Back in the Summer of 1997, at the height of yet another crisis surrounding the seemingly never-ending saga of UN weapons inspection teams led by yours truly [SCOTT RITTER] trying to gain access to sites considered by Iraq to be sensitive to their national security, I had surrounded the headquarters of the Iraqi intelligence service (the Mukhabarat), and was insisting that I be granted access to specific locations inside the headquarters deemed relevant to the Security Council’s mandate governing the disarmament of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs. My chief interlocutor was General Amer al-Sa’adi, the former head of Iraq’s military industry and, at the time, a special advisor to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.