Ex-Official: Russia Moved Saddam's WMD
Kenneth R. Timmerman / Sunday, Feb. 19, 2006 / A top Pentagon official
who was responsible for tracking Saddam Hussein's weapons programs
before and after the 2003 liberation of Iraq, has provided the
first-ever account of how Saddam Hussein "cleaned up" his weapons of
mass destruction stockpiles to prevent the United States from
discovering them.
"The short answer to the question of where the WMD Saddam bought from
the Russians went was that they went to Syria and Lebanon," former
Deputy Undersecretary of Defense John A. Shaw told an audience Saturday
at a privately sponsored "Intelligence Summit" in Alexandria, Va.
(www.intelligencesummit.org).
"They were moved by Russian Spetsnaz (special forces) units out of
uniform, that were specifically sent to Iraq to move the weaponry and
eradicate any evidence of its existence," he said.
Shaw has dealt with weapons-related issues and export controls as a U.S.
government official for 30 years, and was serving as deputy
undersecretary of defense for international technology security when the
events he described today occurred.
He called the evacuation of Saddam's WMD stockpiles "a well-orchestrated
campaign using two neighboring client states with which the Russian
leadership had a long time security relationship."
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Shaw was initially tapped to make an inventory of Saddam's conventional
weapons stockpiles, based on intelligence estimates of arms deals he had
concluded with the former Soviet Union, China and France.
He estimated that Saddam had amassed 100 million tons of munitions -
roughly 60 percent of the entire U.S. arsenal. "The origins of these
weapons were Russian, Chinese and French in declining order of
magnitude, with the Russians holding the lion's share and the Chinese
just edging out the French for second place."
But as Shaw's office increasingly got involved in ongoing intelligence
to identify Iraqi weapons programs before the war, he also got "a flow
of information from British contacts on the ground at the Syrian border
and from London" via non-U.S. government contacts.
"The intelligence included multiple sightings of truck convoys, convoys
going north to the Syrian border and returning empty," he said.
Shaw worked closely with Julian Walker, a former British ambassador who
had decades of experience in Iraq, and an unnamed Ukranian-American who
was directly plugged in to the head of Ukraine's intelligence service.
The Ukrainians were eager to provide the United States with documents
from their own archives on Soviet arms transfers to Iraq and on ongoing
Russian assistance to Saddam, to thank America for its help in securing
Ukraine's independence from the Soviet Union, Shaw said.
In addition to the convoys heading to Syria, Shaw said his contacts
"provided information about steel drums with painted warnings that had
been moved to a cellar of a hospital in Beirut."
But when Shaw passed on his information to the Defense Intelligence
Agency (DIA) and others within the U.S. intelligence community, he was
stunned by their response.
"My report on the convoys was brushed off as ?Israeli disinformation,'"
he said.
One month later, Shaw learned that the DIA general counsel complained to
his own superiors that Shaw had eaten from the DIA "rice bowl." It was a
Washington euphemism that meant he had commited the unpardonable sin of
violating another agency's turf.
The CIA responded in even more diabolical fashion. "They trashed one of
my Brits and tried to declare him persona non grata to the intelligence
community," Shaw said. "We got constant indicators that Langley was
aggressively trying to discredit both my Ukranian-American and me in
Kiev," in addition to his other sources.
But Shaw's information had not originated from a casual contact. His
Ukranian-American aid was a personal friend of David Nicholas, a Western
ambassador in Kiev, and of Igor Smesko, head of Ukrainian intelligence.
Smesko had been a military attach? in Washington in the early 1990s when
Ukraine first became independent and Dick Cheney was secretary of
defense. "Smesko had told Cheney that when Ukraine became free of Russia
he wanted to show his friendship for the United States."
Helping out on Iraq provided him with that occasion.
"Smesko had gotten to know Gen. James Clapper, now director of the
Geospacial Intelligence Agency, but then head of DIA," Shaw said.
But it was Shaw's own friendship to the head of Britain's MI6 that
brought it all together during a two-day meeting in London that included
Smeshko's people, the MI6 contingent, and Clapper, who had been
deputized by George Tenet to help work the issue of what happened to
Iraq's WMD stockpiles.
In the end, here is what Shaw learned:
# In December 2002, former Russian intelligence chief Yevgeni Primakov,
a KGB general with long-standing ties to Saddam, came to Iraq and stayed
until just before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.
# Primakov supervised the execution of long-standing secret agreements,
signed between Iraqi intelligence and the Russian GRU (military
intelligence), that provided for clean-up operations to be conducted by
Russian and Iraqi military personnel to remove WMDs, production
materials and technical documentation from Iraq, so the regime could
announce that Iraq was "WMD free."
# Shaw said that this type GRU operation, known as "Sarandar," or
"emergency exit," has long been familiar to U.S. intelligence officials
from Soviet-bloc defectors as standard GRU practice.
# In addition to the truck convoys, which carried Iraqi WMD to Syria and
Lebanon in February and March 2003 "two Russian ships set sail from the
(Iraqi) port of Umm Qasr headed for the Indian Ocean," where Shaw
believes they "deep-sixed" additional stockpiles of Iraqi WMD from
flooded bunkers in southern Iraq that were later discovered by U.S.
military intelligence personnel.
# The Russian "clean-up" operation was entrusted to a combination of GRU
and Spetsnaz troops and Russian military and civilian personnel in Iraq
"under the command of two experienced ex-Soviet generals,
Colonel-General Vladislav Achatov and Colonel-General Igor Maltsev, both
retired and posing as civilian commercial consultants."
# Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz reported on Oct. 30, 2004, that
Achatov and Maltsev had been photographed receiving medals from Iraqi
Defense Minister Sultan Hashim Ahmed in a Baghdad building bombed by
U.S. cruise missiles during the first U.S. air raids in early March 2003.
# Shaw says he leaked the information about the two Russian generals and
the clean-up operation to Gertz in October 2004 in an effort to "push
back" against claims by Democrats that were orchestrated with CBS News
to embarrass President Bush just one week before the November 2004
presidential election. The press sprang bogus claims that 377 tons of
high explosives of use to Iraq's nuclear weapons program had "gone
missing" after the U.S.-led liberation of Iraq, while ignoring
intelligence of the Russian-orchestrated evacuation of Iraqi WMDs.
# The two Russian generals "had visited Baghdad no fewer than 20 times
in the preceding five to six years," Shaw revealed. U.S. intelligence
knew "the identity and strength of the various Spetsnaz units, their
dates of entry and exit in Iraq, and the fact that the effort (to clean
up Iraq's WMD stockpiles) with a planning conference in Baku from which
they flew to Baghdad."
# The Baku conference, chaired by Russian Minister of Emergency
Situations Sergei Shoigu, "laid out the plans for the Sarandar clean-up
effort so that Shoigu could leave after the keynote speech for Baghdad
to orchestrate the planning for the disposal of the WMD."
# Subsequent intelligence reports showed that Russian Spetsnaz
operatives "were now changing to civilian clothes from military/GRU
garb," Shaw said. "The Russian denial of my revelations in late October
2004 included the statement that "only Russian civilians remained in
Baghdad." That was the "only true statement" the Russians made, Shaw
ironized.
The evacuation of Saddam's WMD to Syria and Lebanon "was an entirely
controlled Russian GRU operation," Shaw said. "It was the brainchild of
General Yevgenuy Primakov."
The goal of the clean-up was "to erase all trace of Russian involvement"
in Saddam's WMD programs, and "was a masterpiece of military camouflage
and deception."
Just as astonishing as the Russian clean-up operation were efforts by
Bush administration appointees, including Defense Department spokesman
Laurence DiRita, to smear Shaw and to cover up the intelligence
information he brought to light.
"Larry DiRita made sure that this story would never grow legs," Shaw
said. "He whispered sotto voce [quietly] to journalists that there was
no substance to my information and that it was the product of an
unbalanced mind."
Shaw suggested that the answer of why the Bush administration had
systematically "ignored Russia's involvement" in evacuating Saddam's WMD
stockpiles "could be much bigger than anyone has thought," but declined
to speculate what exactly was involved.
Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney was less reticent. He
thought the reason was Iran.
"With Iran moving faster than anyone thought in its nuclear programs,"
he told NewsMax, "the administration needed the Russians, the Chinese
and the French, and was not interested in information that would make
them look bad."
McInerney agreed that there was "clear evidence" that Saddam had WMD.
"Jack Shaw showed when it left Iraq, and how."
Former Undersecretary of Defense Richard Perle, a strong supporter of
the war against Saddam, blasted the CIA for orchestrating a smear
campaign against the Bush White House and the war in Iraq.
"The CIA has been at war with the Bush administration almost from the
beginning," he said in a keynote speech at the Intelligence Summit on
Saturday.
He singled out recent comments by Paul Pillar, a former top CIA Middle
East analyst, alleging that the Bush White House "cherry-picked"
intelligence to make the case for war in Iraq.
"Mr. Pillar was in a very senior position and was able to make his views
known, if that is indeed what he believed," Perle said.
"He (Pillar) briefed senior policy officials before the start of the
Iraq war in 2003. If he had had reservations about the war, he could
have voiced them at that time." But according to officials briefed by
Pillar, Perle said, he never did.
Even more inexplicable, Perle said, were the millions of documents "that
remain untranslated" among those seized from Saddam Hussein's
intelligence services.
"I think the intelligence community does not want them to be exploited,"
he said.
Among those documents, presented Saturday at the conference by former
FBI translator Bill Tierney, were transcripts of Saddam's palace
conversations with top aides in which he discussed ongoing nuclear
weapons plans in 2000, well after the U.N. arms inspectors believed he
had ceased all nuclear weapons work.
"What was most disturbing in those tapes," Tierney said, "was the fact
that the individuals briefing Saddam were totally unknown to the U.N.
Special Commission."
In addition, Tierney said, the plasma uranium programs Saddam discussed
with his aids as ongoing operations in 2000 had been dismissed as "old
programs" disbanded years earlier, according to the final CIA report on
Iraq's weapons programs, presented in 2004 by the Iraq Survey Group.
"When I first heard those tapes" about the uranium plasma program, "it
completely floored me," Tierney said.
source:
http://newsmax.com/archives/articles/2006/2/18/233023.shtml?s=lh&s=br
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