The decision to secretly destroy large sections of Iraq’s WMD stocks and infrastructure without keeping good records would prove to be one of the most fateful events in Saddam’s—and America’s—march toward disaster. It meant that even when Iraq later sought to be honest about what had been destroyed in the summer of 1991, its officials would struggle to persuade U.N. inspectors. Not even the programs’ secret leaders knew fully what had been done. “We didn’t know what was destroyed and what was not,” Jafar recalled. “It was all a big mess.”[10]
