ABSTRACT
During 1997 and 1998, the work of the IAEA in Iraq was a difficult but ongoing process of attempting to resolve the outstanding questions of the October 1997 report. Dillon tried to make it clear to the Iraqi side namely Hajjaj how important it was to complete the documentation: the documents were a vital part of the program and, ‘withholding documents from the inspectors meant withholding the program’. Hajjaj, with whom Dillon had a good working relationship, put the word out that documents had to be gathered, and the Action Team received hundreds of them. In the end, when the inspections were terminated in December 1998, only two reports of the whole INP were missing: one was trivial, and the other was the formal statement regarding the weaponization mission for the Al-Atheer facility. The Agency, however, did not have all the centrifuge drawings, some of which showed up after US-led Iraq invasion, in a drum buried in Mahdi Al-Obeidi’s garden.
