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New Iraqi Nerve Gas?

Iraq News, 11 Nov 1999

The central focus of Iraq News is the tension between the considerable, proscribed WMD capabilities that Iraq is holding on to and its increasing stridency that it has complied with UNSCR 687 and it is time to lift sanctions. If you wish to receive Iraq News by email, a service which includes full-text of news reports not archived here, send your request to Laurie Mylroie .

U.S. News & World Report
October 25, 1999
BAD CHEMISTRY
A mystery at a pesticide plant
   The two Russians call themselves civilian agricultural advisers, but 
their reported presence at an Iraqi pesticide plant is setting off 
alarms in intelligence circles that Saddam Hussein is trying to rebuild 
stocks of chemical weapons to threaten his neighbors or be used for 
terrorism. 
   The two Russians, according to intelligence sources, are former 
subordinates of retired Gen. Anatoly Kuntsevich, the former deputy 
commander of the Russian Army Chemical Corps. Kuntsevich ran afoul of
Russian authorities in an illicit 1994 attempt to ship chemical weapons 
components to Syria and, investigators suspected, from there to Iraq. 
United Nations weapons inspectors were tipped off last year that he, or 
people associated with him, were making overtures to Baghdad.
Deadly weapon 
  What makes this latest report so alarming is that the two former Army 
officers, according to a Mideast intelligence source, are experts in a
relatively new class of Russian chemical weapons, known as the Novichok 
group. These are at least five times more lethal than the VX nerve gas 
found in Iraq's arsenal after the gulf war. The newer compounds, deadly 
if inhaled or absorbed through the skin, can't be detected by current 
U.S. sensors, and victims are virtually untreatable. 
   Could Iraq be seeking to produce Novichok agents? If so, the most 
likely place would be somewhere like the pesticide plant in the 
al-Saklawiyah region of western Iraq's desolate al-Anbar province. 
Former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter says that Iraq would be hard
pressed to produce such advanced compounds and that even an attempt to 
do so would require buildings and other infrastructure that would 
"create a footprint" detectable by Western intelligence agencies.
     U.S. government officials said they aren't aware of any such 
developments, though administration officials worry Baghdad is trying to 
clandestinely rebuild its weapons capabilities.
    It has been nearly a year since Iraq barred further inspections by 
the U.N. Special Commission, which was responsible for finding and 
destroying Iraq's chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons 
capabilities. Richard Butler, the Australian who headed UNSCOM, told the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month that he believes Iraq's 
ability to wage war with prohibited weapons is "undiminished and 
possibly greater" than when U.N. inspections were halted last December.
-Richard Z. Chesnoff with Douglas Pasternak