[casi] Russia Hid Saddam's WMD's

[Holger Guttenburger <oldglory2@DELETETHIScharter.net>]

Washington Times | October 2, 2003
By Ion Mihai Pacepa

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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