CIA Slowed Probe of Iraq Arms Links, Gonzalez Says

Poor cooperation by the CIA with federal law enforcement officers was partly responsible for lapses that nearly allowed Iraq to obtain sensitive nuclear triggers from a San Diego company a few months before the Persian Gulf War, the chairman of a key House committee charged Thursday.

Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez (D-Tex.), whose Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs Committee has been investigating the George Bush Administration’s relationship with Iraq before that country invaded Kuwait, credited a U.S. Customs Service undercover operation and the cooperation of a San Diego businessman with preventing the transaction.

Gonzalez, speaking on the House floor, said that Customs Service officials “had a hard time getting any information out of the CIA,” despite a request for its data on Iraq’s procurement network and its efforts to obtain sophisticated technology from the West that would be useful for military purposes.

Although the CIA had “abundant knowledge” that Iraqi agents in the United States and England were seeking nuclear bomb technology, it forced Customs to wait six months in late 1989 during a crucial aspect of its investigation before responding with “only cursory information . . . that was already public,” Gonzalez said.

But Dan Supnik, a resourceful Customs agent, with the cooperation of businessman Jerry Kowalsky, then president of CSI Technologies of San Diego, thwarted Iraqi efforts to purchase 100 electric capacitors, or triggers, that could be modified to detonate nuclear bombs, he told Congress. Supnik posed as an employee of CSI to obtain information on Iraq’s purchasing network.

Gonzalez said that the CIA also failed to share its knowledge with Commerce Department officials who approved export licenses for the triggers without realizing the identity of a firm known as Euromac that was fronting for Iraq.

“The CIA’s poor cooperation with the Euromac investigation fits the all-too-familiar pattern of an agency that refuses to cooperate with law enforcement efforts,” Gonzalez said, adding that it previously withheld information from the Justice Department in the criminal prosecution involving Italy’s Banca Nazionale del Lavoro.

That case involved the prosecution of Christopher P. Drogoul, former Atlanta manager of BNL, who approved $5 billion in loans to Iraq between 1985 and 1989. In a report earlier this month, the Senate Intelligence Committee criticized the CIA for overlooking nine classified documents relevant to BNL that never reached prosecutors in Atlanta. It said that the CIA had failed to recognize the law enforcement value of its information and that the agency and the Justice Department both had bungled their communications.

The CIA declined immediate comment Thursday on Gonzalez’s charges.

Kowalsky, who has been an independent electronics consultant since leaving CSI in 1991, told The Times that he spoke with CIA agents on several occasions during the nuclear triggers investigation. He said that they advised him not to let Customs know of their interest in the case.

He also said that the CIA did not seem interested in pursuing a criminal case, but wanted the dealings to continue for as long as possible so they could gather information.

“I would say it was a rivalry between the CIA and Customs,” Kowalsky said.

Other sources said that, in attempting to purchase the triggers, Iraqi agents claimed they intended to use them in air-conditioning systems or for research in laser technology at the University of Baghdad. But in conversations tape-recorded by Supnik, the Iraqis made it clear that the triggers were to be used for military purposes, the sources said.

As a result of cooperation between U.S. Customs and its British counterparts, several Euromac employees have been indicted and convicted in London on charges of export violations, Gonzalez said.

Times staff writer Douglas Frantz contributed to this story.