Mahdi Obeidi

Obeidi - as "Saddam's nuclear mastermind" - oversaw Hussein's top secret centrifuge program and later became director-general of Iraq's Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization. He received much of his early scientific training in the United States. A talented mathematics student, he landed a five-year scholarship from the Ministry of Education for study at the Colorado School of Mines when he was only 18. After earning a master's degree in petroleum-refining engineering, he returned to Iraq and joined the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission.

For over ten years, Obeidi worked to meet the unrealistic demands of Hussein. "We were so close to getting a bomb. We were so close to getting tens or hundreds of bombs. Looking back, the world was lucky." Time ran out with the war in Kuwait and in 1991, Obeidi asserts that Hussein went to great lengths to destroy his stocks of illegal weapons and hide his projects, and ordered Obeidi to hide the core of the program from UN weapons inspectors. For years afterwards, Obeidi concealed himself and all signs of the program, repeatedly lying to weapons inspectors about their existence.

In the immediate aftermath of the 2003 war in Iraq, Obeidi contacted the weapons inspectors he had been forced to lie to for many years and voluntarily turned over key plans and parts to US intelligence. He led them to a lotus tree in his back yard where he had buried them years before. The few remaining components and plans for the uranium-enriching centrifuge that he turned over to the US during the war still represent the largest collection of evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

In his riveting book, The Bomb in My Garden, Obeidi brings to light the truth about Hussein's quest for nuclear weapons, and the extent of how he circumvented the international safeguards specifically intended to bar developing nations from obtaining the knowledge and materials needed to build nuclear weapons. He offers a rare glimpse into the crazed workings of Hussein's inner circle, and the intimidation, paranoia, and absurd demands that characterized his years working under Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel.