On Dec. 24, 2002, nearly three months before fighting in Iraq began,
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon accused Saddam Hussein's regime of
transferring key materials for his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs
to Syria in convoys of 18-wheel trucks to hide them from U.N. weapons
inspectors. "There is information we are verifying, but we are certain
that Iraq has recently moved chemical or biological weapons into Syria,"
Sharon told Channel Two television in Israel.
Before talking about this on Israeli television, Sharon gave detailed
information to the Bush White House on what Israel knew and what it suspected.
Insight has learned, however, that once the information was handed over to the
U.S. intelligence community, officials at the State Department's Bureau of
Intelligence and Research (INR) swept it aside as lacking credibility.
In May 2003, just as major combat operations in Iraq were winding down,
new reports surfaced in Israel, this time alleging that convoys of Iraqi water
tankers carrying WMD components crossed the border into Syria repeatedly
between Jan. 10 and March 10. The tankers reportedly were met by Syrian special
forces and escorted to the heroin poppy fields of a Syrian-controlled area in
Lebanon's Bekáa Valley, where their contents were dumped into specially
prepared pits and buried. Again, INR discounted the reports, U.S. officials
tell Insight.
Reports of Iraqi WMD winding up in Syria were not just coming from the
Israelis. In October 2003, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, head of
the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, revealed that vehicle traffic
photographed by U.S. spy satellites indicated that material and documents
related to Saddam's forbidden WMD programs had been shipped to Syria before the
war. It was no surprise that the United States and its allies had not found
stockpiles of forbidden weapons in Iraq, Clapper told a breakfast briefing
given to reporters in Washington. "Those below the senior leadership saw
what was coming, and I think they went to extraordinary lengths to dispose of
the evidence," he said.
"We have had six or seven credible reports of Iraqi weapons being
moved into Syria before the war," a senior administration official tells
Insight. "In every case, the U.S. intelligence community sought to
discount or discredit those reports."
This January, after he returned to Washington from Iraq, where for six
months he had served as the CIA's top gun with the Iraq Survey Group hunting
for Saddam's banned weapons, David Kay said he had uncovered evidence that
weapons material had been moved to Syria shortly before the war. "We are
not talking about a large stockpile of weapons," he told the Sunday
Telegraph in London. "But we know from some of the interrogations of
former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war,
including some components of Saddam's WMD program. Precisely what went to
Syria, and what has happened to it, is a major issue that needs to be
resolved."
Another piece of this puzzle was provided by a Syrian intelligence
officer in letters smuggled to an antiregime activist living in Paris named
Nizar Nayouf. In one letter the source identified three locations in Syria
where WMD materials had been buried under an agreement between the Syrian and
Iraqi leadership. Two of the sites were specially dug underground bunkers and
tunnels. The third site was a factory operated by the Syrian air force in the
village of Tal Sinan, located between the cities of Hama and Salimiyyah. In a
follow-up letter dated Jan. 7, Nayouf's source provided more details on these
locations, along with a map, and alleged that some of the weapons had been
moved out of Iraq in ambulances.
So are Saddam's WMD stockpiles in Syria? When Insight asked the CIA if
it was investigating these and other reports, a spokesman acknowledged there
was "some evidence that way" and that the United States was "looking
at all types of possibilities," but vigorously discouraged further
inquiries. Administration officials tell Insight that the refusal to report on
Syria's complicity with Saddam's regime stems from a "pro-Syria bias in
the State Department and some elements of the intelligence community, whose
threshold for evidence on Syria is suspiciously high."
Shoshana Bryen regularly escorts groups of retired U.S. military flag
officers (admirals and generals) to Israel for meetings with senior Israeli
political and military leaders, as well as intelligence officials. "We
went to Israel just before the war and just after," she tells Insight.
"Both times, Israeli intelligence officials told us, yes, WMD were
definitely in Iraq, and that they had been sent to Syria." The Bush
administration was trying to downplay these reports, she believes,
"because if Iraqi weapons are in Syria, we're going to have to do
something about it, and they don't want another war."
Return to "Saddam's WMD Have Been Found"
Kenneth R. Timmerman is a senior writer for Insight.
http://www.insightmag.com/main.cfm?include=detail&storyid=670123