Russia Hid Saddam's WMDs

[R.A. Hettinga]

<http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=10111>

Front Page Magazine

Russia Hid Saddam's WMDs
By Ion Mihai Pacepa
Washington Times | October 2, 2003


On March 20, Russian President Vladimir 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." I implemented 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 World countries, which lack
sophisticated production facilities, often do not retain lethal 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's "war-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 upcoming war-Saddam's Katyusha 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
UN 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-power status in Eurasia. 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.



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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'