's mother died, and the Iraqi woman was buried in the American heartland.

Soon, Sawsan was ready for the CIA. The White House drumbeat on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction kept building that summer. It was filling the front pages and the airwaves by the time Chris.