Can you post any good columns on all those Iraqi WMDs that Bush spoke about in his State of the Union speech. You remember, right?...the reason we invaded Iraq.
Here, glad to help :-)
Odyssey of Frustration
In Search for Weapons, Army Team Finds Vacuum Cleaners
washingtonpost.com
BAGHDAD -- For once the team found a building intact.
The low stucco structure, one of several walled off from the street, was the 17th target of the war for Army Lt. Col. Charles Allison and the special weapons hunters under his command. Heavy crossbars sealed the doors. That, at least, was encouraging. There would not have been much left to lock if looters got here first.
U.S. intelligence called this place "Possible SSO Facility Al Hayat," after the Special Security Organization of President Saddam Hussein. It ranked No. 26 on a U.S. Central Command priority search list. Allison's team pulled up in six Humvees, not long before noon on May 1, to scout for biological and chemical arms.
"Go get the breach kit," ordered Army Maj. Kenneth Deal, second in command. A soldier returned with bolt cutters, a crowbar and a sledgehammer. Deal carried a digital camera. Army Sgt. 1st Class Will T. Smith Jr. and Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Shawn Anderson wielded chemical sensors that looked like oversized power drills.
Smashing padlocks and deadbolts, the men checked for booby traps as they felt their way by flashlight from room to room. They reached a murky stone passage, smelling of mold. Cement covered its windows. Steel doors, a dull orange, lined the hall.
Interrogation cells? Munitions vaults?
One last bolt snapped. The door creaked open and Deal stepped through. There, in the innermost chamber, he found a cache of vacuum cleaners.
So it goes for Site Survey Team 3, which today begins its ninth week in the hunt for illegal weapons. One of four such units assembled before the war, it has screened intelligence leads from Basra to Baghdad with discouraging, even darkly comic, results.
Allison's 25 men and women have dug up a playground, raided a distillery, seized a research paper from a failing graduate student and laid bare a swimming pool where an underground chemical weapons stash was supposed to be.
Built around a cadre of experts from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the unit is trained and equipped to identify nerve agents and choking agents, live pathogens and fermenters to grow them, nuclear enrichment technology and missiles that exceed Iraq's permitted range. But Washington has been unable thus far to send Team 3 anywhere it could apply those capabilities.
Team 3's odyssey through Iraq is a tale of frustration and disillusionment. Allison and his unit arrived with the firm belief -- and dread -- that Iraq possessed the weapons of chemical war. They expected U.S. intelligence to guide them, and they were secure in their own technology and skills. When probe after probe sank dry holes, and the team's mission appeared to have failed, a sardonic tone began to creep into discussions of their work.
"No weapons of mass destruction here, sir," Deal deadpanned to his boss at a bombed-out presidential palace annex, the day after the vacuum cleaner affair. Both men were standing with handfuls of scavenged faucets, strip lights and circuit breakers. Finding no weapons to inspect, they had turned their attention to getting repair parts for their war-damaged headquarters nearby.
The search is not over, and one major part of it -- interrogation of Iraq's senior scientists and leaders -- is concealed from view. Some of Team 3's counterparts have unearthed ingredients and gear -- including transportable biological laboratories -- that could be used to build illegal arms. Any such concealment breached Iraq's obligation, under U.N. Security Council resolutions, to disclose all "dual-use" facilities.
But no one has confirmed that Iraq actually manufactured or retained a biological or chemical weapon after the last ones accounted for by U.N. inspectors in 1998.
The experience of Allison's unit is typical of the weapons hunt as a whole. All four of the original site survey teams, including Allison's, are dedicating much of their time to "sensitive sites" that have no known connection to weapons of mass destruction. These sites are of interest to U.S. intelligence agencies for evidence of crimes against humanity or links to terrorists, among other subjects. Three of the four "mobile exploitation teams" -- another kind of search unit -- have also shed their weapons experts and moved on to other missions. Only one is still searching full time for weapons of mass destruction.
"Supposedly the weapons were a primary goal," said Anderson, a Navy cryptologic and nuclear specialist whose job at home is to verify arms control pacts. In comments echoed strongly by others, he added: "I mean, the president said, 'Go find the weapons of mass destruction.' But it has become a secondary mission."
For this account, a reporter lived and traveled with Team 3 for a week and consulted the personal records of team members. Interviews were conducted with 46 participants in the weapons hunt, including members of four other search teams and two higher-level headquarters units directing their work.
Collectively, the conversations portrayed a hunt without the means, so far, to flush its quarry. Team 3 was sent to some facilities without being briefed on inventories already known from years of U.N. inspections. At other sites, the team could not work effectively for lack of Arabic language skills. In a repository for disabled nuclear equipment, Allison and his inspectors had to labor side by side with looters too numerous to evict. More often, the looters had come and gone. Twice, the team found signs of machinery disassembled and expertly removed.
Of those interviewed, the great majority said they remained convinced of President Bush's charge that Hussein concealed forbidden weapons to the end. But many also said they no longer know how they will find proof.
"The way everybody was talking, the way the intel was -- we're still waiting to find it," said Smith, who normally works in biological and chemical arms treaty enforcement. "But we haven't even begun to scratch the surface of 1 percent of the land mass. It might be right next door."
Anthrax Alert
Three days into the war, Team 3's tactical radio squawked a summons. Marine combat troops reported finding anthrax in an abandoned building near Basra.
Allison had been expecting just such a call. Iraq's government admitted in 1995 that it secretly manufactured thousands of liters of anthrax. But Iraq also said it had disposed of all the stocks. U.N. inspectors could not verify that claim, and the Bush administration said it was a lie. Secretary of State Colin Powell told the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 that as many as 16,500 liters of Iraqi anthrax were unaccounted for.
A soft-spoken man who reads a bible by headlamp at night, Allison followed his father into the Army. He is 51 years old, lanky and tall, his neck and forearms three shades darker than they were before he left his suburban Virginia desk job for the desert.
After 15 years around nuclear munitions, he seldom displays strong emotion. But the March 22 summons, he recalled, "spun us up. It was really exciting."
Adrenaline surged for more reasons than one as the team boarded twin CH-46 helicopters. They were beating their way north to a front, where militiamen loyal to Hussein still fought with unexpected ferocity. Allison spent his early career in field artillery, and Deal, his executive officer, logged years in tanks. But Team 3 was not built for combat. "They kept saying 'permissive' and 'benign' " to describe the expected work environment, Allison recalled. "They didn't say anything about people shooting at us."
There was no shooting that day. What the team found when it landed was a lone Marine in a field.
"He informed us that he had what he thought was anthrax in his pocket," Allison reported later that day to his superiors.
The Marine was "CBRN officer" for his tank battalion, responsible for assessing chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear hazards. Clearing a building, one of his squads had found unidentified powder and called for help.
The Marine officer had collected a sample and taped it inside a glass jar. He wrapped the jar into the sturdy brown cover of a "meal, ready-to-eat." He taped that, too. Then he sealed the bundle in a Ziploc bag, stuffed it into his trousers and waited for the helicopters to land.
A suspicious-looking document in Arabic accompanied the package. Handwritten on lined paper, the manuscript included three sketches of laboratory flasks. Allison turned to Smith. Together they performed a rapid field assay, using reactive papers known as "bio-tickets." Nothing happened. A second test confirmed it: no anthrax, and no other toxin described in the assay's book of codes.
Still curious, team members took the Arabic manuscript back to Camp Commando for translation.
"It ended up being some kid's high school science project," Deal said.
Weapons Spotting
Eight days later, the arms hunters saddled up again. Marines had fought their way past an ammunition storage site near Nasiriyah and reported "indications" of chemical weapons. Details were vague, and a day elapsed before Team 3 got word.
A BBC television crew shot video at the site on March 29, finding it abandoned but largely undisturbed. By the time Team 3 arrived on March 30, looters had left a shambles. There was no way to guess whether ordnance was gone. The team could only take readings of what remained. Using a $16,000 flame spectrometer, resembling a slate gray steam iron with digital display, they found no trace of nerve or blister weapons.
Nasiriyah became an unhappy template for Team 3's search. The invading forces came and went, and Iraqis found opportunity in chaos. Sometimes looters stripped a building to its bare frame -- pulling even sockets and wiring from the walls. Sometimes they burned what they could not carry. Often enough, by the time Team 3 reached a site, someone had done both.
"We should have known from our experience of past wars that this would happen," said Christopher Kowal, who last week left the his military intelligence assignment and an assignment on Mobile Exploitation Team Charlie, one of Team 3's fellow search units. "A huge amount of intelligence just walked away."
The pace of work by Team 3 picked up as U.S. forces advanced, but not its progress. Some of the American combat units had been issued pocket-sized guides from the Pentagon to help soldiers and Marines turn up leads. Titled the "WMD Facility, Equipment and Munitions Identification Handbook," the guide offered descriptions and color pictures of the whole range of weapons programs that the Bush administration suspected Iraq still maintained. The theory was that otherwise untrained ground troops could serve as spotters. Encountering something suspicious, a soldier could pull out his handbook and compare what he saw to a centrifuge cascade, a pressurized sprayer, a freeze dryer, fermenter or vacuum pump. This was the origin of the April 1 report of Frog missiles with chemical warheads that were said to be parked under a tree. They were not Frogs, and not chemically armed. Another day brought "suspicious glass globes," filled, as it turned out, with cleaning fluid. A drum of foul-smelling liquid revealed itself as used motor oil.
Team 3 employed a pair of Fox reconnaissance vehicles, sealed against the outside air and equipped to detect any chemical warfare agent. Army Spec. Tanya Cowley, who drove one, said she frequently "set up for an over-watch" during early missions to warn the team of danger. "That's our mission," she said. "Check for gas, chemicals, vapors." Encountering none, Team 3 eventually stopped bringing the Fox along.
One intriguing tip came on April 6. Human intelligence -- the team did not know its origin -- described a chemical vault that Iraqi officials had buried in a schoolyard. Allison's team reached the Aziziyah middle school for girls and spent a full day and night watching excavators dig. "All we did is, we tore up some poor kids' playground," Lt. Shaun Gordon, Team 3's operations officer, recalled recently. Marine engineers found a geometry text in the dirt. The vault remained a mirage.
Top Nuclear Sites
On April 10, the day after Hussein's statue tumbled out of its boots on Firdaus Square in Baghdad, Allison was dispatched to two of Iraq's most important nuclear sites. One was called the Tuwaitha Yellowcake Storage Facility, where the International Atomic Energy Agency keeps track of tons of natural and partially enriched uranium. Close by stood the forbidding berm walls of the Baghdad Nuclear Research Center, where Israel bombed the Osirak reactor in 1981 and the United States bombed a Russian-built reactor 10 years later. Between them, the two facilities entombed most of Iraq's former nuclear weapons program.
Just that morning, according to U.S. and U.N. sources, the Vienna-based IAEA had sent an urgent message to Washington. The twin complexes at Tuwaitha, the message said, were "at the top of the list" of nuclear sites requiring protection of U.S. and British forces.
A Marine engineering company had found the sites abandoned a few days earlier. The captain in command reported looters to be roaming the compounds. Allison's task was to measure the radiation hazard.
"We couldn't get close because we were receiving too high a dose" of radiation, Allison recalled. But the team found disturbing signs, even from a distance. The door to a major storage building, one of three known jointly as Location C, stood wide open.
Deal's personal dosimeter warned him to leave the scene, but first he shot a few seconds of videotape, by reaching his hand with the camera around the doorframe. The jerky images showed office debris strewn alongside scores of buried drums. Those drums, and others nearby, were supposed to contain 3,896 pounds of partially enriched uranium and more than 94 tons of yellowcake, or natural ore.
Looters had plainly been inside. At a minimum, they had exposed themselves and their families to grave health risks. More ominously, they might have taken some nuclear materials with them.
"There were also containers of what looked like medical isotopes on the ground," Allison said. "We backed off because we didn't have the capability to deal with radiation that high."
Before Team 3 could complete its survey, Allison received a "frago" -- a fragmentary order -- to leave at once. Tuwaitha was at the center of an unresolved dispute between the Bush administration and the IAEA, which monitors compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and Bush's advisers were divided among themselves. Until it had clear instructions, the headquarters for U.S. ground forces in Iraq wanted nothing to do with the site.
Standing under the desert sun with an Iridium satellite telephone at his ear, Allison raised his voice in angry protest at orders to leave the nuclear center unprotected. Eventually his superiors agreed to allow Marines to stay. Allison's report later that day said that even so "the maneuver commander did not have sufficient forces to secure both sites."
"I hope somebody has done something," Allison said, recounting the story some time afterward, "because a lot of that [material] is just laying around."
Tuwaitha was not Team 3's last brush with nuclear chaos. On April 24, two weeks later, Allison received orders to survey a warehouse holding the disabled machinery of Iraq's former nuclear weapons program. The Ash Shaykhili Nuclear Facility was a kind of boneyard for bombed reactor parts, broken vacuum pumps and heat exchangers and gas centrifuges rendered inoperable by U.N. inspectors.
Allison's assignment was to focus on an underground facility at the site. Whatever U.S. intelligence suspected there, sources in Washington said it was enough to place Ash Shaykhili in 11th place on the priority list of Iraqi weapons sites to be surveyed.
When Team 3 arrived, it found a nightmare unfolding.
The warehouses already had been "completely destroyed by looters, all burned up," Allison recalled. He saw charred pieces of what looked like equipment for electromagnetic isotope separation. A damaged glove box had been tossed in a scrap metal pile.
And the looters were not finished. Scores of civilians still swarmed the site, wrenching and cutting prizes away and loading them onto wheelbarrows, cars and trucks. They paid almost no attention to Allison's small team.
"There was no security anywhere to be seen," the team reported later that day. "Local civilians were in the process of looting and dismantling the facility when the team arrived, and remained during the entire exploitation. Site Survey Team 3 only had adequate security for force protection for team members."
Seated on a folding canvas chair, recalling the scene in an interview eight days afterward, Allison raised his eyebrows and shook his head.
"If there was something there" to reveal an undeclared Iraqi weapons program, he said, "it was long gone."
Professional Pillaging
The fall of Baghdad April 9 brought U.S. forces to the center of Iraq's military-industrial establishment. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld predicted that would mark a turning point in the hunt, and it did. But the results brought a stunning deflation of hope.
By the second week of April, Team 3 no longer had to chase tips in the hinterlands. Based in the capital, and free to move, it drew assignments based on the best of U.S. intelligence.
Washington's master list of suspect sites numbered more than 900. But the catalog of serious prospects was succinct.
Central Command kept daily track of two key rosters. One was called simply, "Top 19 WMD." The other was "Top 68 Non-WMD." Sites on the second list were suspected of clandestine activities unrelated to weapons of mass destruction, such as support for terrorists.
To assemble the 19 top weapons sites, intelligence services had photographed and eavesdropped inside Iraq, interviewed defectors and sifted more than a million pages of documents. Analysts modeled the buildings, linking physical structures to research programs, resources and personnel over time.
Now the models could be tested. Team 3 and its counterparts drove into the sites and looked where they liked. What they found was far from what they expected. Most sites lay in ruins.
A comparison of Team 3's survey history with priority lists obtained from sources elsewhere shows that Allison and his team screened four of the Top 19 weapons sites -- one of which was Ash Shaykhili, the nuclear boneyard. "About every place we've been to," Allison said, "was trashed."
The Baghdad Research Complex, reached April 19, might have provided investigators with months or years of work. Adjacent to the University of Baghdad, the broad campus featured laboratories and office space for some of the disciplines most important to military science: applied chemistry, biological and nuclear engineering, aviation and space research. The site was so large, yet pillaged so comprehensively, that Team 3 picked over the bones for two days without a discovery. "On a scale of one to ten," Smith said, describing the looting, "it was an eight-plus."
Some of the damage appeared to be calculated, hinting at another explanation for the frustrated weapons hunt. Outside an alternative energy lab, Deal said he found computers and paper file boxes arranged in a stack and burned. "Looters are stealing computers," he said. "Why would they burn them?"
In a biology lab, the team found broken glassware and supplies but only bare mounts where work tables and ventilation hoods had been. "There's an obvious difference between looting and professional removal," Deal said.
Other intelligence leads among the Top 19 appeared to be simply errors.
One such site, the Malab Ashab Chemical Co., was suspected of concealing an underground store of weapons or their ingredients. Team 3 arrived on April 25 and found an Olympic swimming and diving complex. The Dhubbat Chemical Storage Site, another of the Top 19, turned out to be a factory for metal signs. Team 3 found thousands of license plates where looters had trampled them.
Intelligence also dispatched the team to a place it called the "Al Sald Suspected Chemical Site."
Its Christian owners called it Asriya Anis Arak. Acting director Janan Roger Lassow showered Allison and his men with hospitality, escorting them around the family-owned distillery and attempting to press them with gifts of arak, the company's anise-flavored liqueur. A tip on a secret cache of documents brought Team 3 to the doorstep of a man who admitted taking them from his chemistry lab. But he was only a frightened graduate student, anxious that looters might destroy his masters thesis, in progress. His subject was metallurgy, Gordon said afterward, and "apparently he wasn't very good at it. Our interpreter found some of his tests, and he scored about 30 percent."
Intelligence was supposed to have been better than this. British Wing Commander Sebastian Kendall, who has helped lead planning for the weapons hunt from the headquarters of U.S. and British land forces, said analysts had identified numerous sites at which they assessed there was "a high probability of finding a link to WMD." That comment was made in an interview on April 20, when the probabilities of finding such weapons were already dipping but had not yet crashed. "We started off with a list," he said. "It is true that the environment is changing based on reality."
Busy Work
Ten days after Kendall spoke, Allison slumped in a metal folding chair and gazed without pleasure at a computer display of his next assignment. He and Deal had taken a Humvee to 3rd Infantry Division headquarters for orders.
It had been days since the team had drawn a mission with any prospect of success. Nearly all the top weapons sites had been exhausted. Allison and his fellow team leaders were paying pro forma visits to buildings that had long since been swept clean by other Americans in the capital. The last of those visits, on April 27, had been especially galling: Team 3's "suspected WMD storage" assignment was a U.S. field artillery headquarters.
Allison looked up from the "target folder" on his screen and called to Deal, who was fashioning a coffee cup with a pocket knife and plastic bottle.
"They're trying to slip us non-WMD missions," Allison said.
Army Lt. Col. David Velasquez, the division's chemical officer, arrived just in time to overhear.
"They are WMD," he said.
"By whose definition?" Allison asked.
That was the nub of an argument that both men knew was taking place over their heads. Col. Timothy Madere, the nonconventional weapons officer for V Corps, wanted to use survey teams like Allison's to screen a broader universe of sites. Anything the teams turned up would be an improvement, Madere told colleagues, because no specific weapons leads were left.
"We are not getting the intelligence we need," said a V Corps officer who shares Madere's views, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Allison and his fellow team leaders, backed by the Pentagon agency that sent them, maintained that their weapons expertise did not qualify them to gather general intelligence.
"Here's the double-edged sword," Deal said irritably to Velasquez, who nodded in agreement. "We go, we don't know what we're looking for . . . and we miss it."
Allison pulled Velasquez aside. Deal took his commander's place at the computer. He began to read about "Possible SSO Facility Al Hayat" -- where, the next day, he would encounter the vacuum cleaners. He frowned.
"Is it a WMD facility?" Allison asked. "No, sir, the description is not WMD at all," Deal said. "Likely abandoned after [1998]. May be used by high ranking officials. Yadda yadda yadda. This is going to be a waste of time."
Normally affable, Allison stewed silently on the ride home. Many of his soldiers now said they were doing busy work, reduced to "checking the blocks" on an obsolete list. It was getting harder for him to disagree.
The next morning, over a breakfast of chicken and Mexican rice, he said, "If it doesn't set off our monitors, we can't do much. We don't have Arabic."
Language Barriers
The language barrier loomed larger as time went on. If Team 3 had found vats of nerve agent, as its leaders once hoped, part of the mission could have been accomplished with instruments and technical expertise. But if the team had to look for subtler clues, it lacked the tools.
Around present-day Hilla, not far from Baghdad, archaeologists believe the Tower of Babel once stood. Team 3 is a Babel in miniature. Among its 25 men and women are Turkish, Spanish, Russian and Chinese speakers, but no one understands the local language.
At the suspected SSO facility on May 1 -- the stucco building with doors bolted tight -- the unusual sight of intact locks prompted team members to recheck their weapons. Someone hostile might still be inside.
"I can get to my pistol, but not easily," said Deal, who held the camera. "If you don't get them, I will, sir," Smith replied, the muzzle of his M-4 angled forward and down.
What they could not do was ask a question, should they find someone there. Yet they were supposed to ask questions under the guidelines for surveying a suspected secret police site such as this. One suggested query is, "Was there a lot of noise, such as people screaming?" Others ask about covered buses and unusual activity at night.
Anderson, the only team member learning Arabic, still does not have the ability to ask those questions. He has taught himself five phrases so far: "Good morning," "Good evening," "Drop your weapon," "That's dangerous," and "Keep away."
As Team 3 worked, it became evident more than once that even a passive reading knowledge would help.
On its way through one darkened corridor, the team reached an especially recalcitrant door. Sgt. Ivan Westrick, the team's explosive ordnance technician, swung the sledgehammer in a powerful arc that struck sparks with every blow, like flint on steel. A reporter later translated a snapshot of a sign across that door. It said, "No Smoking."
A longer announcement, in bold red and blue strokes, attracted the team's attention. The sign had been positioned in such a way that Saddam Hussein, gazing sternly off the canvas of a youthful portrait, appeared to be reading it. Anderson wondered briefly what it might say.
Had anyone known the answer then, the chamber of vacuum cleaners in the next corridor would have come as no surprise. Neither would the contents of the other sealed rooms: air conditioners, rolls of fabric, marble facing stones.
"Honorable Brother and Packer," the sign began. "Packaged goods cannot be returned after leaving the depot." The sign welcomed suggestions, apologized for delays, and thanked patrons for their cooperation. It concluded with a two-word signature: "STORAGE ADMINISTRATION."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company |
