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In early 2004, 20 ORNL employees led by Alex Riedy quietly entered a building located on the outskirts of Baghdad. Their mission: Determine the amount of natural uranium dumped onto a floor by Iraqi looters, repackage the non-fissionable material in appropriate containers, and close the containers with seals approved by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The looters apparently needed uranium-containing canisters to store water. Indifferent to the contents, they broke the IAEA seals and emptied the canisters onto the floor. The Oak Ridge participants in the secret project hoped the episode might become public when President Bush addressed ORNL employees in July 2004. Seated near the podium, they were disappointed but not surprised when the president did not mention their efforts in Iraq. Instead, his remarks focused on Oak Ridge's role in the shutdown of Libya's nuclear program (see Article 13 - "Out of Sight" Missions). "We do exciting work," says Michael Whitaker, manager of the Safeguards Group in ORNL's Nuclear Science and Technology Division. "But a difficulty in our job is that we cannot tell the news media when and why we do something until our work with a country's nuclear material is complete." A similar news blackout was maintained in 1994 when Riedy led the Project Sapphire team that removed from Kazakhstan enough highly enriched uranium to make more than 20 atomic weapons. Riedy's team packaged the material, loaded it onto U.S. Air Force C-5 cargo airplanes, and oversaw the safe transportation of the material to the Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where the uranium was transferred onto secure tractor- trailer rigs and transported to the Oak Ridge Y-12 National Security Complex for interim storage.
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