Banned Weapons Remain Unseen Foe

Saddam Hussein, a team of U.S. and Australian weapons hunters was told, may have built drone aircraft rigged with nozzles to spray poison gases, plus two short-range missiles with warheads designed to carry deadly chemicals or germs, at the former Ibn Firnas aeronautics research center.

The team's mission: Find the drones and use portable X-ray gear to peer into the warheads.

Donning flak vests and helmets, and loading their weapons, the 26-member team climbed into six Humvees and SUVs and sped to the sprawling complex just north of the reeking trash mountains of the Baghdad city dump.

They quickly found the "drones": five burned and blackened 9-foot wings dumped near the front gate. "It could have been a student project, or maybe a model," the team's expert, U.S. Air Force Capt. Libbie Boehm, said with a shrug.

The "missiles" were found too, after a bit of searching through a junk heap: two discarded casings of artillery rockets.

Not everyone was disappointed. Ignoring the soldiers, a dozen or so bedraggled looters pillaged the site's 17 bombed buildings. They soon rode off with two donkey carts and a flatbed truck filled with broken radio parts, twisted window frames and other scrap.

"The looters had a better day than we did," said Lt. Col. Michael Kingsford as he ordered his team to head home. "One thing I can say for sure is there's no smoking gun here."

Frustration is routine for the men and women on the front lines of the search for Hussein's suspected stockpiles of illicit weapons. Five days of living with them offered a vivid view of a high-profile hunt that remains in serious disarray nearly three months after the war began.

After visiting more than 300 suspect Iraqi facilities, from pesticide plants to hospital laboratories, the weapons teams have hit all the priority sites identified before the war by U.S. intelligence. Most were so heavily bombed or looted that any potential evidence was long gone.

Moreover, the teams have largely visited the same sites that U.N. inspectors searched last winter without result. They were never given any of the U.N. reports, so knew little about what was there before. Commanders have made such comparison more difficult by changing the names of some long-known U.N. sites.