Investigative Report
Saddam's WMD Have Been Found
Post April 26, 2004
By Kenneth R.
Timmerman
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."
Lt. Gen. Amer Rashid al-Obeidi
(left) and Lt. Gen. Amer Hamoodi al-Saddi (right) speak to
an unidentified French intelligence officer at the Baghdad
International Arms Fair in April 1989, and another French
officer listens in (behind al-Saadi, facing camera)
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.
email
the author
Kenneth R. Timmerman is a senior writer for Insight and author of The French Betrayal of America, just released from Crown Forum.
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