Reprinted from NewsMax.com
Ex-Official:
Russia Moved Saddam's WMDs
Sunday, Feb. 19,
2006
A top Pentagon official who was responsible for tracking Saddam
Hussein's weapons programs before and after the 2003 liberation of
Iraq, has provided the first-ever account of how Saddam Hussein
"cleaned up" his weapons of mass destruction stockpiles to prevent
the United States from discovering them.
"The short answer to the question of where the WMDs Saddam
bought from the Russians went was that they went to Syria and
Lebanon," former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense John. A. Shaw told
an audience Saturday at a privately sponsored "Intelligence Summit"
in Alexandria, Va. (www.intelligencesummit.org)
"They were moved by Russian Spetsnaz (special forces) units out
of uniform, that were specifically sent to Iraq to move the weaponry
and eradicate any evidence of its existence," he said.
Shaw has dealt with weapons-related issues and export controls
as a U.S. government official for 30 years, and was serving as deputy
undersecretary of defense for international technology security when
the events he described today occurred.
He called the evacuation of Saddam's WMD stockpiles "a
well-orchestrated campaign using two neighboring client states with
which the Russian leadership had a long time security
relationship."
Shaw was initially tapped to make an inventory of Saddam's
conventional weapons stockpiles, based on intelligence estimates of
arms deals he had concluded with the former Soviet Union, China and
France.
He estimated that Saddam had amassed 100 million tons of
munitions –- roughly 60 percent of the entire U.S. arsenal.
"The origins of these weapons were Rusisan, Chinese and French in
declining order of magnitude, with the Russians holding the lion's
share and the Chinese just edging out the French for second
place."
But as Shaw's office increasingly got involved in ongoing
intelligence to identify Iraqi weapons programs before the war, he
also got "a flow of information from British contacts on the ground
at the Syrian border and from London" via non-U.S. government
contacts.
"The intelligence included multiple sitings of truck convoys,
convoys going north to the Syrian border and returning empty," he
said.
Shaw worked closely with Julian Walker, a former British
ambassador who had decades of experience in Iraq, and an unnamed
Ukranian-American who was directly plugged in to the head of
Ukraine's intelligence service.
The Ukrainians were eager to provide the United States with
documents from their own archives on Soviet arms transfers to Iraq
and on ongoing Russian assistance to Saddam, to thank America for its
help in securing Ukraine's independence from the Soviet Union, Shaw
said.
In addition to the convoys heading to Syria, Shaw said his
contacts "provided information about steel drums with painted
warnings that had been moved to a cellar of a hospital in
Beirut."
But when Shaw passed on his information to the Defense
Intelligence Agency and others within the U.S. intelligence
community, he was stunned by their response.
"My report on the convoys was brushed off as ‘Israeli
disinformation,'" he said.
One month later, Shaw learned that the DIA general counsel
complained to his own superiors that Shaw had eaten from the DIA
"rice bowl." It was a Washington euphemism that meant he had commited
the unpardonable sin of violating another agency's turf.
The CIA responded in even more diabolical fashion. "They
trashed one of my Brits and tried to declare him persona non grata to
the intelligence community," Shaw said. "We got constant indicators
that Langley was aggressively trying to discredit both my Ukranian
American and me in Kiev," in addition to his other sources.
But Shaw's information had not originated from a casual
contact. His Ukranian-American aid was a personal friend of David
Nicholas, a Western ambassador in Kiev, and of Igor Smesko, head of
Ukrainian intelligence.
Smesko had been a military attaché in Washington in the
early 1990s when Ukraine first became independent and Dick Cheney was
secretary of defense. "Smesko had told Cheney that when Ukraine
became free of Russia he wanted to show his friendship for the United
States."
Helping out on Iraq provided him with that occasion.
"Smesko had gotten to know Gen. James Clapper, now director of
the Geospacial Intelligence Agency, but then head of DIA," Shaw
said.
But it was Shaw's own friendship to the head of Britain's MI6
that brought it all together during a two-day meeting in London that
included Smeshko's people, the MI6 contingent, and Clapper, who had
been deputized by George Tenet to help work the issue of what
happened to Iraq's WMD stockpiles.
In the end, here is what Shaw learned:
In December 2002, former Russian intelligence chief Yevgeni
Primakov, a KGB general with long-standing ties to Saddam, came to
Iraq and stayed until just before the U.S.-led invasion in March
2003;
Primakov supervised the execution of long-standing secret
agreements, signed between Iraqi intelligence and the Russian GRU
(military intelligence), that provided for clean-up operations to be
conducted by Russian and Iraqi military personnel to remove WMDs,
production materials and technical documentation from Iraq, so the
regime could announce that Iraq was "WMD free."
Shaw said that this type GRU operation, known as "Sarandar," or
"emergency exit," has long been familiar to U.S. intelligence
officials from Soviet-bloc defectors as standard GRU practice;
In addition to the truck convoys, which carried Iraqi WMD to
Syria and Lebanon in February and March 2003 "two Russian ships set
sail from the (Iraqi) port of Umm Qasr headed for the Indian Ocean,"
where Shaw believes they "deep-sixed" additional stockpiles of Iraqi
WMD from flooded bunkers in southern Iraq that were later discovered
by U.S. military intelligence personnel;
The Russian "clean-up" operation was entrusted to a combination
of GRU and Spetsnaz troops and Russian military and civilian
personnel in Iraq "under the command of two experienced ex-Soviet
generals, Colonel-General Vladislav Achatov and Colonel-General Igor
Maltsev, both retired and psing as civilian commercial
consultants."
Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz reported on Oct. 30, 2004,
that Achatov and Maltsev had been photographed receiving medals from
Iraqi Defense Minister Sultan Hashim Ahmed in a Baghdad building
bombed by U.S. cruise missiles during the first U.S. air raids in
early March 2003.
Shaw says he leaked the information about the two Russian
generals and the clean-up operation to Gertz in October 2004 in an
effort to "push back" against claims by Democrats that were
orchestrated with CBS News to embarrass President Bush just one week
before the November 2004 presidential election. The press sprang
bogus claims that 377 tons of high explosives of use to Iraq's
nuclear weapons program had "gone missing" after the U.S.-led
liberation of Iraq, while ignoring intelligence of the
Russian-orchestrated evacuation of Iraqi WMDs;
The two Russian generals "had visited Baghdad no fewer than 20
times in the preceding five to six years," Shaw revealed. U.S.
intelligence knew "the identity and strength of the various Spetsnaz
units, their dates of entry and exit in Iraq, and the fact that the
effort (to clean up Iraq's WMD stockpiles) with a planning conference
in Baku from which they flew to Baghdad."
The Baku conference, chaired by Russian Minister of Emergency
Situations Sergei Shoigu, "laid out the plans for the Sarandar
clean-up effort so that Shoigu could leave after the keynote speech
for Baghdad to orchestrate the planning for the disposal of the
WMD."
Subsequent intelligence reports showed that Russian Spetsnaz
operatives "were now changing to civilian clothes from military/GRU
garb," Shaw said. "The Russian denial of my revelations in late
October 2004 included the statement that "only Russian civilians
remained in Baghdad." That was the "only true statement" the Russians
made, Shaw ironized.
The evacuation of Saddam's WMD to Syria and Lebanon "was an
entirely controlled Russian GRU operation," Shaw said. "It was the
brainchild of General Yevgenuy Primakov."
The goal of the clean-up was "to erase all trace of Russian
involvement" in Saddam's WMD programs, and "was a masterpiece of
military camouflage and deception."
Just as astonishing as the Russian clean-up operation were
efforts by Bush administration appointees, including Defense
Department spokesman Laurence DiRita, to smear Shaw and to cover up
the intelligence information he brought to light.
"Larry DiRita made sure that this story would never grow legs,"
Shaw said. "He whispered sotto voce to journalists that there was no
substance to my information and that it was the product of an
unbalanced mind."
Shaw suggested that the answer of why the Bush administration
had systematically "ignored Russia's involvement" in evacuating
Saddam's WMD stockpiles "could be much bigger than anyone has
thought," but declined to speculate what exactly was involved.
Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney was less reticent.
He thought the reason was Iran.
"With Iran moving faster than anyone thought in its nuclear
programs," he told NewsMax, "the administration needed the Russians,
the Chinese and the French, and was not interested in information
that would make them look bad."
McInerney agreed that there was "clear evidence" that Saddam
had WMD. "Jack Shaw showed when it left Iraq, and how."
Former Undersecretary of Defense Richard Perle, a strong
supporter of the war against Saddam, blasted the CIA for
orchestrating a smear campaign against the Bush White House and the
war in Iraq.
"The CIA has been at war with the Bush administration almost
from the beginning," he said in a keynote speech at the Intelligence
Summit on Saturday.
He singled out recent comments by Paul Pillar, a former top CIA
Middle East analyst, alleging that the Bush White House
"cherry-picked" intelligence to make the case for war in Iraq.
"Mr. Pillar was in a very senior position and was able to make
his views known, if that is indeed what he believed," Perle said.
"He (Pillar) briefed senior policy officials before the start
of the Iraq war in 2003. If he had had reservations about the war, he
could have voiced them at that time." But according to officials
briefed by Pillar, Perle said, he never did.
Even more inexplicable, Perle said, were the millions of
documents "that remain untranslated" among those seized from Saddam
Hussein's intelligence services.
"I think the intelligence community does not want them to be
exploited," he said.
Among those documents, presented Saturday at the conference by
former FBI translator Bill Tierney, were transcripts of Saddam's
palace conversations with top aides in which he discussed ongoing
nuclear weapons plans in 2000, well after the U.N. arms inspectors
believed he had ceased all nuclear weapons work.
"What was most disturbing in those tapes," Tierney said, "was
the fact that the individuals briefing Saddam were totally unknown to
the U.N. Special Commission."
In addition, Tierney said, the plasma uranium programs Saddam
discussed with his aids as ongoing operations in 2000 had been
dismissed as "old programs" disbanded years earlier, according to the
final CIA report on Iraq's weapons programs, presented in 2004 by the
Iraq Survey Group.
"When I first heard those tapes" about the uranium plasma
program, "it completely floored me," Tierney said.
Copyright
2006, Kenneth R. Timmerman