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Posted Sept. 30, 2002
(Issue dated Oct. 15, 2002)
Tables: Secret Nuclear transfers
(London) - Recent intelligence information revealing
dramatic progress in Iraq's nuclear-weapons program has given a new
urgency to U.S. and British efforts to build international support
for war with Iraq, according to Iraqi opposition leaders interviewed
by Insight in London.
The information, from recent defectors and other sources working with
the broad-based Iraqi National Congress (INC), indicates that Baghdad
has made "a recent breakthrough" in production of the fissile
material needed to produce the bomb. It was buttressed on Sept. 24
when the British government released an "unprecedented" white paper
based in part on classified intelligence information on Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction programs. As U.N. inspectors ultimately
discovered after several years of investigations in Iraq, the lack of
nuclear-weapons materials was the only obstacle that blocked Iraq
from joining the nuclear club before the Persian Gulf War in 1991. It
remains so today.
The warnings from the opposition INC coincide with new assessments of
Iraqi weapons programs from independent think tanks. "If Iraq were to
acquire material from another country, it is possible that it could
assemble a nuclear weapon in months," the Carnegie Endowment in
Washington concluded in a recent report.
Former Clinton national-security official Gary Samore is more
circumspect in a just completed "net assessment" of Iraq's weapons
programs for the International Institute for Strategic Affairs in
London. While he agrees that Iraq rapidly could assemble a weapon
with fissile material from abroad, he doubts Iraq can produce special
nuclear material on its own. "That will take much longer, with a
relatively higher risk of detection than for chemical- or
biological-weapons production," he tells Insight.
But the think tanks also admit that they are just guessing. For the
last four years there have been no international weapons inspectors
in Baghdad. The only hard information on Iraqi weapons programs has
come from Iraqi defectors and from U.S. national-technical means,
including spy satellites and overflights of Iraq by combat air
patrols. The U.S. intelligence community has all but admitted
publicly that it has no human sources in Iraq.
"We know that Saddam Hussein pursued weapons of mass murder even when
inspectors were in the country," President George W. Bush reminded
the United Nations on Sept. 12. "Are we to assume that he stopped
when they left?" To credit this regime's good faith is "to bet the
lives of millions and the peace of the world in a reckless
gamble."
A former senior Iraqi intelligence officer tells Insight that
information obtained by the INC during the last few months indicates
"Iraq has made significant progress recently in uranium enrichment."
That conclusion is based on Iraqi purchases of specialized magnets
from Germany and aluminum tubes for enrichment centrifuges from South
Africa, as well as firsthand reports from defectors and sources in
place who have visited new clandestine nuclear- and
biological-weapons production sites during the last 18 months.
Among those clandestine sites are several new uranium-enrichment
plants, INC says. "Iraq is no longer using large, easy-to-spot
facilities, but small-scale production plants that fit in small
areas," a senior INC official says. According to Insight sources,
Iraqi engineers are miniaturizing the bomb design to make it fit onto
a missile, using modeling software and fast new computers recently
imported through Dubai, and actively enriching uranium using
centrifuges and gaseous-diffusion membranes.
"Yes, there is a new urgency," says Ahmed Chalabi, a member of the
six-man INC leadership committee in London. "We see an acceleration
of these programs that shows Saddam is hell-bent on acquiring fissile
material not just to build one bomb, but to have a stockpile of
weapons," he tells Insight.
The Iraqi regime is turning increasingly to South Africa to procure
nuclear materials and forbidden equipment needed for its weapons
programs, INC sources tell Insight. A top Iraqi intelligence
official, Nadhim Jabouri, has been dispatched to the Iraqi embassy in
Johannesburg to handle contacts with South African nuclear engineers.
He also is in touch with Armscor, the state armaments directorate
(also known as Denel), which supplied Iraq with advanced 155 mm
howitzers during the Iran-Iraq war.
To grease the skids and arrange travel documents, Iraqi procurement
agents operating in Amman, Jordan, go through the first secretary of
the South African embassy, Shoeman du Plessis. The willingness of the
South African government to sell nuclear material and weapons to
Iraq, and their fear of getting caught, could explain the virulent
outburst by former South African president Nelson Mandela, who told
Newsweek recently that the U.S. ó not Saddam Hussein ó
presents "a threat to world peace."
The credibility of the INC information was given a new boost in a
White House report issued to buttress the president's U.N. speech.
The section on Iraqi weapons programs began by citing Adnan Saeed
al-Haideri, an Iraqi specialist who visited scores of clandestine
weapons sites before defecting to the INC in November 2001.
Al-Haideri had become Iraq's top authority in specialized epoxies
used to seal minute cracks in concrete structures and clean rooms to
prevent leaks that could give away their location. His skills made
him an essential partner of Iraq's Special Security Organization,
which used him to hide mini-production labs and storage facilities in
private houses and other sites across Iraq.
When the CIA debriefed him in December 2001, al-Haideri identified
300 separate clandestine sites used by Iraq to hide biological and
chemical weapons and nuclear materials. Some of the equipment was
hidden in lead containers stored in fake wells lined with concrete.
Al-Haideri said he was called in to seal cracks in the concrete
because the Iraqis feared U.S. surveillance satellites would pick up
the slightest radioactive emissions.
Al-Haideri's access to Iraq's best-kept secrets provided the United
States with a "motherlode of intelligence," one source familiar with
his debriefing tells Insight. Iraq is so worried about what he told
the CIA that a senior official took reporters in early August to a
Baghdad site he claimed al-Haideri had identified as a
biological-weapons production plant. Instead, the official claimed,
it was a "livestock vaccination laboratory." Reporters were shown
abandoned monitoring cameras installed by the United Nations.
Dust-covered equipment and bottles littered the floor. Pointing to
this "evidence," their Iraqi escort claimed that al-Haideri "is lying
to the CIA" and was "motivated by our enemies."
Early this spring, intelligence analysts in Washington monitoring the
progress of Iraq's nuclear-weapons programs were stunned when they
discovered plans by a known Iraqi procurement front, al-Wasel &
Babel, to purchase large quantities of special aluminum tubes for
uranium-enrichment centrifuges. The procurement had been spread over
a 14-month period, beginning in mid-2001.
The involvement of al-Wasel & Babel set off alarm bells. "This is
a known front for the Iraqi intelligence services and their parallel
procurement network controlled by Saddam Hussein's son Qusay," the
former intelligence officer says. Some shipments quietly were
intercepted en route to Iraq, but a large number of the tubes slipped
through, according to intelligence sources. Using these special
aluminum tubes, Iraq now is believed to be operating a miniature
uranium-enrichment "cascade" at a clandestine location, hermetically
sealed to prevent telltale emissions.
Al-Wasel & Babel is a joint venture between the Lootah group in
Dubai and the Rawame family, an Iraqi clan with close ties to Saddam
Hussein, that operates primarily out of Jordan. Their agent in
Baghdad, Jamil al Hajaj, hand-delivers tasking messages from the
regime to procurement agents operating outside of Iraq. Al-Wasel
& Babel previously has been identified by U.S. intelligence as a
conduit for clandestine purchases of Japanese fiber-optic cable
through China. When Insight called the group's commercial manager in
the city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, a Pakistani named Sabr
Montaz al-Qoreishi, we were told that al-Hajaj was arriving from
Baghdad on Sept. 14.
Al Wasel & Babel is registered with the United Nations as a
legitimate partner in oil-for-food deals and reportedly has handled
close to $900 million of Iraqi government contracts. Money from
Iraq's blocked account with the Banque Nationale de Paris (BNP) is
routed to al-Wasel's account (No. 104 481 4976) at the al-Riggah
branch of the Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank in Dubai, contractual
documents obtained by Insight show.
The former intelligence officer, who now works with the INC, provided
details of the dual networks Iraq has set up to get around the U.N.
trade restrictions. For five years he personally ran a procurement
network based in Dubai for the Special Security Organization, the
elite of Saddam's vast intelligence apparatus in charge of overseas
procurement and with hiding key equipment and material for Saddam's
weapons programs. He was arrested by the regime in 1998, viciously
tortured, then given an injection and dumped on the street. Bleeding
from his nose, mouth and stomach, he managed to escape to Northern
Iraq and ultimately to Turkey, where human-rights workers treated him
successfully for thallium poisoning, a favorite method of the regime
for executing its enemies.
Saddam's thuggish older son, Uday, controls the first network. Its
primary purpose is to flood the U.N. sanctions committee with export
requests to trigger the release of funds from the escrow account with
the BNP in New York City where since 1991 the proceeds from Iraq's
oil revenues have been deposited. In some cases, the former officer
said, Uday uses cutouts and middlemen to sign fictitious contracts
with European companies for goods such as food and medicine that
routinely are approved by the United Nations. "Once the contracts are
approved, the money is released from the escrow account," he says.
"Iraq then pays the company up to 40 percent for the paperwork, and
lets them keep the goods. Saddam desperately needs the 60 percent in
cash for forbidden goods and could care less about food or
medicine."
French exporters, interviewed by Insight, explained yet another
finesse of Saddam's commercial network. They said they had been
approached by an Iraqi front company known as ALIA, based in the
Garden district of Amman, Jordan. "Uday uses ALIA to squeeze a 10
percent commission from exporters that gets kicked back to the
regime," an exporter tells Insight. Large companies such as Renault
Vehicules Industriels, Schneider Electric SA and Dow Agrosciences
have used ALIA to sell several hundred million dollars worth of
U.N.-approved goods to Iraq, according to export documents obtained
by Insight. The Iraqi purchases included off-road vehicles, large
quantities of specialized pumps and chillers that could be used for
uranium enrichment, 2,000-liter and 5,000-liter reactor vessels
needed to produce chemical weapons and chemicals for pesticides. All
ostensibly were sold for civilian purposes and approved by the U.N.
sanctions committee in New York.
In France, ALIA also is known as SOFRAG ALIA Development France,
according to the documents. It applied to the United Nations for
permission to export $1 million worth of oil-well logging equipment
to Iraq under an approved program to rebuild Iraqi oil fields. Such
equipment is particularly sensitive because it includes neutron
generators which U.N. weapons inspectors discovered were key
components in the crude gun-implosion nuclear device Iraq had
designed and tested before the 1991 gulf war.
The availability of dual-use equipment such as neutron generators
provides an additional sense of urgency to the United States and
Britain in making the case for war against Iraq. This is how Saddam
Hussein built his war machine in the 1980s and early 1990s, arms
experts and analysts who track the arms industries in developing
countries agree. And yet, instead of tightening export controls on
such sales, the United Nations dramatically loosened them in May
after intense lobbying from France, Germany, China and Russia
convinced the State Department to go along.
"Before the new rules," one French exporter of agricultural equipment
tells Insight, "it took us anywhere between 12 and 18 months to get a
contract approved by the U.N. sanctions committee. Now they are
required to give us an answer within 10 days, and failure to reply
means the contract is automatically approved."
Particularly worrying is the loosening of restrictions on high-tech
equipment. Goods now available for export to Iraq under U.N. Security
Council Resolution 1409, which was adopted in May, include a broad
range of equipment with clear military applications ó from
agricultural sprayers that can be used to disperse biological
weapons, to fiber optics and telecommunications hardware that have
been used by the Iraqi military to improve and harden its integrated
air-defense network.
Until recently, state-owned Chinese companies were the main suppliers
of fiber-optics gear to Baghdad [see "Rogues Lending Hand to
Saddam," Feb. 18]. But new documents obtained by Insight show
that Europe's premier technology giants now are getting into the act.
Siemens of Germany and Alcatel of France have racked up sales worth
several hundred million dollars that recently were approved by the
U.N. sanctions committee, directly and through overseas subsidiaries.
Both companies were partners of Iraq's Ministry of Industry and
Military Industrialization before the 1991 gulf war. Their return to
Iraq, albeit under the auspices of providing civilian
telecommunications equipment, gives Baghdad access to the most
advanced technology currently available in the West.
Now, Saddam has agreed to the return of U.N. arms inspectors, but it
will take them months to develop the cadres and tradecraft to counter
Iraqi deception, Samore believes. Chief arms inspector Hans Blix "is
operating with a skeletal staff because he has insisted that experts
who come to work for him quit their government jobs to reassure Iraq
that they won't engage in intelligence collection." In his previous
role as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Blix
regularly certified that Iraq was engaged in purely civilian nuclear
research, thus allowing Saddam to import massive amounts of nuclear
technology, which was used to develop nuclear weapons.
But the U.N. sanctions have become irrelevant for another reason.
Since 1999 there has been no monitoring of trade across the
international land borders with Iraq. "King Abdallah [of
Jordan] threw Lloyds of London out of the port of Aqaba, where
they were supposed to monitor Iraqi imports," the former Iraqi
intelligence officer says. "There are regular convoys of trucks to
Baghdad from Jordan, and now a direct rail link from Syria carrying
military spare parts and production gear, including equipment needed
in Iraq's nuclear-weapons plants."
In June, Iraq brought in by rail from the Syrian port of Tartous a
shipment of 60 military jet engines to upgrade aging MiG-21 fighters,
the source says. More recently, Iraq purchased four Kolchuga
air-defense missile batteries from Ukraine and brought them in
through Syria. In exchange for its aid, Iraq is supplying Syria with
250,000 barrels of oil per day through the reopened Banias pipeline.
Syria uses the Iraqi oil for its domestic consumption, freeing up oil
for its own small-scale production to earn hard currency on the
export market.
In Europe, meanwhile, reaction to Bush's U.N. speech was mixed, with
many editorialists claiming the president had "not made the case" for
war with Iraq. But, behind the scenes, well-informed sources tell
Insight that the fix is in, the result of intensive backroom
bargaining during the last six months by administration envoys. One
well-informed businessman close to French President Jacques Chirac
believes that the French rejection of the U.S.-U.K. war plans is just
for show. "What Chirac is really afraid of is losing face," the
businessman tells Insight. "Chirac fears that the Franco-German
alliance in Europe is being outmaneuvered by Britain and its new
allies, Italy and Spain. When push comes to shove, he will sacrifice
the French companies now doing business in Iraq and throw in his lot
with the United States."
Samore has made four trips to Moscow in recent months and believes
that securing Russian acquiescence will be the most difficult.
"[Russian President Vladimir] Putin is probably inclined to
go along with Bush at the U.N.," Samore believes. "But people in the
Russian security and foreign-policy establishment are resentful of
the concessions he's already made to Washington, and don't want to
lend legitimacy to a U.S. effort to install a pro-U.S. government in
Baghdad. It could get ugly."
Iraqi opposition leaders, who also have had quiet discussions with
top Russian officials in recent months, believe Moscow's main concern
is getting some return on the $15 billion Iraq owes the former Soviet
Union for arms purchases and industrial assistance in the 1980s. "I
think the Russians are straightforward and keep their word," said one
opposition source. "We don't expect any problem with them."
Kenneth R. Timmerman is a senior writer for
Insight magazine.
email the author
Added to this, the British report says intelligence "has confirmed
that Iraq wants to extend the range of its missile systems to more
than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles), enabling it to threaten other
regional neighbors," and can now produce biological-warfare agents
using "mobile laboratories."
In presenting the Joint Intelligence Committee assessment ó
the first of its kind to be released to the public ó Prime
Minister Tony Blair emphasized that "Iraq is preparing plans to
conceal evidence of these weapons, including documents, from renewed
inspections," explaining the cynicism with which Saddam's promises to
allow U.N. weapons inspectors back into Iraq has been greeted in
Washington and London. ó KRT
Source: U.N. sanctions committee
Kenneth R. Timmerman is a senior writer for
Insight.
email the author
