I am not sure that I buy this - this would need corroboration. I will say, though, that it does make sense, and would explain alot. At the very least, it's an interesting read. Just putting it out there, make what you will of it: 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. General Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. He is currently finishing a new book, Red Roots: The Origins of Today's Anti-Americanism.
Centrifuge. Ah, yes, that little thing they dug up in the scientist's backyard, the one you said was a little prototype or something. Curiously, everyone who matters seems to think that it was a working prototype, and the templates found with it had the sole purpose of being used to produce more. Yes, that centrifuge. That little thing that was proof positive that Saddam had at the very least both the intent and the equipment to restart his nuke program after the inspectors left. That nuke program that you said did not exist. Yes, centrifuge... Why did you bring that up? It is proof positive that you were wrong.
I don't doubt that Saddam destroyed his weapons or disposed of them at some point in the last decade. But I don't see the upside for Putin in helping him out; too risky for Russia for too speculative of a gain. Sounds like a bit of wistful exaggeration of former soviet power by a former soviet state official.
Obviously, the Soviets (Russians) wouldn't want the stuff traced back to them. That, and they could make us look like jackasses. That said, maybe. Like I said, not sure I buy it myself.
Yeah, but you could just as easily trace Iraqi arms components and a back to us, so it's a wash in that department
I brought it up because it like this story has zero credibility. I will repeat this again. A buried centrifuge does not make an ongoing nuclear program. You might argue that it was Saddam's intent to reconstitute his old nuclear program once UN inspectors left. I will counter that the only thing for sure is that Saddam wanted that possibility. Besides Saddam had the resources to start a nuclear program from scratch. Not having the small working centrifuge prototype would only represent a delay. BTW, if everybody saw the centrifuge from your perspective, the lack of Iraq WMD would no longer be a topic for discussion.
Wanting a nuclear weapon means nothing. Hell, *I* want a nuclear weapon! (...my precious...we wants it...) But there is zero proof that Saddam had anything more than thoughts of a nuclear program. Unless thoughts could actually kill, Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction there. And if we're going to invade, overthrow and occupy a country, you would hope we'd be *sure* before doing so.
Yes, yes, yes. You are all of course right - Saddam didn't have any WMD. Hell, he probably never did. I concede your point - there are no WMD. (Kidding, I concede nothing, especially not something as ridiculous as that, and especially not the very same day that Mr. Kay claimed that we have found evidence of such programs...) GreenVegan - Just out of curiosity, was the centrifuge, and the templates for it, "merely a thought"? Was it not a material object? Just curious. Oh, and was the botulinum sample found in the bioweapons scientists' house - announced today by Mr. Kay - just a thought, too?
Damned edit. Get used to that word, cause I think that my prediction of a month or so ago is going to be coming true pretty soon.
In the words of Arnold Schwarznegger: "Where there's smoke there's fire" Or were those programs just, I dunno, a mental exercise for some of Iraq's more morbid scientists to engage in to pass the time and entertain themselves with? Something tells me that the programs had a product...
Why should I get used to it? None of your predictions in this arena (and I repeat: none) have ever come true yet. Why should this one be any different?
Really? Make two lists: the number of nations with nuclear weapons, and the number with programs to attempt to acquire nuclear weapons. You might notice that one is much longer than the other...and besides, what is the definition of a program? If there's a memo saying that so and so is interested in looking into the possibility of developing some sort of chemical agent with military capacity, is that evidence of a program? Where is this line being drawn...or redrawn, now that the black and white line of actual weapons seems to have gone the way of the dodo and other arguments for this war. As I predicted a month and a bit back...stay tuned. We may soon be seeing blueprints for a gun that might be designed to smoke...
MacBeth: Two things: 1) As for predictions - what prediction? You yourself have said many times here that you also believed that Iraq had WMD. Everyone did. So you are in exactly the same predictive boat as the rest of us, you're just not honest enough to admit it. 2) We know for a fact that up until 1998 Iraq did maintain real WMD stocks. Not just programs, but stocks of actual weapons. That is friggen undeniable. We know it from the UNSCOM inspections. For you to sit here and try to insinuate that Saddam's programs never actually produiced anything is disingenuous to say the least. Although I must say not surprising. Truth decorates your posts less often as the days go by. Oh, and what was that botulinum for? Theoretical work?
Exactly. They weren't just whistling dixie. And Saddam had spent almost his entire reign of blood and terror bent on acquiring nukes. Thank God those Israelis that half the board hates had enough cojones to take care of that for us. If you're not developing weapons, why should you stonewall, harass, threaten and otherwise impede inspectors when you have nothing to hide? Hmmmmmm........
