Posted on 10/28/2004 8:01:36 PM PDT by notkerry
A second defense official said documents on the Russian support to Iraq reveal that Saddam's government paid the Kremlin for the special forces to provide security for Iraq's Russian arms and to conduct counterintelligence activities designed to prevent U.S. and Western intelligence services from learning about the arms pipeline through Syria.
The Russian arms-removal program was initiated after Yevgeny Primakov, the former Russian intelligence chief, could not persuade Saddam to give in to U.S. and Western demands, this official said.
. . . . the most important and useful arms and explosives appear to have been separated and moved out as part of carefully designed program. . . .
The Russian forces were tasked with moving special arms out of the country. . . .
The Russian units were dispatched beginning in January 2003 and by March had destroyed hundreds of pages of documents on Russian arms supplies to Iraq while dispersing arms to Syria, the second official said. . . .
"Whatever was not buried was put on lorries and sent to the Syrian border," the defense official said.
Documents reviewed by the official included itineraries of military units involved in the truck shipments to Syria. The materials outlined in the documents included missile components, MiG jet parts, tank parts and chemicals used to make chemical weapons, the official said. . . . .
Also, an Arabic-language report obtained by U.S. intelligence disclosed the extent of Russian armaments. The 26-page report was written by Abdul Tawab Mullah al Huwaysh, Saddam's minister of military industrialization, who was captured by U.S. forces May 2, 2003.
The Russian "spetsnaz" or special-operations forces were under the GRU military intelligence service and organized large commercial truck convoys for the weapons removal, the official said.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Link to the article, not to the homepage. I can't find the updated article.
Nothing from Gertz will be an October Surprise, since he's ignored by all US newspapers and nightly TV (except for the odd appearance on a Cable news network panel or something.)
He's the master of the exciting, vaguely sourced story that ends up going nowhere. How many of those have we seen the past few years?
>>>"Whatever was not buried was put on lorries and sent to the Syrian border," the defense official said.
This 'official' must be a Brit - we don't call trucks "lorries" on this side of the pond...
Huge news! There are DOCUMENTS! How do we get this out there quickly - need to get it out in the next 24 hours or it will have no effect before Tuesday....
missed point
I remember the French warning Saddam not to use WMD if there is a war. I thought they had concern for US troops. I was wrong. The Russian & French wanted to set up President Bush by taking the WMD out of Iraq. After the war, see no WMD. The war was not necessary. The Democrats picked up on this soon after. That’s one of the reasons Kerry & Company support the UN. The other is that thery are a bunch of Communists.
No there aren't. There are documents that some unnamed official that Gertz claims to have talked to "saw." Gertz doesn't have any documents and you can rest assured he never will.
Good point.....
Oh, now you're making me pessimistic. Well, I don't claim to know about Gertz's sourcing - I read some of his articles but I guess I was mainly thinking that "John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security" would not have gone "on the record" yesterday if there wasn't some strong backing for this story. The last thing this administration needs is any more charges of "bad intelligence" or worse..... I wasn't so much trusting in Gertz as thinking that no one in the Pentagon would be DUMB enough to go on the record about this if they weren't going to be able to substantiate it. Maybe that's too much to hope for.
Bluntly, it strikes me that Gertz is full of crap most of the time.
And I'm a Republican that has voted straight Republican tickets nationally and statewide since 1988, and I'm voting for Bush Tuesday, so I'm not some sort of DU troll.
Anyone that is constantly telling you exciting things that you want to hear is someone you should be very suspicious of.
Gertz stories tend not to go anywhere and tend not to get corroborated.
snip from article:
"The disappearance of the material was reported in a letter Oct. 10 from the Iraqi government to the International Atomic Energy Agency."
This, along with todays (other) stories about insurgents having gotten these explosives with the "help" of US Intel agents is probably enough to explain the current hoopla.
Beyond that, the russkie/E Euro assistance in removal before we entered Iraq is more than plausible......if not them, the fedayeen saddam etc would certainly have moved them elsewhere in Iraq during the buildup to invasion, but I don't recall anything about this type explosives being used in car-bombs, etc in Iraq, which seems odd if they are available to the insurgents.
Put your tin foil hat back on....
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.