The story begins in the early morning on March 20, 2003, in the ritzy Baghdad neighborhood of Mansour. Before dawn, the quiet neighborhood was shaken by an enormous explosion: American cruise missiles, after flying through hundreds of miles of darkness, smashed with deadly precision into a large house. The explosions -- the famous "decapitation strikes" intended to kill Saddam Hussein -- marked the beginning of the war. An Iraqi businessman whom we shall call Ahmed (for reasons of security he insisted his name be withheld) lived just a few streets away from the house destroyed by the missiles. Shortly after the attack, one of his young sons, curious, wandered into the house next to the one hit by the missiles. When he came home he told his father that in one of its rooms he saw the flag and desk that Saddam Hussein used in his taped television addresses during the war. Ahmed believes that he knows the very house Saddam Hussein was staying in.

Three weeks later, on April 9, the day Baghdad fell to U.S. and British troops, Ahmed saw something else strange in his neighborhood. Three men appeared at another posh house in the neighborhood, carried everything inside the house outside, and began systematically burning it -- files, computer disks, photographs and videotapes. Ahmed had long suspected that the building had been used by Iraq's dreaded Mukhabarat. Now he was sure. Mukhabarat officials had apparently decided to store their archives in a remote location, knowing that the main Mukhabarat compound, the Hakamiyeh, was likely to be attacked during the war.

Joined by other curious neighbors, Ahmed decided to take a look inside the house. Under normal circumstances this would have been unthinkable, but Saddam's forces had melted away, and the three Mukhabarat men were only concerned with destroying evidence. Ahmed tried to take two videotapes out of the house, but the men stopped him and ordered him to throw them on the fire. For three days, the men continued to burn files, while U.S. troops mopped up the last pockets of resistance in the Iraqi capital. On the last day, Ahmed's youngest son, 8 years old, went to have a look at the house again. Waiting until the Mukhabarat men were not looking, he simply grabbed a videotape from a pile that was to be burned, hid it under his shirt and brought it home.

Ahmed, in turn, gave the videotape to a journalist colleague and travel partner, telling him it might be worth investigating. In early August, we watched the videotape in a hotel room in Baghdad -- an experience that set in motion a strange and fascinating odyssey.

The videotape, filmed with two cameras that change angles, shows a room decorated in a style somewhere between kitschy and frumpy. It is apparently a routine secret recording of a meeting. Three middle-aged men are present. One, balding and chain-smoking, sits in an easy chair in the middle, with his back to a wall. He is unmistakably the most dominating figure in the room. He is Tahir Jalil Habbush, the head of the Mukhabarat -- the Jack of Diamonds in the American deck of most-wanted Iraqis, whose whereabouts remain unknown. To his left, on a couch, sits a nervous, fidgety man who talks too much and doesn't always make sense, like a man who knows he's in trouble. This is the informer, Salah Abed Nasser, a factory owner who also owns a farm. To Habbush's right sits Abdel Wahab, the head of the science department of the Istikhbarat, the department of military intelligence. Now and then a servant comes in to pour coffee and orange juice.

The tape begins with Habbush asking, "Is this the same subject again or a different one?" Abed Nasser replies, "No, no sir, it's the same subject that I told you about ... By the grace of God, we reached good results and God willing we'll keep on going." Abed Nasser goes on to say, "This is about the canister that they were convinced was VX, about nerve gas." VX is one of the most lethal chemical agents known to man. Iraq used it to turn back Iran's massive human-wave assaults toward the end of the bloody Iran-Iraq war.

It soon becomes clear that Abed Nasser had just run a successful sting operation at his farm. Posing as a buyer, he lured the possessors of the canister to his farm. The cylinder was retrieved and three of the people involved were arrested. Most of the videotape concerns the sting's bungled coverup, which led members of his wife's clan to threaten Abed Nasser's life -- a bizarre, at times almost ludicrous saga to which we shall return. But the matter of most interest concerns the Iraqi officials' discussion about what was in the canister, where it came from and what to do with it.

Abdel Wahab, the scientist, tells Habbush that he had one of his people first test the material in the canister to see what they were dealing with. "Sir, the first test proved it came from Al-Muthanna establishment, where they used to make chemical weapons ..."

Al-Muthanna (also known as Samarra) was the major plant where Iraq developed and manufactured its chemical weapons. The complex of laboratories and factories near Baghdad was bombed by the allies during the first Gulf War and was subsequently heavily scrutinized by UNSCOM inspectors. It is widely accepted that Iraq manufactured chemical weapons, including the nerve gas Sarin, at the site before 1991.

Then, in the crucial passage of the videotape, Abdel Wahab says that the intelligence service is planning to hand over the canister to the National Monitoring Directorate (Da'erat Al Raqaba Al Wataniyah) "so that we won't make the country lose anything. They won't bring the name of our apparatus into it." The "beneficiary," he says, is the "Arab Cleaning Company" -- also known as the Arab Company for Detergent Chemicals, or Aradat. The Arab Cleaning Company is a plant at which some of the chemicals from Al-Muthanna that were destined for use in Iraq's chemical weapons program were shipped to be turned into detergent, with U.N. approval.

In short, top Iraqi officials are planning to give the canister to the NMD, which would then sell it to the Arab Cleaning Company, which would then use it in its aboveboard production of detergents.

What is the significance of Abdel Wahab's somewhat cryptic statement "so that we won't make the country lose anything" and "they won't bring the name of our apparatus into it"? The most likely interpretation is that Iraq did not want to be blamed by the U.N. for holding back a canister containing a chemical that could be used for making WMD, and therefore wanted to keep the Mukhabarat's name out of it.

Scott Ritter, for one, takes this view. "The Mukhabarat appears to have been trying to do the right thing without getting their name involved." He adds, "That does not mean they did the right thing all the time." According to him, the NMD was a responsible agency: If the Iraqis handed it over to them, "The NMD would deal with it according to the rules and regulations."

If Ritter is right, the tape contains a small piece of evidence that tends to support the idea that Iraq did in fact dismantle its chemical weapons program after 1991. Former arms inspector Rolk Ekeus argues that Iraq did just that. In a June article in the Washington Post he argued that after the war, Iraq knew its chemical-weapons stocks (which he says were intended for use against Iran and internal opposition, not to use against the U.S.) were degraded to the point of uselessness and therefore retooled its program to "design and engineering, with the purpose of activating production" if needed to fight Iran. Presumably in this scenario Iraq would have destroyed its remaining stocks of chemicals, since they would have been useless and only aroused suspicion.

But no ultimately convincing theory can be advanced about the case of the rogue canister, because there are too many unknowns. (It is even theoretically possible that the entire tape was a fake, made by Saddam's henchmen and intended to "prove" his compliance with the U.N. -- but considering how the tape was acquired and its content, the odds of that being true are long.) Although we were able to establish many facts about the canister and the people involved with it, we were unable to find out three crucial things: why the canister was taken from Al-Muthanna, when it was taken, and what happened to it. Even beyond that, even if Iraq acted in the utmost good faith on this one occasion, it's not possible to draw any final conclusions about its chemical weapons program.

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