So those Iraqi mobile bioweapons labs, or weather-balloon
hydrogen plants, or EM-50 Urban Assault Vehicles, or whatever they
were, are back in the news. The Washington Post suggested
that when President Bush declared that they were biological weapons
factories, he was ignoring an expert report arguing that they were
not, in fact, WMD-related. Several blogs (e.g., here, here, here, and
here) jumped on the Post to point out
that buried within the Post’s article is a note that a
joint CIA/DIA report identifying the trailers as biological weapons
factories arrived the next day.
The Post article describes the report as “unequivocal in
its conclusions” that the trailers were not bioweapons labs, and
mentions the report being written by “a secret fact-finding mission
to Iraq — not made public until now.” Later on, the Post
describes two teams of military experts looking over the trailers
as well.
Curiously, on June 7, 2003, the New York Times had
already described three teams looking over the trailers in
Iraq. Two of the teams were in agreement that the trailers were WMD
labs, but the third, more senior team was not at all “unequivocal,”
but “divided sharply over the functions of the trailers.” Given
that the dissenting experts with “direct access to the evidence”
whom the Times quotes were both British and American
experts, and the Post also describes the secret team as
being made up of “nine civilian U.S. and British experts,” the
Post’s scoop on the “secret” third team is looking less,
well, scoopy, and more like a rehash of information mostly in the
public domain for nearly three years. (See also George Gooding at
Seixon.com, who got the scoop on the Post’s non-scoop.)
In any case, over the course of 2003 consensus moved toward the
conclusion that the trailers were hydrogen plants, and not
bioweapons labs, and the 2004 Duelfer report ultimately embraced
the finding of the “secret” technical team.
SCOOP OR NOT, I’M GLAD the story came up again. The whole incident
left a nagging question that has bothered me for years now: if
these vehicles were just innocuous balloon-juice factories, why
were the Iraqis so scared of them?
Flash back to February 5, 2003, when Secretary of State Colin
Powell
addressed the U.N. General Assembly about Iraq’s WMD program.
He played audio of an intercepted phone call between an Iraqi
Brigadier General and a Colonel, dated November 26, 2002, and
showed slides of their transcribed conversation:
COL: About this committee that is coming…
GEN: Yeah, yeah…
COL: …with Mohamed El Baradei [Director, International Atomic
Energy Agency]
GEN: Yeah, yeah.
COL: Yeah.
GEN: Yeah?
COL: We have this modified vehicle.
GEN: Yeah.
COL: What do we say if one of them sees it?
GEN: You didn’t get a modified…You don’t have a modified…
COL: By God, I have one.
GEN: Which? From the workshop…?
COL: From the al-Kindi Company
GEN: What?
COL: From al-Kindi.
GEN: Yeah, yeah. I’ll come to you in the morning. I have some
comments. I’m worried you all have something left.
COL: We evacuated everything. We don’t have anything left.
GEN: I will come to you tomorrow.
COL: Okay.
That sure got the General’s attention, didn’t it? There was
something about the mention of a “modified vehicle” from the
“al-Kindi Company” that made him want to visit this colonel’s site,
wherever it was, “in the morning.” That would be November 27, the
first day that IAEA and UNSCOM inspections resumed. And on the very
first day of the inspections, this general was rushing out to tend
to this particular vehicle.
Probably because of those darned hydrogen generators. Yeah?
Yeah.
The reference to “Al-Kindi” is very important, by the way. There
are two Al-Kindis that relate to this story. One of them is the
Al-Kindi Research Complex, “one of the largest
and most secret arms project[s] in Iraq,” located in Mosul. It
looks like they mainly did missile research there, but also did
nuclear and chemical weapons research at some point. This location
is important because one of the two vehicles was found on their lot
in April 2003. It’s also important because the 2003 CIA report on
the biolabs mentions that “Senior Iraqi officials of the
al-Kindi Research, Testing, Development, and Engineering facility
in Mosul were shown pictures of the mobile production trailers, and
they claimed that the trailers were used to chemically produce
hydrogen for artillery weather balloons.” That’s a logical answer
for a technician in a rocketry plant that had missile test
facilities, a wind tunnel, and a launch range.
The other Al-Kindi Company is located in Abu Ghraib,
near Baghdad. Its full name is the Al-Kindi Company for the Production of
Veterinary Vaccines. According to UNMOVIC, it is a declared and
monitored site which produces a “variety of viral and bacterial
veterinary vaccines, using basic glassware and techniques.”
Whether or not they were asked about the trailers is
not in the unclassified CIA report.
