Britain Warned Allies of Iraqi Arms Purchases, Witness Says

A British intelligence official, testifying from behind a screen, told a London court Friday that details of Iraq’s secret arms-buying effort were shared with other Western intelligence agencies as early as 1987.

The official, identified only as “Officer B” of the MI5 security service, did not specifically say the CIA received the intelligence reports.

However, a U.S. intelligence source confirmed independently that the CIA received data about the Iraqi arms network from Britain during that time period.

“We had a lot of information about the Iraqi network, and we were getting it out,” said the U.S. source.

Earlier accounts have described numerous U.S. intelligence reports on Iraq’s efforts to buy weapons technology, and Defense Department concerns about such illicit purchases by Baghdad date back to 1985. But Friday’s account represents the earliest date that Western governments had solid evidence of Iraq’s ambitious program.

The testimony came at the trial of three former directors of Matrix Churchill Corp., a British-based, Iraqi-owned company. They are accused of violating British export laws by shipping millions of dollars worth of machine tools to Iraqi arms factories between 1988 and 1990.

A senior British trade official testified earlier in the week that Matrix Churchill had been allowed to export to Iraqi arms factories because two of its officials were providing information on Iraq’s arms program to intelligence agencies.

Peter Earnest, a CIA spokesman, declined to comment on Friday’s testimony, saying: “We do not discuss agency relationships with other intelligence agencies.”

A Matrix Churchill subsidiary in Solon, Ohio, played a major role in the U.S. end of Iraq’s arms-buying network, according to documents and federal investigators. Many of its transactions were financed through the Atlanta branch of Italy’s Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, which provided $5 billion in illicit loans for Baghdad.

Internal Matrix Churchill documents show that the Ohio subsidiary helped Iraq acquire technology for its nuclear-weapons program, Condor 2 ballistic missiles and the supergun developed by artillery wizard Gerald Bull, who was murdered in March, 1990.

The CIA knew by at least in November, 1989, that Matrix Churchill was part of the Iraqi network, according to a CIA report disclosed previously in The Times. Yet the Ohio subsidiary was not shut down by U.S. customs agents until September, 1990, a month after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.