The Boston Globe May 29, 2003
Report links Iraqi trailers to weapons
By Robert Schlesinger
WASHINGTON -- A report from two US intelligence agencies yesterday said a pair of Iraqi trailers filled with laboratory equipment was the best evidence that Saddam Hussein's government had a biological weapons program.
Although they still lack solid evidence of any biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons in Iraq, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded in a six-page ''white paper'' that each trailer was part of a larger two- or three-trailer facility for production of the weapons.
But the report, which comes more than six weeks after the Pentagon declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq, also underscored that US officials have been unable to prove their assertions that the Hussein regime developed weapons of mass destruction. Although they have found circumstantial evidence to suggest a possible program, US officials have not yet uncovered actual weapons.
The intelligence officials, speaking in a conference call with reporters, acknowledged that they arrived at their conclusion about the trailers through inference and deduction rather than from traces of a biological agent.
''Our experts who are in the field right now . . . have said this is an ingenious, unique, and Iraqi design, not the way anyone else would have manufactured biological agent,'' one of the intelligence officials said, speaking to reporters on condition of anonymity. ''We believe that the Iraqis designed it not with efficiency in mind, but for production of bioagent to be hidden.''
But critics said that is not strong enough to support the US claims.
''They still have not found any biological agents,'' said Corey Hinderstein, assistant director of the Institute for Science and International Studies. ''The main findings rely on a single source, the intelligence of one defector. There is weak confirmation. It is disturbing how a report that says it is now confident that it was a mobile [biological weapons] plant doesn't back it up.''
Even a specialist who accepted the findings of yesterday's report said the United States has a growing credibility problem until more positive evidence is unearthed.
''These trailers had better turn out to be the tip of the iceberg rather than the smoking gun,'' said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense think tank. ''If the rest of the program turns out to have been just totally indistinguishable from chlorine for water purification or pesticide production or baby milk, then I think there's going to be a problem here.''
The report focused on a trailer that was captured mostly intact by Kurdish forces near Mosul in April and a second similar vehicle that had apparently been looted and was found by the US military at the Al Kindi research facility in Mosul earlier this month. Both trailers are under US military control in Baghdad, the officials said.
The intelligence officials said the trailers closely matched information previously provided by an unnamed Iraqi who claimed to have been a chemical engineer who managed similar plants. His information was corroborated by three other sources: an Iraqi civil engineer, a defector from the Iraqi intelligence service, and an unidentified third person.
The trailers appeared to be advanced versions of the mobile facilities that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell cited in his February speech to the UN Security Council in which he laid out charges that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
The officials said a simple ''technical assessment'' of the trailers would not have identified them as biological production sites, and that they reached that conclusion only by pairing that assessment with previous intelligence of their existence.
US officials were not surprised by the lack of traces of any bioagents, because they did not expect to find any. Traces of sodium azide, urea, and aluminum were found on the trailers but officials were unable to say what significance those materials had.
UN weapons inspectors, who searched for evidence of weapons of mass destruction before the war in Iraq, have urged the Pentagon to allow them to return but have been denied permission. UN officials were unavailable for comment yesterday on the report.
According to the report, senior production officials at the research facility at Al Kindi said the trailers were used to produce hydrogen for use in artillery weather balloons. While acknowledging that the plants could be used for that purpose, intelligence officials said it was illogical and unlikely.
''The Iraqis had a motivation for inefficiently producing biological agent,'' one official said. ''They had no motivation for inefficiently producing anything else. If they wanted to produce hydrogen, they should have produced it efficiently.'' The official added that the facility was probably developed more for secrecy than for efficiency of chemical production.
But Hinderstein said biological weapons conclusions cannot be reached simply by deduction.
''We feel they need to have positive evidence. Clearly, the methodology is flawed,'' she said.
The report also noted that the trailers were found mounted on heavy equipment transporters, usually used for moving around Iraqi tanks or other heavy military equipment. That ''suggests that whatever was on top of it was of some value,'' said one official. ''They didn't use those for transporting chickens.''
According to manufacturing tags found in the trailers, the labs were produced between 2002 and early 2003, even as war between the United States and Iraq became imminent, the officials said.
Globe correspondent Bryan Bender contributed to this report; Robert Schlesinger can be reached at schlesinger@globe.com.
Copyright © 2003, Globe Newspaper Company
