Structure Built to Shelter Iraqi Elite, U.S. Says

The Baghdad structure destroyed by U.S. bombs Wednesday was built as an air raid shelter for the families of Iraq’s elite, American officials said Thursday, adding that among the civilians who died in it may have been officials of the ruling Baath Party, their spouses and children.

Western intelligence officers believe that the building also was linked to a neighboring compound of villas reserved for top officials and distinguished foreign visitors--including a house frequently used by Palestine Liberation Organization chief Yasser Arafat, who was in Baghdad during the bombing, one official said.

“We watched them build those things,” said a U.S. official previously stationed in Baghdad. “Our understanding was that these were VIP shelters, built for government cadres and party people.”

The reinforced concrete structure in the Baghdad suburb of Amariya was one of a number of such shelters built during Iraq’s war with Iran in the 1980s but apparently never used until this year, the official said.

The structure that was bombed was modified and converted into a military command-and-communications center in the late 1980s and was used for that purpose since, Pentagon officials said.

However, the Bush Administration has decided to try to weather the outcry over the estimated several hundred civilian casualties resulting from the bombing rather than release specific evidence supporting its argument.

White House and Pentagon officials declined to provide surveillance photos or other evidence as proof, saying public disclosure of such information would compromise sensitive intelligence sources.

“We specifically do not talk about our ability to intercept Iraqi military communications because that would then allow them to change the way they’re doing it,” said Lt. Gen. Thomas W. Kelly, the director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Still, some in the intelligence community were aghast that Pentagon officials went as far as they did.

Even Kelly’s acknowledgement of a communications intercept--or “sigint,” for signals intelligence, as it is known in the intelligence community--was considered highly unusual.

In addition, experts fear that the Administration has risked drying up whatever intelligence sources the United States has in Iraq, and also has given Saddam Hussein crucial information that indicates its successes in monitoring his communications.

Seeking to close the door on debate over the bombing, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said: “The military has looked into this. They have considered it. They discussed it publicly; announced their conclusion. We are satisfied that we’ve looked into it and did the right thing for the right reasons and we will continue to attack command-and-control centers.”

Asked why the coalition felt that it needed to continue bombing Baghdad, rather than restricting its targets to the troops and supply lines closer to the Kuwaiti battlefield, Fitzwater said: “Their command-and-control center is there. Their military is there, just like our military is in Washington. It’s as simple as that.

“Baghdad is where this war is originated from. It’s where Saddam Hussein is. It’s where his military is. It’s where the leadership is,” he said.

To the suggestion that the Administration had offered no proof that the bombed facility was a command-and-control center, Fitzwater said: “We think that it is, without question in our mind, through various intelligence sources, and not a matter that we have to address again. . . . “

Consequently, the question of the facility’s purpose remains unanswered and open to conjecture.

Reviewing some of the information made public Wednesday, William E. Odom, a retired Army general and the former head of the National Security Agency, said photographs of the structure support the argument that its uses went beyond sheltering civilians. He referred to the high fence, topped with barbed wire, that surrounded the building, and expressed surprise that such a barrier would be erected around a building that large numbers of people might need to enter quickly.

Odom echoed what others have suspected--that the building may have been part of a macabre ruse intended to draw U.S. fire.

He said the Iraqis may have faked military communications and truck traffic to make a civilian bomb shelter appear to be an important military facility. The idea behind this, he said, would be to lead the United States to “take the bait and kill all the civilians,” and thus risk the stability of the allied coalition by creating a wave of international outrage.

“I sort of suspect that this could have been a trap,” he said.

Other experts contend that the facility very easily could have been just what Pentagon officials are saying.

At the time the shelters were built, “they could only take a small fraction of Baghdad’s population,” said the official who had served in Baghdad. “It was clear that these were for cadre. . . . You’re talking about a few thousand people.”

He said the intended use of the shelter for a select few civilians could explain the presence of the fence.

On the other hand, he noted, “one of the shelters was built in my neighborhood, and there was no fence around that one.”

Another U.S. official said many of the people who have appeared on television tapes mourning the casualties of the bombing were in military uniform. “We have a suspicion” that at least some of the victims were dependents of military officers, he said.

Kelly said camouflage paint may have been intended to make it appear that the building had already been destroyed.

Ervin Massinga, a military analyst with the Washington-based Center for International and Strategic Studies, said that the Iraqis probably camouflaged the structure to make it appear to be a park, or perhaps the playground of the school nearby.

Without camouflage, he speculated, the squat, heavily fortified structure would have stood out in even greater contrast to the surrounding neighborhood of houses and apartment buildings.

Kelly said the targeted building “stopped being a bomb shelter . . . when they went back and did a whole bunch of stuff to it to turn it into a military command-and-control facility. At that point it was no longer a civilian bomb shelter, it no longer served a civilian purpose, and it began to be a military target.”

He pointed to what appeared to be an iron-gated entrance, with additional iron protection around the building that limits access. He said ducting inside the complex was not typical for a civilian shelter, but was of the type that would be used for communications cables.

Iraqi Health Minister Abdel-Salam Mohammed Saeed told reporters Wednesday that the shelter was one of five such structures in Baghdad, each with a maximum capacity of 2,000 people. The Iraqi capital’s total population is an estimated 4.6 million.

Iraqi officials said that 288 bodies had been recovered from the shelter by Thursday evening and that more than 100 others might still be inside. An unknown number survived the blasts and the ensuing fire in the multilevel underground structure.

Navy Capt. David Herrington, deputy director of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said U.S. intelligence agencies had attempted to identify all hardened structures in Baghdad and concluded: “Clearly, protecting civilians was not a high priority” for the Iraqi government.

“If you took all the hardened structures that we could find in the city and packed people in standing as closely as you could . . . less than 1% of the people in the city of Baghdad could be protected during an air strike,” he said.

Amariya, the suburb where the shelter was located, is west of Baghdad on the main highway to the Jordanian border.

“It’s a reasonably nice area,” said the official who had been stationed in Baghdad. “It’s adjacent to an area where the Iraqis built a compound of villas for distinguished foreign visitors. Yasser Arafat stayed in one of the villas for months on end.”

He said Western intelligence officers believed that the compound may have been linked to the shelter by an underground passage.

Arafat frequently stayed in Baghdad after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 forced him to move his headquarters out of Beirut. The PLO then moved its political leadership to Tunisia but declared Baghdad its military headquarters.

Arafat has been in Baghdad since Tuesday, officials said, adding that they did not know where.

The PLO chief visited the shelter Thursday and condemned the bombing.

There was no immediate explanation for the difference between the U.S. estimate of a dozen shelters and the Iraqi health minister’s of five shelters.

The U.S. official said the shelters were never used during the Iran-Iraq war.

“They built them around 1985, but they kept them closed,” he said. “They were built, as far as we could tell, in reaction to the Iranian Phantom (bomber) strikes in the early part of the war.”

Iran’s air force stopped most of its bombing raids by the mid-1980s because of a shortage of spare parts. In the late 1980s, Iran launched Scud missiles against Baghdad, but the Iraqi authorities never opened the shelters.

“They weren’t really usable in Scud attacks,” he said. “With Phantoms, you had some warning of the attack; with Scuds, you didn’t. People didn’t take shelter during the period of Scud attacks because they didn’t feel terribly threatened.

“So the shelters were shut up and unused,” he said. “They were kind of white elephants, to tell the truth.”

Times staff writer Karen Tumulty contributed to this article.

THE BUILDING IN BAGHDAD

An allied bombing raid on Wednesday has sparked intense debate over the nature of the facility that was bombed in Baghdad, right. Here is what is known so far:

U.S. POSITION: There is conclusive evidence that the structure was a military command and control center and a legitimate target, officials say. The allies did not know civilians were in the facility.

IRAQ POSITION: Authorities maintain the building was a civilian bomb shelter and that the raid was a deliberate attack in an effort to weaken morale. According to Iraq, 500 civilians were killed in the bombing raid. Only eight people were said to have survived.

The building was shattered 4 a.m. Iraqi time on Wednesday by two laser-guided bombs dropped from an F-117A Stealth fighter.

The facility was located in a middle-class Baghdad suburb called Amariya, next to a school and a grocery. It was the only structure hit in the vicinity.

The structure was built as a bomb shelter in 1985, during the Iran-Iraq War, according to U.S. officials. Iraq says it was one of five such facilities built in Baghdad during the war.

In the late 1980s, U.S. officials said, the structure was hardened to enable electronics gear to withstand the electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear blast.

The facility was equipped with special air filtration systems, communications gear, electronic equipment and special wiring.

It was topped by a 10-foot-thick concrete roof and sheets of metal.

It was painted with camouflage blotches on the roof.

The facility was identified as a “shelter” in English and Arabic.

The structure was surrounded by chain-link and barbed-wire fencing.

The United States has detailed blueprints of the two-tiered structure.

The structure, 40 feet deep, was believed capable of holding an estimated 2,000 people.