For Abed Nasser it must be a jarring experience to be confronted out of the blue three years later by two journalists who seem to know all the details of the case. After some searching, through the sheik of the al-Ezzi clan we located Abed Nasser's house and his textile factory in the Wazariyeh district of Baghdad. The factory lies close to a main highway out of town; according to our driver, a huge portrait of Saddam Hussein used to decorate the side facing the road. We catch Abed Nasser in the middle of his siesta in his small, cluttered office to the side of the factory. Despite his obvious anxiety he is willing to talk.

"My life is still in danger from this affair," is one of the first things he says. It appears that Majed's family is convinced that Abed Nasser received a lot of money from the Mukhabarat for his role in the affair, and they are applying pressure on him to pay up. Later, when talking to Majed, we find out that this is not the end of it. The two people who had the cylinder in their possession in 2000 and who were arrested in the sting operation were actually freed in the general amnesty that the regime announced last year. One of them is from a large Shiite family: it was probably at his house or shop in Saddam City that the cylinder was stored for so many years before he tried to sell it. This Shiite man, who is only referred to as Salaam, and his family came to Majed in June this year and demanded that he pay them for the value of the cylinder, or else. Majed had to pay Salaam 5.5 million Iraqi dinars, about $300. Now he and his family are trying to make Abed Nasser pay them back that money, which they hold him responsible for. Majed does confirm, however, that he himself only did a couple of months in jail because of Abed Nasser's intervention.

For his part, the former informer is convinced that everybody else, including Habbush and Abdel Wahab, made a lot of money off the cylinder. He was paid just 250,000 Iraqi dinars, according to the tape. Also on the tape, Abdel Wahab estimates -- correctly, as it turns out -- the retail value of the container at some $3,000 at best. "Frankly speaking, they made a good deal of it," says Abed Nasser. "I lost a lot of money on it; I was the victim."

Abed Nasser contends that when Majed and his friends first contacted him, they wanted him to sell the container to Iran. He thinks that the Mukhabarat has sold it to Libya. These claims seem weak, even absurd, considering that HF is not that hard to come by for those countries, and they certainly didn't need to get it from Iraq. But since the end of the war Abed Nasser has been approached by "the coalition." He is also convinced, despite our repeated denials, that we are from the CIA. "I know lots of things," says Abed Nasser tantalizingly. He seems to be angling for a lucrative new job with Iraq's new rulers, along the lines of the duties he used to perform for the old regime.

But Abed Nasser has one more role to play in this tangled tale. Incredibly, he remembers what was written on the containers. It was made in Holland "by a factory starting with an M," he says. He even has photographs of the cylinder on which the words "Hydrogen Fluoride" can clearly be made out: The cylinder is lying in a backyard against a brick wall, probably the same backyard where it spent four years in the middle of Saddam City -- an innocent-looking canister that contained enough HF to make the people living in the area very sick, had it leaked or exploded. Abed Nasser also indicates that he knows that the government sometimes shipped material to the Arab Cleaning Company.

We have one last place to visit.

One day in August we approach the Arab Cleaning Company in Beji. A dozen or more chimneys belch out cumulus clouds of black smoke over the massive refinery near Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit. Oil production and other industries that were shut down by the war are back on line in this dusty, sun-baked landscape. The wind is blisteringly hot.

On the edge of the refinery complex the Arab Company for Detergent Chemicals, also known as the Arab Cleaning Company, looms like an oasis of order, cleanliness and sanity. Row upon row of containers for industrial gases surround the factory. Inside the fence surrounding the company's land, hundreds of empty HF containers can be seen.

The company's acting general manager, Zuheir Abed Rashid, and his production manager, Mutia Sa'id, seem very cooperative. (The previous general manager lost his job when the old regime fell.) They say that the facility was regularly visited by the U.N. inspectors and that they used to show them all the books. They say their company received 203 tons of HF from Al-Muthanna in 1991. Most of it was in very large containers but some of it came in 14 smaller containers that exactly match the pictures Abed Nasser showed us. They take us out in their pickup truck to have a look at the empty containers that they still keep on the terrain. "Container disposal is one of our biggest problems," says Abed Rashid.

The installation turns kerosene into something called LAB, which is then used to produce detergents. For every ton of LAB produced a certain amount of HF, which acts as a catalyst in the process, is lost. Even more HF is lost when the system is cleaned, the manager says.

At the very back of the facility, behind a noxious-smelling pool and a facility wafting with poisonous-looking fumes, the cylinders stand in the burning sun. There can be no mistake: They are white cylinders with black letters reading "hydrogen fluoride" and "shippers Melchemie -- from Holland to Baghdad." They contain 688 kilograms. They were filled with HF in 1983, according to the labels, and probably shipped to Iraq not much later. These are the only 688-kilogram containers of HF ever received by the company, says Mutia Sa'id, a veteran of the plant, and they came from Al-Muthanna. At the very least this seems to indicate that the government knew then that it had to get rid of part of its visible and well-known nerve gas program.

And then -- nothing. The company management and its bookkeepers insist that it never again received a 688-kilogram cylinder from the government, neither from the NMD nor from the Mukhabarat. Our missing container remains missing. We use Abed Nasser's pictures as a reference, but are unable to find the cylinder at the site. The 14 containers of 688 kilograms are all accounted for: They came straight from Al Muthanna in 1991. When we suggest that the bookkeeping might be shoddy, they bristle: "Not one gram can get in here without me knowing it and it being registered," says Abed Rashid. Of course they may think they have good reason to conceal the fact that they received more chemicals from the government. They may just not want any trouble. Says Ron Manley, a former U.N. weapons inspector, "The Iraqis are good at keeping paperwork, but they are also good at keeping paperwork that's required rather than that which is accurate."

Did the Mukhabarat indeed dispose of the cylinder by handing it over to the NMD, to be turned into soap by the aptly-named Arab Cleaning Company? Or did it end up somewhere else? And what does this whole story say about Iraq's missing WMD programs -- the reason for which the United States went to war? On this scorching and desolate plain, there are no answers.

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