CIA Chief Cites Firms’ Weapons Aid to 3rd World

CIA Director William H. Webster said Thursday that West European companies have knowingly played a crucial role in developing chemical weapons not only in Libya but also in Iran, Iraq and Syria.

In what he termed an “equally disturbing” trend, Webster told a Senate committee that foreign firms are helping Third World nations develop ballistic missiles to deliver chemical and biological weapons that some of them see as the “poor man’s answer to nuclear weapons.” Webster did not identify any of the firms.

The Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday that U.S. officials have concluded that West Germany’s largest aerospace firm, Messerschmidt-Boelkow-Blohm and SNIA-BPD, a subsidiary of the Italian industrial giant Fiat, have played a key role in a joint Argentine-Egyptian project to develop a medium-range ballistic missile.

Iraq, according to U.S. officials, has provided financial backing for the two-stage, solid-fuel Condor 2 missile, which is expected to have a range of up to 800 miles. Some analysts expect the first test launch of the missile in the next two to three months.

A spokesman for SNIA-BPD, Gualberto Ranieri, said Thursday that the company has never transferred missile technology to Egypt, Libya or Iraq and that it ended its cooperation with Argentina’s rocket development program in 1985. Ranieri said that Fiat and its subsidiaries have not participated in the Condor 2 project.

As Webster testified before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, five members of the House of Representatives introduced a bill to impose sanctions on U.S. or foreign firms selling restricted ballistic missile technology.

In his appearance before the Senate committee, Webster reaffirmed the U.S. conclusion that West German and Japanese companies had played a key role in building a Libyan chemical weapons plant that intelligence analysts believe to be the single largest in the Third World.

Webster said that with a potential output of “tens of tons per day” of mustard gas and nerve agents, the sprawling facility 40 miles southwest of Tripoli “far exceeds” any conceivable military demand of Libya alone.

As many as 20 countries, most of them Third World nations, may currently be developing chemical weapons, the CIA director told the Senate committee.

“We are (also) concerned that the moral barrier to biological warfare has been breached,” Webster said, with 10 or more countries working to produce “previously known and futuristic biological weapons,” some of them more potent than the deadliest chemical warfare agents.

He did not identify any of the 10, but other reports have pointed to evidence of biological warfare programs in Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Israel, Syria and Libya.