HER dusty file was one of hundreds of thousands of documents stacked in a house in a wealthy neighbourhood of Baghdad. Asma Rasheed married a pilot, lived comfortably in the presidential compound of Saddam Hussein and directed a microbiology programme that was not supposed to exist.

Rasheed’s light blue folder has emerged from a huge archive seized by forces loyal to Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, which opposed Saddam. The archive — a dark who’s who of Iraq — reveals the tiniest details of blandishments and humiliations by a paranoid regime that shared the Nazis’ obsession with documentation.

In four days since arriving in Baghdad from the southern city of Nasiriya, Chalabi’s forces have captured the complete archives of the Iraqi army, the Special Security Organisation (SSO), led by Saddam’s younger son Qusay, and the Amn al-Amm, the Iraqi equivalent of MI5.

The archives had been removed from ministries and hidden in private homes. The military files were stacked floor to ceiling on metal shelves in the former home of Raifa Chalabi, the opposition leader’s sister. The house, in the wealthy al-Mansour neighbourhood, was confiscated by the regime two years ago.

The archive’s guards were not supposed to let this treasure-trove fall into the hands of the opposition. The next-door neighbour said they had returned every day last week to try to burn the house, but he and others had driven them off.

If she is still alive, Rasheed will not welcome the discovery of her file. The 52-year-old scientist worked in the research programme of the SSO, which was responsible for protecting Saddam’s inner circle.

Qusay also directed Saddam’s illegal procurement of weapons of mass destruction and, according to Rasheed’s file, appears to have hidden an entire research programme from United Nations inspectors.

Like other files, Rasheed’s reveals the extent to which the regime watched people. An interrogation record shows she was asked about her personal life and replied: “All my friends are Ba’athis (members of Saddam’s party)”. She was rated “good” on that evaluation.

The file of Lieutenant Colonel Hamid Lefta discloses that he was promoted because as head of the central prison of the Fifth Army he executed Lieutenant Colonel Nizar, Staff Colonel Hamid, Lieutenant Gazi and Major Muafaq. Their crimes are not recorded.

Then there is Sheehab Ahmed Moussa, whose photograph shows an unsmiling man of heavy brows and pudgy cheeks. Now 54, he joined the Ba’ath party at the age of 12 and got on well in the Iraqi military, rising to serve as a captain in a chemical weapons unit in the Iran-Iraq war.

Moussa passed his interrogation with flying colours. When asked: “Down to your third cousin, has anyone in your family been sent to prison or been forced to leave their job for political reasons?” he was able to answer: “No.”

He also answered “No” to the questions of whether anyone in his family, down to the third cousin, had been executed; married a non-Iraqi; lived outside Iraq; or belonged to any party other than the Ba’ath. At the end of his interrogation he signed a document agreeing to his execution if he had lied.

American officials will want to ask Moussa more questions. By 1996 he had risen to general manager of chemical production at the Al-Qaqa site in Iraq, one of those suspected of harbouring Saddam’s manufacture of chemical weapons.

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