A couple of hundred pounds of anthrax can kill millions of people if it is effectively dispersed in the air above a large city. It now appears that the Iraqis had drone aircraft that might have been able to do that, according to a source close to the U.N. Special Commission on Iraq. The Iraqis also loaded botulism toxin into warheads for Scud missiles. There is no sign that any of these weapons were actually used; nor, say investigators, is there any evidence yet that Iraq’s biological agents might be responsible for the mysterious and varied symptoms of “Gulf War syndrome,” which afflicts more than 10,000 U.S. veterans of the conflict. In fact, most of the evidence uncovered so far is circumstantial. But the implications for dismantling Iraq’s weapons program are deeply disturbing. “You have to ask, can we really find this stuff?” Rolf Ekeus, the chairman of the U.N. commission, told NEWSWEEK. “Can we really assure the international community? And what will happen if we can’t?”
With a current budget of $24 million a year and a core staff of 120, the commission was created to clean up the dangerous mess left in 1991 when the gulf war ended with Saddam Hussein, the man who started it all, still in power. Draconian sanctions were imposed, preventing Iraq from engaging in any normal foreign trade, including the vital sale of oil. As laid out in a succession of U.N. resolutions, the minimum price for lifting sanctions is the elimination of Iraq’s long-range missiles and any weapons of mass destruction-nuclear, chemical or biological-plus the installation of monitoring systems to make sure Saddam never tries to produce such weapons again. The U.N. Security Council now acts, in effect, as Iraq’s parole board, reviewing the file every 60 days.
The investigation of Iraq’s germ-warfare program has required painstaking detective work. Some of the poisons and pathogens were blended in experimental brews that still baffle Western experts. Aflatoxins, for instance, were loaded into bombs. These poisons normally form on stored grain and can cause liver cancer. But they don’t seem to make much of a weapon. “The toxicity is such that it would be easier to kill a person by hitting him with the bomb,” says Richard Spertzel, an American germ-warfare expert now on the U.N. team. Another disease, called wheat cover smut, would normally be used to kill crops. But evidently the Iraqis were experimenting with its potential use against humans. “I have no idea in what connection,” says Spertzel.
Last year investigators turned up more meaningful evidence–of Iraqi imports of growth medium, which is used to cultivate bacteria. The Iraqis claimed they had used only a few hundred pounds of the material each year for civilian research, but visits to producers in Germany, Switzerland and elsewhere turned up evidence that Baghdad had imported as much as 66,000 pounds in two years. “They said it was an incompetent minister of health; they said they ordered too much,” Ekeus recalls. But the United Nations insisted on accounting for all of it-and about $$,000 pounds was found to be missing. The explanation offered by the Iraqis? “That during the riots immediately after the war the mobs went to all these hospitals and found this [growth] medium and destroyed it,” says Ekeus. He shakes his head. “You don’t need to be terribly sharp to understand that they were trying to take us for a ride.”
The Iraqis became increasingly belligerent. By August they were threatening to stop any further cooperation with the United Nations, and according to Ekeus, the United States was readying a fleet in the Persian Gulf to force compliance, if necessary. Then came the “thunderbok,” as Ekeus calls it: Saddam’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, who had directed the weapons program, defected to Jordan. Suddenly, in an apparent effort to undermine whatever information Kamel could offer, Baghdad invited Ekeus to a new, detailed briefing on its biological weapons. It provided 650,000 pages of documents about its programs. There was talk of “full compliance.” Yet Ekeus says these new documents appear to have been “hastily sanitized.”
The Iraqis now claim, for instance, that its biological weapons were intended for use only if Iraq itself were attacked with weapons of mass destruction. Yet the weapons were supposedly destroyed completely on orders given over the phone, without any supporting documentation whatsoever. “This is obviously a very peculiar story,” says Ekeus. Meanwhile records have been found showing that the Iraqis have not accounted for another 5,500 pounds of anthrax–theoretically enough to kill more than 50 million people. There’s also evidence of previously unsuspected chemical-weapons production-although, as Ekeus puts it, “chemical weapons now sound nice, compared with the biological program.”
With the credibility of the Iraqi leadership so low, and the risks now so horribly high, the process of confirming the destruction of weapons and preventing the creation of new ones could go on almost indefinitely. The prolonged suffering of the Iraqi people under the sanctions weighs on many Western consciences. Balancing those hardships against the potential horror Sad-dam could inflict, if he still has some weapons of mass destruction, is a task that haunts Ekeus and his investigators. “We have to clean up,” he concludes. It now appears that for at least as long as Saddam is in power, the people of Iraq may never get parole from the economic sanctions. .
