Russia tied to Iraq's missing arms
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By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
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Russian special forces troops moved many of Saddam Hussein's weapons and
related goods out of Iraq and into Syria in the weeks before the March 2003
U.S. military operation, The Washington Times has learned.
John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international
technology security, said in an interview that he believes the Russian
troops, working with Iraqi intelligence, "almost certainly" removed the
high-explosive material that went missing from the Al-Qaqaa facility, south
of Baghdad.
"The Russians brought in, just before the war got started, a whole series of
military units," Mr. Shaw said. "Their main job was to shred all evidence of
any of the contractual arrangements they had with the Iraqis. The others
were transportation units."
Mr. Shaw, who was in charge of cataloging the tons of conventional arms
provided to Iraq by foreign suppliers, said he recently obtained reliable
information on the arms-dispersal program from two European intelligence
services that have detailed knowledge of the Russian-Iraqi weapons
collaboration.
Most of Saddam's most powerful arms were systematically separated from other
arms like mortars, bombs and rockets, and sent to Syria and Lebanon, and
possibly to Iran, he said.
The Russian involvement in helping disperse Saddam's weapons, including some
380 tons of RDX and HMX, is still being investigated, Mr. Shaw said.
The RDX and HMX, which are used to manufacture high-explosive and nuclear
weapons, are probably of Russian origin, he said.
Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita could not be reached for comment.
The disappearance of the material was reported in a letter Oct. 10 from the
Iraqi government to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Disclosure of the missing explosives Monday in a New York Times story was
used by the Democratic presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry, who accused
the Bush administration of failing to secure the material.
Al-Qaqaa, a known Iraqi weapons site, was monitored closely, Mr. Shaw said.
"That was such a pivotal location, Number 1, that the mere fact of [special
explosives] disappearing was impossible," Mr. Shaw said. "And Number 2, if
the stuff disappeared, it had to have gone before we got there."
The Pentagon disclosed yesterday that the Al-Qaqaa facility was defended by
Fedayeen Saddam, Special Republican Guard and other Iraqi military units
during the conflict. U.S. forces defeated the defenders around April 3 and
found the gates to the facility open, the Pentagon said in a statement
yesterday.
A military unit in charge of searching for weapons, the Army's 75th
Exploitation Task Force, then inspected Al-Qaqaa on May 8, May 11 and May
27, 2003, and found no high explosives that had been monitored in the past
by the IAEA.
The Pentagon said there was no evidence of large-scale movement of
explosives from the facility after April 6.
"The movement of 377 tons of heavy ordnance would have required dozens of
heavy trucks and equipment moving along the same roadways as U.S. combat
divisions occupied continually for weeks prior to and subsequent to the 3rd
Infantry Division's arrival at the facility," the statement said.
The statement also said that the material may have been removed from the
site by Saddam's regime.
According to the Pentagon, U.N. arms inspectors sealed the explosives at
Al-Qaqaa in January 2003 and revisited the site in March and noted that the
seals were not broken.
It is not known whether the inspectors saw the explosives in March. The U.N.
team left the country before the U.S.-led invasion began March 20, 2003.
A second defense official said documents on the Russian support to Iraq
reveal that Saddam's government paid the Kremlin for the special forces to
provide security for Iraq's Russian arms and to conduct counterintelligence
activities designed to prevent U.S. and Western intelligence services from
learning about the arms pipeline through Syria.
The Russian arms-removal program was initiated after Yevgeny Primakov, the
former Russian intelligence chief, could not persuade Saddam to give in to
U.S. and Western demands, this official said.
A small portion of Iraq's 650,000 tons to 1 million tons of conventional
arms that were found after the war were looted after the U.S.-led invasion,
Mr. Shaw said. Russia was Iraq's largest foreign supplier of weaponry, he
said.
However, the most important and useful arms and explosives appear to have
been separated and moved out as part of carefully designed program. "The
organized effort was done in advance of the conflict," Mr. Shaw said.
The Russian forces were tasked with moving special arms out of the country.
Mr. Shaw said foreign intelligence officials believe the Russians worked
with Saddam's Mukhabarat intelligence service to separate out special
weapons, including high explosives and other arms and related technology,
from standard conventional arms spread out in some 200 arms depots.
The Russian weapons were then sent out of the country to Syria, and possibly
Lebanon in Russian trucks, Mr. Shaw said.
Mr. Shaw said he believes that the withdrawal of Russian-made weapons and
explosives from Iraq was part of plan by Saddam to set up a "redoubt" in
Syria that could be used as a base for launching pro-Saddam insurgency
operations in Iraq.
The Russian units were dispatched beginning in January 2003 and by March had
destroyed hundreds of pages of documents on Russian arms supplies to Iraq
while dispersing arms to Syria, the second official said.
Besides their own weapons, the Russians were supplying Saddam with arms made
in Ukraine, Belarus, Bulgaria and other Eastern European nations, he said.
"Whatever was not buried was put on lorries and sent to the Syrian border,"
the defense official said.
Documents reviewed by the official included itineraries of military units
involved in the truck shipments to Syria. The materials outlined in the
documents included missile components, MiG jet parts, tank parts and
chemicals used to make chemical weapons, the official said.
The director of the Iraqi government front company known as the Al Bashair
Trading Co. fled to Syria, where he is in charge of monitoring arms holdings
and funding Iraqi insurgent activities, the official said.
Also, an Arabic-language report obtained by U.S. intelligence disclosed the
extent of Russian armaments. The 26-page report was written by Abdul Tawab
Mullah al Huwaysh, Saddam's minister of military industrialization, who was
captured by U.S. forces May 2, 2003.
The Russian "spetsnaz" or special-operations forces were under the GRU
military intelligence service and organized large commercial truck convoys
for the weapons removal, the official said.
Regarding the explosives, the new Iraqi government reported that 194.7
metric tons of HMX, or high-melting-point explosive, and 141.2 metric tons
of RDX, or rapid-detonation explosive, and 5.8 metric tons of PETN, or
pentaerythritol tetranitrate, were missing.
The material is used in nuclear weapons and also in making military
"plastic" high explosive.
Defense officials said the Russians can provide information on what happened
to the Iraqi weapons and explosives that were transported out of the
country. Officials believe the Russians also can explain what happened to
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs.
