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Stars and Stripes: Gulf War: Secret History,
Week Eight: Don’t Know Much About Biology
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Gulf War: Secret History, Week Eight: Don’t Know Much
About Biology
Sep 18, 2000
William M. Arkin
Special to The Stars and Stripes
When the name “Salman Pak” was mentioned as Iraq’s biological weapons facility in The New York Times on Sept. 5, 1990, there was an air of specificity that presented the implication that Saddam Hussein’s arsenal was known, and vulnerable to the United States and its allies. The facility had actually first been publicly fingered by ABC-TV more than a year and a half earlier. And in Apr. 1990, NBC-TV had reported that the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta had exported cultures of West Nile Fever virus to the laboratory.
Yet even though Salman Pak would soon show up on virtually every news media and expert map of prospective Iraqi targets, when the Air Force’s Checkmate target planners finalized their first “Operation Instant Thunder” target list, Salman Pak was inexplicably absent. This would be the beginning of a tense internal effort to find, and destroy, Iraq’s biological weapons (BW). Air war planners soon corrected their error, and it didn’t take long before Washington made it clear that this was a national priority. But the intelligence establishment never could produce the goods, even as enormous energy went into meticulously planning attacks on “suspected” facilities.
Bugs and Things
With CIA Director William Webster’s public acknowledgment
that Iraq had a “sizable stockpile” of biological weapons
(BW) in September 1990, America was largely introduced to a new
Iraqi threat. House Armed Services Committee chairman Rep. Les
Aspin, D-Wisc., told reporters that BW constituted “a new
dimension to the problem ... more important and more serious ...
than the chemical threat.” Two germ weapons - botulinum toxin
and anthrax - were “confirmed” to be under development,
and Iraq’s program was labeled the most aggressive and extensive
in the Third World.
While the press filled with apocalyptic scenarios of Iraqi germ warfare, enormous internal U.S. government energy went into examining potential Iraqi civilian casualties that might stem from the destruction of biological agents in their bunkers. This was particularly the case after a Defense Intelligence Agency assessment concluded that “an attack on the Iraqi biological agent storages [sic] could result in the release of virulent microorganisms and/or toxins that could result in exceedingly high casualties/fatalities.”
The worst-case official scenario was truly apocalyptic.
An Iraq Interagency Biological Warfare Working Group was established
in response to Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney’s urging,
and its BW Technical Assessment estimated that if 1,000 kilograms
of dried anthrax spores were stored in a bunker in bulk containers,
and 99.99 percent were killed or somehow contained in the bunker
during an attack, the resultant release of just .01 percent would
mean about 100,000 billion spores in the air.
“This translates into 5-10 billion human lethal doses,”
the report stated.
Intelligence agencies had no hard evidence of BW production
or munitions. Before the invasion, there were intelligence reports
that Iraq had acquired 40 custom-built Mistral-2 aerosol generators
able to spray micron size BW particles. A subsequent classified
DIA assessment concluded ominously that “In light of the
unscrupulous use of chemical agents in the Iran-Iraq war and the
record of human rights in Iraq, we postulate that given a threatening
or no-win circumstance, Iraq will launch a BW attack.” By
October, the intelligence agencies were speculating in Top Secret
reports that Iraq probably also possessed clostridium perfingens,
vibrio cholerae, plague, tularemia, brucellosis, and staphylococcal
enterotoxin B.
In October, the Armed Force Medical Intelligence Center circulated
their classified assessment:
We believe that ... agents have been weaponized and that biological
and toxin munitions already exist. We further believe that deployment
of BW munitions in significant numbers will take place by the
end of this year, if not already implemented.
The Plan
Air war planners in Checkmate and the CENTCOM Black Hole in Riyadh
were hardly equally seized with the problem. The disconnect was
that destruction of Iraq’s nuclear, biological, and chemical
capability did not fit Col. John Warden’s conception of Iraq’s
“centers of gravity.” He believed, and Brig. General
Buster Glosson, the newly appointed chief of the Black Hole, seemed
to agree, that the Iraqi leadership was indeed the first targeting
priority, followed by infrastructure such as communications, electricity
and oil facilities.
Yet it was abundantly clear that Washington was obsessed with nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) weapons. When Glosson went to Washington in early October to brief President Bush on the outlines of the plan to bomb Iraq, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf’s staff suggested that the name for the target “priority-two” target category labeled “infrastructure” be re-designated “Nuclear-Chemical-Biological Capability” to reflect the national emphasis.
That didn’t mean that the Black Hole had any new targets.
Other than the nondescript Salman Pak center on a finger-like
peninsula of the Tigris River 25 kilometers south of Baghdad,
there was nothing else to bomb. By November, intelligence would
identify three additional facilities near Baghdad that it labeled
“suspect” BW-related. Two were in Abu Ghraib, a western
suburb (one being the infamous “baby milk” factory,
which will be addressed later in this series). The third was a
suspect production site at Taji, north of the city.
Based on the design of the storage bunkers at Salman Pak, imagery
analysts also identified 35 12-frame bunkers located at dispersed
eight ammunition depots from Basra to northern Iraq as potential
vaults for special weapons. Seventeen of the 35 had “probable”
refrigeration equipment and duct work near or on their entrances,
Top Secret reports stated. Air conditioning “might”
be related to biological weapons, CIA and DIA analysts concluded.
In the Dark
A month before the Iraqi invasion, the CIA issued two Top Secret
reports - “Iraq’s Growing Arsenal: Programs and Facilities”
and “Beating Plowshare into Swords” - on Saddam’s
extensive industrial infrastructure. Though the reports described
in detail the functions of industrial facilities, they were also
decidedly limited in terms of what the agency knew. The problem,
“Iraq’s Growing Arsenal” reported, was that “...
many entities are false end users, passing the materials acquired
from foreign suppliers directly to enterprises involved in military
projects, including chemical and biological warfare.” In
other words, the BW program was being hidden behind vaccines,
veterinary medicine and food research.
Intelligence analysts did not know if there were produced agents, nor where they were, but still the planners had to consider the possibility of infecting the Iraqi population, coalition soldiers, and adjoining nations. A fierce internal battle raged from October to well into December over whether even to attack BW bunkers. Many in Washington argued that it was too risky altogether to bomb BW facilities.
Generals Schwarzkopf and Horner argued that the risks could
be minimized with the proper targeting technique. Attacks would
take place at dawn, when there were low winds. Exposure to the
sun’s ultraviolet rays would then accelerate the breakdown
of concentrated agents. The surest way of degrading BW toxins,
scientists speculated, was to create very high temperatures. Weapons
specialists suggested penetrating the refrigerated bunkers with
2000-lb. laser-guided bombs and then immediately dropping incendiary-filled
cluster bombs to burn off any escaping spores. Using this technique,
biological weapons would become first night targets for F-117
stealth fighters.
Meanwhile, a new “Fusion Committee” of the Interagency
Working Group reevaluated the earlier report, concluding a mere
six days before the Jan. 15 United Nations deadline for Iraq to
withsraw from Kuwait that “the original estimates of potential
Iraqi casualties resulting from U.S. and coalition air strikes
on BW related facilities was far too high.” They said that
there was little likelihood that strikes would be a threat to
coalition forces, and that Iraqi dangers, they believed, were
minimal.
Little did the targeters or the decision-makers know that they had the potential of bombing just about any facility and unleashing biological agents, given the lack of accurate information. It would be five years before the United States would finally learn the true nature of Saddam’s germ warfare arsenal.
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