merican and British intelligence analysts with direct
access to the evidence are disputing claims that the mysterious trailers
found in Iraq were for making deadly germs. In interviews over the last
week, they said the mobile units were more likely intended for other
purposes and charged that the evaluation process had been damaged by a
rush to judgment.
"Everyone has wanted to find the 'smoking gun' so much that they may
have wanted to have reached this conclusion," said one intelligence expert
who has seen the trailers and, like some others, spoke on condition that
he not be identified. He added, "I am very upset with the process."
The Bush administration has said the two trailers, which allied forces
found in Iraq in April and May, are evidence that Saddam Hussein was
hiding a program for biological warfare. In a white paper last week, it
publicly detailed its case, even while conceding discrepancies in the
evidence and a lack of hard proof.
Now, intelligence analysts stationed in the Middle East, as well as in
the United States and Britain, are disclosing serious doubts about the
administration's conclusions in what appears to be a bitter debate within
the intelligence community. Skeptics said their initial judgments of a
weapon application for the trailers had faltered as new evidence came to
light.
Bill Harlow, a spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency, said the
dissenters "are entitled to their opinion, of course, but we stand behind
the assertions in the white paper."
In all, at least three teams of Western experts have now examined the
trailers and evidence from them. While the first two groups to see the
trailers were largely convinced that the vehicles were intended for the
purpose of making germ agents, the third group of more senior analysts
divided sharply over the function of the trailers, with several members
expressing strong skepticism, some of the dissenters said.
In effect, early conclusions by agents on the ground that the trailers
were indeed mobile units to produce germs for weapons have since been
challenged.
"I have no great confidence that it's a fermenter," a senior analyst
with long experience in unconventional arms said of a tank for multiplying
seed germs into lethal swarms. The government's public report, he added,
"was a rushed job and looks political." This analyst had not seen the
trailers himself, but reviewed evidence from them.
The skeptical experts said the mobile plants lacked gear for steam
sterilization, normally a prerequisite for any kind of biological
production, peaceful or otherwise. Its lack of availability between
production runs would threaten to let in germ contaminants, resulting in
failed weapons.
Second, if this shortcoming were somehow circumvented, each unit would
still produce only a relatively small amount of germ-laden liquid, which
would have to undergo further processing at some other factory unit to
make it concentrated and prepare it for use as a weapon.
Finally, they said, the trailers have no easy way for technicians to
remove germ fluids from the processing tank.
Senior intelligence officials in Washington rebutted the skeptics,
saying, for instance, that the Iraqis might have obtained the needed steam
for sterilization from a separate supply truck.
The skeptics noted further that the mobile plants had a means of easily
extracting gas. Iraqi scientists have said the trailers were used to
produce hydrogen for weather balloons. While the white paper dismisses
that as a cover story, some analysts see the Iraqi explanation as
potentially credible.
A senior administration official conceded that "some analysts give the
hydrogen claim more credence." But he asserted that the majority still
linked the Iraqi trailers to germ weapons.
The depth of dissent is hard to gauge. Even if it turns out to be a
minority view, which seems likely, the skepticism is significant given the
image of consensus that Washington has projected and the political
reliance the administration has come to place on the mobile units. At the
recent summit meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia,
President Bush cited the trailers as evidence of illegal Iraqi arms.
Critics seem likely to cite the internal dispute as further reason for
an independent evaluation of the Iraqi trailers. Since the war's end, the
White House has come under heavy political pressure because American
soldiers have found no unconventional arms, a main rationale for the
invasion of Iraq.
Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, who also used Iraqi illicit
weapons as a chief justification of the war, has been repeatedly attacked
on this question in Parliament and outside it.
Experts described the debate as intense despite the American
intelligence agencies' release last week of the nuanced, carefully
qualified white paper concluding that the mobile units were most likely
part of Iraq's biowarfare program. It was posted May 28 on the Internet at
www.cia.gov.
"We are in full agreement on it," an official said of the Central
Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency at a briefing on
the white paper.
The six-page report, "Iraqi Mobile Biological Warfare Agent Production
Plants," called discovery of the trailers "the strongest evidence to date
that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program."
A senior administration official said the White House had not put
pressure on the intelligence community in any way on the content of its
white paper, or on the timing of its release.
In interviews, the intelligence analysts disputing its conclusions
focused on the lack of steam sterilization gear for the central processing
tank, which the white paper calls a fermenter for germ multiplication.
In theory, the dissenting analysts added, the Iraqis could have
sterilized the tank with harsh chemicals rather than steam. But they said
that would require a heavy wash afterward with sterile water to remove any
chemical residue - a feat judged difficult for a mobile unit presumably
situated somewhere in the Iraqi desert.
William C. Patrick III, a senior official in the germ warfare program
that Washington renounced in 1969, said the lack of steam sterilization
had caused him to question the germ-plant theory that he had once
tentatively endorsed. "That's a huge minus," he said. "I don't see how you
can clean those tanks chemically."
Three senior intelligence officials in Washington, responding to the
criticisms during a group interview on Tuesday, said the Iraqis could have
used a separate mobile unit to supply steam to the trailer. Some Iraqi
decontamination units, they said, have such steam generators.
The officials also said some types of chemical sterilization were
feasible without drastic follow-up actions.
Finally, they proposed that the Iraqis might have engineered anthrax or
other killer germs for immunity to antibiotics, and then riddled germ food
in the trailers with such potent drugs. That, they said, would be a clever
way to grow lethal bacteria and selectively decontaminate the equipment at
the same time - though the officials conceded that they had no evidence
the Iraqis had used such advanced techniques.
On the second issue, the officials disputed the claim that the mobile
units could make only small amounts of germ-laden liquids. If the trailers
brewed up germs in high concentrations, they said, every month one truck
could make enough raw material to fill five R-400 bombs.
Finally, the officials countered the claim that the trailers had no
easy way for technicians to drain germ concoctions from the processing
tank. The fluids could go down a pipe at its bottom, they said. While the
pipe is small in diameter - too small to work effectively, some analysts
hold - the officials said high pressure from an air compressor on the
trailer could force the tank to drain in 10 or 20 minutes.
A senior official said "we've considered these objections" and
dismissed them as having no bearing on the overall conclusions of the
white paper. He added that Iraq, which declared several classes of mobile
vehicles to the United Nations, never said anything about hydrogen
factories.
Some doubters noted that the intelligence community was still
scrambling to analyze the trailers, suggesting that the white paper may
have been premature. They said laboratories in the Middle East and the
United States were now analyzing more than 100 samples from the trailers
to verify the intelligence findings. Allied forces, they noted, have so
far failed to find any of the envisioned support vehicles that the
trailers would need to produce biological weapons.
One skeptic questioned the practicality of some of the conjectural
steps the Iraqis are envisioned as having taken to adapt the trailers to
the job of making deadly germs.
"It's not built and designed as a standard fermenter," he said of the
central tank. "Certainly, if you modify it enough you could use it. But
that's true of any tin can."
The reporting for this article was carried out by Judith Miller in
Iraq and Kuwait and by William Broad in New York. Her agreement with the
Pentagon, for an "embedded" assignment, allowed the military to review her
copy to prevent breaches of troop protection and security. No changes were
made in the review.