Something fishy for Captain Haddock
Owen Matthews on the enigmatic results of the hunt for weapons of mass destruction. Have they all been looted?
I, f there is any justice in the world. Captain Duane Haddock of US special forces is due a medal. He was, we can reveal, the first coalition soldier to
find something approaching concrete evidence of Saddam's evil arsenal of weapons of mass destruction; to wit, a trailer believed to be a mobile bio-weapons laboratory found parked by a roadblock south of Mosul.
Captain Haddock made his discovery on 24 April, after a tip-off from Kurdish pcshmerga forces who stopped the trailer and its attached cab at a dusty little place called Tall Kayaf, on the Mosul–Kirkuk road. This was not, however, the first sighting of Dr Germ's mobile death-wagon. It seems that US special forces had first got wind of the trailer on 19 April, eight days after the collapse of resistance in the northern capital of Mosul, when it was spotted being driven around the outskirts of the city. For reasons which are still unclear, the trailer was not apprehended, but US forces believe that the rig had already been stolen at that point and was presumably being driven around by a looter in search of a buyer. 'A lot of other things were going on at that time,' explains Captain Haddock, one of the chemical officers of Task Force Viking, the 4,500-strong special forces-led unit who were the first US troops into northern Iraq.
But when the second sighting was reported on 24 April, Haddock was ready. He and his small team of trained men were quickly on the scene in their full NBC suits. swabbing the grey, canvas-sided trailer and its strange contents with detector paper. Inside were several compressors, drip feeders, driers, storage tanks, incubators and ventilators, all cleverly integrated into the relatively small space, and all brand, spanking new. One boiler plate on the compressor read 'Iraqi State Machine Factory, 2002'. A variety of tests for chemical and biological agents came up negative, leading Haddock's superior, LieutenantColonel Brian Clark, to conclude that it had been 'scrubbed down,' presumably by fastidious Iraqi germ scientists keen to cover their tracks before abandoning the trailer intact and making their escape.
Late last week, after an inexplicable delay of nearly a fortnight while the trailer stood on the apron at Ain-Kawa airport, near the Kurdish city of Erbil, the Pentagon announced the discovery. It was all the more significant a breakthrough because Colin Powell, in his presentation to the United Nations on 5 February, described in detail the existence of just such labs. Powell quoted 'an Iraqi civil engineer in a position to know the details of the programme', and 'an Iraqi major' as saying that Iraq 'has mobile biological research laboratories'. And here it was, the smoking gun — or something very close to it. Even better, two smoking guns, because another, identical trailer was found parked in a lay-by on the outskirts of Mosul, near Saddam's palace, a day after the original announcement.
But here the plot thickens. For one thing, the Pentagon's announcement seemed tinged with a certain diffidence, as though the finding of weapons of mass destruction was an academic chronicling of just another aspect of the evil of Saddam's defunct regime. The news of the germ-trailers generated little excitement in the US press — indeed, it was overshadowed by reports of looting of low-grade radioactive material at the al-Tawitha nuclear-research facility, and speculation on how that material could make its way into 'dirty bombs now being plotted by the still-undefeated enemies of the US.
Then came the news, reported in the Washington Post, that the US was to withdraw the core of its WMD search teams, the 75th Exploitation Task Force, from Iraq in June since the group have failed to find any biological and chemical weapons. All but a handful of the list of sites drawn up by US and British intelligence had been thoroughly searched, and nothing — apart from the two trailers and some documents — had been found.
That rather begs an explanation from Colin Powell as to just what he was on about at the UN Security Council meeting. In his detailed presentation, he actually named only three sites: an alleged chemical weapons lab at Taji Cone of 65 such sites in Iraq'), a chemicals factory at Tariq ('which includes facilities specifically designed for Iraq's chemical-weapons programmes') and a rocket-research facility at Al-Moussaib Ca site which Iraq has used for at least three years to trans-ship chemical weapons from production facilities to the field').
Major Brian Lynch and Major Paul Haldeman, WMD-detection officers of the 101st Airborne Division, visited the AlMoussaih site, one of a list of 155 'sites of WMD sensitivity' the US military was asked to inspect, of which 19 were given top priority. It was a solid rocket motor support and testing facility, one of the 'key sites' of interest to the US, but by the time US forces got there records had been systematically destroyed, then the place was bombed, then looted. There were no signs of any live agents, or of any significant lab gear or documentation.
'We went through this place over and over,' says Haldeman, as he sits in a large marble-panelled hall hung with banks of video screens and rows of laptops in Saddam's palace in Mosul, now the 101st's divisional HQ. 'There wasn't a lot left.'
It was the same story at Al-Kindi, a major rocket-research facility near Baghdad and a near certainty for WMDs. US intelligence thought. Instead, the 101st found 'a very sophisticated research facility,' says Lynch, tut no smoking gun.' But Al-Kindi had been hit by a bunker-buster bomb, and the scientists had burned most of the papers before they left. And so on — the same basic pattern was repeated for the 50 or so sites on the list visited by Lynch and the 101st, and for another 50 or so seen by Colonel Clark of Task Force Viking.
'We've found a lot of little pieces,' says Clark of the two months he has spent WMD hunting in northern Iraq. 'We need to put it all together to make up the whole jigsaw.' Clark himself is due to be shipping out soon, handing over the task of looking for WMDs to teams of 'civilian experts' due to come out to Iraq 'sometime soon'.
No one doubts that Saddam Hussein had at some point an extensive chemical arsenal and a frightening biological-weapons research programme. The story of this grim arms race will be the picture which emerges in due course from Colonel Clark's 'jigsaw pu77Ie'. But this is not why we were persuaded to back the war against Saddam. We were asked to back military action because, we were assured by our leaders, Saddam was in possession of an arsenal of unconventional weapons so large and deadly that he posed a direct threat to the security not only of the United States but also of the whole Western world.
The truth is that Saddam did not have enough of these (in Mr Powell's words) 'horrible weapons' to deploy them in his own defence, as his regime was theatrically, and with a good year's advance warning, destroyed. Saddam's arsenal was so small and dispersed that no trace of it can be found, even after a month of searching. Yes, Saddam had WMDs, and there is no doubt of a systematic campaign to destroy evidence of them as the US invaded. But whatever discoveries are made in coming weeks and months, can we really say that they existed in such quantities that they were an overwhelming threat to world peace on 19 March 2003? Or that the vestiges of the weapons programmes could not have been kept under control by UN inspectors — whose incompetence at finding evidence of WMDs was so bitterly lambasted by the US as its leaders pushed us all to war?
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