The Greatest Threat Iraq, Weapons Of Mass Destruction, And The Crisis Of Global Security
288
The Greatest Threat Iraq, Weapons Of Mass Destruction, And The Crisis Of Global Security
288Paperback(Reprint)
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781586480394 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | PublicAffairs |
| Publication date: | 06/07/2001 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.25(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
| Lexile: | 1280L (what's this?) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
A GLIMPSE OF TERROR
Sometimes it is the sideshow, not the main act, that is most revealing. Such a moment occurred late one evening in Baghdad in March 1998, almost a year after I had begun the job of leading UNSCOM—the UN effort to remove Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Yet another day of inconclusive talks between the government of Iraq and UNSCOM representatives was coming to a close. I was feeling tired, a bit tense, and increasingly frustrated with Iraq's relentless efforts to defeat our mission.
All our meetings had been hostile in tone, but this session had been among the most heated. Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, whom Saddam had appointed to lead the anti-UNSCOM effort, had evidently decided to step up the level of combat in his dealings with UNSCOM and in particular with me. He'd spent the evening hurling insults and insinuations across the table, accusing me of wanting to prolong the disarmament process, of capriciously shifting UNSCOM's demands, of seeking to indefinitely extend the UN sanctions against Iraq in a deliberate effort to harm the Iraqi people. Evidently, he hoped to provoke an angry response from me, to be captured on tape by one of the five video cameras silently recording the action around the huge, dim conference room. Footage of an outburst by the man whom the state-controlled Iraqi media had dubbed "Mad Dog Butler" would be useful propaganda.
It was tempting to fight back, to try to break out, but there was nowhere to go. I refused to rise to the bait.
Thehemmed-in atmosphere in the conference room was no help. Located on the seventh floor of the grim concrete-block structure that housed the offices of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry, the room was a huge space, some 10,000 square feet, inadequately lit by strip lights and dominated by a large, open-centered rectangular table covered in green baize. Along the Iraqi side of the table sat ten men in olive uniforms decorated with a variety of insignia I never quite learned to decipher—combinations of oak leaves, eagles, seven-pointed stars, and crossed scimitars. Tariq Aziz sat at the center of his frontline. Behind the ten at the table were twenty-five or thirty supporters in ranks of chairs that vanished backward into the increasing gloom of the outer edges of the conference room, a mixture of men in military garb and business suits and a single woman, the notorious Dr. Rihab Rashida Taha, once dubbed by a Western tabloid "Dr. Germ" because of her role in directing Iraq's program of biological warfare. This half-lit room, through which the periodically moving video cameras floated with their red indicator lights, had no decorations other than an Iraqi flag beside the inevitable grandiose portrait of Saddam Hussein in military uniform.
Across the table from Aziz and his entourage, the UNSCOM party numbered about a dozen. I sat directly opposite Aziz with my deputy, the determined, if somewhat taut Charles Duelfer, at my right side. Duelfer was provided to UNSCOM by the U.S. State Department. There were also policy officers—Gustavo Zlauvinen from Argentina, Eric Fournier from France, and Nikita Zhukov from Russia. These men were there to provide advice and counsel to me. They were all professionals, but the Russian and French officers clearly had the responsibility of seeking to influence my decisions toward the Russian and French viewpoints, which by this time had begun to distinctly favor Iraq. So the challenge I faced did not originate solely from the other side of the table.
Also in attendance were my legal adviser, John Scott, a Briton, and leaders representing each aspect of UNSCOM's tripartite mission: Nikita Smidovitch, a Russian, head of missile disarmament; the German Dr. Horst Reeps, who ran the chemical weapons group; and Dr. Gabrielle Kraatz-Wadsack, another German, who led our biological weapons work. Three commissioners, members of UNSCOM's twenty-one-person advisory body representing sixteen nations, were also present as observers.
In Baghdad, it was typical for us to meet with the Iraqis twice a day: in the morning and then, after a break during the period of the extreme afternoon heat, at an evening session starting around eight o'clock. On this particular occasion, little of substance was discussed. The more we pressed for answers to our questions about the nature, extent, and purposes of the Iraqi weapons-manufacturing programs, the more Tariq Aziz spat out his abuse. In fact, Reeps and Smidovitch, both longtime staff members, had commented to me, during a break, that the level of hostility on the part of Iraq was now greater than they'd seen at any time during the commission's seven-year history.
The hostility wasn't merely unpleasant. A veiled threat of physical violence was always signaled, if only subliminally. This was not simply because of Saddam's well-known propensity to use violence as a way of seizing and consolidating power, but because of actual attempts to intimidate and harm us. Two months before, an Iraqi rocket-propelled grenade had been fired into UNSCOM headquarters—fortunately killing no one. We'd stepped up our security precautions as a result, but the undercurrent of anxiety among our staff in Baghdad had heightened thereafter.
When it became obvious that the evening's discussions were proving fruitless, we agreed to call a halt. Clearly, Iraq was going to give us nothing of the materials and evidence we had asked for. For our part, we were in no mood to be sucked into a theatrical confrontation. It was time for me to return to New York, to report Iraq's continued intransigence to the Security Council, and to plan future surprise inspections in the hope of uncovering the evidence of what we knew to be their programs for making and retaining weapons of mass destruction.
I rose, along with the rest of the UNSCOM team, and prepared for the usual phony, polite, formal leave-taking. Stepping around to the Iraqi side of the conference table, I extended my hand to Aziz. He then began the unexpected sideshow. Rather than shake my hand, Aziz signaled to a group of figures barely discernable in a dark corner of the room. Two uniformed men strode up into the light, pulling between them a third man. He was a slight fellow dressed in the typical garb of an Iraqi farmer: an open-necked shirt, rough cotton trousers, and a pair of much-worn sandals. He had the gnarled skin and dark complexion of one long exposed to the harsh Mideast sun, and he wore the black moustache affected by nearly all Iraqi men in imitation of Saddam Hussein. But what struck me most forcibly was his obvious, intense fear. He was hunched as though to shield his body from expected blows, he was trembling all over, and when he glanced at me, I saw in his eyes the look of terror.
The men in uniform held this man firmly and thrust him toward me. Aziz declared, "Mr. Butler, I want to show you something important. You have accused us of testing biological weapons on human beings. It's an outrageous lie. In particular, you have shown a photograph of the forearm of a person on which there were sores. You said the sores were caused by the testing of weapons. You asked for an explanation. Well, here's your explanation! This man is the man in your photograph. Look at his arm!" Aziz yanked up the left sleeve of the farmer's shirt, exposing an unmarked forearm. "So much for your claims!"
I felt deep pity for the farmer. Aziz has had his thugs grab you off the street and drag you up here for this charade, I thought. God only knows what you think is happening or fear what will be done to you if the foreigner doesn't like what he sees on your arm, or if in some other unknown way you fail this test. He must have known how cheap a life like his had become in Saddam's Iraq.
As evidence of anything real, the charade was ludicrous. We'd heard from Iraqi defectors that inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad had indeed been used as subjects of biological weapons testing. The photograph we'd obtained was consistent with such reports. Our efforts to inspect the prison and study inmate files that might prove or disprove these allegations had been illegally rebuffed. Aziz's answer to this was to present a randomly selected man and, incredibly, insist that his was the forearm shown in our photo. It was horrible and a travesty.
Such behavior was typical of Iraq's treatment of UNSCOM: a mixture of bluster, brazenly inept lies, and thinly veiled threats of violence. Under the circumstances, I decided not to argue with Aziz; why further frighten his poor victim? I simply said, "I see what you're seeking to demonstrate. Good night."
This episode has haunted me, mainly because of its cynical cruelty, but also because it encapsulated some central truths about the regime of Saddam Hussein, the nature and importance of the struggle by the world community to deprive him of weapons of mass destruction; and why the loss of control over the spread of such weapons poses the greatest threat to world peace and security, to life on earth.
First, the regime of Saddam Hussein. Its brutal and tyrannical nature has been documented elsewhere in detail for almost two decades. The political currency of his regime is homicide, frequently threatened and often delivered. But there was something particularly chilling about the relatively minor display of this fact we saw that night: It evidently did not trouble Aziz or his henchmen that we saw it firsthand. Far more important was that they act out their lie about their biological weapons program, no matter how cruelly or implausibly.
The incident also illustrated the callousness of the regime toward its own people—a quality we witnessed daily in our dealings with Iraq, something that gives the lie to Saddam's public protestations that his primary goal is to lift the awful burden of international sanctions from the backs of the Iraqi people. Because the United Nations has tied the removal of those weapons to the removal of the sanctions on 22 million Iraqis, he could achieve sanctions relief at any time by giving up his weapons. He has resolutely refused to do that, thus trading off the welfare of the Iraqi people—of which that night's victim was a small but perfect example—for his own power and weapons.
The intimidating aspect of that night's charade, directed at UNSCOM, was also clearly not lost on Aziz. His actions that night, coded through their handling of one of their own, sent a calculated message to us: This is how we deal with those who oppose us.
We'd discussed with Tariq Aziz the photo of the scarified forearm because we believed it represented evidence that the Iraqi government had not only developed chemical and biological weapons—facts already established—but also tested them on living humans in violation of every code of human rights. Iraqi defectors we'd interviewed had told us that Iraq tested biological agents on Iranian soldiers taken prisoner during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, as well as on the Abu Ghraib inmates during 1994 and 1995. To this day, the full facts are obscure. But when we sent an inspection team early in 1998 to the prison to search for the documentary evidence, all the inmate files were there except those covering the two crucial years. And when Iraq realized what we were looking for, it abruptly terminated the whole inspection.
This is Saddam Hussein's regime: cruel, lying, intimidating, and determined to retain weapons of mass destruction—weapons capable of killing thousands, even millions, at a single blow.
In fact, while Tariq Aziz was stage-managing his hideous charade that night, developments in the UNSCOM search for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities were coming to a head. A smoking gun we'd long sought was about to fall into our hands. I learned of its existence, two months later, in June 1998, at the start of my next visit to Baghdad.
As usual, I arrived in Iraq by way of the Habbaniyah air base, accompanied by several key UNSCOM staff members and technical experts. We disembarked into the painful glare of a Baghdad summer's day and were greeted by the Iraqi government protocol people and an Iraqi TV crew wanting to ask me about our visit. The latter never involved anything remotely like a Western-style news conference. Journalists working for the Iraqi media mainly make statements rather than ask questions. These would include "questions" like, "When do you plan to stop murdering Iraqi babies through your cruel sanctions?"
As I addressed such questions and then chatted with my Iraqi government handlers, two of our technical experts—Horst Reeps and Igor Mitrokhin—were drawn aside by Tim Blades, one of our chemical experts then in Baghdad. Blades appeared agitated. He'd met us at the airport because it was the earliest moment at which he could present us with a newly completed laboratory report. Reeps read it immediately. The look on his face made plain that its contents were very serious.
When our luggage had been loaded into the cars and we were ready for the ninety-minute ride into Baghdad, Reeps and Blades approached me. "There's something you must see now," Reeps said, handing me a thin sheaf of papers. It contained the results of an analysis recently conducted in a Maryland laboratory, one of thirty such laboratories in the world registered under the Chemical Weapons Convention (the treaty banning chemical weapons) as a source of verification of chemical weapons data. At UNSCOM's request, the laboratory had analyzed a collection of metal fragments, remnants of missile warheads deliberately destroyed by explosion by Iraq and buried in a pit at a place called Nibai, forty kilometers outside Baghdad. The question we'd posed was: What sorts Of weapons agents, if any, had been loaded into these warheads before their destruction?
It hadn't been easy arranging these tests. The warheads had been unilaterally and secretly destroyed by Iraq, not under international supervision as required by the UN resolutions. The intent, obviously, was to conceal the number of warheads destroyed as well as their nature and content. The only way UNSCOM could verify the truth of Iraq's claims to have destroyed a particular number of warheads was by literally digging up and piecing together thousands of metal fragments from the extensive pits at Nibai—a task just as arduous, time-consuming, and frustrating as it sounds. And as difficult as assembling those fragments was, finding out the nature of the original warheads could be even more difficult.
After months of work, we managed to recover a horde of metal pieces, apparently parts of destroyed missile warheads. We took these bits away in plastic bags and stored them in a locked shed near Baghdad, securely labeled and with their contents carefully recorded on video, with the ultimate objective of having them analyzed by a competent laboratory.
Immediately, Iraq started arguing about who really owned the metal pieces and about whether they could be taken out of the country. This was the first sign that Iraq was concerned—that something significant might be revealed when we analyzed these fragments. Of course, the Security Council resolutions under which UNSCOM was charged with disarming Iraq gave us every right to examine relevant evidence for signs of weapons of mass destruction. After a difficult standoff we won our point. We had the pieces sealed in environmentally safe containers and flew them in our own plane to Bahrain, from where they were then sent via secure transport to the laboratory in Maryland.
Now the results of the analysis were ready. The chemists had swabbed each of the pieces of metal to remove and collect the surface residues for analysis. As one might expect, they found a spectrum of substances on the metal surfaces, ranging from ordinary dirt to chemicals of various kinds. But there were also clear traces of a chemical called EMPA, short for ethyl methyl-phosphoric acid. It was this finding that had caused Horst Reeps to blanch. EMPA is a degradation product of one and only one known compound in the universe—the chemical VX, one of the most toxic substances ever made.
As it turned out, VX was not the only chemical weapons agent or the only nerve agent made by Iraq. Essentially, Iraq made virtually all of the prohibited agents and used some of them both in and outside Iraq. But VX was and is the most devastating of them. It can be sprayed as a liquid or scattered into the atmosphere as an aerosol. A missile warhead of the type Iraq has made and used can hold some 140 liters of VX, which could be dispersed by a burster tube, which breaks opens the warhead on impact, creating a lethal aerosol that would quickly spread through the atmosphere of a city. A single such warhead would contain enough of the chemical to kill up to 1 million people. (A single droplet of VX on the skin constitutes a lethal dose.) And the missile targets within a modest 600-mile range from Iraq include such populous, politically and culturally important cities as Damascus, Tehran, Amman, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem. This is one of the reasons why the Security Council imposed a range limit of 150 kilometers on Iraqi missiles (a limit Iraq is now breaching).
I read the laboratory report carefully, and the scientists on the UNSCOM staff confirmed its significance to me.
Initially, Iraq had denied having ever manufactured, let alone deployed, VX. But this was not true. The Muthanna State Establishment had once been a busy, powerful laboratory and factory for the development and manufacture of advanced chemical and biological weapons. It had been largely destroyed by Coalition bombing during the Gulf War, and later UNSCOM had smashed the remaining scientific equipment found there and built thick-walled concrete bunkers in which the leftover chemicals were safely sealed. When I'd visited Muthanna, 100 miles northwest of Baghdad, I'd seen a vast area of destruction, four square miles, surrounded by high barbed-wire fences and sensitive machines constantly monitoring the desert air for traces of deadly substances. It was under one of the destroyed buildings at Muthanna that we'd found documents proving that Iraq had been making VX. We also found traces of VX in soil samples gathered nearby.
Confronted with this evidence, the Iraqis then admitted having manufactured VX but claimed that the quantity produced amounted to no more than 200 liters. Subsequent probing by UNSCOM showed they'd made at least 3,900 liters (about 3.9 metric tons). So Iraq's initial complete lie had been replaced by a false statement on quantity.
We also discovered that they were using the so-called choline method for manufacturing VX, which from a scientific and technical standpoint is the more sophisticated of two possible methods. Clearly, production of VX was no small experiment or minor sideline for the Iraqi arms makers but rather a major effort.
It is important to record, in this context, that under the UN resolutions that created UNSCOM and imposed sanctions on Iraq, Saddam's regime was required to provide us with full, final, and complete declarations of their weapons inventories and weapons-manufacturing capabilities. Our first job in Iraq was to verify those declarations and, after that, to "destroy, remove, or render harmless" any prohibited items. We were never supposed to play the role of detectives. But the lies we were being fed forced us into such a role.
Having been obliged to admit that they'd manufactured VX, and then sought unsuccessfully to lie about the quantity involved, Iraq then reached for its third lie on VX: They'd never "weaponized" the chemical—that is, deployed it in missile warheads or other means of delivery. So when I read the June 1998 report about the warhead fragments from Nibai, it was clear that we had a major problem on our hands. Iraqi VX had been weaponized and, perhaps, used in warfare as well. That was serious indeed.
The first decision I faced was how to manage this discovery. I chose to handle it in a low-key fashion. Rather than make any public statement about our findings or report them immediately to the UN Security Council, I decided to start the process by asking the Iraqis for an explanation. Thus, the next morning, in my first meeting with Tariq Aziz, I quietly informed him that we'd received certain laboratory findings related to the Iraqi deployment of VX. We needed more information about this subject, I said, and in any case we were still waiting to learn how much VX had been produced—a fact that now carried greater importance in light of the current information.
"We don't want to jump to conclusions," I assured Aziz, "so perhaps our chemical experts from both sides should withdraw into another room to discuss the findings." Aziz agreed, and the chemical experts accordingly adjourned to a smaller committee room.
When we later reconvened in the larger room, the Iraqis gave us their response. Predictably, Tariq Aziz denied everything. "You claim to have found the chemical VX in missile fragments from Iraq. But this can't possibly be true! As we've told you many times, we never put VX into any missile warhead or any other weapon. This so-called laboratory report is a fabrication cooked up by you or your friends to slander and harm Iraq. It's no surprise that these findings were produced in an American laboratory—what else would you expect? We demand new tests before we'll even discuss the issue further."
This response was unsurprising, and I was ready with a reply. I said our chemical experts had already prepared letters to the Swiss and the French governments, describing the problem and asking for further examinations of the missile fragments in a French defense laboratory and in an independent, government-funded laboratory in Switzerland. Both establishments had impeccable reputations for scientific objectivity and were also registered under the Chemical Weapons Convention.
I told Aziz, "We have no objection to further analysis. Would you consider laboratories in France and Switzerland acceptable? Good. But let me make it clear that I utterly reject your suggestion that these first results have been falsified because they were done in the United States. The results are valid."
"In deference to your wishes," I continued, "we'll have the French and Swiss scientists comment on the methodology used by the American chemists. And they'll also perform their own tests on different metal samples. But even if the French and Swiss laboratories find no traces of EMPA—and I hope that will be the case—Iraq will still need to explain why the missile fragments already tested contained EMPA. No future test results can wipe away that question."
"Furthermore," I said, "I remind you that you have never adequately declared how much VX you made. That's really the more important question. Weaponizing this chemical is one issue, but of fundamental significance is that you tell us how much of the stuff you made! Give us the documents—show us the throughput of raw materials—let us verify the truth."
It wasn't the first time, or the last, that I made such a plea. As was most often the case, the plea went unanswered.
After wrangling over whether more missile fragments could be sent out of the country, we went forward with additional testing. The Swiss laboratory reported finding no EMPA on the shards it examined. The French laboratory reported ambiguous findings: It discovered traces of MPA, a different chemical closely related to EMPA and associated with other chemical weapons, as well as traces of other substances possibly consistent with EMPA but possibly also consistent with a detergent that might have been used to wash the samples. (There were questions about the French laboratory work. The results had taken uncommonly long to arrive, even allowing for the usual extended August holidays of the French, and we'd been hearing whispered reports through our own scientists that political pressure had been brought to bear by the French government on the laboratory—denied by French diplomats.)
However, when we held a meeting in New York with representatives from all three laboratories as well as our own chemistry staff, all agreed that the procedures that had been followed by the Maryland laboratory were impeccable and their findings unimpeachable. Iraq still had to explain those findings.
It is not known whether Iraq ever used VX in warfare. It's possible—though generally considered unlikely—that Iraq used VX during the Iran-Iraq War. A more plausible alternative is that Iraq used VX on its own citizens. Dr. Christine Gosden at Liverpool University in the United Kingdom has long studied Saddam Hussein's attack in 1988 on Kurds in the northern Iraqi village area of Halabja. Gosden has evidence that nerve agents—including VX, she firmly believes—were among the chemical cocktail used against these northern areas. The overall size of Iraq's VX production remains unknown to this day.
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgments | xi | |
| Map of Iraq and Surrounding Regions | xiv | |
| Introduction | xv | |
| 1. | A Glimpse of Terror | 1 |
| 2. | Peace as a Career | 12 |
| 3. | To Disarm Saddam | 34 |
| 4. | The Summons | 55 |
| 5. | What Honeymoon? | 72 |
| 6. | The Russians Make Their Move | 93 |
| 7. | The Resistance Stiffens | 111 |
| 8. | Kofi Annan Goes to Baghdad | 127 |
| 9. | Road Map to Nowhere | 155 |
| 10. | The Five-Dollar Bet | 169 |
| 11. | The Final Deception | 187 |
| 12. | Desert Fox and the Twilight of UNSCOM | 200 |
| 13. | Son of UNSCOM | 222 |
| 14. | Conclusion: The Principle of the Exception | 233 |
| Notes on Sources | 243 | |
| Index | 249 |