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CNN Live At Daybreak

Iraq Sent Weapons Program Scientists to Be Trained in U.S.

Aired July 04, 2002 - 06:08   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: The United States hands out nearly half a million student visas every year, but no one actually keeps track of what the students are studying or what they do with that knowledge if and when they return home.

As CNN's Andrea Koppel reports, some officials are looking to change that.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ANDREA KOPPEL, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Until he fled Iraq in August, 1994, Khidir Hamza was among Iraq's best and brightest, a nuclear physicist considered the father of Baghdad's nuclear bomb. For two decades, Hamza secretly worked to build Saddam Hussein an atomic weapon.

Hamza says he learned much of what he needed to know in the 1960s, as a young graduate student right here, in the United States.

(on camera): You came here to study nuclear physics. Did you have any intention to build a nuclear bomb?

KHIDIR HAMZA, FORMER IRAQI NUCLEAR SCIENTIST: No. At the time no.

KOPPEL (voice-over): Hamza got his master's at MIT and a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Florida State University. At the time, Hamza says he expected his skills would go toward peaceful purposes. But Saddam Hussein had other plans for Hamza.

(on camera): How many of your colleagues who worked in the nuclear program with you had studied in the U.S. or in the West?

HAMZA: Actually, when I went back, most of them.

GEORGE BORAS, HARVARD UNIVERSITY: The question of whether foreign students use knowledge that they can learn in the U.S. and then go back home and turn that knowledge against us, it's actually become much more important, obviously, since 9/11.

KOPPEL: Harvard professor George Boras just completed a study of the student visa program in the United States. In the 1970s, the U.S. issued 60,000 student visas a year. Thirty years later, that number jumped six fold, to 350,000. In the 1980s, many of those students were Iraqis. Saddam Hussein wanted more Iraqi scientists to get an American education.

HAMZA: He gave us a huge budget to send people here to be trained to fill in the slots we needed in the nuclear weapons program. And we sent hundreds, probably up to a thousand or more, in the U.S.

KOPPEL: After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, U.N. weapons inspectors were surprised to find plenty of U.S. trained Iraqi scientists.

CHARLES DEULFER, FORMER U.N. WEAPONS INSPECTOR: The pattern was the best people studied abroad, studied in the West and then their talents were applied for weapons programs.

KOPPEL (on camera): Do you think that Saddam's weapons program would be where it is today without U.S. training, Western training?

HAMZA: It wouldn't. No way. The leaders of the program, especially in biology and nuclear, were trained here.

KOPPEL (voice-over): After the Gulf War, the U.S. withdrew the welcome mat for Iraqi students, but not for thousands of other students from countries in Asia and the Middle East.

(on camera): Since September 11 and the discovery so many al Qaeda members entered the U.S. on student visas, the Bush administration has only just begun to compile a nationwide database of foreign students. To date, though, there are no government records tracking these students, what they studied or how they used that knowledge back home.

Andrea Koppel, CNN, at the State Department.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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