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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: NickSE who wrote (100770)	6/9/2003 2:37:15 AM
From: KLP	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

U.S. checkpoints find gold-laden Iraqi trucks By Paul Salopek Chicago Tribune Sunday, June 08, 2003, 12:00 A.M. Pacific seattletimes.nwsource.com KIRKUK, Iraq — Another battered truck hauling what appears to be a dazzling fortune in gold bars was stopped at a routine U.S. Army checkpoint in Iraq on Wednesday, the third such cache of bullion seized in two weeks. An officer with the 173rd Airborne Brigade, the unit that detained the truck near the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, said that 1,183 ingots were recovered in the latest bust. The seizure fits a pattern established by two similar gold-laden vehicles stopped by U.S. troops in late May. All the trucks appeared to have originated in Baghdad and seemed to be heading for either the Syrian or Iranian border. "Same modus operandi," the American officer said, on condition of anonymity. "Mercedes truck. Bad registration. Trying to pass (the gold) off as brass." More than 4,100 gold bars have been confiscated so far from the rusty beds of old trucks trundling down the bomb-cratered roads of Iraq. The combined value of the gold has been calculated at between $718 million and $1 billion. Some of the recovered gold already has been flown to Kuwait for safe-keeping, the U.S. Army said. It took six soldiers four hours to load one shipment onto a cargo plane. The entire pile of ingots, nearly big enough to fill a dump truck, will be returned to the people of Iraq when a new government is established. The source of such vast quantities of gold in war-bruised Iraq remains a tantalizing mystery. U.S. officials have kept mum about the case. And ordinary Iraqis fascinated by the tale of the "gold trucks" have spawned conflicting rumors. Some say the loot is Kuwaiti gold seized during the 1990 Iraqi invasion, while others insist it is treasure pried from thousands of looted Baath party safety-deposit boxes in Baghdad. But a source close to the U.S. investigation says that all the truck-borne ingots share the same strange characteristic: The bars aren't pure, like the bullion found at Fort Knox, but crudely melted bricks of jewelry. A soldier who was a precious-metals dealer in civilian life gauged the purity of the treasure confiscated near Kirkuk at 21 carats, the ideal grade for jewelry-making. And that obscure detail convinces many knowledgeable Iraqis that the gold's journey stretches all the way back to the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and into ousted President Saddam Hussein's greedy pockets. "Iraq has no major gold reserves, and no Iraqi banks ever held this much private jewelry," said Daya al-Khayoun, director general of Iraq's state-run Rafideen Bank, which saw 60 of its 70 Baghdad branch offices gutted by looters after the war. "What was found in those trucks has to be the gold Saddam asked Iraqis to donate to fight the Iran war," al-Khayoun said. "That gold helped keep him in power." During the bleakest years of the 1980-88 conflict between Iran and Iraq, Saddam and his ministers appeared often on Iraqi television, exhorting citizens to contribute their jewelry to the war effort. Rich businessmen, many Iraqis recall, were expected to cough up three to five pounds of gold or face a visit by Saddam's goon squads. Some of that jewelry ended up being hammered into a solid gold carriage for Saddam, although it broke under its own weight during a 1996 parade in Baghdad. But the bulk of the people's patriotic largess ended up unspent in state vaults beneath Iraq's Central Bank or in Saddam's presidential palaces, al-Khayoun says. How it may have gotten smelted hastily into ingots, loaded onto two-ton Mercedes-Benz trucks and carted out of Baghdad is still a puzzle. And the drivers aren't talking. "This crime was not the work of stupid neighborhood looters," said Fahdil Mohammed, a metallurgist in Baghdad's gold market. Punching figures into his calculator, Mohammed estimated that the process of turning 70 to 80 tons of bracelets, necklaces and rings into 20-pound ingots would have taken a crew of a dozen skilled metal workers several weeks. "This job must have been arranged before the war," he said. "It probably was ordered from somebody at the top of the old regime." Some American officers agree. While there are many clandestine smelters in Iraq — occupation forces in the southern city of Basra puzzled for weeks over why the power grid kept blowing, until they discovered a network of hidden electric forges for melting down stolen copper wire and brass-shell casings — the secrecy required to process as much as $1 billion of gold suggests that the job was done under government supervision, they said. The trucks' oddly unimpeded journeys across Iraq also have raised suspicions. All three vehicles traveled hundreds of miles through mostly lawless country before being stopped by happenstance at U.S. roadblocks. "It's almost as if they were being protected," said Maj. Kevin Petit, the executive officer of the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Kirkuk. "Like, it was bad news to mess with some powerful guy's booty."