How Saddam got weapons of mass destruction: Saddam Hussein's war machine is being built systematically to strike at the U.S. with new nuclear, biological and chemical weapons designed to kill millions

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 15, 2002 | by Kenneth R. Timmermann

The former intelligence officer, who now works with the INC, provided details of the dual networks Iraq has set up to get around the U.N. trade restrictions. For five years he personally ran a procurement network based in Dubai for the Special Security Organization, the elite of Saddam's vast intelligence apparatus in charge of overseas procurement and with hiding key equipment and material for Saddam's weapons programs. He was arrested by the regime in 1998, viciously tortured, then given an injection and dumped on the street. Bleeding from his nose, mouth and stomach, he managed to escape to Northern Iraq and ultimately to Turkey, where human-rights workers treated him successfully for thallium poisoning, a favorite method of the regime for executing its enemies.

Saddam's thuggish older son, Uday, controls the first network. Its primary purpose is to flood the U.N. sanctions committee with export requests to trigger the release of funds from the escrow account with the BNP in New York City where since 1991 the proceeds from Iraq's oil revenues have been deposited. In some cases, the former officer said, Uday uses cutouts and middlemen to sign fictitious contracts with European companies for goods such as food and medicine that routinely are approved by the United Nations. "Once the contracts are approved, the money is released from the escrow account," he says. "Iraq then pays the company up to 40 percent for the paperwork, and lets them keep the goods. Saddam desperately needs the 60 percent in cash for forbidden goods and could care less about food or medicine."

French exporters, interviewed by INSIGHT, explained yet another finesse of Saddam's commercial network. They said they had been approached by an Iraqi front company known as ALIA, based in the Garden district of Amman, Jordan. "Uday uses ALIA to squeeze a 10 percent commission from exporters that gets kicked back to the regime," an exporter tells INSIGHT. Large companies such as Renault Vehicules Industriels, Schneider Electric SA and Dow Agrosciences have used ALIA to sell several hundred million dollars worth of U.N.-approved goods to Iraq, according to export documents obtained by INSIGHT. The Iraqi purchases included off-road vehicles, large quantities of specialized pumps and chillers that could be used for uranium enrichment, 2,000-liter and 5,000-liter reactor vessels needed to produce chemical weapons and chemicals for pesticides. All ostensibly were sold for civilian purposes and approved by the U.N. sanctions committee in New York.

In France, ALIA also is known as SOFRAG ALIA Development France, according to the documents. It applied to the United Nations for permission to export $1 million worth of oil-well logging equipment to Iraq under an approved program to rebuild Iraqi oil fields. Such equipment is particularly sensitive because it includes neutron generators which U.N. weapons inspectors discovered were key components in the crude gun-implosion nuclear device Iraq had designed and tested before the 1991 gulf war.