Iraq List Censored to Protect the Innocent and the Helpful

UNITED NATIONS -- When the 10 nonnuclear members of the Security Council receive their censored copy of Iraq’s weapons declaration Monday, the reports will no longer contain Iraq’s recipes for weapons of mass destruction. But another potentially volatile ingredient will be excised as well: the names of foreign companies that, knowingly or not, have supplied Iraq with weapons-making materials.

Security Council members are concerned not only that such disclosures might embarrass their nations’ companies but also that Iraq might have set out to do so intentionally, by naming prestigious multinationals or firms connected with government officials.

For their part, U.N. inspectors say that they don’t want to undermine any intelligence-gathering efforts done with the cooperation of companies and that they are also worried about liability issues.

“Should they be held responsible if they thought they were selling a fermenter to a beer company and it ended up in a biological weapons program in Iraq?” asked Ewen Buchanan of the U.N.’s inspection office.

It is not clear whether any of the companies or countries named on Iraq’s current list are new to U.N. inspectors or whether they refer to previously unknown transactions. A nine-page index to the new Iraqi declaration suggests that, as in the past, Iraq has chiefly duplicated information about procurement activities that occurred before 1991.

But past Iraqi declarations and documents discovered by U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq from 1991 to 1998 “were littered with the names of suppliers,” Buchanan said.

One set of Iraqi documents in particular, dating from 1996 and 1997, was “chockablock with supplier names, front companies, letters of credit and other details,” recalled a former U.N. inspector who asked not to be identified. Those names, with the exception of several accidentally revealed in one U.N. report, have never been made public by the world body.

Although most of the declared deals were done legally before the Security Council ordered Baghdad to give up its weapons of mass destruction in 1991, they reveal the deceptions Iraq employed to obtain the building blocks of its weapons programs, especially its allegedly extensive biological weapons efforts.

According to accidental disclosures in a 1999 U.N. report compiled under then-chief weapons inspector Richard Butler, from 1985 to 1989, Iraq bought strains of anthrax, botulinum toxin, gangrene, West Nile virus and other pathogens from the American Type Culture Collection, a biological supply firm in Rockville, Md. Iraq also successfully ordered germ strains from the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

Some of the strains were ordered in the name of the University of Baghdad, considered to be a place of legitimate research, while others went to a front company acting as a purchasing agent for Iraq’s weapons program. But all were paid for by the military, according to Iraqi records turned over to the U.N.

Companies in Italy, Germany and Switzerland supplied fermenters used to grow the germs. In 1987 and 1988, 39 tons of growth media sufficient to produce about 4 tons of bacteria -- enough to kill everyone in the world many times over -- came from the Oxoid company in Britain and Fluka Chemie in Switzerland. Iraq still hasn’t accounted for the remaining growth media, U.S. and U.N. analysts have said.

Rolf Ekeus, the chief U.N. inspector in the 1990s, decided at the time not to publicly identify any of Iraq’s foreign suppliers to ensure their cooperation in U.N. intelligence-gathering efforts.

Buchanan said that previous inspection teams would often question suppliers about what they had sold to whom and then cross-check the information. Often, the process revealed the middlemen or front companies that had procured materials for Iraq’s covert weapons programs.

Chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix said last week that he intends to follow suit and to excise the names in the new report before he shares it with the 10 nonnuclear members of the Security Council. If the inspectors “were to give the names publicly, they would never get another foreign supplier to give them any information,” Blix told reporters.

During the 1990s, U.N. inspectors tracked scores of suspect transactions to companies in Eastern Europe, Asia and elsewhere. More recently, Western intelligence agencies have investigated and in some cases intercepted additional Iraqi procurement efforts in several countries.

U.S. and British intelligence sources have said that Iraq has tried to order from Turkey thousands of atropine auto-injectors used to combat nerve gas and has attempted to buy enriched uranium from West Africa, along with aluminum tubes that could be used for uranium enrichment.

The U.N. and the U.S. are also investigating Iraq’s attempt to buy a high-tech Kolchuga radar system from Ukraine through Jordanian middlemen. A presidential bodyguard reportedly taped the Ukrainian president authorizing that deal.

There may be more revelations in Iraq’s 11,807-page declaration that only the five permanent Security Council members -- the U.S., Britain, China, France and Russia -- are authorized to see. But if the five have their way, the rest of the world won’t hear about them.

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Farley reported from the U.N. and Drogin from Washington.