By Robert Windrem
NBC News investigative producer for special projects

If Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak is forced into exile, he is likely to have access to billions in assets. But if Egypt’s successor government tries to recover any of it, it will have a hard time, if history is any judge.

Estimates circulated inside the U.S. government, developed by various agencies, put  Mubarak’s wealth at between $2 billion and $3 billion.  How much of that total is outside of Egypt, and in what form, is uncertain. How much is recoverable is an even smaller fraction.

AP reported that some in Egypt believed Mubarak controlled $70 billion in assets, but U.S. officials dismissed that number as wildly exaggerated. They noted that Bill Gates, the richest man on the Forbes 400 list, is worth $53 billion.

Nick Peck, Head of Complex Investigations of Nardello & Co., worked in a similar position with Kroll Associates when that company was hired by Kuwait to track Saddam Hussein’s wealth. He’s also familiar as well with Kroll’s attempts to track, and recover, the wealth looted from the Philippines by the Marcos family.

“The initial numbers are often very overblown,” says Peck. “Often suspect in terms of how much the official has.”

Officials say historically most of the assets controlled by dictators remains within their home countries. Peck pointed to a stash of millions of dollars in cash and gold bars found hidden underground in Iraq following the war.

“Always concerned about their own security, they like to keep an amount liquid in their own country,” says Peck. “But if he’s planning long term, for a future outside the country, a dictator will think, ‘Let me stuff some in Swiss bank or a Panamanian nominee account.’”

Indeed, finding the hard currency or the gold bars at home is nowhere near as difficult as tracking paper and real assets overseas. Peck points out that the Marcos family invested heavily in midtown Manhattan real estate, while Saddam held tens of millions of dollars in public stock in European companies. The Shah of Iran used a family foundation to acquire a Fifth Avenue office building.

Proving ownership, says Peck, is difficult.

“If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s likely a duck, but that often doesn’t meet the legal threshold to seize that asset,” he notes. “It’s a tough battle to prove it. There are nominee accounts," accounts in another person's name, "but no bank savings book. What you’ll almost never find is a deposed leader’s name linked to accounts.”

Peck says he also heard reports while investigating Saddam that certain events would trigger asset transfers from financial institutions in western locales to more obscure institutions.

There are other common denominators, says Peck. Often times, a trusted family member and/or confidante is located overseas near the assets. Saddam’s half-brother, Barzan al-Tikriti, controlled Saddam’s overseas assets from an office in Geneva. (Barzan, like his half-brother, was hanged by the Iraqi government for crimes against humanity unrelated to his investments.)

“What people have to understand is there are no shortcuts," Peck said. "It's time consuming and requires some degree of luck in getting the right sources to successfully identify the stolen assets."

In another country in transition, Tunisia's provisional cabinet on Thursday adopted a battery of "practical mechanisms" to enable it to recover assets of figures of the ousted regime, the country’s official news agency said.

Once recovered, "the smuggled and plundered funds and assets" will be used for the development of mainly poorer areas in the country, it said.

REUTERS/Loay Abu Haykel

Omar Suleiman, Egyptian intelligence chief and vice president

By Robert Windrem
NBC News investigative producer
for special projects

Increasingly, the U.S. is placing its trust in Omar Suleiman’s ability to serve as an intermediary between Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and those calling for democracy in the Arab world’s most populous nation.

But while Suleiman, the longtime intelligence chief and new Egyptian vice president, has long been a favorite of U.S. and Israeli officials, his animosity toward some in the Egyptian resistance may make it difficult to serve as a go-between.

According to reports out of the White House, the U.S. sees Suleiman as the best short-term solution, one in which there is both real change and political stability, a difficult job with virtually all sides calling for Mubarak to step down.

Typical of the effusive praise U.S. officials have lavished on Suleiman over the years is this excerpt from former CIA Director George Tenet, in his 2007 memoir, “At the Center of the Storm.”

“Omar Suleiman has been head of the Egyptian intelligence service for many years. A general as well as an intelligence chief, Umar is tall and regal looking, a very powerful man, very deliberate in his speech. He’s also tough and engaging. In a world filled with shadows, he is straight up and down,” Tenet stated as he wrote about the Middle East peace process.

“Umar has also done as much behind the scenes as anyone else I can think of to try to bring peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis,” he added. 

“That was true when the United States was still engaged in the process. It’s even more so now that we are long gone from it. When nobody was trying to go see Hamas, when nobody was talking to the Palestinians, when nobody was talking to the Israelis, when nobody was pushing forward with innovative ideas to try to get people talking to each other, Umar was on the ground taking risks,” he continued.

At many of the meetings Tenet had with Suleiman, his then chief of staff, John Brennan, was present.  Brennan, who learned Arabic in Cairo, is now President Obama’s highly trusted counterterrorism adviser and plays an increasingly larger role in National Security Council discussions on Egypt.

More recently, Suleiman was credited by U.S. and Israeli officials with keeping arms out of Gaza.  Suleiman also often carried messages from Israel and the U.S. to Hamas.

The week before the revolt began in Cairo, in fact, Suleiman was quoted as warning Hamas that unless it released an Israeli soldier it would face serious consequences. 

The Jerusalem Post reported on Jan. 29 that Suleiman warned Hamas that he expected “a massive operation” against Hamas in Gaza unless IDF soldier Gilad Schalit, held in Gaza for almost two years, is released.

While the U.S. and Israel trust him, there are indications that at least one party in the Egyptian opposition does not.

Mark Hosenball of Reuters reported this weekend that U.S. diplomatic documents published by WikiLeaks show that Suleiman has long sought to demonize the opposition Muslim Brotherhood in his contacts with skeptical U.S. officials.

According to a February 2006 diplomatic cable, Suleiman accused the Muslim Brotherhood of spawning “11 different Islamist extremist organizations,  most notably the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Gama'a Islamiya (Islamic Group).″ 

The same month, in another cable, he is quoted as describing as “unfortunate” the Muslim Brotherhood’s success in recent parliamentary elections and suggesting Egypt needs new measures to restrain them.

Suleiman met this week with two representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood as part of a larger meeting with protest leaders and prominent Egyptians.

After Suleiman described the meeting as a productive negotiation, other participants denounced his account as a ploy to taint them as collaborators.

While U.S. officials quoted in the WikiLeaks cables admit the Muslim Brotherhood has among its membership “extremists both we and the Egyptian government oppose, Egyptian authorities have a long history of threatening us with the MB bogeyman.″

Who is Omar Suleiman? There's more in the video below from msnbc TV:
 

By Robert Windrem
NBC News investigative producer for special projects

NBC News has obtained more than a dozen documents from the United States, Russia and Israel that shed some light on several Egyptian weapons of mass destruction programs, including its nuclear potential and details of a joint North Korean-Egyptian missile development agreement.

The documents, stretching back two decades, reveal an Egyptian commitment to research and development of WMDs, the acronym for weapons of mass destruction that thrust itself into the common lexicon during the Iraq war. They also reveal that Cairo is interested in nuclear and radiological weapons, though the extent of that interest is far from clear.

The U.S. has long known about but tolerated because of Egypt’s central role in both the Middle East peace talks and counterterrorism. To quote one congressional expert on arms proliferation, "If they were any other Arab state, we would be all over them every day on these issues."

Related story: Concerns grow over Egypt's WMD research

At the same time, U.S., Israeli and Russian officials have expressed concerns that the Egyptian weapons programs — particularly its missile expertise – has the potential to destabilize the relative peace that has reigned in the Middle East for several decades. Despite these concerns, the officials say, Egypt has continued to work on many of these programs.

Egyptians have defended its development of WMDs as a necessary counterbalance to Israel's weapons capabilities, which are daunting even to the first Arab state to sign a peace treaty with the Jewish state. With an estimated 200 nuclear warheads — bigger than Great Britain’s arsenal — and 100 medium-range missiles, Israel is in a world of diminishing nuclear programs, a regional superpower — at least.

Here is a breakdown on the Egyptian programs, drawn from the U.S., Russian and Israeli documents, all of which were either publicly disseminated or declassified under the Freedom of Information Act: 

Nuclear proliferation
The most revealing document in the trove is a Jan. 28, 1993, report by the Foreign Intelligence Service, the KGB's successor organization. The report, titled “Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction,” was issued at a time of extraordinary public openness in Russia and has not been updated since.

The report stated that while Egypt had "no special program of military-applied research in the nuclear sphere" at the time, it had made significant advances on nuclear technology.

Among other things, it said Egypt had:

• Built a research reactor at Inshas, north of Cairo, built with help from Argentina.
• Contracted with Russia to supply a MGD-20 cyclotron accelerator, which would be helpful in exploring uranium enrichment technologies.
• Begun construction of a facility at its Inshas research center that “in its design features and engineering protection could in the future be used to obtain weapons-grade plutonium from the uranium irradiated in the research reactors."

In addition, NBC News obtained a U.S. Customs Service account of a debriefing of an Egyptian-American spy, Abdel Kadr Helmy. Helmy, who was jailed in the 1980s for trying to obtain various missile technologies  including Pershing-II guidance packages – said in the interviews that Egypt had an active nuclear weapons development program that included sending uranium to Pakistan for enrichment to bomb-grade levels. He also said that an Egyptian Brigadier General, Ahmad Nashet, ran both the civilian nuclear establishment in Cairo as well as the nascent bomb program.

Helmy subsequently disavowed the claim, and Egypt has steadfastly denied interest in nuclear weapons.

Chemical weapons
The Egyptians are also interested in chemical weapons. Specifically, the FIS document notes: "Techniques of the production of nerve-paralyzing and blister-producing toxic agents have been assimilated."

Furthermore, the FIS said, "There is information to the effect that Egypt is displaying interest in purchases overseas of warheads intended for filling with liquid chemical warfare agents. The stockpiles of toxic substances available at this time are insufficient for broad-based operations, but the industrial potential would permit the development of the additional production in a relatively short time." It may be that the warheads the Russians discussed were ultimately bound for Iraq. 

Biological weapons
Similarly, the Egyptians have a biological weapons program, according to statements from the FIS, the CIA and the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency dating back to the 1990s.

"At the start of the 1970s," the FIS report stated, "President Sadat confirmed this, announcing the presence in Egypt of a stockpile of biological agents stored in refrigerating plants. Toxins of varying nature are being studied and techniques for their production and refinement are being developed at the present time in a (unnamed) national research center."

In response to a question during a congressional hearing on WMD proliferation on Feb. 24, 1993, CIA Director R. James Woolsey confirmed that Egypt is counted as a nation with biological weapons capability.

And in three annual reports to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee since 1995, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency has used the same language to assess the Egyptian program: "The United States believes that Egypt had developed biological agents by 1972. There is no evidence to indicate that Egypt has eliminated this capability and it remains likely that the Egyptian capability to conduct biological warfare continues to exist."

What is intriguing about these reports is that, unlike a similar report in 1994, they did not include this sentence: "The United States however has not, however, obtained recent information on this program" — the implication being that the U.S. did receive information about the program starting in 1995, though it’s not clear what that information was.

Missiles
The area where Egypt excels is in missile development.

The FIS report noted: "By 1990, Egypt's missile forces were armed with a regiment each of Soviet Scud-B (with a range of 300 kilometers) and Frog 7 (70 km) transporter-erector-launchers and also a certain quantity of Sakr 80 and Sakr 365 Egyptian-Iraqi-North Korean short-range missiles. It is technically possible to fit the Scud and Frog warheads with chemical weapons.”

The report also noted that China had reached an agreement with Egypt to assist in modernizing a manufacturing plant to build “new modifications of the Scud B-class missiles and three domestic types of Egyptian surface-to-surface missiles."

A 1992 Israeli Defense Forces memorandum on Mideast missile programs provided this appraisal of the Egyptian program aimed at acquiring and supporting ground-to-ground missiles, or GGM in weapons-speak:

"During the 1950s, and aided by German Nazi scientists, a concerted effort was made to build factories which would manufacture missiles,” it said. “This effort continued over the years; at present the Egyptian army diverts resources to this endeavor.”

The memo said that the Egyptian program was focused on the Scud, and that North Korea was its main ally. In the early 1980s, it said, North Korea bought tens of Russian-made medium-range Scud-B missiles from the Egyptians and, in exchange, helped the Egyptians set up the infrastructure for missile production and assembly. The Egyptian factories are said to have begin active production in 1993.

An even bigger concern among foreign intelligence services is the medium-range Condor II missile program, a joint project of Egypt, Argentina and Iraq.

In congressional testimony on April 18, 1991, U.S. Customs Service agent Daniel Burns stated that Abdelkader Helmy, the Egyptian-American rocket scientist who had pleaded guilty to helping Egypt obtain equipment and material for the Condor-II missile discussed with him several projects, including an “Egyptian effort to develop a nuclear warhead, including the Cobalt-60 effort and the purchase of uranium from France."

Helmy’s statement is of particular concern as Cobalt-60, a radioactive isotope that could be used in a radiological or "dirty" bomb, which disperses radioactive material on detonation.

As stated above, Helmy later disavowed the statement and returned to Egypt. Egypt has denied any interest in nuclear weapons.

From Woodstock to the Million Man March to the Egyptian rallies in Tahrir Square, journalists and officials have struggled to count the number of people in a crowd.

Here's a link back to a piece on the science of counting a crowd, published on msnbc.com before the inauguration of President Barack Obaama:

When people gather in vast numbers, 'official' estimates often run wild

The author is Steve Doig, who for decades has done reality-based crowd-counting for festivals, political rallies, bowl parades and other events. He is a professor at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. During a 20-year career as a reporter at the Miami Herald, he specialized in data analysis, and contributed to Pulitzer Prize-winning work on Hurricane Andrew.

By Robert Windrem, NBC News investigative producer for special projects

What a difference a few days make when it comes to assessing a volatile protest against a foreign government.

Three days ago, the consensus among U.S. officials was, in the words of one, that Egypt “isn't likely to be the flashpoint that Tunisia turned out to be."

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the main reason for that view was Egypt’s repressive security apparatus.

But by Friday, the official said, the widely held view was that "this could go either way." Adjectives being bandied about among higher-ups included "fluid" and "extraordinarily tense." 

The outcome may be determined within a matter of hours, the official said, adding, "Somebody has to do something to break the tension and fast."

U.S. officials do not expect a conciliatory message from President Hosni Mubarak, the official said, noting that no one would believe such a statement and that it could even exacerbate tensions given the harsh repression.

It's possible Mubarak will offer to meet with Nobel Peace laureate Mohamed ElBaradei, who returned to Egypt to join the protesters in calling for Mubarak to step down, the official said, but that too is problematic. It would set ElBaradei up as someone who people can rally around.  As for ElBaradei’s house arrest, that may be a good thing because "not everyone on the streets is of one mind."

Finally, and perhaps most important, the official said "Mubarak is poised and is positioned to crack down harder if that is what he wants to do,” the official said. “He has not pulled out all the stops on repression."