How to Recruit Iraqi Weapons Scientists
“Building civilian science was a more powerful tool than putting people in prison or killing them.”
This month, Statecraft focuses on America’s attempts to build nations in Iraq and Afghanistan. We think these stories are a great opportunity to get a closer look at what we mean by “state capacity.” Massive stateside bureaucracies attempted to build new, stable institutions in foreign countries. How did those bureaucracies perform? How about the institutions we built abroad?
Last week, we talked to a former CIA chief of base in Afghanistan, about CIA operations and why signals intelligence is overused.
In today’s installment, we talk to Alex Dehgan about his time in Iraq, as Science Advisor for the Bureau of Near East Affairs, and as Chief Scientist at USAID.
What You’ll Learn
What makes a good fixer?
How do you manage a $2 million program in cash?
How did the U.S. build a virtual science library for Iraq?
I want to start with your work in Iraq. Tell us about your assignment there.
I was set to become an academic and teach at the Yale School of the Environment. I'd spent three years doing fieldwork in a tent in Madagascar trying to understand extinction, and was looking at houses in New Haven. Three days after I came back from Madagascar, 9/11 happened. I realized at that point that I needed to do something that involved service and engagement. Through a fellowship with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), I joined the State Department.
I had my pick of positions, but the science advisor’s secretary directed me to work on the Middle East because he was like, “That's where the action is. That's where you need to be.” There was an immediate opportunity to go to Iraq to redirect former weapons scientists, a program which at that time was run by the Department of Defense (DOD) as a representative of the State Department.
I wasn't looking for the weapons. My job was to take the knowledge of the scientists and put it toward rebuilding the country. I was an extinction biologist at the time, not an expert on nuclear, chemical, biological, or delivery systems, which is what these scientists were. I didn't have a great set of data on the people we were supposed to be talking to.
But I did know that if you were going to redirect someone, you had to have a vessel to redirect them into. That meant rebuilding the civilian science community that had been destroyed by Saddam Hussein and 30 years of wars, sanctions and everything else.
At that time, there was real animosity between [Secretary of State] Colin Powell and [Secretary of Defense] Donald Rumsfeld. And when I got to Iraq, there was not a lot of interest in supporting the State Department programs that were on the ground. You had to be really entrepreneurial to make this thing work.
It's been a little while since I read Rise of the Vulcans. Could you give me the quick and dirty on why those two cabinet-level officials were at odds?
I think it's just fundamentally about access to power and control. Billions of dollars were going into Iraq. The United States had set up the sovereign government, which was controlled by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). It was the first time we had done that since taking over Japan, and there was an enormous amount of hubris in our actions.
In fact, there was this feeling that we would never hand Iraq back. When I first got there, I was living in Saddam Hussein's pool house. I later moved to what I think was his ballroom, where I lived with hundreds of other people in double sets of bunk beds. We showered in a trailer that was outside the palace and tried to make things work.
I had a document from Colin Powell that gave me apparent authority to execute this program to redirect former scientists. And I had $2 million, which we were quickly able to turn into $62 million to rebuild science. At that time, the DoD wasn't supportive of the program. They would not help us and we had no access to the infrastructure that was there, so we had to figure out how to execute on our own.
Even getting things like cars from Halliburton was difficult: they had a rule at the time that you had to drive around white unarmoured Suburbans with Texas plates that had to be washed every week. And that was just insane because that was the surest way to get killed. So we went out to the open car market.
I had also met some journalists from the Christian Science Monitor, and they were like, “Oh, you need a fixer.” I got introduced to the fixer who had been working for the New York Times and I hired him on the spot. And then we went into the Baghdad car market where, you know, in the first three days of the war, something like 100,000 cars entered the country. No one knew how to drive, a lot of people didn't have access to cars unless you had Saddam's permission. People who had never driven cars before were crashing into each other.
We bought a car and decorated with local style. We put on stickers that said, “I love Iraq,” put on the air freshener with the plastic half pulled off, and started working on figuring out who the scientists were and who we were supposed to work with.
Let me back you up — what makes a good fixer?
I think it's this ability to find whatever resources you need and be able to get there and support the person. You're putting your life in their hands, so there has to be camaraderie and trust between you.
We needed the fixer to have networks that we could tap into. We set up a science center outside of the Green Zone because that's where the scientists were and we had to set up our own security force to protect it. We had to get weapons. We had to get supplies and do procurement. The fixer needed to be scrappy and have the networks and be able to maintain the security of the project.
I think the second requirement is being able to communicate. We were very lucky that this person spoke phenomenally good English.
Talk to me about the state of play of the scientific community in Iraq when you arrived. What existed?
Eight hundred years ago, Iraq was one of the centers of science in the world. There was the Bayt al-Hikmah, the House of Wisdom, where great advances in medicine, astronomy, and mathematics were made, great works of literature created. But recent sanctions meant people didn't have access to journals, and the war, particularly the looting that happened after the U.S. invasion, gutted labs and institutions.
Under Saddam, the scientists were in this situation where they had to produce biological, nuclear, and chemical weapons systems that have been used against others, such as the Kurds and the Iranians in the country. This was organized through civilian companies that were dual use: they could be working on both irrigation nozzles and rocket nozzles for missiles, and trying to do so in a way that escaped sanctions.
If you were successful in making progress, you got cars and houses and resources. If you were not successful in making progress, your family was killed or you were killed. So the incentive was always to say that you were making progress. Some of the community had been jailed by the United States, some had fled the country, some were unemployed. The country stopped paying people.
Part of the job was to figure out who actually had knowledge of proliferation. We interviewed hundreds of scientists, and spent a lot of time trying to identify who were the leaders who had the knowledge that could lead to a bomb, or a missile. We created the space for a science center outside of the Green Zone because requiring the scientists to come into the Green Zone would put them at risk, and we needed to build trust.
The people waiting in those lines were targets and getting hit by improvised explosive devices and there was this lack of — how would you put it? — a lack of respect by making them go through the process of crossing that barrier all the time. We set up the center near one of the major universities. This colonel in the CPA said that we could have any palace we wanted. We asked, “What happens at handover?” And they were like, “We don't know.” No one believed that handover would happen. So we actually went out and negotiated a lease to rent a house, but the State Department wouldn't approve the lease.
Why not?
Unclear. We wrote the lease up ourselves, I’m a lawyer. The State Department lawyers didn't want to approve it, but they weren't saying that we couldn't do it.
There are some lawyers that help you figure out how to solve problems, and then there are other lawyers that will only tell you why you can't do something. And they were falling in that category. So we actually found these lawyers within the CPA itself, one of whom became a major advisor on the Middle East across the Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations and is now an ambassador.
We started working with those guys to figure out how to solve these problems, how to rent a house next to the university and set up the systems to actually be able to convene this community of scientists. I think there was reluctance, but we co-opted the intelligence companies and the DoD officials that we were working with, brought them on our side, which I think was very important. Then they started introducing us to scientists and providing us with the intelligence and the access we needed.
It was so bad at that time. I was flying back to the embassy in Kuwait, filling up a backpack with $20, $30, $50 thousand in cash, signing for it personally, and then flying to Iraq and running this $2 million program, entirely in cash. I had a little receipt book and I was writing receipts for everything, but that was the level at which we had to operate to actually be able to make this program work.
We had a very clear mission. We could use the authority of the State Department whenever the CPA was a barrier to what we were trying to do, but sometimes the State Department itself was a barrier.
How did you think about the long term for these programs? You had funding and immediate cash available, but you were trying to set up a new private economy of science in a war-torn country.
I think a huge problem with the Coalition Provisional Authority was that no one actually realized that there could be an end to our governance in Iraq. The biggest challenge was that we wanted to set up institutions owned by and created for the Iraqis. And so the first thing I did was convene a group of really good scientists who had been involved in the weapons programs and said, “Look, here is the purpose of our program. We have these non-proliferation aims, but on the flip side, this is your chance to build civilian science in the country. What do we need and how do we do it?”
I started working with that scientific leadership to build a National Academy of Sciences, an Office of Science and Technology Policy type of institution for the parliament, and a National Science Foundation. We helped Iraqis get through the required non-proliferation treaties to be able to access science. And then when I returned to the United States, I worked on building things like the virtual science library for Iraq. Because of looting and sanctions and conflict, they really needed to have journal access.
We worked with the parliament and the Iraqi leadership. Literally the very last thing that the CPA did, before the handover to the Iraqis, was pass laws for all of these science initiatives that we had created to stay standing. I think that outlasting the CPA and leaving that legacy in the next generation of leaders and scientists was one of the most important things we could have done.
Tell me about the virtual science library.
I was looking at a map of Baghdad and saw that they had a natural history museum and I was like, “Oh, I need to go visit this.”I had worked out of the Field Museum of Natural History during my graduate program at the University of Chicago. So I drove out there with my fixer.
All the collections that had been collected by the British and Iraqis were destroyed by the massive looting after the U.S. invasion, but the library at the museum was phenomenal. They even had a stuffed lion, because there used to be lions in Iraq up until the 1920s or so. But looters had chopped off the head and carted it off somewhere.
Physical hard copy library?
Yeah, hard copy, natural history library. I found out that a group of female librarians actually put their lives at stake to defend this library and prevent the looters from going in and destroying and carting off the books. It was a really good library, but because of sanctions and conflict, it was 30 years out of date. So I worked with American conservation biologists, ecologists, and evolutionary biologists from multiple universities to collect full sets of journals that covered the last 30 years. We shipped the full sets and some important books from that 30-year time period over to my APO address [Army Post Office], my personal mail address.
After the handover to the Iraqi government, I had to come back to Washington. I didn’t want to, but I had technically been on a D.C.-based fellowship, and they were really unhappy that I had spent all of this time in Iraq. When I came back, I told the story about the library at the AAAS, and another fellow came to me and said, “Why don't we do digital libraries?” Digital libraries were just starting to come online in the U.S. At that time, Iraq wasn't connected to the internet, except for maybe Saddam and his families, but that was starting to change and I was thinking that this probably could be a reality.
Susan Cumberledge, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, D.J. Patil, who became the U.S. Chief Data Scientist, another State Department colleague, and I started working on building a digital science library to cover all of these fields. The first thing we needed to do was get permission. It was very clear that some of the freedom I had to be an “intrapreneur” within the CPA would be restricted under the State Department.
It was very hard coming back from Iraq to an office that wasn't very interesting to be in, but I was like, “This is a good project for us to be able to do. How do we get support for this?” One of the problems we had was the clearance process at the State Department.
Tell us about it.
Most people hate it, right? They despise it because you have an interesting idea, you send it up for an action memo, and any interesting component of the idea is eradicated as people edit your document and your language.
Give me more context. You want to get something done at State and you send the action memo. What is that?
You send an action memo and there's a set of people who are automatically interested in being part of it and editing your document, including policy planning. But there are also lots of other people in your chain of command. If you’re sending it to the secretary, you may also have to send it to the assistant secretary or the undersecretary's office.
And then there might be other people in other departments of State who are not in your chain of command but also have interest. All of those people have to be on the clearance list.
And when you say “have interest,” does that mean having authorization to edit?
For instance, if I'm doing something on Egypt, but it involves science, I would need to go to the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, the Office of the Science and Technology Advisor, and the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs and the desk officer for each and get their sign off. That list just gets longer and longer.
By the time your memo is complete, all these people have had a chance to rewrite it, and whatever kind of novel idea you had is destroyed. And this is part of the reason why sometimes we don't see policy evolving in the State Department, because there is an elasticity through the bureaucracy that rebounds against novel ideas, pulling them back in.
We were thinking about how to get approval for the virtual library, and we knew that people treat action memos differently than they do information memos. People have a lot of memos to clear. They're going to invest their time in the action memos and they'll sign off on these other memos. The interesting thing about that clearance is that it's an endorsement of your idea, and that really was a critical piece for us.
So we decided to draft this as an info memo, which was merely, “Hey, Secretary Powell, we want to advise you on something that's going on.”
Instead of minimizing the clearance list, we had this idea to get everyone that could have an interest and maybe beyond that to sign off on this idea, and get it to look like the entirety of the State Department approved the idea.
We sent it up to the Secretary of State, who we knew loved science and technology. He literally introduced the internet into the State Department despite the reluctance to bring in this newfangled technology. He just wrote on top of the memo, “Good,” and then his initials, “C. P.,” Colin Powell. We made a thousand copies of that page and of the clearance list and used that to convince the Defense Threat Reduction Agency that the Secretary of State of the United States endorsed this idea, along with the entirety of the State Department.
We ultimately got the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which was attempting to prevent nonproliferation, to invest in the project by giving Iraqis access to 17,000 journals using full-text, federated search, which was a new concept at the time. And we had negotiated with scientific agencies to get the journals at a fraction of the cost, or no cost.
So we gave all of the scientific institutions in Iraq the ability to search all of these journals using a single search bar. That was the big thing, right? This is an agency whose entire job is to prevent proliferation, and we got them to recognize that building civilian science was a more powerful tool for that than putting people in prison or killing them, which was the approach that we had been taking.
And that was part of the reason for this conflict that was playing out on the National Security Council between Powell and Rumsfeld. The idea was to just shoot or kill these people who were a proliferation concern, but we were approaching it with the idea of cooperative threat reduction. Cooperative threat reduction means you're working to actually reduce the risk. And in turn, you're using science as a framework to build the official relationship between countries.
I had heard that this project, rebuilding science, was probably one of the most popular things we have done in Iraq. The head of the oil ministry was a nuclear physicist who had been trained at Argonne National Labs in the United States and he adored us for this work. He would not meet with the high level folks at the embassy, but when we came to town or when we would visit we could get any access we wanted. It reinforced this idea that you could be entrepreneurial to push for and build things you know to be right. But at the same time, this is also a really powerful tool for diplomacy that we could use.
Go one layer deeper about how you negotiated with journal publishers to get access to all these resources.
We partnered up with the National Academy of Sciences to help us connect with the larger journal publishers. There are a few scientific societies that are a little bit harder to work with, quite frankly, because they have one journal that they charge thousands of dollars for.
The idea was to inspire people about what we were trying to achieve, to literally restore science to its rightful place as a way of helping rebuild an entire society that had been brutalized by Saddam. No matter what you think of the war, what Saddam did to Iraq and what he did to the Kurds and in the region was terrible. This was an opportunity to say, “Hey, we're giving a pathway. We're giving tools that the United States is deeply respected for.” Even when there is animosity toward our foreign policy, respect for our science and ingenuity and technology is one of the most valuable things we have around the world.
So with the journals, it was getting them on board with that idea and getting them inspired by the opportunity to transform a nation. And in fact, it became a model for other programs. We used the virtual science library to actually expand to other countries around the world, which was taken over by the Civilian Research and Development Foundation. The one in Iraq was taken over by the Iraqi government, and then over time their relationship with journals became normalized as in the U.S.
Is that virtual science library still extant in Iraq?
It has essentially become integrated into the normal digital libraries that they had. The technology eventually advanced, but it was the key that allowed us to create a new generation of scientists, engineers, and physicians that could help with the rebuilding of the country, right? All of these individuals had been building terrible things at risk to their lives. We spent all this time looking for weapons when what we really needed to do was harness knowledge. We reinforced the value of cooperative threat reduction, and we did it in an entrepreneurial way with the information memo, which I’m proud of. When I left that office in the State Department they gave me a framed copy of that original memo and I still have that.
After your time at State, did you go straight to USAID?
No, it’s a little confusing. When I left, I went to the policy planning staff under President Bush. It was probably not the right time for me to be working for the political leadership at the State Department in that way. Secretary Rice was very fundamentally different from Secretary Powell.
In the Obama administration, I started working on things like the Cairo Initiative, which was our science engagement of the larger Islamic world. I worked on the Iran deal, again leading with science diplomacy because the official negotiations were really supported through doing science. I also wrote transition papers for the incoming administration, including on how we use and restore science, technology, and innovation to its rightful place within USAID. One of the suggestions was to appoint a chief scientist or science and technology advisor for the agency. It took a year, but Raj Shah got appointed. He invited me on to work on science, but I started with no budget, no people, and built from there. If you don't have resources, where can you find free resources for what you're trying to do?
I was part of the team to stand up this new policy bureau, to restore policy leadership at USAID within the office of science and technology, as opposed to just having State own it.
Just to clarify, you were creating this office from scratch.
Yes. We were creating a bureau from scratch and then I was running the office in that bureau from scratch. We were thinking about what USAID really needed, and there were a number of initiatives.
The first thing we wanted to do was restore technical leadership to USAID. And so we needed to get science policy fellows, engineers, scientists into the agency and into the front lines. It was really hard to staff up because Congress doesn't like spending money that goes to other countries, even though it's in our interest. But they had created all these foreign service limited positions for Iraq and Afghanistan and they were unfilled. And I was like, “Can we use these to pay for AAAS fellows?” USAID historically has had the most AAAS fellows of any agency, most of their technical bureaus historically were led by AAAS fellows, but we had really lost that scientific expertise.
We were able to actually bring in all these AAAS fellows and USAID eventually had 65 science and technology policy fellows, including 20 who went into the missions. That gave us a network of people across the agency who were not tied to the bureaucracy, but they were tied to our goals in science.
We had 20 of them embedded in our office and that allowed us to transform. All of a sudden, our office was exploding in size and that gave us a huge amount of power. We had really smart, eager people with real science competency to actually work on creating new scientific integrity policies, new research policies, create the grand challenges for development, and build new programs that engaged universities in novel ways.
We set up a geo center and an Office of the Chief Geographer. The second thing we did was bring back what were called ST positions, which were SES-equivalent positions for scientists and engineers. We had a career path for science that was not just, you know, a money manager. USAID was really turning into a foreign affairs organization, and it had lost that technical aspect.
The third thing we did was partner with scientific agencies to create joint programs. We had a program with the National Science Foundation, where they were funding American scientists and we funded their development counterparts in the global South who could not get funding from NSF. So we could literally build programs that leveled the playing field by allowing countries to solve their own problems.
We did this with NSF, NIH, USGS, NASA, and NOAA across the board, and then we started bringing in SES-level people from these technical science agencies into USAID on detail. We had convinced NIH to give us one of their most senior leaders to embed with us for a year.
It got to the point where we were growing so rapidly within the agency that two things happened. First, the administrator accused me of going down to the local coffee shop and randomly pulling people out of the line and signing them up for USAID, because she was so tired of onboarding people week after week.
Did you pull people out of the coffee line?
If I was having coffee with them, yes. But it's that kind of hardscrabble approach that took us from three full time employees to an office with 50 people. We didn't have furniture, and other offices would abandon furniture to throw away in the hallways, so we would go out at night and just grab it all.
We had 20 people working together at desks in a room that was intended for a single person. That created momentum, and then we started getting space and resources started catching up with us. We created things like the Grand Challenges for Development program, another example of how to partner with other donors like the Gates Foundation, Canada, and the Swedes, to join in on what we were trying to do. And that gave us much more money to play with. It allowed us to mitigate risk and be much more successful.
When you say it gave you more money to play with, is that because outside donors were matching or because you were pulling money into a given issue?
In fact, we had the Swedish government give my office $200 million for the grand challenges program. I was investigated by the inspector general because this had not happened before in this way.
Wow. How did you get the Swedes to give you a fifth of a billion dollars?
I went to Sweden and they had essentially a home week where they brought together all of their ambassadors and all their development officers. Because we'd been building this program, it was very important that we bring them along on what we were trying to do. I was able to address that whole home week on the goals of the Grand Challenges program. That’s how we got that money.
We ended up organizing some grand challenges around saving lives at birth and maternal care, Ebola, Zika, some challenges around water as well. One particular challenge was for problems of obstructed labor and how to deal with that within a remote community, with simple tools as opposed to surgical intervention. And we had an Argentine car mechanic who had seen a video of how you get the cork that's fallen into a wine bottle out using reverse pressure.
That’s extremely Argentine.
Yes. Super Argentine. And he realized that could be actually a solution for obstructed labor. He approached his own health ministry, proposed an idea, and they're like, “There's no place to really fund this except for this grand challenge that's just been released. Let's submit it.” It's called the ODON device. It made the front page of the New York Times and it's scaling worldwide now as a result of this innovator who had no connection to traditional global health and never would have been considered within it.
Any final tips and tricks for writing persuasive memos to leadership? It sounds like that's unlocked doors for you.
These are persuasion documents. It is so important to have not just concision and getting to it quickly, but to really think about it as if you're writing a story and trying to bring people along to understand what the end of that journey is.
We think of writing as scientific papers or policy papers and we write dry, boring things. I think we can actually choose to make things interesting and engaging, persuasive and powerful.
One last thought, and I think I've learned this after USAID and government service. I think there's a real value in taking a scientific approach to the value proposition testing, and we can use that in policy as well. We can think about the assumptions we're making and how to test those assumptions while we build and to allow ourselves to pivot if we need to.
That sounds like it should be straightforward, to use the scientific method to test whether you're effective. Why am I wrong?
I don't know, and I wish I knew. When I was in government, there were 1,000 people proposing things that I thought would not go anywhere, and I wish there had been a way to test it. Somehow those ideas also go forward. So asking, “Is this going to solve people's problems, and what is it worth to them to have that problem solved?” is an important element that we should bring into government.
What are some examples of proposals that don’t satisfy a scientific assessment?
Yeah, there's a really famous study that found that 31% of World Bank reports have never been downloaded. Think about how much money goes into hiring that expertise, generating the report, and that it's never really used. I've seen a million of these proposals. If we just provide the data, that will be enough. There’s a lack of understanding of behavioral science of what people need, of how something would be valuable to them, that I think should be part of the process.
Thanks to Rita Sokolova for her judicious edits.
How wonderful. Now that we set this up, it will prove invaluable to Iran. Ain't global transparency grand? Thank you, US taxpayers. And paraplegic soldiers.
What were we NOT thinking??