Ex-spy fingers Russians on
WMD
On March 20, Russian PresidentVladimir Putin
denounced the U.S.-led "aggression" against Iraq as "unwarranted" and
"unjustifiable." Three days later, Pravda said that an anonymous Russian
"military expert" was predicting that the United States would fabricate finding
Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov
immediately started plying the idea abroad, and it has taken hold around the
world ever since.
As a former Romanian spy chief who
used to take orders from the Soviet KGB, it is perfectly obvious to me that
Russia is behind the evanescence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass
destruction. After all, Russia helped Saddam get his hands on them in the first
place. The Soviet Union and all its bloc states always had a standard operating
procedure for deep sixing weapons of mass destruction — in Romanian it was
codenamed "Sarindar, meaning "emergency exit."Iimplemented it in Libya. It was
for ridding Third World despots of all trace of their chemical weapons if the
Western imperialists ever got near them. We wanted to make sure they would never
be traced back to us, and we also wanted to frustrate the West by not giving
them anything they could make propaganda with.
All
chemical weapons were to be immediately burned or buried deep at sea.
Technological documentation, however, would be preserved in microfiche buried in
waterproof containers for future reconstruction. Chemical weapons, especially
those produced in Third Worldcountries,which lack sophisticated production
facilities, often do not retainlethal properties after a few months on the shelf
and are routinely dumped anyway. And all chemical weapons plants had a civilian
cover making detection difficult, regardless of the circumstances.
The plan included an elaborate propaganda routine.
Anyone accusing Moammar Gadhafi of possessing chemical weapons would be
ridiculed. Lies, all lies! Come to Libya and see! Our Western left-wing
organizations, like the World Peace Council, existed for sole purpose of
spreading the propaganda we gave them. These very same groups bray the exact
same themes to this day. We always relied on their expertise at organizing large
street demonstrations in Western Europe over America'swar-mongering whenever we
wanted to distract world attention from the crimes of the vicious regimes we
sponsored.
Iraq, in my view, had its own "Sarindar"
plan in effect direct from Moscow. It certainly had one in the past. Nicolae
Ceausescu told me so, and he heard it from Leonid Brezhnev. KGB chairman Yury
Andropov, and later, Gen. Yevgeny Primakov, told me so too. In the late 1970s,
Gen. Primakov ran Saddam's weapons programs. After that, as you may recall, he
was promoted to head of the Soviet foreign intelligence service in 1990, to
Russia's minister of foreign affairs in 1996, and in 1998, to prime minister.
What you may not know is that Primakov hates Israel and has always championed
Arab radicalism. He was a personal friend of Saddam's and has repeatedly visited
Baghdad after 1991, quietly helping Saddam play his game of hide-and-seek.
The Soviet bloc not only sold Saddam its WMDs, but
it showed them how to make them "disappear." Russia is still at it. Primakov was
in Baghdad from December until a couple of days before the war, along with a
team of Russian military experts led by two of Russia's topnotch
"retired"generals,Vladislav Achalov, a former deputy defense minister, and Igor
Maltsev, a former air defense chief of staff. They were all there receiving
honorary medals from the Iraqi defense minister. They clearly were not there to
give Saddam military advice for the upcomingwar—Saddam'sKatyusha launchers were
of World War II vintage, and his T-72 tanks, BMP-1 fighting vehicles and MiG
fighter planes were all obviously useless against America. "I did not fly to
Baghdad to drink coffee," was what Gen. Achalov told the media afterward. They
were there orchestrating Iraq's "Sarindar" plan.
The
U.S. military in fact, has already found the only thing that would have been
allowed to survive under the classic Soviet "Sarindar" plan to liquidate weapons
arsenals in the event of defeat in war — the technological documents showing how
to reproduce weapons stocks in just a few weeks.
Such a plan has undoubtedly been in place since
August 1995 — when Saddam's son-in-law, Gen. Hussein Kamel, who ran Iraq's
nuclear, chemical and biological programs for 10 years, defected to Jordan. That
August, UNSCOM and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors searched
a chicken farm owned by Kamel's family and found more than one hundred metal
trunks and boxes containing documentation dealing with all categories of
weapons, including nuclear. Caught red-handed, Iraq at last admitted to its
"extensive biological warfare program, including weaponization," issued a "Full,
Final and Complete Disclosure Report" and turned over documents about the nerve
agent VX and nuclear weapons.
Saddam then lured Gen.
Kamel back, pretending to pardon his defection. Three days later, Kamel and over
40 relatives, including women and children, were murdered, in what the official
Iraqi press described as a "spontaneous administration of tribal justice." After
sending that message to his cowed, miserable people, Saddam then made a show of
cooperation with U.N. inspection, since Kamel had just compromised all his
programs anyway. In November 1995, he issued a second "Full, Final and Complete
Disclosure" as to his supposedly non-existent missile programs. That very same
month, Jordan intercepted a large shipment of high-grade missile components
destined for Iraq. UNSCOM soon fished similar missile components out of the
Tigris River, again refuting Saddam's spluttering denials. In June 1996, Saddam
slammed the door shut to UNSCOM's inspection of any "concealment mechanisms." On
Aug. 5, 1998, halted cooperation with UNSCOM and the IAEA completely, and they
withdrew on Dec. 16, 1998. Saddam had another four years to develop and hide his
weapons of mass destruction without any annoying, prying eyes. U.N. Security
Council resolutions 1115, (June 21, 1997), 1137 (Nov. 12, 1997), and 1194 (Sept.
9, 1998) were issued condemning Iraq—ineffectual words that had no effect. In
2002, under the pressure of a huge U.S. military buildup by a new U.S.
administration, Saddam made yet another "Full, Final and Complete Disclosure,"
which was found to contain "false statements" and to constitute another
"material breach" of U.N. and IAEA inspection and of paragraphs eight to 13 of
resolution 687 (1991).
It was just a few days after
this last "Disclosure," after a decade of intervening with the U.N. and the rest
of the world on Iraq's behalf, that Gen. Primakov and his team of military
experts landed in Baghdad — even though, with 200,000 U.S. troops at the border,
war was imminent, and Moscow could no longer save Saddam Hussein. Gen. Primakov
was undoubtedly cleaning up the loose ends of the "Sarindar" plan and assuring
Saddam that Moscow would rebuild his weapons of mass destruction after the storm
subsided for a good price.
Mr. Putin likes to take
shots at America and wants to reassert Russia in world affairs. Why would he not
take advantage of this opportunity? As minister of foreign affairs and prime
minister, Gen. Primakov has authored the "multipolarity" strategy of
counterbalancing American leadership by elevating Russia to
great-powerstatusinEurasia. Between Feb. 9-12, Mr. Putin visited Germany and
France to propose a three-power tactical alignment against the United States to
advocate further inspections rather than war. On Feb. 21, the Russian Duma
appealed to the German and French parliaments to join them on March 4-7 in
Baghdad, for "preventing U.S. military aggression against Iraq." Crowds of
European leftists, steeped for generations in left-wing propaganda straight out
of Moscow, continue to find the line appealing.
Mr.
Putin's tactics have worked. The United States won a brilliant military victory,
demolishing a dictatorship without destroying the country, but it has begun
losing the peace. While American troops unveiled the mass graves of Saddam's
victims, anti-American forces in Western Europe and elsewhere, spewed out
vitriolic attacks, accusing Washington of greed for oil and not of really caring
about weapons of mass destruction, or exaggerating their risks, as if weapons of
mass destruction were really nothing very much to worry about after all.
It is worth remembering that Andrei Sakharov, the
father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, chose to live in a Soviet gulag instead of
continuing to develop the power of death. "I wanted to alert the world,"
Sakharov explained in 1968, "to the grave perils threatening the human race
thermonuclear extinction, ecological catastrophe, famine." Even Igor Kurchatov,
the KGB academician who headed the Soviet nuclear program from 1943 until his
death in 1960, expressed deep qualms of conscience about helping to create
weapons of mass destruction. "The rate of growth of atomic explosives is such,"
he warned in an article written together with several other Soviet nuclear
scientists not long before he died, "that in just a few years the stockpile will
be large enough to create conditions under which the existence of life on earth
will be impossible."
The Cold War was fought over
the reluctance to use weapons of mass destruction, yet now this logic is
something only senior citizens seem to recall. Today, even lunatic regimes like
that in North Korea not only possess weapons of mass destruction, but openly
offer to sell them to anyone with cash, including terrorists and their state
sponsors. Is anyone paying any attention? Being inured to proliferation,
however, does not reduce its danger. On the contrary, it increases it.
Ion Mihai Pacepa, a
Romanian, is the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from
the former Soviet bloc.
