Underlying the geopolitical game of chicken between the United States and Iraq is the chilling fear that one of the world’s most ruthless leaders may be well on his way to arming himself with heinous biological weapons capable of killing vast numbers of civilians without warning.
Nearly seven years since the U.S. and its allies declared victory in the Persian Gulf war over Iraq, Western experts believe the frayed international coalition against Hussein has fallen short in its primary postwar mission to destroy his ability to develop weapons of mass destruction.
After years of Iraqi efforts to hamper United Nations weapons inspectors, culminating in a dramatic expulsion of U.S. inspectors last week, Western arms specialists say there is a growing body of evidence that Hussein’s regime is working to step up its secret weapons production.
With a laboratory the size of a walk-in closet and a seemingly innocent blend of chemicals and cultures used to make antibiotics, Iraqi scientists laboring outside the view of inspectors could in weeks or days brew up enough deadly anthrax and botulinum toxins to churn to a bloody pulp the insides of thousands of people.
Employing a small missile, unmanned plane or even hand-held sprayer, Hussein’s regime could uncork supplies of a vicious cancer-causing fungus called aflatoxin, or a hemorrhaging virus that causes blindness, or molds that kill crops and livestock. The Iraqis were known to be cultivating all of these as recently as two years ago.
Hussein also could order dredged from their presumed hiding place hundreds of tons of chemical agents that Iraq once imported to make VX nerve gas, a compound so lethal that a single drop on a finger leaves helpless victims twitching and convulsing to death in three to five minutes. Significant amounts of chemical building blocks that must be mixed to create these agents never have been found.
U.S. and other Western arms control analysts interviewed by the Tribune in Europe, the Middle East, Washington and at the UN are now virtually certain that Iraq quietly has been working on all of these capabilities in the years since then-President George Bush declared the gulf war had destroyed Hussein’s war machine. Today, these experts agree that Iraqi biological and chemical weapons programs were hobbled but not broken by the war and the humbling international sanctions that followed.
“The stakes here are real, and they are enormous,” said Richard Haass, top Middle East expert on the National Security Council during the Bush administration and now director of foreign policy studies at The Brookings Institution. “This is someone who has used weapons of mass destruction twice, against his own people and against Iran. He does not have qualms.”
Based on UN inspection reports and Western intelligence assessments, Washington and its allies are convinced that Hussein possesses the resources and technical skill to begin cranking out menacing new supplies of exotic weaponry and delivery systems with even a brief absence of foreign watchdogs. This is a long-cherished Iraqi goal that Hussein appears willing to pursue even if it leads to a renewed military confrontation with the U.S.
Senior Clinton administration and UN officials monitoring the rapidly unfolding situation in the gulf say Hussein precipitated the crisis after the UN made clear to Iraq it intended to focus its inspection efforts in early November on suspected concealment of biological weapons.
In an Oct. 22 letter to Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, chief UN weapons inspector Richard Butler complained of Iraq’s interference with UN inspections and sought information on three areas of concern: Iraq’s biological weapons program; missile warheads that inspectors believe were filled with biological and chemical agents; and documentation on Iraq’s stores of the deadly chemical nerve gas VX. Senior administration officials said they believe Iraq may be hiding some of its secret germ warfare program in sites controlled by Hussein’s elite Republican Guard long kept off limits to UN inspectors.
Two days later, Iraq announced the expulsion of U.S. inspectors. “Who knows why the Iraqis do what they do?” said Ewan Buchanan, spokesman for the UN Special Commission on Iraq. “They may well feel now they’re being cornered, and the only way out is an artificial crisis.”
The U.S. is declining to share its satellite surveillance pictures of suspected Iraqi weapons sites with UN inspectors. Washington is willing to share the intelligence assessments of those pictures, but not the images themselves, a senior official said. Therefore, the U.S. may be in a position to know more than the UN about Iraq’s capabilities.
In expelling the U.S. inspectors and thereby prompting the UN to withdraw nearly its entire inspection team, Hussein defied the most blunt threats that Washington could direct his way, tapping into a deep strain of anti-American sentiment in the Mideast in hopes of burnishing his image as an Arab patriot instead of a diabolical despot. Iraq denies it seeks to produce weapons of mass destruction.
President Clinton and other top U.S. officials, though, were preparing Americans for possible military action. Asked about the dangers presented by Iraq’s secret arms program, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said Hussein’s weapons “will not discriminate, if and when they are used, and therefore it is important for the region to understand that he is a threat.”
Suspicions of Hussein’s motives are rooted in history. In its war with Iran a decade ago, Iraq was known to have unleashed pre-World War II era chemical weapons such as sarin, tabun and mustard gas that can sicken, blister or even kill in high enough concentrations. United Nations inspectors have destroyed hundreds of tons of such substances in recent years.
But intelligence from high-ranking Iraqi defectors has detailed far more ambitious and sophisticated weapons programs involving VX and a stew of deadly fungi and bacteria that are easy to grow and easy to hide. Meanwhile, Iraqi cooperation with UN inspectors over the years has been grudging, inconsistent and evasive, only reinforcing the notion that Hussein has a lot to hide.
Echoing privately voiced UN complaints, a Defense Department report Nov. 8 ridiculed as a charade Hussein’s claims of cooperation with weapons inspectors.
“We believe that Iraq maintains a small force of Scud-type missiles, a small stockpile of chemical and biological munitions, and the capability to quickly resurrect biological and chemical weapons production,” the report asserted.
When asked about missile parts or chemicals proscribed under terms of the 1991 cease-fire resolution, the pattern by Iraqi officials has been to staunchly deny their possession until presented with hard evidence to the contrary.
Until two years ago, the Iraqis were insisting they had purchased from one foreign supplier a scant 250 grams of nutrients that could be used to grow deadly bacteria, according to Tim Trevan, a former British diplomat who once worked with the UN inspection team. The company, however, told inspectors it had shipped 38 tons of the substance to Iraq, Trevan said.
The whereabouts of much of that material remains a mystery.
In recent months, Iraq has taken the foot-dragging to new heights, a development that has both frustrated weapons inspectors and raised new suspicions about Hussein’s intentions.
On at least three occasions, informed sources said, inspection teams were denied access to sites they sought to scrutinize. At least once, inspectors were kept cooling their heels outside a site while Iraqis could be seen burning documents inside. On another occasion, Iraqi personnel aboard UN helicopters were said to have tried to interfere with the controls while in the air over a site the Iraqis wanted to keep hidden from inspectors.
Despite the interference, inspectors have found–and neutralized–an impressively terrifying array of high-tech and unconventional weaponry.
A sampling of that inventory included components for a supergun, essentially a giant cannon capable of shooting a 1-ton projectile hundreds of miles; 151 medium-range Scud or similar missiles; 19 mobile missile launchers; 75 special missile warheads for chemical warfare, some with loaded with sarin; more than 28,000 artillery rockets, shells and airbombs armed with deadly chemicals; and hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemical agents that had yet to be loaded.
At the Muthanna State Establishment in the desert northwest of Baghdad, inspectors found and destroyed massive caches of chemicals and raw materials used in the production of chemical weapons.
In June of 1996 they also neutralized the Al Hakam biological weapons facility southwest of Baghdad, which Iraqis had long claimed was used merely for the production of animal feeds and biopesticides. In fact, the facility was used to grow anthrax, aflatoxin and botulinus, the bacterium that causes botulism. Indeed, Iraq for years contended it had no biological weapons program, changing its tune only in 1995 after UN inspectors uncovered incontrovertible evidence. Similar denials masked production of VX, a nerve agent that is more lethal and more stable than its predecessors. Depending on climate conditions, it could remain hazardous for months before evaporating.
After the war ended in 1991, Iraqis admitted to only the laboratory production of a few milligrams of VX and insisted they had dropped the experiment. By early 1995, after persistent investigation by the UN, Iraqi officials upped their estimates of VX production to 160 kilograms, which they claimed to have destroyed. By the fall of 1995, the story changed again to 1 ton of VX.
The latest Iraqi admissions have risen to 4 tons, again, all allegedly destroyed.
Now the inspectors believe they have ample reason to doubt the Iraqi story. By canvassing suppliers around the world, they have pinpointed at least 400 tons of pre-war Iraqi imports of raw materials used in the production of VX, chemicals with mouth-crunching names like chloroethanol, diisopropylamine and phosphorous pentasulfide. An international treaty restricts the export of such materials, but they have been readily available on the black market.
Hussein’s pre-war drive to build a nuclear weapons program has been well documented. According to some reports, he hasn’t abandoned the quest.
In a report in its December issue, the authoritative London-based Jane’s Intelligence Review warned that Iraq still is possessed of the scientific talent and industrial base to build nuclear bombs. A “good-deal” of bomb-making material may have been hidden from weapons inspectors, the publication asserted.
Still, nuclear programs are so technically daunting and hard to hide that experts consider them a lower priority of concern–at least in the short term–than other weapons development, especially biological agents.
Even if Hussein’s regime had destroyed its entire cache of germ weapons, experts say biological killers are so easy to make that enough to cause the deaths of thousands of people can be cooked up in days or weeks in a tiny lab that can easily be dismantled to avoid prying eyes of UN watchdogs.
“It could be almost anywhere– any basic factory, the back of a truck, any warehouse,” said Haass. “That’s the problem. Unlike a nuclear program, which requires tremendous infrastructure and has telltale signs, this sort of thing is much more easily hidden.”
Dr. Kathleen Bailey, senior fellow at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said a biological weapons lab could be quickly erected using equipment no different than that found at any good university or hospital laboratory.
Because they occur in nature, biological agents are hardier and less volatile than their chemical cousins. They could be freeze-dried, slipped into an aerosol spraying device and squirted into the atmosphere over a heavily populated region. Bailey said a crop-duster equipped with a device as crude as a fire extinguisher nozzle could wreak terror on a large scale.
“If you delivered anthrax against Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, you could be looking at thousands of casualties, maybe even tens of thousands,” Bailey said.
“And if it is contagious, it would last a lot longer.”
According to one British newspaper report last week, Iraqi technicians had figured out how to rig small planes to fly by remote control and spew toxins over populated areas. Such aircraft would have the added advantage to Hussein of being able to fly low over desert terrain to avoid radar detection. Bailey said crude versions of cruise missiles also could easily be used to spread toxins over long distances.
A recent Pentagon briefing paper sent to the White House describes what is claimed to be evidence uncovered by UN inspectors that Iraq was trying to buy parts to produce long-range missiles capable of hitting Europe.
With biological and chemical weapons, the biggest obstacle is not producing them but figuring out how to spread them to effect maximum damage, a process experts refer to as “weaponizing” the agent.
Fortunately for Tokyo residents, the doomsday cult Aum Shinri Kyo never mastered that skill. Eleven people died and 5,500 were injured when cult disciples unleashed a sarin attack in Tokyo subway in March 1995. Had the chemical been spread from the air, the toll almost surely would have been far higher. Worried Western experts believe the Iraqis watched the Japanese situation closely.
“As long as Saddam is in power, it will be hard for inspectors to say with 100 percent certainty they have found everything he has been hiding,” said Trevan, the former UN inspector. “They may be able to say at some point that they’ve found everything important, as long as they continue monitoring. While they monitor, Iraq can’t reactivate its programs. That’s why the monitoring is so important.”
