London Times September 13, 2002

By Tom Mangold

As George Bush urges the UN to back him on Iraq, a BBC reporter tells how weapons inspectors have faced lies and obstruction In March 1991, after the Gulf War, Iraq agreed to halt further all work on all weapons of mass destruction, and to allow UN inspectors to locate and where necessary destroy any documentation, hardware and software that Saddam possessed. UN Resolution 687 decreed that Iraq must unconditionally accept the destruction, removal or rendering harmless of its weapons of mass destruction.

Saddam was to declare all his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons within 15 days and to reveal the location and details of all related research, development, production and support activities. A new UN body, Unscom, was created to verify compliance. It recruited a large number of multinational team of inspectors to travel to Iraq to seek and destroy.

What really happened? The inspectors were serially lied to, deceived, spied on, harassed, bullied and obstructed. Finally, in 1998, Saddam kicked them all out. They have never returned.

Lt-Col Gabriele Kraatz-Wadsack, of the German Army Medical Service, was one of Unscom’s top on-site investigators. In July 1998, deep inside the six-storey command post of Saddam Hussein’s Air Force, she had managed to persuade some officers to open a safe filled with documents. She was seeking evidence of the past manufacture, possession and use of biological agents as weapons.

As usual, the Iraqis had lied and lied - saying the documents were irrelevant to her enquiries. With the temperature inside the office rising to 54C (130F), Wadsack now faced a growing number of Air Force thugs and bully boys. As they menaced her, her eyes flicked to the document and caught the giveaway word “khas” - “special”, the euphemism used by the Iraqi military for biological and chemical warfare matters. She took the document, as she was fully entitled to do.

Her UN interpreter confirmed that it appeared to contain written evidence of munitions used by the Iraqi Air Force. These weapons included LD-250 bombs which Iraq had used to test biological warfare agents such as anthrax and botulinum toxin. The Iraqi Air Force officers shouted at her that the document was not relevant and she could not take it. She held her position and suggested a compromise: by which she would photocopy the document and the original would stay in the safe.

But when Wadsack tried to make copies the photocopy machine had already been sabotaged. The Iraqis made urgent phone calls to Baghdad. They came back and told her that permission to take photocopies had been revoked but she could make notes.

More phone calls to Baghdad, then another security officer bore down on her and said permission to take notes had been rescinded. He asked to see something on the document as a pretext and, as she held it up, he snatched it from her, thus crossing the dangerous line between verbal harassment and physical coercion. The colonel used her phone to call her chief executive, Ambassador Richard Butler, direct in New York. He negotiated an arrangement by which the document would be placed in a tamper-proof plastic envelope with UN seals at each end. The Iraqis would keep the document but it would eventually be revealed. It remains unexamined to this day.

On another assignment, Wadsack was briefed to pay a visit to a prison where, according to an intelligence brief, the Iraqis had used prisoners for live human experiments with biological agents. To make her visit enjoyable, the Iraqis allowed selected prisoners to leave their cells to scream abuse at her. Inside the prison office she demanded the prison records for 1994-95. They were missing.

“They’ve been returned to the appropriate ministries,” a smiling prison official told the inspector. “But I see you have papers for the years prior, namely 1992 and 1993,” she replied. The Iraqi official shrugged and turned away. Richard Butler now says: “I personally believe those human experiments happened. One day, the evidence will emerge.”

Terry Taylor, the former Colonel of the Royal Anglian Regiment, and now director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Washington, was an Unscom arms inspector in Iraq who was deeply hated by the Iraqis. By 1997 the Iraqi spy apparatus had penetrated Unscom’s own offices on the 30th and 31st floors inof the UN building in New York, both with electronic listening devices and one active Iraqi-paid agent.

When Taylor and Wadsack planned one key operation infor Baghdad they were forced to retire to a noisy Thai restaurant on Third Avenue, where strategies were discussed quietly and diagrams drawn on table napkins.

Taylor says: “Before entering Baghdad for the operation we went to a safe house in Bahrain where we dry-ran the operation. We knew our hotel room in Baghdad was bugged 24/7 and we knew the usual ‘special girls’ would be on duty in the lobby. Next we had to agree the use of special code words we could use in front of our numerous Iraqi minders. Also, in the past, people we have been looking for have literally jumped out of windows carrying secret files, so we had a plan to deal with that too.”

The ever-present minders would often discover where the UN inspectors were heading and give warning. “There was no point giving them a hint of our destination,” Taylor recalls, “as they invariably sanitised the location within hours. I forbade all operational discussions on internal phones in the hotel or even in public places or rooms. Important conversations were scribbled on scraps of paper and shown to the person concerned. All very le Carré, and all very necessary, believe me. “Even when we set off, we used a small portable GPS (Global Positioning System) to plot the route and we kept our hands over it because the minders were desperately trying to find out where we were going.” Taylor eventually got to his man, a university professor and expert on the deadly ricin, a favoured toxin for individual assassination.

Nothing better reveals the extent of Iraqi cheating, lying and dissimulation than the saga of the missing growth medium. Growth medium is the dry nourishment required to feed deadly bacteria to reproduce them. In 1995, David Kelly, the senior British inspector, met an Israeli intelligence officer in a safe apartment in New York. The Israeli handed over documents showing that British and German companies had exported some 32 tonnes of growth medium for bacteria to the Iraqis - substantially more than could ever have been required for normal civilian use. Indeed, it was an indefensible figure. Only one conclusion could be drawn.

Kelly, Rod Barton, an Australian inspector, Dick Spertzel, an American inspector, and Wadsack led the hunt for the growth medium. They quickly ran into wall after wall of Iraqi lies. Barton says: “They lied and lied about that growth medium: they said they’d lost it, then they said it had been stolen in food riots after the war, then they came up with the idea that some had ‘fallen off a lorry’. Finally they said they’d destroyed it after its five-year sell-by date expired, but I knew that that date was actually a manufacturer’s ‘best by’ date and that as long as the powder stayed double wrapped and dry it actually had a ten-year life.”

Wadsack remembers: “They told me that the medium had gone to hospitals in small containers for civilian use, but I knew it was the wrong medium for civilian use. Anyway, it was in the wrong bag sizes for that. The Iraqis just lied.”

Kelly, Barton and Wadsack established that some eighteen18 tonnes of the medium had been used by the Iraqis for growing substantial amounts of anthrax and botulinum toxin. When the final count was done, they found that seven tonnes were unaccounted for. It’s still missing to this day.

“They say it’s been stolen,” says Barton says, “but we know for sure that’s just another lie. It’s good for growing bacteria for years to come. My guess? They will use it for anthrax.”

Hamish Killip, a former colonel in the Royal Engineers, discovered three warheads on R-400 bombs containing deactivated botulinum toxin; he helped to uncover the deadly drop-tanks that will send biological weapons over the horizon. These are like fuel tanks added to the wings of a plane. Each holds 450 gallons and has a special drain and a couple of British-invented Venturi electric valves which force the bacterial agent out in an nice even spray. “We discovered they would have used anthrax,” says Killip says. “We even found the paperwork which showed they’d given the project a name - Thul Fiqar, which means something like Double-Edged Sword. That’s ominous, because the Iraqis never allot names like that to a project that’s not going to war.

“Worse still, the Iraqis had an unmanned drone that they tested with a piloted MiG23 flying alongside. Of course They lied and denied the two projects were ever linked. We discovered the projects had been co-ordinated by the same person. I tell you, an RPV (remotely piloted vehicle) carrying biological warfare drop-tanks filled with anthrax, that’s incredibly awful, the most ghastly weapon.”

There was much left undone when Saddam expelled Butler’s men. Richard Butler says: “There was the biological warfare agent manufacturing network, the dual civilian/military use equipment they failed to declare, the hidden growth fermenters, they key personnel who disappeared without trace or explanation, the mobile biological warfare mobile facilities and munitions still filled with bacterial agents. We left at least 20 per cent of their structure intact.”

Unscom was disbanded and from the ashes arose Unmovic, the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission. Gone were the hard-eyed experts such as David Kelly. The new inspectors would all have to be United Nations employees and not, as previously, government-appointed experts.

The chairman of Unmovic is the Swedish diplomat Hans Blix, the epitome of international political correctness. In interviews he has promised not to use controversial or intrusive methods (such as eavesdropping) to foil Iraq’s attempts to hide the weapons. He saysid: “We do not see our mandate to humiliate, harass or provoke.”

Blix further agreed to follow UN inspection procedures for Saddam’s so-called “sensitive sites”. In a 1998 agreement between the Secretary-General, Kofi Annan and Iraq, the UN agreed to a series of time-consuming steps that would delay any inspections by about a week before UN personnel could access more than 1,000 buildings at eight of Iraq’s presidential sites. Just to give the Iraqi’s plenty of warning, the procedures include such time-wasting requirements as prior notification of the inspection, then flying the team (together with UN diplomats) to Iraq, then holding a meeting at the Foreign Ministry to discuss the inspection.

Iraq now knows the game only too well, invented most of the rules, and has had four free years to hide its programmes on weapons of mass destruction even more deeply. Who will give odds that, if there is a next time, the whole truth will emerge without hindrance?

-- Anonymous, September 13, 2002