Baghdad 1984: Two trucks arrive at theMeirTweig synagogue the only shul in use by the handful of Jews still remaining in Baghdad. The trucks have been dispatched bySaddamHussein the country’s ruthless dictator charged with the mission of delivering yet another slap to the face of the Jewish community.

Saddam’s men go upstairs to the women’s section where a large stash of Jewish seforim documents and artifacts have been consolidated and safeguarded — cherished relics of a Jewish community that has largely fled. The men confiscate everything they can find load the trucks and drive off leaving the synagogue’s occupants terrified and bereft.

Baghdad 2003: A coalition led by US and British forces invades Iraq largely on the pretext thatSaddamHussein has stockpiled weapons of mass destruction. Eventually Saddam is lifted out of an underground bunker and the Iraqi army is defeated but those famous WMDs are never found.

It’s a warm Monday in May with the US-led coalition forces and the Iraqi National Congress (INC) in control of Baghdad. An Iraqi informant probably seeking to curry favor with Iraq’s new leadership approaches INC leaderAhmedChalabiand tells him that he used to head the Jewish section of Saddam’s intelligence service. He claims there is an entire trove of Jewish artifacts including a seventh-century Talmud written on parchment still lying there in the Mukhabarat Saddam’s infamous intelligence agency.

Chalabi immediately calls two longtime friends currently in Baghdad: HaroldRhode(who worked with the INC from 1991 to 2003) and journalist JudithMillerof the New York Times.Miller has been embedded with the 16-member Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha a group searching for those elusive nuclear biological and chemical weapons. Rhode Miller Team Alpha and a few Iraqis from the INC jump into their Jeeps and head for the Mukhabarat. They’re not really sure what if anything they might expect to find there.

United States 2014: “So off we went and our informant points to two windows down below in the basement” recountsDr.Rhode now retired and safely back at his home in Potomac Maryland. “The next time we looked around he had disappeared into thin air.