The germ hunters: lessons from Iraq

An important new book on biological weapons and nonproliferation is being published this week. Amy E. Smithson’s Germ Gambits: The Bioweapons Dilemma, Iraq and Beyond (Stanford University Press) is a carefully researched and fascinating study of the long struggle by United Nations weapons inspectors to uncover Saddam Hussein’s germ warfare program in the 1990s. Smithson has meticulously reconstructed the UNSCOM missions, using interviews and documents. Her narrative reveals how a group of smart, determined gumshoes eventually were able to piece together the truth about Iraq’s program, and dismantle it, long before the United States went to war. Today’s posting is a short excerpt from the book, by permission. Smithson is a senior fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies of the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

From GERM GAMBITS: THE BIOWEAPONS DILEMMA, IRAQ AND BEYOND, by Amy E. Smithson. (c) 2011 Stanford University. Reproduced by permission of Stanford University Press, www.sup.org.

After Coalition forces ousted the Iraqi army from Kuwait in a four-day ground offensive in late February 1991, the ceasefire conditions included Iraq’s unconditional agreement that the United Nations would remove, render harmless, or destroy its weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. This disarmament mandate was directly linked with the lifting of trade sanctions. The UN established the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) to implement the disarmament mandate. Swedish diplomat Rolf Ekeus took the helm of UNSCOM, dispatching his seventh team of inspectors into Iraq in August 1991.

David C. Kelly, a former chief of microbiology in the United Kingdom’s chemical and biological weapons defense facility, led UNSCOM’s first biological inspection. To the task he brought field experience from inspections of dual-use facilities in the Soviet bioweapons program.  Kelly became a mainstay of the inner circle that busted Iraq’s bioweapons program, the chief of thirty-seven UNSCOM missions to Iraq. A Welsh biologist who sported wire-rimmed spectacles, Kelly was known for his quiet methods and encyclopedia knowledge of biological weapons. On UNSCOM’s first biological inspection, this unassuming scientist began to demonstrate his knack for getting interviewees to divulge more than they intended.

Together with Nikita Smidovich, one of Ekeus’s top lieutenants, Kelly fashioned a questionnaire to extract more detail from the Iraqis about the ten facilities they identified as having dual-purpose equipment, which can be used for offensive weapons programs as well as for civilian commercial and research purposes.  Kelly intended to quietly slip his twenty-eight specialists in microbiology, medicine, biotechnology, safety, and communications into Iraq, but the Iraqis knew they were coming because UNSCOM followed its previous practice of announcing inbound inspections.

Amy E. Smithson

At Habbaniyah Military Airfield on August 2, 1991 an Iraqi delegation greeted the team, including Rihab Taha, who held a PhD in biology from a British university and was later identified as a leader of the Iraqi military bioweapons program. Getting right down to business, Kelly asked for an 8:00 p.m. meeting. After the exchange of courtesies at the Palestine Hotel, Brig. Gen. Hossam Amin, who headed the nascent National Monitoring Directorate, dropped the first bombshell.

Amin said that Iraq was prepared to cooperate with UNSCOM, and then, as David Huxsoll put it, Amin began to “lay it on the table.” Huxsoll, a veterinarian who directed the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases and later the Plum Island Animal Research Disease Center, was intimately familiar with the fine line between defensive and offensive research. He listened to Amin closely, measuring every word.

Admitting that Iraq’s earlier declaration was incorrect, Amin identified the Salman Pak facility, 15 miles south of Baghdad, as a center for military biological research and stated Iraq had engaged in a research program for “military purposes” under the auspices of the Technical Research Center, where Dr. Ahmed Murtada directed electronic, forensic, and biological research. Taha, he said, led a small military biological research group of ten people and reported to Murtada. Amin said that research was limited to work on three agents, volunteering a list of publications from Salman Pak and of the agents studied, including Iraq’s sources for those pathogens. Amin concluded that Iraq had never produced agents or had biological weapons.

Taha followed, explaining briefly why they chose to work with anthrax, botulinum toxin, and Clostridium perfringens. Their research, she claimed, consisted of academic studies about the properties of the agents, their sensitivity to antibiotics, their resistance to the environment, and issues related to immunization. Concerned that Salman Pak would be bombed, they halted the work in August 1990, autoclaved the agents, and evacuated the facility. Taha’s very nervous demeanor belied the pressure of the moment.

Kelly instantly began trying to determine what the Iraqis meant by a program of military research. “The Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention does not ban research, and defensive work with known biowarfare agents is permissible, but at a certain point, a country that wants these weapons is going to do things to make decisions about the suitability of agents for offensive purposes, and that is when the thin line is crossed,” explained Huxsoll.

Kelly inquired “about various defensive research activities with several questions and various angles, and the answer always came back that they did not do that.” For example, Kelly asked whether Iraq vaccinated its soldiers against the agents they were working with and was told that the Ministry of Health vaccinated Iraqi citizens, including soldiers, against typhoid and cholera. He asked for more detail about the tests conducted with the three agents, and Taha said they had tested these three agents to determine their LD50, a technical abbreviation for a standard toxicity test to identify how much of a substance is needed to kill 50 percent of the test animals. In other words, what the Iraqis described in various ways was not a defensive program. “For me,” said Huxsoll, “that left only one option as to what they were doing. They never labeled their work as defensive and they certainly weren’t describing defensive work, so at the very least it raised the questions of what they were doing and why.”

So Kelly finally asked point blank if their work was defensive, and Amin’s reply was, “Oh no, not defensive.” Amin then blurted that the research was offensive. Kelly asked again whether Amin was talking about a defensive program, and Amin tried to recover by saying that it could be for offensive purposes, defensive purposes, or both. After this eyebrow-raising exchange, Kelly inquired why Iraq had started an offensive bioweapons program. Amin replied that Iraq began the program in the 1980s when it was worried that Iran and Israel might have such weapons. Amin repeatedly stressed that the program was limited to research and strenuously denied that Iraq had manufactured biowarfare agents or weapons. Kelly also asked why they were revealing this program at this point, and Amin said they were concerned that this work would be misinterpreted and used for propaganda purposes. Kelly requested a statement about their work at Salman Pak, and the Iraqis later produced a handwritten version for him bearing Amin’s signature. That night, the Iraqis gave Kelly a list of ten facilities in response to UNSCOM’s questionnaire.

After this encounter, some inspectors thought the Iraqis had just confessed to an offensive research program, others that the Iraqis said or meant to say that their work was confined to permitted defensive activities. “So,” recalled Huxsoll, “there was varying interpretation of this statement amongst the team, but all of the inspectors had sufficient information that there was undoubtedly some kind of a program there. What it was had to be settled.”

Kelly, who had intended to inspect the Foot and Mouth Disease Vaccine plant at Al Daura first, said Iraq’s acknowledgment of Salman Pak “actually threw me” and that he knew he had to head there the next day. Shortly after 10:00 p.m., Kelly notified the Iraqis that Salman Pak would be inspected. Later that night, some inspectors reviewing Iraq’s facilities list saw it included the “Al Hukm plant” (or Al Hakam) and the notation that some fermenters were stored there.

At this stage, in August 1991, the inspectors were trying to gauge what the Iraqis were saying and had done, and the Iraqis were trying to determine what the inspectors already knew. With Amin’s slip of the tongue and their pre-emptive declaration of Al Hakam, the inspectors appeared to have the upper hand. Retired British Army Col. Hamish Killip, a member of UNSCOM’s first inspection team at the Al Muthanna chemical weapons compound and of Kelly’s maiden biological team, mused that “they must have been kicking themselves” because Iraq revealed at the outset more than the inspectors could independently confirm. That night, the inspectors pondered how, if at all, Al Hakam might be linked to Iraq’s bioweapons program.

In September 1991, Huxsoll led UNSCOM’s second biological team to Al Hakam, which the Iraqis said was not a warehouse after all but a chicken feed plant.  Practically everywhere the inspectors looked, they saw things that were strikingly inconsistent with a commercial operation, immediately raising suspicions that Al Hakam was indeed involved in Iraq’s bioweapons program.  After a lengthy hiatus in dedicated biological inspection missions, in the spring of 1994 UNSCOM augmented its biological staff and within months the inspectors collected sufficient incriminating evidence to paint Iraq into a corner.  On July 1, 1995, Iraq admitted that it had made biowarfare agents.