U.S. to search cleric's house in Iraq

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The U.S. military tomorrow will begin a major excavation in search of banned weapons components an Iraqi informant said were buried by Saddam Hussein's regime at a Muslim clerics's house in Najaf in December, three months before the war began.

Pentagon officials told The Washington Times that David Kay, who is leading the CIA's search for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, briefed officials on the classified intelligence in Washington this week.

The Iraqi informant told Mr. Kay's team that the weapons components were moved to the cleric's house in Najaf, south of Baghdad, and buried at the base of a wall. Since the Iraqi came forward, the U.S. military has been monitoring the site and is scheduled to begin digging tomorrow.

If the informant's information proves true, it means Saddam was actively hiding weapons components at the very time U.N. inspectors had re-entered Iraq and were conducting searches. That team left Iraq shortly before President Bush ordered the March 20 invasion.

A U.N. team left Iraq in 1998 after the regime repeatedly blocked access to suspected sites. Baghdad claimed it no longer harbored chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, or their components.

Pentagon sources said that after Mr. Kay received the information, he asked the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), to study the Najaf site. A comparison of before-and-after images showed that the ground had been disturbed.

Sources describe Mr. Kay as somewhat optimistic that weapons or their components will be found there. It was not on the CIA's list of suspected weapons sites before the war.

Mr. Kay told the press this week that members of Saddam's weapons-deception program are coming forward to provide new intelligence. He said the United States now has a better understanding of the lengths to which the regime went to conceal banned components.

"This was a program that over 25 years spent billions of dollars, 10,000 people, was actively shielded by a security and deception plan," said Mr. Kay, who led the U.N.'s first weapons-inspection team after the 1991 Gulf war. "So, it is not something that is easy to unwrap."