UN Seeks Proof of Tests on Humans; Prisoners Allegedly Biological Guinea Pigs

January 31, 1999 Sunday

BYLINE: By Stephen J. Hedges, Chicago Tribune Washington Bureau.
DATELINE: WASHINGTON

There had long been stories. They began in 1983 and spread like wildfire through the cities and villages that are folded into the jagged hills of northern Iraq. The men were taken, the stories went, and some boys as well. Human guinea pigs, everyone said. But there was no real proof.

The rumors gained more currency the next year with reports that Iraqi troops used mustard gas in their war against Iran. And again in 1988, when Iraqi planes dropped a blanket of lethal gas over 70 Kurdish communities, killing thousands and leaving thousands more with singed lungs, burning sores and violent convulsions.

United Nations inspectors were mindful of the old stories in January 1998 as they made their way toward Abu Ghraib prison, 25 miles west of Baghdad. They had their own story to try to prove.

It came from a document, forwarded to them by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, summarizing an interview with a high-level Iraqi defector in Europe. He described the activities of a secretive Iraqi intelligence cadre, Unit 2100, which he said took Iraqi political prisoners from Abu Ghraib to a military post at Al Haditha, 115 miles to the northwest.

"The unit conducted experiments on human subjects using chemical and biological warfare agents," states the document. "Prisoners who were sent to Unit 2100 did not return."

The defector's account and the accuracy of his past information had all but convinced the inspectors that Iraq had used the political prisoners to advance their most heinous weapons in 1994 and 1995. The inspectors hoped to find prison records to confirm that story.

But once inside the prison, they found that the records for 1994 and 1995 were missing. When they asked for the documents, Iraq effectively ended United Nation's inspections in Iraq, leaving the suspicion of human testing just that--a suspicion.

"It's one of the stories that you're just wanting to believe is true," said an inspector with the UN Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM). "But in terms of hard data, I can't tell you that it's true."

Since the 1991 Persian Gulf war, inspectors have discovered and destroyed a trove of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons material. Yet they and Western intelligence sources strongly believe that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein still maintains a chillingly lethal arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and the means to reconstitute the covert government programs that produce them.

Of those, they say, none remains more mysterious than Iraq's pursuit of germs and viruses to inflict death, injury and disease on its enemies.

"The commission has little or no confidence in Iraq's accounting for proscribed items for which physical evidence is lacking or inconclusive, documentation is sparse or nonexistent, and coherence and consistency is lacking," UNSCOM stated in a 260-page report delivered last week to the Security Council.

Iraq has steadfastly denied conducting tests on humans and argues that its biological weapons program is no longer viable.

But the pursuit of evidence to prove or disprove those claims may be one of the greatest losses in the diplomatic bickering that threatens further inspection missions by UNSCOM, if not UNSCOM itself.

UNSCOM has recently come under heavy political fire for its aggressive, intrusive tactics and the gruff manner of its executive chairman, Australian Richard Butler. Russia, China, France and Brazil, all members of the 15-nation UN Security Council, have raised doubts about UNSCOM's methods and its future.

Inspections were halted in December after Iraq refused to give the teams free access to weapons sites. UNSCOM team members say no meaningful work has been accomplished for more than a year.

Continued airstrikes on Iraqi targets by U.S. and British planes make the resumption of searches unlikely. But if they could continue, UNSCOM inspectors say that they would pursue their suspicions of human testing, as well as other open questions about Iraq's biological weapons, including:

- An incomplete accounting of Iraq's biological weapons agents, as well as the weapons used to deliver them.

- Iraq's use of aflatoxin, a non-lethal agent that causes liver cancer.

- Iraq's recent acquisition of equipment to make biological agents, including the purchase of Russian fermentation vessels for germ agent production.

- The discovery of two human-size "inhalation" chambers. Iraq has said it tested animals, such as donkeys, in the chambers, but inspectors note that they are primate-shaped and that Iraq did not use monkeys to test germ or nerve weapons.

- The possibility of buried material or test victims in trenches that were never properly searched.

- The whereabouts of dozens of R-400 aerial bombs that are believed to contain botulinum toxin.

UNSCOM got a late start in its search for Iraq's biological weapons, beginning in 1994, three years after the end of the gulf war. Until then, inspection teams had focused on destroying the tangible evidence of Iraq's chemical, nuclear and missile programs that they had uncovered. Iraq also had assured UNSCOM that it had "obliterated" its biological program in 1991, unilaterally destroying all of its weapons and equipment.

Once UNSCOM's biological team began inspections, however, it became immediately clear that Iraq had lied.

Documents and intelligence provided by knowledgeable defectors revealed that Iraq's biological program was launched in 1973 and put into mothballs in 1979. It emerged again as a program in 1985 and was placed under the president's authority and based primarily at Salman Pak, a biological research facility 15 miles south of Baghdad.

Iraq's security organizations were restructured in 1987, and Salman Pak was placed under the Special Security Organization, a trusted group that did everything from sample Hussein's food to develop secret weapons.

At the head of the SSO was Hussein Kamel Hassan, Hussein's son-in-law. Under Kamel, inspectors say, the program took on a new, sinister character. The development of biological weapons took on the highest priority, "so that anything they wanted for the program they got," said Richard Spertzel, chief of the biological weapons inspection team. "The (biological weapons) program would obtain equipment and materials that they would directly buy. But they were also an impatient lot, and they would take from what was available."

For example, UNSCOM found that Iraq biological weapons program managers began to produce large amounts of biological agents in 1990. In September 1990, the program's scientists took control of a foot-and-mouth vaccine plant in Daura, near Baghdad.

Soon, inspectors say, the center was producing not vaccines for Iraq's large livestock and dairy industry, but anthrax and botulinum toxin, both deadly agents.

Absolute proof that Iraq still had an active biological weapons program came in August 1995 when Kamel surprised the world and fled to Jordan. Fearful that Kamel would expose Iraq's deepest secrets, Hussein's top aides steered Rolf Ekeus, then UNSCOM's head, to the Haidar Chicken Farm.

Ekeus and his inspectors found 150 crates of documents detailing Iraq's weapons programs. Only 200 documents were related to the biological program and, as the recent UNSCOM report notes, "most of these documents were related to research and did not add a great deal to the commission's overall understanding of the program."

The discovery, however, meant that Iraq could no longer deny the program's existence. Kamel's "defection broke open the floodgate," said Raymond Zilinskas, a former UN inspector who is now senior scientist in residence in the Washington office of the Monterey Institute for International Studies. "The Iraqis themselves admitted to developing and producing weapons and deploying them."

Kamel returned to Iraq in February 1996 and was killed shortly after by gunmen who stormed his residence.

The bulk of Iraq's biological weapons program was run from a place called Al Hakam. It was there that aerial bombs were filled for testing and that agents were tested on animals.

Al Hakam also was the intended destination in 1995 for two Russian-made fermenters--cylindrical canisters that can be used to make everything from beer to anthrax. UNSCOM uncovered documents detailing the fermenters' purchase, and Iraq explained that they were to be used to make a chicken-feed supplement.

UNSCOM, however, says the fermenters, which were imported by the Al-Kindi Co., are only 5 cubic meters each-- too small to make feed supplement economically.

"There were a few things that were peculiar about this animal feed-production plant," said Charles Duelfer, deputy executive chairman of UNSCOM, "beginning with the extensive air defenses surrounding it."

One of two human-size test chambers also was found at Muthanna State Establishment, inspectors say. The other was found in 1991 in a garbage dump near another biological weapons facility, Salman Pak. Inspectors said the Muthanna chamber, which measured 5 cubic meters, was supplied by Karl Kolb, a German company. The chamber at Salman Pak, they say, was smaller and probably made by the Iraqis. Karl Kolb is apparently now defunct; efforts to locate company officials were unsuccessful.

Al Hakam was perhaps the busiest Iraqi biological weapons site, but it wasn't the only one. In the report sent to the Security Council, UNSCOM identified 40 other Iraqi facilities--everything from research labs, weapons depot storage facilities and military airfields to manufacturing plants and university labs.

UNSCOM inspectors stated that Iraq adequately explained the purposes of only five of the facilities. Records and descriptions of activities at the other 35 remain incomplete.

What is clear, UNSCOM says, is that those facilities produced an impressive menu of biological agents, among them:

o clostridium botulinum,which causes paralysis;

o clostridium perfringens, known as gas gangrene, which eats away at skin;

o wheat smut, a moldy growth that can devastate a nation's grain sources;

o bacillus anthracis, or anthrax, which causes death in a matter of days;

o ricin, a castor bean derivative that kills by impeding circulation;

o aflatoxin, the liver-cancer element.

The strangest element in Iraq's arsenal is aflatoxin. The agent is not necessarily lethal, but it does cause liver cancer, usually after about 10 years. Inspectors have questioned Iraq's claim to have manufactured 2,200 liters (572 gallons) of the substance. None of it has been recovered, and some within UNSCOM believe that Iraq's claims to have produced aflatoxin is really just a ruse to conceal production of another unknown agent.

Even stranger is documentary evidence and statements obtained by UNSCOM that Iraq was mixing aflatoxin with riot-control gas. UNSCOM does not have evidence that such laced gas was used against populations opposed to Hussein, such as the Kurds in the north or Shiites in the south. But they note that it would not be unthinkable for a leader who has used chemical weapons on part of his population.

"It is a great way to keep colonels from becoming generals," said an UNSCOM inspector familiar with the searches. "Saddam Hussein hasn't made any weapon that he hasn't used on his own population, with the exception of Scud missiles."

Through their seven years of searching, UNSCOM inspectors have come across persistent stories of human testing. Evidence, on the other hand, has been scarce.

A first chance to find such proof came in 1994 when inspectors dug up trenches near Salman Pak that they believed contained either biological weapons material or the bodies of prisoners who may have been used for testing. But the search was done in the wrong area, and Iraq flooded the plain afterward with water diverted from the Tigris River. A second, proper dig has never been performed.

Another chance came in 1997 when a defector working with the Israeli intelligence suggested that elements of the Special Security Office had been involved in the testing of political prisoners. The defector supplied basic information of Iraqi officers involved in the testing and their postings, which the inspectors verified.

The accuracy of that intelligence led UNSCOM to request more information from other defectors. The CIA delivered a summary of an interview with one defector whose detailed description led to the January 1998 UNSCOM search of records at Abu Ghraib prison.

In 1995, the summary delivered to UNSCOM states, Shiite political prisoners held at Abu Ghraib were taken from their cells and transported to Al Haditha.

"The prisoners were delivered to Unit 2100 between 01 July and 15 August 1995," the intelligence statement says. "All came from the Closed Department of Abu Ghraib. This special department was made up almost exclusively of southern Shiite political prisoners. Officers on duty selected prisoners who were to be delivered to the unit. These prisoners were then transported by General Security personnel to an unknown location near Al-Haditha. It is unknown whether this is a permanent facility or an open area where the unit operated in the field.

"Unit 2100 was subordinate directly to the ministry for Military Industry which was headed by Saddam (Hussein's) son-in-law, Hussein Kamel."

UNSCOM officials say attempts to discover more about Abu Ghraib and the use of prisoners has been impossible since Iraq has blocked access to prison records.