-Caveat Lector-
U.S. Wasn't Sure Plant Had Nerve Gas Role
Before Sudan Strike, CIA Urged More Tests
By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 21, 1999; Page A01
One month before the United States bombed the El Shifa
pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, CIA analysts said more
testing would be needed before they could firmly
conclude that the plant was producing a key component
of deadly VX nerve gas, as the Clinton administration
maintained on the night of the strike.
The bombing, one year ago this week, has led to a
lawsuit by the plant's owner, an embarrassing series of
retractions by top U.S. officials, and an increasingly
pressing question: Just how certain does the government
need to be before it uses force against a suspected
terrorist group overseas?
The Clinton administration continues to defend the
airstrike, which killed a night watchman and destroyed
the pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, Sudan's capital.
But senior officials now concede that the plant did, in
fact, make some medicines. They also acknowledge that
it may not have manufactured chemical weapons -- at
least at the time of the bombing.
President Clinton ordered the missile strike in retaliation
for Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden's alleged role as
the mastermind in the terrorist bombing of two U.S.
embassies on Aug. 7, 1998. The twin truck bombs in
Kenya and Tanzania killed more than 200 people,
including 12 Americans.
To strike back, U.S. Navy ships fired 13 Tomahawk
cruise missiles at El Shifa and 66 missiles at bin Laden's
training camps in Afghanistan. The attack was timed to
coincide with a meeting of bin Laden's key operatives at
one of the camps.
Since the attack, senior administration officials have
stood behind what they continue to describe as a
"compelling" piece of evidence: a soil sample, secretly
obtained near the El Shifa site by a CIA operative, that
was found to contain a high concentration of EMPTA, a
chemical that does not occur in nature and has no use
except in making nerve gas.
"Nothing that we've learned subsequent to the attacks has
led anybody to [conclude], if they had to do it over
again, that they would make a different decision," one
senior administration official said this week.
However, in a three-page analytical paper written late
last July, well before the embassy bombings or the
retaliatory targeting of El Shifa, CIA analysts raised
questions about what conclusions could safely be drawn
from the soil sample.
According to officials familiar with the paper, the CIA
analysts considered the presence of EMPTA to be a
virtually sure-fire indicator that the plant had something
to do with chemical weapons. But they could not be sure
whether the plant actually manufactured VX or merely
served as a warehouse or transshipment point for
chemicals used in making nerve gas. Nor could they be
sure how recently that activity might have occurred.
The paper, which was reviewed at senior levels in the
CIA and disseminated to the National Security Council
staff, recommended covert efforts to obtain more soil
samples to try to answer those questions.
Intelligence officials also said in interviews this week
that even if El Shifa did make nerve gas, they cannot
explain why a high concentration of EMPTA would have
been present in the soil outside the plant. EMPTA is a
viscous substance that is not volatile enough to vaporize,
and the plant's drainage system is unlikely to have
deposited effluent in surface soil on its periphery.
That uncertainty, the officials said, is another reason
why CIA analysts recommended additional soil sampling at
the site last July.
Still, the intelligence officials played down the
importance of that recommendation and said CIA
Director George J. Tenet did not mention any need for
further testing when he presented senior policymakers
with a "mosaic" of intelligence to support the targeting
of El Shifa at a White House briefing on Aug. 17, 1998,
three days before the U.S. missile strike.
Tenet's chain of evidence, they said, consisted of:
Financial records enabling CIA analysts to "follow the
movement" of millions of dollars from bin Laden to
Sudan's state-owned Military Industrial Corp. in the
mid-1990s.
"Highly reliable intelligence" indicating that bin Laden
had reached an agreement with the Sudanese
government, which is on the State Department's list of
state sponsors of terrorism, enabling him to produce
chemical weapons in Sudan with government assistance
under certain conditions.
Frequent visits by officials linked to El Shifa's original
owner to Samara Drug Industries in Iraq, a
pharmaceutical firm closely linked to the head of Iraq's
program for producing VX from EMPTA.
And, finally, the soil sample containing a high
concentration of EMPTA gathered near the El Shifa plant
by an operative who had been carefully polygraphed and
vetted by his CIA handlers.
The officials denied published reports that the operative
was an Egyptian or an agent of the Egyptian intelligence
agency. They said they still have full confidence both in
the "CIA asset" who collected the sample and in the
chemical analysis of the sample by an independent
laboratory, which they characterized as "95 percent"
reliable.
One intelligence official said Tenet's analysis, which
came after the embassy bombings, had moved
"light-years" beyond the July document recommending
further sampling.
"With information that bin Laden had attacked
Americans before and planned to do so again, that he
was seeking chemical weapons to use in future attacks,
that he was cooperating with the government of Sudan in
those efforts, and that Sudan's El Shifa plant was linked
to both bin Laden and chemical weapons, we had a
responsibility to counter this threat," White House press
secretary Joe Lockhart said in a statement Thursday.
But even in defending the attack, one administration
official said that national security adviser Samuel R.
"Sandy" Berger and Defense Secretary William S.
Cohen made "inaccurate" statements on the night of the
attack when they said they were certain that El Shifa
produced EMPTA.
"We never had any evidence of that," the official said.
"The correct statement, and it has been corrected, was
that EMPTA was present at the plant."
The official also noted a substantial change in the
administration's position with regard to the plant's
owner, the wealthy Saudi businessman Saleh Idris: The
U.S. government no longer claims that he is a terrorist.
Shortly after the missile strike, administration officials
conceded that they had not realized Idris owned the
plant, which he had acquired six months earlier.
Nevertheless, the Treasury Department moved almost
immediately to freeze $24 million he had on deposit at
the Bank of America. The freeze was lifted in May, after
Idris filed suit in federal court and the government did
not contest the case.
Idris has said he now intends to file a second suit,
seeking $30 million in compensation for the plant. It is
unclear whether the government will contest it.
One senior administration official maintained in an
interview this week that Idris's case is "irrelevant" to
the justification for striking the plant.
"Even if you took his view, that he owned it and he's an
innocent guy, as long as we believe, and continue to
believe, that this was a resource associated with
chemical weapons that was available to bin Laden,
Idris's innocence or guilt, and his intentions, really
don't have anything to do with it."
Idris's lawyer, Mark J. MacDougall, a partner at Akin,
Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, responded that there is no
evidence linking El Shifa to the Military Industrial
Corp., under Idris or the plant's previous owner.
The administration's explanation for the El Shifa attack
"has changed dramatically during the past year,"
MacDougall said. "Either the evidence supporting the
decision to destroy the plant exists, or it doesn't. Until
the facts are disclosed, and tested, this is not going to
go away."
� Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
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