"Don't tell me about the law. The law is anything I write on a scrap of paper." -- Saddam Hussein

In 1994, after twenty years developing Iraq's atomic weapon, Dr. Khidhir Hamza made a daring escape to warn the CIA of Saddam's nuclear ambitions... only to be ridiculed and turned away!

After a harrowing journey across three continents with Iraqi agents on his trail, Hamza finally came in from the cold at the U.S. embassy in Hungary. Now he tells a frightening story that U.S. officials have finally come to believe: that Saddam is still feverishly at work on the bomb and, if pushed to the wall, will use it.

Dr. Hamza also presents a startling, unprecedented portrait of Saddam himself: his drunken rages, his women, his fear of germs, and his cold-blooded murder of underlings. A former resident of the presidential palace, Hamza is the only defector who has lived to write a firsthand, intimate portrait of the Iraqi inner circle, its spies and hit men, and their brutal chief.

Saddam's Bombmaker is also a saga of one man's journey through the circles of hell. Educated at MIT and Florida State University, dedicated to a life of peaceful teaching in America, Dr. Hamza relates how the regime ordered him home, seduced him into a pampered life as an atomic energy official, and forced him to design a bomb. The price of refusal was torture.

As the father of the Iraqi bomb, Dr. Hamza designed a device from scratch with the help of World War Two era blueprints from America's Los Alamos labs, all the while planning an escape. Privately, he and his colleagues believed they...