Iraq Had Secret Labs, Officer Says

The officer, who held the rank of brigadier general, said each closely guarded weapons team had three or four scientists and other experts who were unknown to U.N. inspectors. He said they worked on computers and conducted crude experiments in bunkers and back rooms in safe houses around Baghdad.

He insisted they did not produce any illegal arms and that none now exist in Iraq. But he said the teams met regularly and put plans on paper to quickly develop weapons of mass destruction if United Nations sanctions against Iraq were lifted.

"We could start again anytime," said the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he said he fears for his life. "It's very easy. Especially biological.

"The point was, the Iraqis kept the knowledge," he explained during a lengthy interview Friday in which he offered tantalizing details of secret programs. But U.S. weapons hunters "will never find anything here. Only oil."

The failure to find any weapons of mass destruction since the war has sparked mounting criticism in both Washington and London, where senior government officials have been put on the defensive to explain why both public and classified intelligence estimates now appear to have been so inaccurate.

The intelligence officer's account, parts of which could not be independently verified, gives ammunition to both sides of the controversy. He said that U.N. sanctions and inspections in the 1990s crippled Iraq's ability to build illegal weapons and that Hussein's chemical, biological and nuclear programs were effectively eliminated in the mid-1990s.

But his description of an ongoing effort to prepare for illicit weapons production programs in the future suggests that Hussein would have remained a serious threat if U.S.-led forces had not ousted the dictator.

His disclosure comes as newly reinforced U.S. weapons teams have intensified efforts to round up Iraqi scientists and officials. Three senior biowarfare experts were driven away in a van in Baghdad and have not returned home since a meeting June 1 with an American in civilian clothes who gave his name only as "John," according to witnesses.