Hussein Kamel Hassan al-Majid was the son-in-law of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein who defected to Jordan and took to helping the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) and the International Atomic Energy Agency IAEA inspection teams assigned to look for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Kamel rose through the army ranks to become Iraq's minister of military industries, heading the Military Industrialisation Commission , and supervised Iraq's weapons development programs from 1987.

He married one of Saddam Hussein's daughters, Raghad Hussein, and lived in Iraq until 1995. For unknown reasons, Kamel and Raghad defected along with brother, Saddam Kamel al-Majid, and his wife Rana (another of Saddam Hussein's daughters). Jordan granted them asylum, and there they began to cooperate with UNSCOM and its director Rolf Ekeus, the United States' CIA and the British MI6.

Kamel provided the inspection teams with a wealth of information, some of it quite humiliating to the teams (such as how Ekeus's own translator was actually working for the Iraqi government) and some incredibly useful (such as disclosing the fact that Iraq had a biological warfare program before the Gulf War, in addition to providing locations for facilities and huge amounts of documents).

The defection appears to have had a psychological impact in Baghdad due to uncertainty over what Kamel would reveal: soon afterwards inspectors were invited to visit previously unseen weapons sites and new documents were turned over for examination.

Importantly, Kamel maintained that Iraq had destroyed its weapons of mass destruction and related programs after the end of the first Gulf War. Britain's Foreign Office has stated that they disbelieved this claim, however Kamel's version of events appear to have been borne out in the wake of the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.

In 1996, after intermediaries for Saddam Hussein had assured them that all would be forgiven, Hussein Kamel and Saddam Kamel were convinced to return to Iraq with their wives. Reportedly, immediately upon their return, they were ordered to divorce their wives and were denounced as traitors. They refused to surrender to Saddam's security forces and were killed in a 13 hour firefight at a safe house.

External links

Iraq's Most Senior Defector http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/iraq/defector.shtml