Frustrated, U.S. Arms Team to Leave Iraq

Andrej Tisma aart at eunet.yu
Sun May 11 18:25:21 CEST 2003



Frustrated, U.S. Arms Team to Leave Iraq

 By Barton Gellman

 BAGHDAD -- The group directing all known U.S. search efforts for weapons
of mass destruction in Iraq is winding down operations without finding
proof that President Saddam Hussein kept clandestine stocks of outlawed
arms, according to participants.

  The 75th Exploitation Task Force, as the group is formally known, has
been described from the start as the principal component of the U.S. plan
to discover and display forbidden Iraqi weapons. The group's departure,
expected next month, marks a milestone in frustration for a major declared
objective of the war.

 Leaders of Task Force 75's diverse staff -- biologists, chemists, arms
treaty enforcers, nuclear operators, computer and document experts, and
special forces troops -- arrived with high hopes of early success. They
said they expected to find what Secretary of State Colin L. Powell
described at the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 -- hundreds of tons of
biological and chemical agents, missiles and rockets to deliver the
agents, and evidence of an ongoing program to build a nuclear bomb.

  Scores of fruitless missions broke that confidence, many task force
members said in interviews.

 Army Col. Richard McPhee, who will close down the task force next month,
said he took seriously U.S. intelligence warnings on the eve of war that
Hussein had given "release authority" to subordinates in command of
chemical weapons. "We didn't have all these people in [protective] suits"
for nothing, he said. But if Iraq thought of using such weapons, "there
had to have been something to use. And we haven't found it. . . . Books
will be written on that in the intelligence community for a long time."

  Army Col. Robert Smith, who leads the site assessment teams from the
Defense Threat Reduction Agency, said task force leaders no longer "think
we're going to find chemical rounds sitting next to a gun." He added,
"That's what we came here for, but we're past that."

  Motivated and accomplished in their fields, task force members found
themselves lacking vital tools. They consistently found targets identified
by Washington to be inaccurate, looted and burned, or both. Leaders and
members of five of the task force's eight teams, and some senior officers
guiding them, said the weapons hunters were going through the motions now
to "check the blocks" on a prewar list.

 U.S. Central Command began the war with a list of 19 top weapons sites.
Only two remain to be searched. Another list enumerated 68 top "non-WMD
sites," without known links to special weapons but judged to have the
potential to offer clues. Of those, the tally at midweek showed 45
surveyed without success.

  Task Force 75's experience, and its impending dissolution after seven
weeks in action, square poorly with assertions in Washington that the
search has barely begun.

  In his declaration of victory aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1,
President Bush said, "We've begun the search for hidden chemical and
biological weapons, and already know of hundreds of sites that will be
investigated." Stephen A. Cambone, undersecretary of defense for
intelligence, told reporters at the Pentagon on Wednesday that U.S. forces
had surveyed only 70 of the roughly 600 potential weapons facilities on
the "integrated master site list" prepared by U.S. intelligence agencies
before the war.

  But here on the front lines of the search, the focus is on a smaller
number of high-priority sites, and the results are uniformly
disappointing, participants said.

  "Why are we doing any planned targets?" Army Chief Warrant Officer
Richard L. Gonzales, leader of Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha, said in
disgust to a colleague during last Sunday's nightly report of weapons
sites and survey results. "Answer me that. We know they're empty."

 Survey teams have combed laboratories and munitions plants, bunkers and
distilleries, bakeries and vaccine factories, file cabinets and holes in
the ground where tipsters advised them to dig. Most of the assignments
came with classified "target folders" describing U.S. intelligence leads.
Others, known as the "ad hocs," came to the task force's attention by way
of plausible human sources on the ground.

  The hunt will continue under a new Iraq Survey Group, which the Bush
administration has said is a larger team. But the organizers are drawing
down their weapons staffs for lack of work, and adding expertise for other
missions.

 Interviews and documents describing the transition from Task Force 75 to
the new group show that site survey teams, the advance scouts of the arms
search, will reduce from six to two their complement of experts in missile
technology and biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. A little-known
nuclear special operations group from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency,
called the Direct Support Team, has already sent home a third of its
original complement, and plans to cut the remaining team by half.

  "We thought we would be much more gainfully employed, or intensively
employed, than we were," said Navy Cmdr. David Beckett, who directs
special nuclear programs for the team.

  State-of-the-art biological and chemical labs, shrunk to fit standard
cargo containers, came equipped with enough supplies to run thousands of
tests using DNA fingerprinting and mass spectrometry. They have been
called upon no more than a few dozen times, none with a confirmed hit. The
labs' director, who asked not to be identified, said some of his
scientists were also going home.

  Even the sharpest skeptics do not rule out that the hunt may eventually
find evidence of banned weapons. The most significant unknown is what U.S.
interrogators are learning from senior Iraqi scientists, military
industrial managers and Iraqi government leaders now in custody. If the
nonconventional arms exist, some of them ought to know. Publicly, the Bush
administration has declined to discuss what the captured Iraqis are
saying. In private, U.S. officials provide conflicting reports, with some
hinting at important disclosures. Cambone also said U.S. forces have
seized "troves of documents" and are "surveying them, triaging them" for
clues.

  At former presidential palaces in the Baghdad area, where Task Force 75
will soon hand control to the Iraq Survey Group, leaders and team members
refer to the covert operators as "secret squirrels." If they are making
important progress, it has not led to "actionable" targets, according to
McPhee and other task force members.

 McPhee, an artillery brigade commander from Oklahoma who was assigned to
the task force five months ago, reflected on the weapons hunt as the sun
set outside his improvised sleeping quarters, a cot and mosquito net set
down in the wreckage of a marble palace annex. He smoked a cigar, but
without the peace of mind he said the evening ritual usually brings.

  "My unit has not found chemical weapons," he said. "That's a fact. And
I'm 47 years old, having a birthday in one of Saddam Hussein's palaces on
a lake in the middle of Baghdad. It's surreal. The whole thing is surreal.

  "Am I convinced that what we did in this fight was viable? I tell you
from the bottom of my heart: We stopped Saddam Hussein in his WMD
programs," he said, using the abbreviation for weapons of mass
destruction. "Do I know where they are? I wish I did . . . but we will
find them. Or not. I don't know. I'm being honest here."

 Later in the conversation, he flung the unfinished cigar into the lake
with somewhat more force than required.

 Team members explain their disappointing results, in part, as a
consequence of a slow advance. Cautious ground commanders sometimes held
weapons hunters away from the front, they said, and the task force had no
helicopters of its own.

 "My personal feeling is we waited too long and stayed too far back," said
Christopher Kowal, an expert in computer forensics who worked for Mobile
Exploitation Team Charlie until last week.

 'The Bear Wasn't There'

 But two other factors -- erroneous intelligence and poor site security --
dealt the severest blows to the hunt, according to leaders and team
members at every level.

  Some information known in Washington, such as inventories of nuclear
sites under supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, did not
reach the teams assigned to visit them. But what the U.S. government did
not know mattered more than what it did know. Intelligence agencies had a
far less accurate picture of Iraq's weapons program than participants
believed at the outset of their search, they recalled.

  "We came to bear country, we came loaded for bear and we found out the
bear wasn't here," said a Defense Intelligence Agency officer here who
asked not to be identified by name. "The indications and warnings were
there. The assessments were solid."

  "Okay, that paradigm didn't exist," he added. "The question before was,
where are Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological weapons? What is the
question now? That is what we are trying to sort out."

  One thing analysts must reconsider, he said, is: "What was the nature of
the threat?"

  By far the greatest impediment to the weapons hunt, participants said,
was widespread looting of Iraq's government and industrial facilities. At
nearly every top-tier "sensitive site" the searchers reached, intruders
had sacked and burned the evidence that weapons hunters had counted on
sifting. As recently as last Tuesday, nearly a month after Hussein's fall
from power, soldiers under the Army's V Corps command had secured only 44
of the 85 top potential weapons sites in the Baghdad area and 153 of the
372 considered most important to rebuilding Iraq's government and economy.

 McPhee saw early in the war that the looters were stripping his targets
before he could check them. He cut the planning cycle for new missions --
the time between first notice and launch -- from 96 to 24 hours. "What we
found," he said, was that "as the maneuver units hit a target they had to
move on, even 24 hours was too slow. By the time we got there, a lot of
things were gone."

  Short and powerfully built, McPhee has spent his adult life as a combat
officer. He calls his soldiers "bubbas" and worries about their mail. "It
ain't good" that suspect sites are unprotected, he said, but he refused to
criticize fighting units who left evidence unguarded.

  "You've got two corps commanders being told, 'Get to Baghdad,' and, oh,
by the way, 'When you run across sensitive sites, you have to secure
them,' " he said. "Do you secure all those sites, or do you get to
Baghdad? You've got limited force structure and you've got 20 missions."

  A low point came when looters destroyed what was meant to be McPhee's
headquarters in the Iraqi capital. The 101st Airborne Division had used
the complex, a munitions factory called the Al Qadisiyah State
Establishment, before rolling north to Mosul. When a reporter came
calling, looking for Task Force 75, looters were busily stripping it
clean. They later set it ablaze.
  An Altered Mission
 The search teams arrived in Iraq "looking for the smoking gun," Smith
said, and now the mission is more diffuse -- general
intelligence-gathering on subjects ranging from crimes against humanity
and prisoners of war to Hussein's links with terrorists.

  At the peak of the effort, all four mobile exploitation teams were
devoted nearly full time to weapons of mass destruction. By late last
month, two of the four had turned to other questions. This week, MET
Alpha, Gonzales's team, also left the hunt, at least temporarily. It
parted with its chemical and biological experts, added linguists and
document exploiters and recast itself as an intelligence team. It will
search for weapons if leads turn up, but lately it has focused on Iraqi
covert operations abroad and the theft of Jewish antiquities.

  The stymied hunt baffles search team leaders. To a person, those
interviewed during a weeklong visit to the task force said they believed
in the mission and the Bush administration accusations that prompted it.

  Yet "smoking gun" is now a term of dark irony here. Maj. Kenneth Deal,
executive officer of one site survey team, called out the words in mock
triumph when he found a page of Arabic text at a former Baath Party
recreation center last week. It was torn from a translated edition of
A.J.P. Taylor's history, "The Struggle for Mastery in Europe." At a
"battle update brief" last week, amid confusion over the whereabouts of a
British laboratory in transit from Talil Air Base, McPhee deadpanned to
his staff: "I haven't a clue where the WMD is, but we can find this lab."

  Among the sites already visited from Central Command's top 19 are an
underground facility at North Tikrit Hospital, an unconventional training
camp at Salman Pak, Samarra East Airport, the headquarters of the Military
Industrialization Commission, the Baghdad Research Complex, a storage site
for surface-to-surface missiles in Taji, the Amiriyah Serum and Vaccine
Institute, a munitions assembly plant in Iskandariyah and an underground
bunker at the Abu Ghurayb Palace.

 The bunker, toured several days later by a reporter, withstood the
palace's destruction by at least two satellite-guided bombs. The bombs
left six-foot holes in the reinforced concrete palace roof, driving the
steel reinforcing rods downward in a pattern that resembled tentacles. The
subsequent detonation turned great marble rooms into rubble.

 But the bunker, tunneled deep below a ground-floor kitchen, remained
unscathed. The tunnel dropped straight down and then leveled to
horizontal, forming corridors that extend most of the breadth of the
palace. Richly decorated living quarters were arranged along a series of
L-shaped bends, each protected by three angled blast doors. The doors
weighed perhaps a ton.

 In a climate-control room, chemical weapons filters and carbon dioxide
scrubbers protected the air and an overpressure blast valve stood ready to
vent the lethal shock waves of an explosion. And a decontamination shower
stood under an alarm panel designed to flash the message "Gas-Gaz."

 "Is it evidence of weapons of mass destruction?" asked Deal. "No. It's
probably evidence of paranoia."

  "I don't think we'll find anything," said Army Capt. Tom Baird, one of
two deputy operations officers under McPhee. "What I see is a lot of stuff
destroyed." The Defense Intelligence Agency officer, describing a "sort of
a lull period" in the search, said that whatever may have been at the
target sites is now "dispersed to the wind."

  All last week, McPhee drilled his staff on speeding the transition. The
Iraq Survey Group should have all the help it needs, he said, to take
control of the hunt. He is determined, subordinates said, to set the stage
for success after he departs. And he does not want to leave his soldiers
behind if their successors can be trained in time.

  "I see them as Aladdin's carpet," McPhee told his staff. "Ticket home."

--
To view the entire article, go to
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40212-2003May10.html







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