<< The CIA, to avoid upsetting ties with French intelligence, played down
the French role in helping Saddam. The agency had a weak human
intelligencegathering capability, and France, because of its history of ties
to Iraq, was much better at penetrating Saddam's regime. >>
September 08, 2004
French connection armed Saddam
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The United States stood by for years as supposed allies helped its enemies
obtain the world's most dangerous weapons, reveals Bill Gertz, defense and
national security reporter for The Washington Times, in the new book
"Treachery" (Crown Forum). In this excerpt, he details France's persistence
in arming Saddam Hussein.
New intelligence revealing how long France continued to supply and arm
Saddam Hussein's regime infuriated U.S. officials as the nation prepared for
military action against Iraq.
The intelligence reports showing French assistance to Saddam ongoing in
the late winter of 2002 helped explain why France refused to deal harshly
with Iraq and blocked U.S. moves at the United Nations.
"No wonder the French are opposing us," one U.S. intelligence official
remarked after illegal sales to Iraq of military and dual-use parts,
originating in France, were discovered early last year before the war began.
That official was careful to stipulate that intelligence reports did not
indicate whether the French government had sanctioned or knew about the
parts transfers. The French company at the beginning of the pipeline
remained unidentified in the reports.
France's government tightly controls its aerospace and defense firms,
however, so it would be difficult to believe that the illegal transfers of
equipment parts took place without the knowledge of at least some government
officials.
Iraq's Mirage F-1 fighter jets were made by France's Dassault Aviation.
Its Gazelle attack helicopters were made by Aerospatiale, which became part
of a consortium of European defense companies.
"It is well-known that the Iraqis use front companies to try to obtain a
number of prohibited items," a senior Bush administration official said
before the war, refusing to discuss Iraq's purchase of French warplane and
helicopter parts.
The State Department confirmed intelligence indicating the French had
given support to Iraq's military.
"U.N. sanctions prohibit the transfer to Iraq of arms and materiel of
all types, including military aircraft and spare parts," State Department
spokeswoman Jo-Anne Prokopowicz said. "We take illicit transfers to Iraq
very seriously and work closely with our allies to prevent Iraq from
acquiring sensitive equipment."
Sen. Ted Stevens, Alaska Republican and chairman of the Senate
Appropriations Committee, declared that France's selling of military
equipment to Iraq was "international treason" as well as a violation of a
U.N. resolution.
"As a pilot and a former war pilot, this disturbs me greatly that the
French would allow in any way parts for the Mirage to be exported so the
Iraqis could continue to use those planes," Stevens said.
"The French, unfortunately, are becoming less trustworthy than the
Russians," said Rep. Curt Weldon, Pennsylvania Republican and vice chairman
of the House Armed Services Committee. "It's outrageous they would allow
technology to support the jets of Saddam Hussein to be transferred."
The U.S. military was about to go to war with Iraq, and thanks to the
French, the Iraqi air force had become more dangerous.
The pipeline
French aid to Iraq goes back decades and includes transfers of advanced
conventional arms and components for weapons of mass destruction.
The central figure in these weapons ties is French President Jacques
Chirac. His relationship with Saddam dates to 1975, when, as prime minister,
the French politician rolled out the red carpet when the Iraqi strongman
visited Paris.
"I welcome you as my personal friend," Chirac told Saddam, then vice
president of Iraq.
The French put Saddam up at the Hotel Marigny, an annex to the
presidential palace, and gave him the trappings of a head of state. The
French wanted Iraqi oil, and by establishing this friendship, Chirac would
help France replace the Soviet Union as Iraq's leading supplier of weapons
and military goods.
In fact, Chirac helped sell Saddam the two nuclear reactors that started
Baghdad on the path to nuclear weapons capability.
France's corrupt dealings with Saddam flourished throughout the 1990s,
despite the strict arms embargo against Iraq imposed by the United Nations
after the Persian Gulf war.
By 2000, France had become Iraq's largest supplier of military and
dual-use equipment, according to a senior member of Congress who declined to
be identified.
Saddam developed networks for illegal supplies to get around the U.N.
arms embargo and achieve a military buildup in the years before U.S. forces
launched a second assault on Iraq.
One spare-parts pipeline flowed from a French company to Al Tamoor
Trading Co. in the United Arab Emirates. Tamoor then sent the parts by truck
through Turkey, and into Iraq. The Iraqis obtained spare parts for their
French-made Mirage F-1 jets and Gazelle attack helicopters through this
pipeline.
A huge debt
U.S. intelligence would not discover the pipeline until the eve of war
last year; sensitive intelligence indicated that parts had been smuggled to
Iraq as recently as that January.
"A thriving gray-arms market and porous borders have allowed Baghdad to
acquire smaller arms and components for larger arms, such as spare parts for
aircraft, air-defense systems and armored vehicles," the CIA said in a
report to Congress made public that month.
U.S. intelligence agencies later came under fire over questions about
prewar estimates of Iraq's stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. But
intelligence on Iraq's hidden procurement networks was confirmed.
An initial accounting by the Pentagon in the months after the fall of
Baghdad revealed that Saddam covertly acquired between 650,000 and 1 million
tons of conventional weapons from foreign sources. The main suppliers were
Russia, China and France.
By contrast, the U.S. arsenal is between 1.6 million and 1.8 million
tons.
As of last year, Iraq owed France an estimated $4 billion for arms and
infrastructure projects, according to French government estimates. U.S.
officials thought this massive debt was one reason France opposed a military
operation to oust Saddam.
The fact that illegal deals continued even as war loomed indicated
France viewed Saddam's regime as a future source of income.
Telltale chemical
Just days before U.S. and coalition forces launched their military
campaign against Iraq, more evidence of French treachery emerged.
In mid-March 2003, U.S. intelligence and defense officials confirmed
that exporters in France had conspired with China to provide Iraq with
chemicals used in making solid fuel for long-range missiles. The
sanctions-busting operation occurred in August 2002, the U.S. National
Security Agency discovered through electronic intercepts.
The chemical transferred to Iraq was a transparent liquid rubber called
hydroxy terminated polybutadiene, or HTPB, according to intelligence
reports.
U.S. intelligence traced the sale to China's Qilu Chemicals, "the
largest manufacturer of HTPB in China," one official says.
A French company, CIS Paris, helped broker the sale of 20 tons of HTPB,
a controlled export that was shipped from China to the Syrian port of
Tartus. The chemical solution was sent by truck from Syria into Iraq, to a
missile-manufacturing plant. The Iraqi company that purchased the shipment
was in charge of making solid fuel for long-range missiles.
HTPB technically is a dual-use chemical, because it also can be used
for commercial purposes such as space launches. However, Iraq often
disguised military purchases as commercial ones, as documents found later in
Iraq would confirm.
In a report to Congress, the CIA said Iraq had constructed two "mixing"
buildings for solid-propellant fuels at a plant known as al-Mamoun. The
facility originally was built to produce the Badr-2000, a solid-propellant
missile also known as the Condor.
The new buildings "appear especially suited to house large,
U.N.-prohibited mixers of the type acquired for the Badr-2000 program," the
CIA report stated.
French denials
Despite controversy over prewar intelligence on Iraq, the CIA said its
estimates of Iraqi missiles were on target.
Representatives of the French and Chinese governments went on the attack
when The Washington Times asked about the chemical sale.
Chinese Embassy spokesman Xie Feng did not address the specifics, but
said "irresponsible accusations" about China's exports had been made in the
past.
"These accusations are devoid of all foundation," French Foreign
Ministry spokesman Francois Rivasseau declared. "In line with the rules
currently in force, France has neither delivered, nor authorized, the
delivery of such materials, either directly or indirectly."
By that point, many in the U.S. government were fed up with French
denials.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz called in the French ambassador
to the United States, Jean-David Levitte, to complain about France's covert
and overt support for Saddam's regime.
"Twelve years of waiting was too costly in terms of the growing threat
from Baghdad," Wolfowitz told the ambassador, according to a U.S. official
who was present.
Made in France
The war in Iraq, which began March 19, 2003, provided disturbing
evidence that France's treacherous dealings come at a steep cost to the
United States.
On April 8 came the downing of Air Force Maj. Jim Ewald's A-10
Thunderbolt fighter over Baghdad and the discovery that it was a French-made
Roland missile that brought down the American pilot and destroyed a $13
million aircraft. Ewald, one of the first U.S. pilots shot down in the war,
was rescued by members of the Army's 54th Engineer Battalion who saw him
parachute to earth not far from the wreckage.
Army intelligence concluded that the French had sold the missile to the
Iraqis within the past year, despite French denials.
A week after Ewald's A-10 was downed, an Army team searching Iraqi
weapons depots at the Baghdad airport discovered caches of French-made
missiles. One anti-aircraft missile, among a cache of 51 Roland-2s from a
French-German manufacturing partnership, bore a label indicating that the
batch was produced just months earlier.
In May, Army intelligence found a stack of blank French passports in an
Iraqi ministry, confirming what U.S. intelligence already had determined:
The French had helped Iraqi war criminals escape from coalition forces - and
therefore justice.
Then, there were French-made trucks and radios and the deadly grenade
launchers, known as RPGs, with French-made night sights. Saddam loyalists
used them to kill American soldiers long after the toppling of the
dictator's regime.
The intelligence team sent to find Iraqi weapons also discovered
documents outlining covert Iraqi weapons procurement leading up to the war.
The CIA, however, refused to make public the documents on assistance
provided by France or by other so-called allies of the United States.
The clandestine arms-procurement network, disclosed late last year by
the Los Angeles Times, put a Syrian trading company in a pivotal role.
Documents showed the company, SES International Corp., was the conduit for
millions of dollars' worth of weapons purchased internationally, including
from France. Al Bashair Trading Co. in Baghdad was the major front used by
Saddam to buy arms abroad.
A Defense Department-sponsored report produced in February identified
France as one of the top three suppliers of Iraq's conventional arms, after
Russia and China. The report revealed that France supplied 12 types of
armaments and a total of 115,005 pieces.
A major reason Iraqi militants posed a threat to U.S. forces for so many
months was that they had access to weapons that Saddam stockpiled in
violation of U.N. resolutions.
A close call
One of the most frightening examples of how the militants put French
weapons to use against the Americans came Oct. 26, 2003. That morning, at
about 6 o'clock, they bombarded the Rashid Hotel in Baghdad with French
missiles.
The French rockets nearly killed Wolfowitz, whom Defense Secretary
Donald H. Rumsfeld has called "the brains" of the Pentagon.
The deputy defense secretary had just gotten dressed in his room that
Sunday morning when a car stopped several hundred yards from the hotel. It
dropped off what appeared to be one of the blue electrical generators that
were common in the power-starved Iraqi capital. The driver stayed just long
enough to open a panel on the end of the metal box that was pointing upward
toward the hotel.
The car sped off. Minutes later, a pod of 40 artillery rockets set off
by remote control began firing at the hotel, their trails leaving sparks as
they flew. The rockets hit one floor below where Wolfowitz and about a dozen
aides and reporters were staying.
One rocket slammed into the room of Army Lt. Col. Charles H. Buehring, a
public-affairs officer. The explosion hit Buehring, 40, in the head. A
reporter discovered him and tried to help, but the Fayetteville, N.C.,
resident died a short time later.
In all, between eight and 10 missiles hit the hotel. The casualties
might have been higher, and included Wolfowitz, if the improvised rocket
launcher had fired all the missiles.
Because of a malfunction, 11 failed to go off.
Playing defense
Half the missiles fired at Wolfowitz's hotel were French-made Matra
SNEB 68-millimeter rockets, with a range of two to three miles. The others
were Russian in origin.
The French missiles were "pristine," Navy SEAL commandos reported.
"They were either new or kept in very good condition," said one SEAL who
inspected the rocket tubes.
The rockets were thought to have been taken from Iraq's French-made
Alouette or Gazelle attack helicopters.
The fact that new French missiles were showing up in the hands of Saddam
loyalists months after the fall of Baghdad made Wolfowitz and his close
aides livid. Still, others in the U.S. government worked to defend the
French.
The CIA, to avoid upsetting ties with French intelligence, played down
the French role in helping Saddam. The agency had a weak human
intelligencegathering capability, and France, because of its history of ties
to Iraq, was much better at penetrating Saddam's regime.
The State Department's response was not surprising. Asked about French
support for Iraq while on a fence-mending mission to Paris in May 2003,
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell had said: "We're not going to paper over
it and pretend it didn't occur. It did occur. But we're going to work
through that."
Powell, the retired four-star general and former chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, was too inexperienced in the ways of diplomacy. As a
result, he largely had turned over control of State Department policy-making
to the Foreign Service.
The problem with the Foreign Service is its culture. It trains
diplomats to "get along" with the foreign governments they are sent to work
with. Not insignificantly, Paris is among the most coveted postings in the
world.
Backing down
Pentagon hard-liners on France, led by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, carried
the day early in the war, but accommodationists within the upper councils of
the Bush administration took control as the conflict went on.
Among those who took a softer position on France was National Security
Adviser Condoleezza Rice, the former Stanford provost who surrounded herself
with State Department officials and Foreign Service officers.
Rumsfeld drew a great deal of attention on Jan. 22, 2003 - and created a
backlash within the State Department - when he let fly a verbal salvo
against France and Germany for not siding with the United States, describing
them as "old Europe" during a meeting with foreign reporters.
Rumsfeld also criticized French and German political leaders for making
policy based not on "their honest conviction as to what their country ought
to do" but on opinion polls that reflected ever-shifting public sentiments.
As the accommodationists in the Bush administration gained the upper
hand, Rumsfeld and others were ordered to tone down the anti-Europe
rhetoric. By late last year, the defense secretary's critics within the
Foreign Service were crowing that Rumsfeld had been "tamed."
Just a day after the Iraqi attack on Wolfowitz's hotel in Baghdad, in
an interview with The Washington Times, Rumsfeld took an even softer
approach toward the French.
"People tend to look at what's taking place today and opine that it is
something distinctive," Rumsfeld said of the turbulence in Franco-American
relations. "I don't find it distinctive. I find it an old record that gets
replayed about every five or seven years."
The public soft-policy line was, in many ways, a great victory for
France. Even as new evidence poured in that the French had betrayed the
United States and cost the lives of American troops, the government backed
down from a confrontation with its erstwhile ally.
