3rd World Missiles Linked to German, Italian Firms

The United States has concluded that leading West German and Italian aerospace firms have played a critical role in helping Egypt, Iraq, Libya and Argentina develop medium-range ballistic missiles capable of carrying chemical warheads.

Until recently, arms controllers worried about the proliferation of ballistic missiles used mainly as the delivery vehicles for nuclear weapons in regional conflicts. Now, however, intelligence analysts see the potential of medium-range missiles to deliver chemical weapons as a much more urgent threat.

With ranges exceeding 600 miles, such missiles easily would span the compact geography of the Middle East, for example, adding a volatile new element of high-technology weaponry to an already volatile region. The same is true of potential conflicts in much of Latin America.

Responding to new perceptions of the threat, some members of Congress are preparing to introduce legislation to impose sanctions on industrial firms aiding the spread of missile technology. At the same time, Administration officials, skeptical of the value of sanctions, are taking a new look at the adequacy of a control agreement on missile technology signed in April, 1987, by the United States, West Germany, Italy, France, Japan, Canada and Britain.

In both Congress and the Bush Administration, concern over the spread of ballistic missile technology from European firms to developing countries has been intensified by the international storm over the role of West German firms in building a huge chemical weapons plant in Libya.

Libya continues to insist that the complex at Rabta, 40 miles from Tripoli, is a pharmaceutical plant, although it is defended by anti-aircraft missiles.

In range and payload, the medium-range missiles spreading to the Third World are similar to those the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to eliminate in 1987.

According to an unclassified 1985 study by the Defense Intelligence Agency, a medium-range missile carrying 1,200 pounds of the viscous nerve agent VX would produce a 50% casualty rate in a target area one-third of a mile wide and 2 1/2 miles long.

West German Firm Cited

Administration officials said that West Germany’s largest aerospace firm, Messerschmidt-Boelkow-Blohm (MBB), has been a major contributor to a joint Egyptian, Iraqi and Argentine missile program since the early 1980s, and that SNIA-BPD, a leading subsidiary of the Italian industrial giant Fiat, has also fed essential technology to the program.

These sources said that the Pentagon barred the Italian company from doing business with two U.S. defense firms for six months in 1987 and 1988 in an unpublicized effort to dissuade SNIA from aiding the three-nation project. But they said that this temporary sanction appeared unsuccessful. The suspension was lifted in April, 1988, apparently because SNIA was considered a promising European partner in the space-defense program of the Reagan Administration.

No such action has been taken against the West German firm, although officials said that evidence points to MBB’s continued participation in the joint missile project, as well as in a separate Iraqi missile project in the northern city of Mosul, which is also a suspected site of chemical weapons development.

Officials here said that despite repeated entreaties to Bonn and Rome, there are indications that German and Italian assistance is continuing to flow to a joint development of a missile that Argentina calls the Condor 2 and Egypt has named the Badr 2000. Iraq, which earned worldwide condemnation last year for its devastating chemical attacks on Iranian troops and Kurdish tribesmen, is believed to have been a major financial backer of the project.

Given its range and a payload capacity of more than 1,100 pounds, the missile would easily reach Israeli targets from Egypt or Iraq. It would also put the British-held Falkland Islands within range of Argentine launch sites.

Continuing problems with the missile’s guidance system are believed to have forced a postponement of its first test last year, but some U.S. analysts expect Argentina to attempt a launch in the next two to three months.

In addition, officials said, there is persuasive evidence that West German firms continue to provide technical help to Libya in developing its own medium-range missile. Intelligence is said to indicate that the Libyan chemical weapons plant at Rabta--built chiefly with West German assistance--includes fabrication facilities capable of turning out ballistic missile prototypes.

“This (President Bush’s) government has got to decide what it wants to do about missiles--whether they carry conventional, chemical, biological or nuclear warheads,” an Administration official said. “With a new, incoming Administration, this is a good time to think about the issue.”

Bush, Quayle Concerned

Both President Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle, a former member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, have expressed personal concern about the spread of ballistic missiles to countries with growing access to chemical weapons, another official noted, but the new Administration, occupied with transition problems, has not yet been able to focus on the issue.

Some members of Congress, however, energized by the controversy over the role of West German firms in the Libyan chemical plant, are not inclined to wait.

“The pell-mell efforts of so many countries to develop a ballistic missile production capability has the potential for destabilizing every region of the world where there is a conflict,” California Rep. Howard Berman (D-Panorama City) said.

Berman plans to introduce a bill this week that would require the President to impose sanctions on U.S. or foreign businesses found helping third countries acquire ballistic missile technology.

West German firms, chiefly MBB, began aiding Argentina’s development of a small, single-stage rocket called the Condor 1 in 1979 under an agreement reportedly approved by then-Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. In the early 1980s, however, Egypt, with Iraqi backing, is said to have signed a cooperative agreement with Argentina to develop the much larger, two-stage Condor 2, triggering alarm among British defense analysts who saw it as a potential threat to the Falklands.

Argentine officials have consistently claimed that the Condor is intended to give the country its own space-research capability. U.S. officials contend that it is more likely meant to have military applications and that the interest of Egypt and Iraq in space research is less apparent than Argentina’s.

Since 1984, sources said, as concern spread to the U.S. intelligence community, MBB and SNIA, the Fiat subsidiary, have followed a pattern seen in the German assistance to the Libyan chemical plant--channeling technicians and equipment through intermediary firms in a pattern apparently designed to permit them to deny their role in the project.

Some details of this collaboration have appeared in the German and Italian press in recent months, and U.S. officials said these reports essentially are correct.

The West German news weekly Stern reported last Aug. 25 that the Munich-based MBB had earned more than $250 million from the Condor project. While an MBB subsidiary, Transtechnia, was helping Egypt and Argentina develop solid-fuel rocket motors, the magazine said, a small, nominally independent firm known as Consen had supplied about 200 technicians to guide the overall project.

Consen had hired more than a dozen senior missile experts from MBB, Stern said, yet they continued to use MBB office space and other facilities. U.S. analysts said this suggests an effort by MBB to insulate itself from responsibility for the project. The officials predicted that when the Condor project is complete, many of these experts will find themselves re-employed by MBB.

On Jan. 26, Stern quoted unnamed “Western intelligence services” in reporting that Transtechnia was preparing to ship “laboratory equipment” worth $48 million to an Iraqi research facility called Saad-16 near the northern city of Mosul. The facility is believed to be a center of both chemical weapons and missile development.