Secretary Describes Germ Labs

WASHINGTON -- In perhaps one of the most chilling parts of his presentation, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday that Iraq has built mobile germ weapons labs on railcars and trucks capable of producing enough deadly agents in a month “to kill thousands and thousands of people.”

Providing a trove of new details, Powell said the Iraqis are using the mobile units as both research facilities and small factories to produce quantities of such agents as anthrax bacteria and botulinum toxin. He displayed diagrams of how three truck trailers can be parked together to function as a small factory, with piping, compressors, fermenting tanks and dryers.

The factories “can be concealed easily, either by moving ordinary-looking trucks and rail cars along Iraq’s thousands of miles of highway or track, or by parking them in a garage or warehouse, or somewhere in Iraq’s extensive system of underground tunnels or bunkers,” Powell said.

Calling the laboratories sophisticated and “one of the most worrisome aspects” of U.S. intelligence on Iraq, he said the powder that emerges from the dryers is the most lethal germ form because it can be inhaled and from there enter the bloodstream.

It was not immediately clear whether Powell’s presentation would convince chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix, who said Tuesday that he had seen no proof that mobile chemical or biological weapons labs exist.

“We have had reports of these labs for a long time, but we have never found them,” Blix said, noting that inspectors had even studied soil samples in an effort to confirm the labs’ existence.

Since the mid-1990s, reports have circulated that the Iraqis were seeking to shift their germ weapons efforts to hard-to-find mobile labs after the United Nations was told of such a program by Saddam Hussein’s exiled son-in-law, Hussein Kamel. Some reports have said the Iraqis were trying to conceal the labs in converted milk or ice cream trucks, while others said they were using recreational vehicles of the kind Iraq used as rolling command posts during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Saddam Hussein has always been especially interested in germ weapons, Iraqis have said.

But until Powell’s presentation Wednesday, the U.S. had offered few details publicly.

Powell said U.S. officials became convinced of the mobile labs’ existence in 2000, when they received confirmation of the program from a chemical engineer who had operated one of the factories before U.N. weapons inspectors left the country at the end of 1998. The engineer said the Iraqis would begin production runs on Thursdays at midnight, believing that inspectors would not inspect on Fridays, the Muslim holy day.

The engineer told of how 12 Iraqi technicians died after an accidental release of agents at a lab in 1998, Powell said.

U.S. officials received confirmation of the labs’ existence from three other well-placed Iraqi defectors, Powell said. They provided technical drawings that were “highly detailed and extremely accurate,” the secretary said.

Iraq, Powell said, has at least seven mobile labs, each consisting of two or three trucks, for a total of 18 trucks. And he argued that it would be difficult for inspectors to find the 18 “among the thousands and thousands of trucks that travel the roads of Iraq every single day.”

Powell did not address two other aspects of the purported labs that have worried experts: the threat they would pose to invading U.S. forces during a military campaign, and the risk of proliferation they pose.

Some analysts have argued that such labs could be moved around in wartime and used for surprise strikes. The technicians guarding the trucks might also seize material and steal across the border with the intention of selling it to rogue governments or terrorist groups.

Daniel Benjamin, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington who has written of the purported labs, said he thought Powell’s description of them was “a powerful and persuasive part of the presentation.”