Investigative Report
Saddam's WMD Have Been Found
Post
April 26, 2004
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New evidence out of Iraq suggests that the U.S. effort
to track down Saddam Hussein's missing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) is
having better success than is being reported. Key assertions
by the intelligence community that were widely judged in the media and by
critics of President George W. Bush as having been false are turning out to
have been true after all. But this stunning news has received little
attention from the major media, and the president's critics continue to insist
that "no weapons" have been found.
In virtually
every case - chemical, biological, nuclear and ballistic missiles - the United
States has found the weapons and the programs that the Iraqi dictator
successfully concealed for 12 years from U.N. weapons inspectors.
The Iraq
Survey Group (ISG), whose intelligence analysts are managed by Charles Duelfer, a former State Department official and deputy
chief of the U.N.-led arms-inspection teams, has found "hundreds of cases
of activities that were prohibited" under U.N. Security Council
resolutions, a senior administration official tells Insight. "There is a
long list of charges made by the U.S. that have been confirmed, but none of
this seems to mean anything because the weapons that were unaccounted for by
the United Nations remain unaccounted for."
Both Duelfer and his predecessor, David Kay, reported to
Congress that the evidence they had found on the ground in Iraq showed Saddam's
regime was in "material violation" of U.N. Security Council
Resolution 1441, the last of 17 resolutions that promised "serious
consequences" if Iraq did not make a complete disclosure
of its weapons programs and dismantle them in a verifiable manner. The United
States cited Iraq's refusal to comply with these demands as one justification
for going to war.
Both Duelfer and Kay found that Iraq had "a clandestine
network of laboratories and safe houses with equipment that was suitable to
continuing its prohibited chemical- and biological-weapons [BW] programs,"
the official said. "They found a prison laboratory where we suspect they
tested biological weapons on human subjects." They found equipment for
"uranium-enrichment centrifuges" whose only plausible use was as part
of a clandestine nuclear-weapons program. In all these cases, "Iraqi
scientists had been told before the war not to declare their activities to the
U.N. inspectors," the official said.
But while the
president's critics and the media might plausibly hide behind ambiguity and a
lack of sensational-looking finds for not reporting some discoveries, in the
case of Saddam's ballistic-missile programs they have no excuse for their
silence. "Where were the missiles? We found them," another senior
administration official told Insight.
"Saddam
Hussein's prohibited missile programs are as close to a slam dunk as you will
ever find for violating United Nations resolutions," the first official
said. Both senior administration officials spoke to Insight on condition that
neither their name nor their agency be identified, but
their accounts of what the United States has found in Iraq coincided in every
major area.
When former
weapons inspector Kay reported to Congress in January that the United States
had found "no stockpiles" of forbidden weapons in Iraq, his
conclusions made front-page news. But when he detailed what the ISG had found
in testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence last October,
few took notice. Among Kay's revelations, which officials tell Insight have
been amplified in subsequent inspections in recent weeks:
· A prison laboratory complex
that may have been used for human testing of BW agents and "that Iraqi
officials working to prepare the U.N. inspections were explicitly ordered not
to declare to the U.N." Why was Saddam interested in testing
biological-warfare agents on humans if he didn't have a biological-weapons
program?
· "Reference strains" of
a wide variety of biological-weapons agents were found beneath the sink in the
home of a prominent Iraqi BW scientist. "We thought it was a big
deal," a senior administration official said. "But it has been
written off [by the press] as a sort of 'starter set.'"
· New research on BW-applicable
agents, brucella and Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever,
and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin
that were not declared to the United Nations.
· A line of unmanned aerial
vehicles (UAVs), or drones, "not fully declared
at an undeclared production facility and an admission that they had tested one
of their declared UAVs out to a range of 500
kilometers [311 miles], 350 kilometers [217 miles] beyond the permissible
limit."
· "Continuing covert
capability to manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited
Scud-variant missiles, a capability that was maintained at least until the end
of 2001 and that cooperating Iraqi scientists have said they were told to
conceal from the U.N."
· "Plans and advanced
design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1,000
kilometers [621 miles] - well beyond the 150-kilometer-range limit [93 miles]
imposed by the U.N. Missiles of a 1,000-kilometer range would have allowed Iraq
to threaten targets throughout the Middle East, including Ankara [Turkey],
Cairo [Egypt] and Abu Dhabi [United Arab Emirates]."
· In addition, through
interviews with Iraqi scientists, seized documents and other evidence, the ISG
learned the Iraqi government had made "clandestine attempts between late
1999 and 2002 to obtain from North Korea technology related to
1,300-kilometer-range [807 miles] ballistic missiles - probably the No Dong -
300-kilometer-range [186 miles] antiship cruise
missiles and other prohibited military equipment," Kay reported.
In testimony
before Congress on March 30, Duelfer, revealed that the ISG had found evidence of a "crash
program" to construct new plants capable of making chemical- and
biological-warfare agents. The ISG also found a previously undeclared program
to build a "high-speed rail gun," a device apparently designed for
testing nuclear-weapons materials. That came in addition to 500 tons of natural
uranium stockpiled at Iraq's main declared nuclear site south of Baghdad, which
International Atomic Energy Agency spokesman Mark Gwozdecky
acknowledged to Insight had been intended for "a clandestine
nuclear-weapons program."
In taking
apart Iraq's clandestine procurement network, Duelfer
said his investigators had discovered that "the primary source of illicit
financing for this system was oil smuggling conducted through
government-to-government protocols negotiated with neighboring countries [and]
from kickback payments made on contracts set up through the U.N. oil-for-food
program" [see "Documents Prove U.N. Oil Corruption,"
April 27-May 10].
What the
president's critics and the media widely have portrayed as the most dramatic
failure of the U.S. case against Saddam has been the claimed failure to find
"stockpiles" of chemical and biological weapons. But in a June 2003
Washington Post op-ed, former chief U.N. weapons inspector Rolf Ekeus called such criticism "a distortion and a trivialization
of a major threat to international peace and security."
The
October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi Weapons of Mass
Destruction concluded that Saddam "probably has stocked at least 100
metric tons (MT) and possibly as much as 500 MT of CW [chemical warfare] agents
- much of it added in the last year." That assessment was based, in part,
on conclusions contained in the final report from U.N. weapons inspectors in
1999, which highlighted discrepancies in what the Iraqis reported to the United
Nations and the amount of precursor chemicals U.N. arms inspectors could
document Iraq had imported but for which it no longer could account. Until now,
Bush's critics say, no stockpiles of CW agents made with those precursors have
been found. The snap conclusion they draw is that the administration
"lied" to the American people to create a pretext for invading Iraq.
But what are
"stockpiles" of CW agents supposed to look like? Was anyone seriously
expecting Saddam to have left behind freshly painted warehouses packed with
chemical munitions, all neatly laid out in serried rows, with labels written in
English? Or did they think that a captured Saddam would guide U.S. troops to
smoking vats full of nerve gas in an abandoned factory? In fact, as recent
evidence made public by a former operations officer for the Coalition Provisional
Authority's (CPA's) intelligence unit in Iraq shows, some of those stockpiles
have been found - not all at once, and not all in nice working order - but
found all the same.
Douglas
Hanson was a U.S. Army cavalry reconnaissance officer for 20 years, and a
veteran of Gulf War I. He was an atomic demolitions munitions security officer
and a nuclear, biological and chemical defense officer. As a civilian analyst
in Iraq last summer, he worked for an operations intelligence unit of the CPA
in Iraq, and later, with the newly formed Ministry of Science and Technology,
which was responsible for finding new, nonlethal
employment for Iraqi WMD scientists.
In an
interview with Insight and in an article he wrote for the online magazine
AmericanThinker.com, Hanson examines reports from U.S. combat units and public
information confirming that many of Iraq's CW stockpiles have indeed been
found. Until now, however, journalists have devoted scant attention to this
evidence, in part because it contradicts the story line they have been putting
forward since the U.S.-led inspections began after the war.
But another
reason for the media silence may stem from the seemingly undramatic
nature of the "finds" Hanson and others have described. The materials
that constitute Saddam's chemical-weapons "stockpiles" look an awful
lot like pesticides, which they indeed resemble. "Pesticides are the key
elements in the chemical-agent arena," Hanson says. "In fact, the
general pesticide chemical formula (organophosphate) is the 'grandfather' of
modern-day nerve agents."
The United
Nations was fully aware that Saddam had established his chemical-weapons plants
under the guise of a permitted civilian chemical-industry infrastructure.
Plants inspected in the early 1990s as CW production facilities had been set up
to appear as if they were producing pesticides - or in the case of a giant
plant near Fallujah, chlorine, which is used to
produce mustard gas.
When
coalition forces entered Iraq, "huge warehouses and caches of 'commercial
and agricultural' chemicals were seized and painstakingly tested by Army and
Marine chemical specialists," Hanson writes. "What was surprising was
how quickly the ISG refuted the findings of our ground forces and how silent
they have been on the significance of these caches."
Caches of
"commercial and agricultural" chemicals don't match the expectation
of "stockpiles" of chemical weapons. But, in fact, that is precisely
what they are. "At a very minimum," Hanson tells Insight, "they
were storing the precursors to restart a chemical-warfare program very
quickly." Kay and Duelfer came to a similar
conclusion, telling Congress under oath that Saddam had built new facilities
and stockpiled the materials to relaunch production
of chemical and biological weapons at a moment's notice.
At Karbala, U.S. troops stumbled upon 55-gallon drums of
pesticides at what appeared to be a very large "agricultural supply"
area, Hanson says. Some of the drums were stored in a "camouflaged bunker
complex" that was shown to reporters - with unpleasant results. "More
than a dozen soldiers, a Knight-Ridder reporter, a CNN cameraman, and two Iraqi
POWs came down with symptoms consistent with exposure to a nerve agent,"
Hanson says. "But later ISG tests resulted in a proclamation of negative,
end of story, nothing to see here, etc., and the earlier findings and injuries
dissolved into nonexistence. Left unexplained is the small matter of the
obvious pains taken to disguise the cache of ostensibly legitimate pesticides.
One wonders about the advantage an agricultural-commodities business gains by
securing drums of pesticide in camouflaged bunkers 6 feet underground. The
'agricultural site' was also colocated with a
military ammunition dump - evidently nothing more than a coincidence in the eyes
of the ISG."
That wasn't
the only significant find by coalition troops of probable CW stockpiles, Hanson
believes. Near the northern Iraqi town of Bai'ji,
where Saddam had built a chemical-weapons plant known to the United States from
nearly 12 years of inspections, elements of the 4th Infantry Division found
55-gallon drums containing a substance identified through mass spectrometry
analysis as cyclosarin - a nerve agent. Nearby were
surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, gas masks and a mobile
laboratory that could have been used to mix chemicals at the site. "Of
course, later tests by the experts revealed that these were only the ubiquitous
pesticides that everybody was turning up," Hanson says. "It seems
Iraqi soldiers were obsessed with keeping ammo dumps insect-free, according to
the reading of the evidence now enshrined by the conventional wisdom that 'no
WMD stockpiles have been discovered.'"
At Taji - an Iraqi weapons complex as large as the District of
Columbia - U.S. combat units discovered more "pesticides" stockpiled
in specially built containers, smaller in diameter but much longer than the
standard 55-gallon drum. Hanson says he still recalls the military sending
digital images of the canisters to his office, where his boss at the Ministry
of Science and Technology translated the Arabic-language markings. "They
were labeled as pesticides," he says. "Gee, you sure have got a lot
of pesticides stored in ammo dumps."
Again, this
January, Danish forces found 120-millimeter mortar shells filled with a
mysterious liquid that initially tested positive for blister agents. But
subsequent tests by the United States disputed that finding. "If it wasn't
a chemical agent, what was it?" Hanson asks. "More
pesticides? Dish-washing detergent? From this
old soldier's perspective, I gain nothing from putting a liquid in my mortar
rounds unless that stuff will do bad things to the enemy."
The
discoveries Hanson describes are not dramatic. And that's the problem: Finding
real stockpiles in grubby ammo dumps doesn't fit the image the media and the
president's critics carefully have fed to the public of what Iraq's weapons
ought to look like.
A senior
administration official who has gone through the intelligence reporting from
Iraq as well as the earlier reports from U.N. arms inspectors refers to another
well-documented allegation. "The Iraqis admitted they had made 3.9 tons of
VX," a powerful nerve gas, but claimed they had never weaponized
it. The U.N. inspectors "felt they had more. But where did it go?"
The Iraqis never provided any explanation of what had happened to their VX
stockpiles.
What does 3.9
tons of VX look like? "It could fit in one large garage," the
official says. Assuming, of course, that Saddam would assemble every bit of VX
gas his scientists had produced at a single site, that
still amounts to one large garage in an area the size of the state of
California.
Senior
administration officials stress that the investigation will continue as
inspectors comb through millions of pages of documents in Iraq and attempt to
interview Iraqi weapons scientists who have been trained all their professional
lives to conceal their activities from the outside world.
"The
conditions under which the ISG is working are not very conducive," one
official said. "But this president wants the truth to come out. This is
not an exercise in spinning or censoring."
For more on
WMD, read "Iraqi Weapons in Syria"
Kenneth R.
Timmerman is a senior writer for Insight.
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author