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Commentary Magazine
October 2001, pp. 3-6

Sanctions

TO THE EDITOR:
In their much-publicized article, “Shopping with Saddam Hussein” [July-August], Gary Milhollin and Kelly Motz display a remarkably simplistic and somewhat disingenuous approach to the ongoing efforts to circumvent UN economic sanctions. There is no doubt that these sanctions are violated almost at will by Iraq in order to obtain material that would otherwise be denied under the existing embargo. Yet it is a somewhat fantastic leap to say, as the authors do, that any UN inspection regime, including the recently collapsed “smart sanctions” advanced by the United States and Great Britain, would have “little hope of stopping the Iraqis from sneaking in what they need to rebuild their weapons sites and sneaking out the oil to pay for it.”

To justify this bold assessment, the authors claim that “even when the UNinspection regime was in place, the Iraqis had already figured out how to do just that.” But the fact is that the inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) had implemented an extremely effective mechanism for tracking and monitoring Iraq’s clandestine procurement efforts.

The critical fact is that none of the numerous transactions cited by the authors was conducted in violation of relevant UN resolutions. With the exception of the foiled endeavor by Wi’am Gharbiah to bring in Russian ballistic-missile components in 1995 (and even in that case the evidence points to a rogue operation rather than one orchestrated by the Iraqi government), Iraq was not prohibited from possessing any of the material in question, so long as it had been disclosed under the provisions of Resolution 715 (ongoing monitoring and verification) or 1051 (export-import control) prior to arrival in the country. And all items were indeed declared to UNSCOM within the required reporting period.

From 1995 through 1998, as a weapons inspector for UNSCOM, I ran a series of counterproliferation operations known collectively as Operation Tea Cup. The interception of Gharbiah’s shipment in Jordan was the first, and most public, manifestation of this operation, and only UNSCOM, with its strong intelligence relationship with friendly governments, could have pulled it off. For nearly three years, Operation Tea Cup yielded similarly impressive gains, terminating a contract for a glass-lined reactor suitable for both civilian and military activity and tracking down other equipment useful in chemical production processes.

In September 1997, in cooperation with Israeli intelligence, I traveled to Kiev to meet with the head of the Joint Intelligence Center/National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine for the express purpose of investigating the activities of Yuri Orshansky, a figure mentioned by the authors. Although they contend, without any supporting evidence, that Orshansky delivered goods to Iraq subsequent to a series of protocols signed in 1995-1996, my investigation showed the exact opposite: no material brokered by Orshansky or anybody else was delivered to Iraq from Ukraine. I put more faith in my factually supported findings than in the speculative musings of Gary Milhollin and Kelly Motz.

But creative interpretation seems to be their modus operandi. Take the following passage:

Before being forced out in 1998, the UN inspectors compiled a series of confidential reports detailing what they knew about Iraq’s foreign suppliers. . . . What they recount is an ongoing effort to build weapons of mass destruction.

These reports, in truth, recount no such thing. While the many inspections exposed the leakage of the sanctions regime, nothing was discovered that could point to an effort to rebuild Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

My reading of these documents provides a much more realistic assessment. Take, for instance, the report of the combined Missile/Export-Import team inspecting the Karama State Establishment (Iraq’s major ballistic-missile facility) on May 27, 1997. During this inspection, Dr. Hamid Khalil Ibrahim, a leading Iraqi missile scientist, told the team that no foreign goods had been received since May 1996. The team then asked Dr. Hamid (as he was known familiarly) about precision machine tools that Iraq had declared to UNSCOM in December 1996. These tools, of Italian manufacture, did not fall under the technical specifications set forth in Resolution 1051, and so were deemed legitimate (despite having been brought into Iraq in violation of sanctions). The same held true for seven boxes of production tools (of Romanian origin) for gyroscopes, and a British-made grinding machine.

The inspection was conducted in a very thorough manner, and concluded as follows: “No proscribed activity or details were observed.” This phrase is repeated throughout the documents UNSCOM produced concerning Iraq’s compliance with its obligations under the Ongoing Monitoring and Verification (OMV) plan. In fact, since the implementation of Resolution 1051, the inspectors uncovered not a single example of proscribed export-import activity. How Gary Milhollin and Kelly Motz can assert the contrary escapes me.

None of this is to deny today’s harsh reality that goods are pouring through the defunct, and discredited, regime of economic sanctions. Is Iraq using the oil-for-food program to support such activity? Of course it is. One of the last major operations I carried out under Tea Cup was aimed at disrupting efforts to obtain ballistic-missile technology and production capabilities from Aerofina, a Romanian military-industrial company. In the end, none of the activity turned out to be of a proscribed nature, but intercepted conversations between the Iraqi team, headed by Dr. Hamid, and his Romanian intermediary pointedly referred to the oil-for-food program as a means of facilitating the transfer of goods from Romania. He said: “We would use the oil-for-food agreement. The Jordanians don’t ask why, so we could call it ‘electrical parts for sewage system,’ ‘pumps for irrigation,’ ‘coolers for water pumps,’ ‘machine tools,’ ‘instrumentation for pipelines,’ or ‘raw materials.’”

Clearly, then, the Iraqis were, and probably still are, violating the economic sanctions by misrepresenting goods as part of the so-called humanitarian relief effort. But such violations do not automatically translate into schemes for acquiring weapons of mass destruction; in linking the two, Gary Milhollin and Kelly Motz are mixing apples and oranges. Nor does the failure of one program (sanctions) automatically translate into the failure of another (inspections). In fact, the history of UNSCOM’s work shows just the opposite: despite the failure of the sanctions regime, inspectors were able to keep a tight lid on Iraq’s ability to rebuild its past prohibited programs.

Unfortunately, on-site inspections have been tossed into the garbage heap by those U.S. policy-makers who seek not the disarmament of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction but rather the removal of Iraq’s president. It was the mixing of these two disparate objectives that ultimately condemned UNSCOM, and their continued mixing ensures that the United Nations Monitoring and Verification Inspection Commission, UNSCOM’s predecessor, will never be allowed back on the job. Yet the fact is that inspections did, and can, work.

If the authors were sincere, they would try to help formulate a policy that might result in a resumption of inspection activity. That they chose instead to denigrate the process by distorting facts shows that they are motivated by concerns other than nonproliferation. This is a shame, and does a grave disservice to a cause they purport to champion.

SCOTT RITTER
Delmar, New York

GARY MILHOLLIN and KELLY MOTZ write:
Scott Ritter both misunderstands our article and makes a series of claims that are patently false.

Mr. Ritter begins by stating that none of the secret missile deals we described was “in violation of relevant UN resolutions.” He also contends that “Iraq was not prohibited from possessing any of the material in question” as long as it was declared to the United Nations.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. UN Security Council Resolution 661 barred the sale to Iraq by any nation of “any commodities or products,” with only two exceptions: “supplies intended strictly for medical purposes, and . . . foodstuffs.” Resolution 661 was passed in 1990 and was in force when the deals we described were carried out. Does Mr. Ritter believe that gyroscopes and other missile-guidance components are food? Or medicine? Does he think that Saddam Hussein bought them to make sandwiches or bandages?

Missile parts are also munitions—that is, arms. As such, they are also barred from sale to Iraq by UN Security Council Resolution 687, adopted in 1991 and in force during the period we discussed. Resolution 687 not only bans the sale of “arms and related . . . components” to Iraq, it bans even the “promotion or facilitation” of such sales. There is no question that both Resolution 661 and Resolution 687 expressly forbade the deals we described. As a former UN inspector, Mr. Ritter must know that.

That Iraq was not prohibited from possessing any of the imported material is also false: the illegal status of the import followed the goods into the country. Mr. Ritter tries to obscure this point by claiming that Iraq “declared” all the items it illegally imported. He is misleading the reader: in fact, Iraq declared its secret imports only after the UN inspectors had discovered them independently. Seized Iraqi documents make it clear that Iraq intentionally did not declare illegally imported items, “in order to avoid problems.” This, too, Mr. Ritter should know perfectly well.

Citing secret missile contracts with the Romanian company Aerofina, Mr. Ritter claims that none of Aerofina’s deals with Iraq “turned out to be of a proscribed nature.” Yet Aerofina agreed to supply missile-engine parts, gyroscopes for missile guidance, the tools and equipment needed to produce these items, and the equipment needed to test them. Iraq claimed that these purchases were made for short-range missiles, which it is permitted to develop on its own. The crucial fact, however, is that a total arms embargo under Resolution 687 is still in effect on the sale of any missile parts to Iraq—whether for short- or long- range missiles. Thus Mr. Ritter is wrong again: the Aerofina deals were indeed “proscribed.” They were proscribed when they occurred, and they are proscribed today.

In his letter, Mr. Ritter himself admits that Iraq violated the UN sanctions “almost at will.” How he can say that and simultaneously assert that no UN resolutions were being violated is something only he understands.

Mr. Ritter takes considerable pains to argue that none of the goods brokered by Yuri Orshansky, a Ukrainian middleman, was actually delivered. As a criticism of our article, this is disingenuous. We ourselves pointed out that the UN inspectors were “unable to find any of the equipment” they suspected Orshansky of brokering. What we did say was that, in interviews with us, the inspectors offered two possible explanations for this outcome: either Iraq bought the equipment and hid it for future use, or Iraq may have been only shopping and comparing prices. We deemed the latter possibility unlikely after so many trips, so much consultation, and so many contracts for specific items. We think it more likely that secret imports from Ukraine are helping Iraq rearm today.

Perhaps Mr. Ritter’s most surprising assertion is that “nothing was discovered [by the UN inspectors] that could point to an effort to rebuild Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.” Mr. Ritter himself, while a UN inspector, went to great lengths to penetrate Iraq’s elaborate system of concealment and deception, which employed thousands of persons with no other purpose than to hide Iraq’s efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction. His present claim is contradicted by his own experience.

There is little doubt that Iraq is still concealing its weapon programs. The strongest evidence is its refusal to admit UN inspectors. This refusal is causing the continuation of the trade embargo, which in turn is costing billions in lost oil revenue. Saddam Hussein obviously thinks that concealing his weapons is more important than feeding his population.

It is untrue that we “denigrate” the inspection process, as Mr. Ritter accuses us of doing. We think the best outcome in Iraq would be to have fully empowered inspectors return and complete the job of disarmament. Unfortunately, the UN’s effort to monitor Iraq’s imports was never intended to stop illegal sales, and was never effective in doing so. Instead, it was established to allow Iraq to import dual-use goods and to insure that they were used for legitimate purposes. Now that the inspectors are gone, Iraq is free to use its imports, legal or illegal, for any purpose it wishes.

Finally, Mr. Ritter seems to be confused about which government is responsible for getting UN inspections—in his words—“tossed into the garbage heap.” By attacking the U.S., he is fingering the wrong culprit; the Iraqi government is solely responsible for prohibiting the return of inspectors. Worse, by blaming the U.S., Mr. Ritter is implicitly condoning Iraq’s continued flouting of UN resolutions. This curious stance, when added to his other invalid claims, leads one to wonder whose side he is really on.

Commentary Magazine
July-August 2001, pp. 23-7

Whether or not the world is ready, Saddam Hussein is back. With oil income now reaching the levels he enjoyed before the Gulf war, Iraq’s president is beginning to buy his way out of the “box” in which former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright famously declared we had confined him.

What Saddam chooses to spend his money on is of cardinal importance. During the decade before the 1991 Gulf war, when he could buy what he wanted, his weapons scientists imported factories to make poison gas, strains of microbes for germ-warfare agents, missiles that during the Gulf war would kill U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, and equipment that, had the war not intervened, would long since have produced an atomic bomb.

But the Gulf war did intervene, and as a consequence, after its troops were routed in Operation Desert Storm, Iraq pledged to disarm. To verify that it had done so, a UN inspection regime was put into place, coupled with a ban on international trade with Baghdad that had been imposed in 1990. The inspectors were in for a big surprise. They uncovered a complex of secret sites in which virtually every kind of weaponry of mass destruction was being fabricated. Iraq had purchased giant magnets and centrifuges for enriching uranium, had imported German components to enhance the range of Scud missiles purchased from the Soviet Union, had bought plants for producing chemical and biological agents, and had actually loaded those agents into warheads. (The record of these purchases can be found in our online publication, IraqWatch.org.)

It was these discoveries, and the resulting friction with Saddam’s regime, that led in 1998 to the UN inspectors being forced out. The sanctions on international trade, however, remained in place, though increasingly they had come to resemble what President Bush last January characterized as so much “Swiss cheese.” Now a joint British-American proposal has been put forward that would replace the current broad-based sanctions with prohibitions only on the sale of arms and some civilian “dual-use” items. The new arrangement would also continue the current “oil-for-food” system, under which Iraq can sell as much oil as it wants but is supposed to deposit the revenue in a UN-supervised escrow account and use it only to buy civilian goods that the UN has specifically approved.

The new proposal—whether adopted by the UN or not—has little hope of stopping the Iraqis from sneaking in what they need to rebuild their weapons sites and sneaking out the oil to pay for it. For the truth is that even when the UN inspection regime was in place, the Iraqis had already figured out how to do just that.

Here is how the system works. Suppose an Iraqi site needs a new computer-controlled machine tool, one especially capable of making the high-precision parts needed for long-range missiles or nuclear weapons. Since such a purchase would be vetoed at the United Nations, the order goes instead to a middleman in Jordan. The middleman contacts the manufacturer, who cannot export to Iraq without the approval of the UN but is perfectly free to export to Jordan, unhampered by any embargo. The machine goes to the free-trade port of Aqaba, where the middleman—listed falsely as the final user—loads it on a truck and illegally sends it to Iraq.

The international community’s export-control system operates on the assumption that, in such cases, at least some steps will be taken to stop goods at the border, or, failing that, to punish malefactors later. But neither is happening. The only trucks that stop at the border between Jordan and Iraq are the ones carrying goods bought under oil-for-food contracts that have been authorized by the UN. These come to rest inside Iraq itself so that UN monitors can check the paperwork, thus enabling the seller to get his money. Other trucks, carrying contraband cargo, simply cross the border unchecked.

And how does the contraband cargo get paid for? According to the latest estimates, Jordan imports, at discount prices, about $300 million worth of Iraqi oil per year outside the UN oil-for-food program. (Jordan argues that it has no other source of affordable oil, so the UN and the United States have chosen to ignore this continuing breach in the embargo.) To get reimbursed for his hot cargo, the smuggler or his agent presents an invoice to the commercial attaché at Iraq’s embassy in Jordan, who pays him out of the proceeds of the sale of Iraq’s oil shipments. In effect, cut-rate oil is being bartered for whatever Iraq wants to buy.

There is, of course, a reason why Jordan does not police its borders or track what goes through its free-trade zones. If machine tools stopped coming out of Jordan, discounted oil would stop coming in. Jordanian middlemen, officials, and others who live off the discount would be hit hard. Besides, in addition to the $300 million in unregulated oil, Iraq directs oil-for-food contracts through Jordan. The money gives Baghdad enormous leverage.

A similar situation is developing in Syria. Last November, oil began to flow through a newly repaired Iraq/Syria pipeline, all of it outside UN control, at a value estimated at $1 billion a year. Although Secretary of State Colin Powell recently announced a Syrian pledge to bring this revenue under UN jurisdiction, Syria has taken no discernible action. As billions of dollars in unregulated cash pile up in Damascus, smuggling can be expected to explode. And Lebanon, which this past April was offered a deal similar to Jordan’s, appears to be next.

Since Saddam could sell his oil at a much higher price by operating through the UN, he is obviously expecting something in return from the slush funds he has been creating around his borders. What is he getting, and from whom?

Before being forced out in 1998, the UN inspectors compiled a series of confidential reports detailing what they knew about Iraq’s foreign suppliers. We have been able to see these reports, which have never been published. What they recount is an ongoing effort to build weapons of mass destruction. Throughout the 90’s, in violation of the UN embargo and in the teeth of the inspection regime, the Iraqis were continuing to “import goods . . . from at least . . . twenty different countries.” On Iraq’s shopping list were “turnkey facilities, full-sized production lines, industrial know-how, high-tech spare parts, and raw materials.” The success of this import program depended on “a disturbing proclivity on the part of several countries and companies to supply Iraq with missile technology and assistance, despite the sanctions maintained by the United Nations.”

The core of Iraq’s present supply network dates from the early 1990’s. As the result of a decision to concentrate its shopping expeditions in Eastern Europe, Iraqi delegations fanned out to Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, and Russia, waving petrodollars in front of these countries’ once proud but now starving missile and military plants. They returned with suitcases full of illicit contracts for virtually every kind of equipment a missile-maker might need.

The experience in Belarus was typical. In July 1995, a high-level Iraqi delegation arrived in Minsk. It came from the Badr State Establishment, which had achieved renown before and during the Gulf war. Badr’s machine tools had turned out components for the high-speed centrifuges that Iraq was counting on to process uranium for its first atomic bomb. Badr also made parts for the Al Hussein missile, one of which killed U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf war and several of which landed in Tel Aviv. Today, the plant still retains a line of powerful machine tools.

The main attraction in Minsk was a company called Belstroyimpex. There the Iraqis looked at high-end machine tools, a production line for making diamond-cutting tools, and another production line for powder metallurgy. Iraqi records show that a contract for these machines, or for an even longer list of equipment, was then being carried out. The final shopping list included the diamond-cutting tools, which can be used to make precision parts for nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, and a highly sensitive plasma spray machine that can be used to protect nuclear-weapon components from corrosion. The list also included design work for integrated circuits destined for a military electronics plant that, before the Gulf war, had produced military radars, missile components, and equipment for making nuclear-weapon fuel. The deal was obviously not submitted to the United Nations as required; if it had been, it would never have been approved.

Like so much other contraband entering Iraq, the machines traveled first to the free-trade zone in Aqaba. There they lay until word was given to transfer them to the buyer. An outfit in Amman called the Firas Trading Company served as broker. The confidence Iraq placed in its Jordanian arrangement was a marvel to the UN inspectors. As one of them (a non-native speaker of English) put it colorfully, “Iraq does not consider goods laying in a Jordanian free zone being threatened to loose control.”

Indeed not. During visits to the Badr site in 1996 and 1997, UN inspectors discovered both the powder-metallurgy line and the plasma spray machine (the latter manufactured by the Belarus firm Visoky Vacuum). Obviously the contracts had been fulfilled.* As far as anyone can tell, moreover, the Belarus connection is still active: when inspectors visited the Saddam State Establishment—known also as the Saddam Artillery Plant—in 1998, they observed the Iraqis installing fourteen new machines for manufacturing 75-millimeter lenses. The crates were marked “Republic of Belarus, Vitebsk Machine Building Plant” and “Free Trade Zone, Zarka, Jordan.” In light of the fact that the plant was making optical sights for artillery, one inspector remarked: “You can bet the lenses were not for eyeglasses.”

In Ukraine, the Iraqi focus was more specific: missile components. In September 1993, a Ukrainian trader with a Ph.D. in electronics named Yuri Orshansky arrived in Baghdad. He was accompanied by Dr. Yuri Ayzenberg from a Ukrainian firm, Khartron, well known for its ability to design missile-guidance systems. Within two months, an Iraqi delegation would travel to Ukraine to follow up.

The Iraqi delegation was led by Brigadier General Naim Bakr Ali, head of Iraq’s Scud missile-guidance program. With him were two officials from Iraq’s Missile Research and Development Center, and rounding out the team were Brigadier General Safa from Ibn Al-Haytham, Iraq’s largest missile-manufacturing site, and Major Raad from Al-Karama State Establishment, another such site. Their mission was clear: to negotiate agreements for as much help as they could get. As General Naim would himself tell the UN inspectors, his instructions were simple: “If you find something good, sign; if you do not find something good, then don’t sign.”

He signed. In Ukraine, Orshansky, Ayzenberg, and Naim executed a “protocol”—amounting to an outline of future cooperation—that promised Iraq the keys to a trove of missile technology. Ukraine would sell guidance components for surface-to-surface missiles, help Iraq develop batteries of the latest anti-aircraft missiles, provide equipment for missile research, and even establish a college to train missile experts. To get things started, Iraq asked for price quotes on a test stand for rocket motors, a series of gyroscopes and accelerometers for missile-guidance systems, and high-precision machine tools for making missile parts.

Under questioning, General Naim later claimed that the deal was supposed to take effect only after the embargo was lifted, and hence did not violate UN resolutions. As the inspectors pointed out to him, however, the agreement expressly stipulated that it would come into effect “from the moment it [was] adopted by the governments of Ukraine and Iraq”—that is to say, almost immediately. (Both Naim’s superior and the Ukrainian cabinet approved the deal in 1994.) General Naim also claimed that Iraq intended to work only on missiles that could fly under 150 kilometers, permitted under certain UN resolutions. But an appendix to the agreement described a system for “separating the warhead from the bus”; only long-range missiles, which Iraq is not permitted to possess, have warheads that are separated during flight from the rocket engine (or bus) that carries them aloft. In short, Saddam Hussein was aiming to project his power as far as possible.

In November 1994, General Naim led another Iraqi delegation to Ukraine. Aided by many of the same experts, he signed a second protocol as ambitious as the first. Khartron was now to provide four different types of missile guidance, two of them for separable warheads. According to the protocol, Iraq had already given Khartron the data needed to build the first type, and a schedule was included for receiving the data for the other three. Khartron also helped the Iraqis work on missile-guidance problems during the visit itself.

Iraq has always sought independence in missile production, and so the second protocol, like the first, took into account the ability to manufacture. To help the Iraqis do the necessary research toward that end, Ukraine agreed to supply laboratories, a wind tunnel, computer software, technical assistance, and training. For developing guidance systems themselves, Iraq would get raw materials, a production line for key parts, testing equipment, and a “clean room” to allow assembly of delicate parts in an atmosphere free of dust or dirt. Iraq would also get a production line to build rocket engines, plus equipment to test the engines and their sub-assemblies.

All in all, Yuri Orshansky would travel to Iraq at least six times between 1993 and 1995, and Iraq would send at least four delegations to Ukraine. But under questioning by the UN inspectors, General Naim claimed that Iraq had never actually received a single import. “No deals were ever finalized, no money was ever transferred, and not one penny was made” by the company he had set up to handle the missile deals. The inspectors, who concluded that Naim “was rarely honest,” did not believe his story. Nevertheless, they were unable to find any of the equipment listed in the protocols. None of it turned up at the missile sites they were monitoring, nor could they develop any evidence showing that it might be elsewhere.

In interviews with us, the inspectors have offered two possible explanations for this outcome. Either Iraq bought the equipment and hid it for future use, presumably when the inspection regime would be lifted, or Iraq may have been only shopping—comparing prices in Ukraine to those in Russia and Romania, where it was looking at the same kind of equipment. The latter possibility seems unlikely after so many trips, so much consultation, and so many contracts for specific items. More likely by far is that Iraq received some of the Ukrainian equipment it tried so hard to buy, and that the equipment is in use today.

As it turned out, moreover, Orshansky was offering more than just missiles. At an Iraqi site called Al Kawthar, the inspectors found a 300-page file detailing an illegal February 1995 deal for Russian aircraft. The agreement, with Orshansky’s firm Montelect, included Mi-17 helicopters and Su-25 fighter planes—military hardware that the embargo unquestionably banned—as well as engines and guidance systems for remotely-controlled drones. The drones were every bit as disquieting an item as the tanks and planes; they could be used to deliver poison gas or germ-warfare agents.

This Iraqi file did not reveal whether the helicopters and fighters were to be sent directly from Russian factories or were to be assembled in Iraq. A firm called the Russian Aviation Trading House was supposed to do the buying in Russia, and a Lebanese company, Amsar Trading, was to handle the shipping of arms into Iraq and of oil out. Livinvest, a Russian company, would obtain the needed “approvals” from the Russian government.

Whether this deal went through is likewise uncertain. The Iraqis claimed it did not, and that they never paid Orshansky anything. Whether or not that is true, he clearly remains in favor in Baghdad, and Ukrainian companies are still willing to trade. Only this past April, according to a news report from Kiev, more than 100 Ukrainian companies, including makers of space and aviation gear, displayed their wares at a Baghdad trade exhibition. The report quoted none other than “the honorary Iraqi consul in Kharkov,” Mr. Yuri Orshansky.

While Iraqi delegations were signing contracts in Ukraine, they were also signing them in Romania, in some cases for similar equipment. The main place of interest in Romania was Aerofina, a military firm that Iraqis had visited even before the Gulf war. In February 1994, a group of missile experts returned to Aerofina to ask for help with liquid-fueled missiles. This trip led to still further visits; in January 1995, experts from the Ibn Al Haytham and Al Karama missile sites signed a contract with Aerofina for 250 sets of missile-engine parts that Iraq could not produce itself.

This was, of course, egregiously contrary to the UN embargo. Aerofina nevertheless agreed to provide the special valves, sealing rings, needles, and O-rings that Iraq needed. Some of these parts arrived in Iraq around September 1995, intended for a regulator, the part of a missile engine that maintains thrust.

As in Ukraine, the Iraqis were also looking for missile-guidance components. For $1.16 million, Aerofina agreed in July 1995 to supply twenty sample gyroscopes; also included were the tools and equipment needed to produce them, and the equipment needed to test them. Earlier in 1995, Romania’s Industrial Group of the Army similarly agreed to help Iraq develop the propellant for a solid-fueled missile.

In addition to these contracts, the Iraqis managed to get other Romanian firms to sign protocols for an even broader range of assistance. Thus, in March 1995, the company GIA-RA agreed to provide 100 complete missile engines. Another firm, Romtechnica, undertook to provide engine-testing facilities, while a third, Turbomechanica, agreed to sell injectors and turbopumps.

Iraqi missile experts were grilled about all of these contracts by the inspectors. Once again the Iraqis would admit to getting only a small number of items—specifically, the parts for the engine regulators. All the other contracts, they claimed, had been canceled for lack of funds. Although the inspectors opine that Iraq received far more than it admits to, all they know for sure is that none of the contracted items ever turned up at the sites they were monitoring.

But they do know one other thing for sure: a considerable number of Romanian firms stood ready to violate the UN embargo. And it seems they still are. In February, a delegation of Romanian parliamentarians reportedly met with members of the Iraqi secret service to negotiate arms deals. The trip was apparently authorized by a Romanian party leader whose brother, a former Romtechnica employee, has been linked to shady arms deals in the past.

Finally, the Iraqis also tried their luck in Russia. In June 1993, the Al Karama State Establishment, in search of guidance components for Scud missiles, decided to employ a Palestinian middleman named Wiham Garbiyah. That September, Garbiyah shepherded an Iraqi delegation through Moscow on a successful hunt not only for the Scud components but for guidance elements for a much more powerful missile, the Soviet SS-N-18, which, after being launched from a nuclear submarine, can hit targets more than 4,000 miles away. Garbiyah’s first package of missile parts, which seem to have been mainly samples, arrived in Baghdad in December. It contained Scud components plus at least some parts for the SS-N-18.

By April 1995, Garbiyah was back in Moscow searching for more. In Zagorsk, a town near Moscow famous for its monastery and churches, he managed to buy 120 gyroscopes and accelerometers for long-range missiles. The seller was Niikhsm, a missile-dismantlement plant. Another Russian company, Mars Rotor, obligingly tested the instruments before they left the country. On July 15, 1995, Garbiyah shipped the components to Amman and on July 27 got them through to Baghdad.

It is unclear how many of these particular components the Iraqis wound up with. After being tipped off by intelligence sources, the UN inspectors intercepted one of Garbiyah’s subsequent shipments in Jordan. They also pulled a number of guidance components from the Tigris river, where the Iraqis had thrown them to avoid detection. Again, the only thing we know for sure is that Russian firms were ready to sell missile parts in clear violation of the embargo.

Can Saddam’s smuggling network be shut down? Only if it is possible to control the cargoes coming into Iraq and the oil going out. Neither will be easy. In addition to the determined leadership of the United States, what is required to control the cargoes is the cooperation of four countries—namely, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, and Russia—where America’s writ does not exactly run strong. Belarus is trying to re-integrate itself with Russia, while Russia itself is doing everything it can to help Saddam. Ukraine is mired in political turmoil. The only comparative bright spot is Romania, whose government took positive action in the 1990’s when confronted with the Aerofina deals; there may also be some leverage in Romania’s dependence on international loans. But in general the prospects are bleak.

Could controls work at Iraq’s borders? To change things there, Jordan and Syria would have to start sending all the money they pay for oil to the UN, or withhold it from Saddam in some other way that would dry up his smuggling accounts. They would also have to start blocking his illicit imports, for which the oil shipments, whether discounted or actually free, are acting as bribes. Why should they do that? And what would replace the vast amount of money they would lose?

There may be answers to these questions, but behind all of them lurks the larger question of the West’s political will. While pondering that imponderable commodity, one should reflect upon a particularly chilling item turned up by the UN inspectors: a 1996 directive, from Iraq’s powerful Military Industrial Commission, forbidding any personnel associated with Iraq’s nuclear-weapon effort “to retire, move, transfer, change housing, etc., without the permission of the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission.”† In other words, Saddam Hussein is working to keep his nuclear-weapon teams intact.

Before the embargo began, these teams had the highest claim to Saddam’s resources. Now, as the embargo wanes, and the balances grow in his secret accounts, they can once again buy what they need. Not only is Saddam Hussein back, he is on the way to having nuclear weapons, and the missiles that will deliver them.

* Another piece of evidence that the Jordanian smuggling route was working well turned up in 1998, when the inspectors found a new computer-controlled milling machine at a site that had done missile work before the Gulf war. The machine, built by the Ping Jeng company in Taiwan, had been sent through Aqaba by a Jordanian middleman listed as “Mohanad K. Mohammed.” Documents showed that the machine was built in March 1998, only shortly before turning up in Iraq.

† This was after the defection in 1994 of Khidhir Hamza, the regime’s top nuclear scientist; see the review of his recent book,Saddam’s Bombmaker, by Daniel Pipes in the June Commentary.

GARY MILHOLLIN is the director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, where KELLY MOTZ serves as a research associate. This is their first appearance in COMMENTARY.

The New York Times
June 18, 2001, p. A6

Two American arms control experts, combing through unpublished reports by a disbanded arms inspection commission, say they found evidence that Iraq continued to buy prohibited weapons or parts long after United Nations sanctions were imposed in 1990.

Many of the purchases appear to have been made in Central and Eastern Europe, the experts, Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control in Washington, and Kelly Motz, a project researcher, say in a new independent report. They found documents concerning illegal sales or potential sales by companies in Ukraine, Belarus and Romania. Among the purchases made by the government of Saddam Hussein were missile components and high-technology machine tools.

In the past, United Nations arms inspectors for Iraq had been reluctant to identify countries in public reports, in part because there have also been suspicions of illegal trading by companies in Russia, a powerful member of the Security Council.

The report by the Wisconsin Project, to be published on Wednesday in the magazine Commentary, appears as the United Nations Security Council is debating a new “oil for food” program for Iraq that would lift most restrictions on sales of civilian goods to Iraq.

The Council is stymied over American insistence that, given Iraq’s past subterfuges in acquiring weapons of mass destruction, the plan must include an extensive list of items that could only be sold after a review to make sure they were not intended for military use.

“What this shows is that Saddam’s procurement network is alive and well and has been working steadily despite the sanctions,” Mr. Milhollin said in an interview on Thursday. “To stop it, we need to do better.

“There are a lot of companies out there willing to break the embargo, and they’re also going to be willing to take advantages of weaknesses in this list, which means the list ought to be as strong as we can make it. Given his proclivities to divert things and to stop selling oil for his people in order to leverage us out of controlling his money, if there are going to be mistakes made, we ought to make them on the side of being more careful about what he is allowed to buy.”

The sanctions were imposed on Iraq in 1990, after it invaded Kuwait. The oil for food program allows Iraq to sell oil to alleviate suffering of the civilian population under the sanctions. The United Nations monitors expenditure of the profits, with part going to Kurds in the north and reparations for the Persian Gulf war.

France, Russia and China are objecting to the American list of items that would have to be reviewed under the broadened program.

They contend that some items, beyond clearly prohibited arms, are unnecessarily restrictive and will prolong hardships in Iraq that the new oil-sales plan was intended to alleviate.

Some independent experts say United States intelligence agencies are trying to keep certain items out of Iraq that it could use to make American eavesdropping harder, if not impossible.

In negotiations this week in Paris and New York, the Americans agreed to trim the list somewhat, diplomats said. But continuing disagreements over its scope it could cause the Council to miss another deadline, July 3, for establishing the new oil-sales program.

In their article, Mr. Milhollin and Dr. Motz dismiss the debate over the new plan as largely irrelevant. “The new proposal — whether adopted by the U.N. or not — has little hope of stopping the Iraqis from sneaking in what they need to rebuild their weapons sites and sneaking out the oil to pay for it,” they wrote. “For the truth is that even when the U.N. inspections regime was in place, the Iraqis had figured out how to do just that.”

Iraq continues to argue that it has disarmed as required by the Security Council and that sanctions should be lifted without further preconditions. Russia and France, the Council members with the closest ties to Iraq, say that while an automatic lifting of sanctions is not possible, Iraq should be told clearly what it still needs to do so that sanctions can at least be suspended as soon as possible.

A United Nations commission was set up after the gulf war to monitor Iraq’s weapons, but the inspectors were withdrawn in late 1998, in advance of American and British bombing of Iraq. It was that commission’s documents that Mr. Milhollin and Dr. Motz reviewed.

A new arms inspection system was established, but this week its director, Hans Blix of Sweden, told the Security Council again that inspectors from his new United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission must go to Iraq before a suspension can be considered. Mr. Hussein has barred them.

“The completion of both the inventory of unresolved disarmament issues and the identification of the key remaining disarmament tasks,” he wrote in a report to the Council, “will only be possible after the commission’s experts have commenced work in Iraq and have been able to assess what changes may have occurred during the almost two-and-a-half years when there have been no on-site inspections or monitoring in Iraq.”

Among the examples drawn from the documents of the now defunct United Nations Special Commission was a case that began in 1995 when a delegation of Iraqi specialists from the Badr State Establishment, which made sophisticated machine tools, arrived in Belarus with a shopping list that included diamond-cutting tools. They can be used for making precision parts for nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. Those tools and other materials were bought outside United Nations rules, the authors say, and shipped to Iraq by way of the Jordanian free-trade port of Aqaba.

As late as 1998, before arms inspectors were withdrawn from Iraq, the Wisconsin Project article says, United Nations experts saw high-technology lens-making machinery from Belarus being unloaded in Iraq. In Ukraine, the Iraqis wanted to acquire whole laboratories, with training assistance and computer software. The Iraqis say they never made the purchases, and United Nations inspectors never found evidence of them at missile sites or other places.

Ukraine continues to be publicly active in Iraq, however. This year, according to news reports from Kiev, more than 100 Ukrainian companies, some selling space and aviation equipment, exhibited their goods at a Baghdad trade fair.