Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)

DATE=2/5/03

TYPE=INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

TITLE=RAYMOND ZALINSKAS

NUMBER=3-523

BYLINE=TOM CROSBY

DATELINE=WASHINGTON

CONTENT=

VOICED AT:

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HOST: Raymond Zalinskas served on a U-N weapons inspection team in Iraq in 1994. News Now's Tom Crosby spoke with him shortly after he watched Secretary of State Powell's presentation Wednesday to the U-N Security Council:

MR. ZALINSKAS: I thought it was a very powerful presentation, and he obviously believes in it himself. And I think that's very important, because it used to be that he kind of had a reputation of being a dove on Iraq and now apparently he is convinced of the evidence, which he showed himself, that Iraq is not doing its part in the inspection process.

MR. CROSBY: Let's talk about some of that evidence that he presented. Among the things he presented were audio tapes of what purported to be conversations between Iraqi officers talking about moving or hiding equipment, allegedly. Is that believable in your mind?

MR. ZALINSKAS: It's difficult, because of course he never came up and said "We are moving biological weapons," or chemical weapons. There was, in one of the transcripts, a direct reference to nerve agents. I think that particular part is probably the least convincing but, on the other hand, it's probably the one that they don't want to put on because it would compromise their intelligence sources or how well they're able to monitor even this kind of, let's just say, very, very basic conversation between the military commander and the subordinate officer. And that's pretty amazing, I thought.

MR. CROSBY: Amazing that we're able to hear it with such clarity?

MR. ZALINSKAS: Yes, exactly.

MR. CROSBY: When we talk about what is convincing, then what did you find convincing, if there was some doubt about the audio tape?

MR. ZALINSKAS: Well, it wasn't so much doubt. I think it was incomplete, and you really had to read a lot into it, in what they were saying. With the visual material, I thought that the imagery on the chemical weapons storage plants and the activity that was going on around them was fairly convincing. Because that's the kind of stuff that, when I was an UNSCOM inspector, that we were looking for. We used to have a U-2 flying over the Iraqi facilities on a regular basis, and one of the signs that we looked for about the site was whether or not it really was active, was the transport coming in and out. And here I was being presented with essentially the same thing that we were looking at and putting a lot of meaning into it. So, I found that convincing.

MR. CROSBY: At the time that you were there and you were getting the U-2 readings, did you see evidence of transports moving about at that time?

MR. ZALINSKAS: Oh, yes, sure. U-2 flights that were timed to go before inspections, and then during inspections and after inspections, and you could get a lot of information from just the movement of official cars and also of trucks and so on. It meant a lot.

MR. CROSBY: Speaking of movement, Secretary Powell displayed what he said was evidence that perhaps biological weapons were being produced on mobile units, either trucks or rail cars, and that sort of thing. Again, is that something that you consider viable?

MR. ZALINSKAS: It's very possible to do that. I know that in the U.S. biological weapons program, the one that we ended in 1969, there were experiments with even producing biological weapons on airplanes. So, the diagrams of the production facilities, the mobile production facilities, made a lot of sense. And he seemed to have very concrete information as far as how many of these things there are, or were. Only, I wonder why they don't have any images of those things. But I think, in a way, he explained that too, by saying, how can you pick up 18 trucks out of thousands that move across the Iraqi roads every day.

MR. CROSBY: The ultimate question, I suppose, that has to be asked is: Has a sufficient case been made to take military action against Iraq?

MR. ZALINSKAS: I think that's a political decision. The French Ambassador made the statement that yes, okay, the Iraqis are not cooperating and the inspection system is not perfect, but it's still better than going to war, with all the casualties and all the costs that that involves. So, what we should do is to put more inspectors in and make the surveillance mechanism even more intrusive, and that will then essentially neutralize Iraq as a security threat. So, that's what you have to make a decision on -- is it worth spending between an estimated $50 billion to $200 billion, plus whatever lives you lose, versus having an inspection system that the Iraqis pay for?

MR. CROSBY: But as someone who was there on the ground attempting to do inspections, how many inspectors would it take?

MR. ZALINSKAS: To keep the Iraqis suppressed? I think that they have about 100 right now of UNMOVIC and about 15 to 20 nuclear, so I think if you put in a couple of hundred you would be in a very good position to suppress whatever propensity the Iraqi regime might have to take offensive action.

HOST: Former U-N weapons inspector Raymond Zalinskas speaking from his office at the Monterey Institute of International Studies where he heads the chemical and biological weapons non-proliferation program.

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