A key Iraqi nuclear scientist says he believed by telling the truth about Iraq's weapons, he was helping to stave off the invasion.

Saad Tawfiq, a key figure in Saddam Hussein's clandestine nuclear weapons program, said when he watched Colin Powell waving a vial of white powder and telling the UNSC on February 5, 2003, a story about Iraqi germ labs, he realized he had risked his life and those of his loved ones for nothing.

"When I saw Colin Powell I started crying. Immediately. I knew I had tried and lost," Tawfiq told AFP this week in the Jordanian capital Amman.

Tawfiq's sister got involved under pressure in one of the most successful attempts by the CIA to penetrate Saddam's Iraq, a program built up by agency veteran Charlie Allen to target Iraqi weapons technicians through their relatives.

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"We don't have the resources to make anything anymore. We don't even have enough spare parts for our conventional military. We can't even shoot down an airplane. We don't have anything left. If the sanctions are ever lifted, then Saddam is certain to restart the programs. But there is nothing now," Tawfiq told his sister.

And yet, although all 30 recruited Iraqi weapons scientists said the same thing, that Iraq's programs to develop nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons had long been abandoned, the CIA ignored the results.

Then CIA national intelligence officer Paul R. Pillar said there were other indications that seemed to contradict what the individuals were saying.

But as Tawfiq laments five years later, "You don't have to destroy a country for that."