3 February 2003. Thanks to Alec Chambers, webmaster of CBWInfo.com

Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 07:39:37 -0500 (EST)
From: John Chambers
Subject: Re: WMDs in Iraq
To: intelforum@his.com

>Date: Thu, 23 Jan 2003 23:29:04 -0600
>To: "intelforum@his.com" <intelforum@his.com>
>From: "Damato, Anthony A"
>Subject: WMDs in Iraq
>
>I've been intending for some weeks to write to this Forum to ask a question
>which I now will ask: if the US intelligence community had had any good
>evidence that Iraq was hiding WMD weapons, wouldn't the UN inspectors have
>been tipped off by now as to the location of at least one of these hiding
>places?
>
>  I'd like to hear what our intelligence professionals think.


	Without being facetious: I think the best place to start would be with
a chemical engineer.

        The biggest problem is detecting the manufacture of WMD in the first place.
If you cannot with certainty detect the manufacture of WMD, then it is that
much more difficult to detect them squirreled away.

	The manufacture of chemical and biological weapons is not an unusual
technology. Many chemical weapons are very similar to important agrochemical
products. The classic case is VX, which is almost identical to the pesticides
Amiton and Demiton. Phosgene, of which Russia still has a significant stockpile,
is easily manufactured from carbon monoxide and chlorine. There is essentially
no commerce in phosgene. Chemical plants find it easier to manufacture it as
needed using a commercial phosgene generator and some gas cylinders. This is an
obvious challenge to proliferation control. Most of the precursor chemicals have
legitimate industrial uses and one of them, the sarin precursor isopropanol, is
manufactured on a very large scale.

	There are some oddities, use of special alloy reaction vessels and some
precursor chemicals, but not enough to identify a chemical weapons program with
certainty. A good chemist could find ways of making the precursors, although at
a cost. Alternatively, they could use a process that had been abandoned as
inefficient. Iraq improvised its way into making mustard gas using a process that
had been abandoned by the US after World War II because the product was impure
and unstable. The problem can be further confounded by the techniques of money-
laundering: splitting the process up into small packets or single steps and
scattering the packets across the country.  It is suspected that this is what
was going on in Sudan.

	Unless a country does something daft, like surrounding the perfectly
harmless pharmaceutical plant at Rabta with anti aircraft missile launchers,
it is difficult to identify a chemical plant as a weapons plant with any degree
of certainty.

	It would be nice to be able to examine exhaust plumes from suspected
plants and local soil samples containing possible telltale substances.	But these
plants are in hostile or denied countries. This means that it all comes back to
getting human sources. Saddam Hussein's Iraq has a very good program for discouraging
recruitment of human sources by foreign intelligence agencies.

	This sends the intelligence officer back to whatever he can get, and this
might not be very much. The recent case of the chicken farm is a good example: a long,
low building was suspected as being a hiding place for a Scud missile, probably from
aerial photographs. The UNMOVIC	inspectors took one look at it and realized that a
Scud would never fit in to the building, but they insisted on knocking a hole in a wall
anyway. As an aside, remember how little success the great Scud hunt had during Desert
Storm. Even a fairly large vehicle can be moved covertly with some application.

	The real concern in this case is not the intelligence challenge, the
intelligence community knows it's having a difficult time. It is the motivation
underlying the statements coming from the Bush administration. That is a different
matter, but I share Prof. D'Amato's evident concern.

Alec Chambers

Intelligence Forum (http://www.intelforum.org) is sponsored by Intelligence
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