Thread: So who moved the WMD? Someone did...

NOTE, this post contains 2 different articles.

Ex-Official: Russia Moved Saddam's WMD
Kenneth R. Timmerman
Sunday, Feb. 19, 2006

Reprinted from NewsMax.com
www.newsmax.com/archives/...shtml?s=tn

A top Pentagon official who was responsible for tracking Saddam Hussein's weapons programs before and after the 2003 liberation of Iraq, has provided the first-ever account of how Saddam Hussein "cleaned up" his weapons of mass destruction stockpiles to prevent the United States from discovering them.

"The short answer to the question of where the WMD Saddam bought from the Russians went was that they went to Syria and Lebanon," former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense John A. Shaw told an audience Saturday at a privately sponsored "Intelligence Summit" in Alexandria, Va. (www.intelligencesummit.org).

"They were moved by Russian Spetsnaz (special forces) units out of uniform, that were specifically sent to Iraq to move the weaponry and eradicate any evidence of its existence," he said.

Shaw has dealt with weapons-related issues and export controls as a U.S. government official for 30 years, and was serving as deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security when the events he described today occurred.

He called the evacuation of Saddam's WMD stockpiles "a well-orchestrated campaign using two neighboring client states with which the Russian leadership had a long time security relationship."


Shaw was initially tapped to make an inventory of Saddam's conventional weapons stockpiles, based on intelligence estimates of arms deals he had concluded with the former Soviet Union, China and France.

He estimated that Saddam had amassed 100 million tons of munitions - roughly 60 percent of the entire U.S. arsenal. "The origins of these weapons were Russian, Chinese and French in declining order of magnitude, with the Russians holding the lion's share and the Chinese just edging out the French for second place."

But as Shaw's office increasingly got involved in ongoing intelligence to identify Iraqi weapons programs before the war, he also got "a flow of information from British contacts on the ground at the Syrian border and from London" via non-U.S. government contacts.

"The intelligence included multiple sitings of truck convoys, convoys going north to the Syrian border and returning empty," he said.

Shaw worked closely with Julian Walker, a former British ambassador who had decades of experience in Iraq, and an unnamed Ukranian-American who was directly plugged in to the head of Ukraine's intelligence service.


The Ukrainians were eager to provide the United States with documents from their own archives on Soviet arms transfers to Iraq and on ongoing Russian assistance to Saddam, to thank America for its help in securing Ukraine's independence from the Soviet Union, Shaw said.

In addition to the convoys heading to Syria, Shaw said his contacts "provided information about steel drums with painted warnings that had been moved to a cellar of a hospital in Beirut."

But when Shaw passed on his information to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and others within the U.S. intelligence community, he was stunned by their response.

"My report on the convoys was brushed off as ‘Israeli disinformation,'" he said.

One month later, Shaw learned that the DIA general counsel complained to his own superiors that Shaw had eaten from the DIA "rice bowl." It was a Washington euphemism that meant he had commited the unpardonable sin of violating another agency's turf.

The CIA responded in even more diabolical fashion. "They trashed one of my Brits and tried to declare him persona non grata to the intelligence community," Shaw said. "We got constant indicators that Langley was aggressively trying to discredit both my Ukranian-American and me in Kiev," in addition to his other sources.

But Shaw's information had not originated from a casual contact. His Ukranian-American aid was a personal friend of David Nicholas, a Western ambassador in Kiev, and of Igor Smesko, head of Ukrainian intelligence.

Smesko had been a military attaché in Washington in the early 1990s when Ukraine first became independent and Dick Cheney was secretary of defense. "Smesko had told Cheney that when Ukraine became free of Russia he wanted to show his friendship for the United States."

Helping out on Iraq provided him with that occasion.

"Smesko had gotten to know Gen. James Clapper, now director of the Geospacial Intelligence Agency, but then head of DIA," Shaw said.

But it was Shaw's own friendship to the head of Britain's MI6 that brought it all together during a two-day meeting in London that included Smeshko's people, the MI6 contingent, and Clapper, who had been deputized by George Tenet to help work the issue of what happened to Iraq's WMD stockpiles.

In the end, here is what Shaw learned:


In December 2002, former Russian intelligence chief Yevgeni Primakov, a KGB general with long-standing ties to Saddam, came to Iraq and stayed until just before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

Primakov supervised the execution of long-standing secret agreements, signed between Iraqi intelligence and the Russian GRU (military intelligence), that provided for clean-up operations to be conducted by Russian and Iraqi military personnel to remove WMDs, production materials and technical documentation from Iraq, so the regime could announce that Iraq was "WMD free."

Shaw said that this type GRU operation, known as "Sarandar," or "emergency exit," has long been familiar to U.S. intelligence officials from Soviet-bloc defectors as standard GRU practice.

In addition to the truck convoys, which carried Iraqi WMD to Syria and Lebanon in February and March 2003 "two Russian ships set sail from the (Iraqi) port of Umm Qasr headed for the Indian Ocean," where Shaw believes they "deep-sixed" additional stockpiles of Iraqi WMD from flooded bunkers in southern Iraq that were later discovered by U.S. military intelligence personnel.

The Russian "clean-up" operation was entrusted to a combination of GRU and Spetsnaz troops and Russian military and civilian personnel in Iraq "under the command of two experienced ex-Soviet generals, Colonel-General Vladislav Achatov and Colonel-General Igor Maltsev, both retired and posing as civilian commercial consultants."

Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz reported on Oct. 30, 2004, that Achatov and Maltsev had been photographed receiving medals from Iraqi Defense Minister Sultan Hashim Ahmed in a Baghdad building bombed by U.S. cruise missiles during the first U.S. air raids in early March 2003.

Shaw says he leaked the information about the two Russian generals and the clean-up operation to Gertz in October 2004 in an effort to "push back" against claims by Democrats that were orchestrated with CBS News to embarrass President Bush just one week before the November 2004 presidential election. The press sprang bogus claims that 377 tons of high explosives of use to Iraq's nuclear weapons program had "gone missing" after the U.S.-led liberation of Iraq, while ignoring intelligence of the Russian-orchestrated evacuation of Iraqi WMDs.

The two Russian generals "had visited Baghdad no fewer than 20 times in the preceding five to six years," Shaw revealed. U.S. intelligence knew "the identity and strength of the various Spetsnaz units, their dates of entry and exit in Iraq, and the fact that the effort (to clean up Iraq's WMD stockpiles) with a planning conference in Baku from which they flew to Baghdad."

The Baku conference, chaired by Russian Minister of Emergency Situations Sergei Shoigu, "laid out the plans for the Sarandar clean-up effort so that Shoigu could leave after the keynote speech for Baghdad to orchestrate the planning for the disposal of the WMD."

Subsequent intelligence reports showed that Russian Spetsnaz operatives "were now changing to civilian clothes from military/GRU garb," Shaw said. "The Russian denial of my revelations in late October 2004 included the statement that "only Russian civilians remained in Baghdad." That was the "only true statement" the Russians made, Shaw ironized.
The evacuation of Saddam's WMD to Syria and Lebanon "was an entirely controlled Russian GRU operation," Shaw said. "It was the brainchild of General Yevgenuy Primakov."

The goal of the clean-up was "to erase all trace of Russian involvement" in Saddam's WMD programs, and "was a masterpiece of military camouflage and deception."

Just as astonishing as the Russian clean-up operation were efforts by Bush administration appointees, including Defense Department spokesman Laurence DiRita, to smear Shaw and to cover up the intelligence information he brought to light.

"Larry DiRita made sure that this story would never grow legs," Shaw said. "He whispered sotto voce [quietly] to journalists that there was no substance to my information and that it was the product of an unbalanced mind."

Shaw suggested that the answer of why the Bush administration had systematically "ignored Russia's involvement" in evacuating Saddam's WMD stockpiles "could be much bigger than anyone has thought," but declined to speculate what exactly was involved.

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney was less reticent. He thought the reason was Iran.

"With Iran moving faster than anyone thought in its nuclear programs," he told NewsMax, "the administration needed the Russians, the Chinese and the French, and was not interested in information that would make them look bad."

McInerney agreed that there was "clear evidence" that Saddam had WMD. "Jack Shaw showed when it left Iraq, and how."

Former Undersecretary of Defense Richard Perle, a strong supporter of the war against Saddam, blasted the CIA for orchestrating a smear campaign against the Bush White House and the war in Iraq.

"The CIA has been at war with the Bush administration almost from the beginning," he said in a keynote speech at the Intelligence Summit on Saturday.

He singled out recent comments by Paul Pillar, a former top CIA Middle East analyst, alleging that the Bush White House "cherry-picked" intelligence to make the case for war in Iraq.

"Mr. Pillar was in a very senior position and was able to make his views known, if that is indeed what he believed," Perle said.

"He (Pillar) briefed senior policy officials before the start of the Iraq war in 2003. If he had had reservations about the war, he could have voiced them at that time." But according to officials briefed by Pillar, Perle said, he never did.

Even more inexplicable, Perle said, were the millions of documents "that remain untranslated" among those seized from Saddam Hussein's intelligence services.

"I think the intelligence community does not want them to be exploited," he said.

Among those documents, presented Saturday at the conference by former FBI translator Bill Tierney, were transcripts of Saddam's palace conversations with top aides in which he discussed ongoing nuclear weapons plans in 2000, well after the U.N. arms inspectors believed he had ceased all nuclear weapons work.

"What was most disturbing in those tapes," Tierney said, "was the fact that the individuals briefing Saddam were totally unknown to the U.N. Special Commission."

In addition, Tierney said, the plasma uranium programs Saddam discussed with his aids as ongoing operations in 2000 had been dismissed as "old programs" disbanded years earlier, according to the final CIA report on Iraq's weapons programs, presented in 2004 by the Iraq Survey Group.

"When I first heard those tapes" about the uranium plasma program, "it completely floored me," Tierney said.

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New Post Saddam's WMDs: The Russian connection and the coverup This is a very deep game. Here is another version reporting on similar comments at the conference.


Saddam's WMDs: The Russian connection and the coverup


Wes Vernon
Wes Vernon
February 20, 2006


The free world may soon learn it has just been bamboozled by one of the most clever and well-organized propaganda campaigns in the history of this planet. No WMDs in Iraq? That is not the case, according to eyewitnesses and expert intelligence analysts.

Yes, Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction.

Yes, he intended to use them.

Most Americans don't know that, because the public has been spoon-fed the line that multiple intelligence reports around the world got it all wrong, and that there "never were" weapons of mass destruction.

As it turns out, former CIA Director George Tenet was not wrong when he told President Bush it was a "slam dunk" that Saddam had WMDs. At least it was likely accurate at the exact moment he gave that assurance. Shortly thereafter or at about the time he said it, the weapons were removed.

But of course, you already know that, if you've been reading this column or have listened to Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or watched Fox News. Much of the rest of the media have cheerfully assisted in the "No WMDs" mantra.

What you might not have known until now is that the Russians helped the Saddam deception of removing the WMD from Iraq prior to the war there. As Lt. General Thomas G. McInerney, a military consultant — said in a conversation with this writer — the Russians "masterfully laid it out into the free world that there were no WMDs. Politically, it was picked up [here at home] by the Democratic Party and other parties throughout Western Europe. It was brilliantly done by the Russians that there were no WMDs. And to this day [that story] has still got legs."

But the facts of the story are different from the false conventional wisdom.

At a private "Intelligence Summit" meeting that began Friday just outside Washington, military analysts and intelligence professionals heard the highlights of twelve hours of taped conversations between Saddam Hussein and his top lieutenants. The Iraqi strongman did have a WMD program to include nuclear. How far along he was is another question, McInerney added. But he was still investing in that area. He was supporting terrorism.

General McInerney says Saddam could have had a role in the anthrax attacks in the United States shortly after 9/11 because "it was such a high grade of anthrax that it was not a low-cost energy effort. It was done masterfully."

McInerney adds the latest Russian dots "need to be looked at." They come from many different sources (including from General Jack Shaw who gave a Pentagon insider's account of the Russian connection as he spoke before the Intelligence Summit on Saturday) as well as from Israel and other places around the globe.

Taken together, the dots indicate "there was WMD, [and] that it went out to Syria [three locations] and through Syria on to Lebanon [one location]." The Russian connection was "the orchestrator to move the weapons out. And they had the skill [with a crack team]" and two top generals — "one to help them on the air defense, and one who was to clean this WMD up."

Russian assistance was thorough, to say the least. "The archives and all that were taken out. It was brilliantly done, and then they laid in a program to follow it. And that's the information operations [propaganda] campaign," which General McInerney says was "brilliant." They spread it "into Western Europe, and then to the UN and to the diplomatic world. [And so] it became a part of the political lore that the Democratic Party and our Congress and the administration just backed away from it [the idea that Saddam's Iraq had WMDs]."

General Jack Shaw was Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for International Technology Security at the time this was learned through intelligence sources.

Addressing the three-day conference at a hotel not far from the Pentagon itself, he revealed not only the Russian operation, but the effort — for whatever reason — to cover it up here at home.

When the Cold War ended, Russia's military aid to Iraq and Syria did not. Unlike Germany and Japan at the end of World War II, the free world allies were not able actually to occupy the old Soviet Union and de-communize" it the way Germany was "de-nazified." In Germany, the bums were killed, imprisoned, disgraced, or banished from public office. In Russia, the bums walked free and pulled strings, albeit under different banners. We are paying the price of that in today's Iraq War.

General Shaw explained that Russia not only built up the military arsenals of Iraq and Syria, but also could "provide a pipeline through Syria to funnel weapons to Saddam as the pressure on him increased." Thus, they could "put beyond the reach of an invasion force such munitions [for which] Saddam wanted a safe haven." Or as General Shaw put it, that "assured that the traffic in both directions would be directed and implemented by Russians providing deniability on both sides of the border." Not incidentally, that border has had a 3000-year experience in smuggling.

The chief mischief-maker on the Russian side apparently was General Yevgeny Primakov, who headed the Soviet foreign intelligence service in 1990, served as Russia's minister of foreign affairs in 1996, and as prime minister in 1998. You may remember him as the post-Cold War general who was given to outrageous and threatening outbursts.

Despite Iraq's 8 billion dollar debt to Russia, Primakov convinced the Russian government to invest anew in rebuilding Iraqi military forces after Saddam's humiliating defeat in the Gulf War. "Secret agreements, signed between Iraqi intelligence and the Russian GRU, provided for clean-up operations to be conducted by Russian and Iraqi military personnel — to remove WMDs, materials for production, technical documentation, etc., from Iraq, so that the regime could announce that Iraq was 'WMD free.'"

Part of the plan — specifically dealing with chemical weapons — was described by a Romanian intelligence official now living in protective custody after briefing U.S. intelligence for three years. The Russians specified that all chemical/bio weapons were to be burned or buried at sea in the event of potential capture. Just before war against Iraq by the allied coalition, two Russian ships set sail for the Indian Ocean. Shaw says it's not known whether they then headed for Syria or were destroyed. The point is they were out of Iraq and out of the reach of any invasion force.

In addition to undercutting the U.S. rationale for going to war, the Russians also secured important gains for themselves. Shaw says they increased their influence in Syria and "and put themselves in a position to support armed guerilla action in Iraq after the war." This is a reference to the terrorists (or "insurgents" in delicate media-speak) who have been killing innocent Iraqi citizens, as well as American military and civilian personnel.

None of this in any way contradicts the claims made by General Georges Sada — at one time the second highest ranking general in Saddam's air force — who says in his book "Saddam's Secrets" that he knew the dictator moved the weapons out of the country (see my column of January 29). He says they were moved by air. Some at the Intelligence Summit say weapons were also moved out by cattle trucks. McInerney says it is credible that different conveyances were used. "The fact is they probably went out in a combination of different ways."

The biggest puzzle in all this is why the Bush administration has not shouted this story from the rooftops, especially since it puts the lie to the "Bush lied-People died" propaganda. In our interview, General McInerney (you may have seen him as a military analyst on Fox News) said it is as clear as ever that "Russia was number one, China was number two, France was number three in providing [Saddam] conventional weapons. We know that. There's no question on it. It just hasn't been exposed." You will note those three regimes persistently voted in the United Nations against the U.S. efforts to marshal international force against Iraq with something more meaningful than another tired UN Resolution.

General Shaw put it this way to his audience: "The question is not only how badly we got snookered by the Russkis, but why it is in the U.S. interest to continue the cover-up of the real story. It has been suggested that our knowledge of the movement of these weapons is not helpful as we cannot prove what happened without expanding the war. There is also the old intelligence rationale of not blowing your cover, so you can continue to mine your intelligence sources without compromising them."

General McInerney noted that Russia, China, and France are permanent members of the UN Security Council, and perhaps the Bush administration needs them to help in the global War on Terror. "So maybe [the Bush administration] did not want to create a big problem with them."

So General Shaw is asking, "What is the current Bush administration's game plan? Does it have one? And who are the enforcers?"

The three-day Intelligence Summit conference here is a logical outgrowth of the concern on the part of military and intelligence professionals who are frustrated by cover-up after cover-up of the misdeeds of enemies and our so-called "friends" that have left Americans dead, while the bad guys get away with it.

There's much more to be told. One of the main conference participants — Bill Tierney, a onetime former translator — told conferees the cases involving the first (1993) World Trade Center bombing and the (1995) Oklahoma City bombing should be re-opened so as to bring to a closure the glaring inconsistencies and unanswered questions in the accepted versions of those mysteries.

But we'll get to that later. For now, the Russian connection is enough to ponder.

Wes Vernon is a Washington-based writer and veteran broadcast journalist.

© Copyright 2006 by Wes Vernon
www.renewamerica.us/colum...non/060220