Join a Discussion on the U.S. Military Strikes
This article was reported by WILLIAM J. BROAD, BARBARA CROSSETTE, JUDITH MILLER and STEVEN LEE MYERS and written by MYERS
ASHINGTON -- The United States believed that senior Iraqi scientists were helping to produce elements of the nerve agent VX at a factory in Khartoum that American cruise missiles destroyed last week, administration and intelligence officials said on Monday.
The evidence the administration has cited as justification for the attack consisted of a soil sample secretly obtained months ago outside the pharmaceutical factory, the Shifa Pharmaceutical Industries, the officials said. Officially the administration has refused to describe its evidence in any detail, or to say how it was obtained.
The sample contained a rare chemical that would require two more complex steps to be turned into VX, one of the deadliest nerve agents in existence, and the chemical, whose acronym is EMPTA, has no industrial uses. The United Nations and the United States have long agreed that Iraq is extremely skilled at many kinds of VX production, having worked for years to perfect the best process.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, also said there was evidence that senior Iraqi scientists had aided the efforts to make VX at that factory, and at another plant a couple of miles away.
The connection with Iraq emerged as a key part of the administration's argument for why it was justified in launching cruise missiles at a plant in another country without any warning.
The officials disclosed the information, four days after the American strike, to try to counter claims by the Sudanese government that the factory, located in an industrial area of Khartoum, was purely a benign commercial venture that produced half of the Sudan's medicines.
The United States, however, rebuffed calls from the Sudan and other countries to turn over its evidence. At the United Nations, the Security Council on Monday put off a request by Arab nations -- submitted by one of the United States' closest Arab allies, Kuwait -- to send inspectors to search the rubble in Khartoum for signs of chemicals related to VX.
"I don't see what the purpose of a fact-finding study would be," Peter Burleigh, the deputy American representative to the United Nations, said after the meeting. "We have credible information that fully justifies the strike we made on that one facility in Khartoum."
At a news conference in Khartoum, the Sudanese president, Omar Hassan el-Bashir, kept up his sharp attacks on the United States and President Clinton, saying Clinton ordered the attack to cover up the furor over his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
Clinton and his senior aides have described the evidence linking the factory to the production of VX as compelling and even irrefutable, though until Monday the administration refused to discuss the evidence in any but the most general way.
The officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said the soil sample, collected outside the factory, contained traces of a "precursor chemical" called ethyl methylphosphonothionate, or EMPTA. There would be no viable explanation for the presence of that chemical, they said, other than the production of VX.
"You don't obtain this chemical because you're making ball point pens or whatever," an administration official said. "If you're making this, you're making VX."
VX is an odorless, colorless liquid that can kill with remarkable speed. A mere drop on the skin or inhaled in the lungs is enough to kill an adult within minutes. There are a number of ways to make the agent, but the officials in Washington and other American and foreign officials said the technique using EMPTA is one Iraq used to develop its own VX stockpiles in the 1980s.
Officials in Washington and at the United Nations said there were a number of other factors linking Iraq to the pharmaceutical plant, as well as a second facility.
Earlier this year, President Saddam Hussein's government asked the committee that monitors U.N. sanctions to allow it to buy medicines from the factory under the "oil for food" program that allows humanitarian supplies into Iraq.
Antonio Monteiro, Portugal's representative to the United Nations who is this month's president of the sanctions committee, confirmed the request, but the officials said it was not clear what medicines were ordered or whether any were ever delivered.
Although the United Nations closely monitors goods purchased under the "oil for food" program, the officials said the contract could have provided a pretext for extensive visits by Iraqi officials.
A senior intelligence official said that one of the leaders of Iraq's chemical weapons program, Emad al-Ani, had close ties with senior Sudanese officials at the factory. The official said a number of Iraqi scientists working for Emad al-Ani had attended the grand opening of the factory two years ago.
Although the United States struck at the Shifa plant, officials in Washington acknowledged that the second plant is also suspected of making chemical weapons. That site, according to diplomats in New York and the Sudan, has been frequently visited by Iraqi technicians and was more heavily guarded than Shifa Pharmaceutical.
However, it also in a residential neighborhood, and officials familiar with planning for the American cruise missile strikes said the fear of collateral damage was a factor in choosing a target. A strike at a plant that made VX itself, not merely a precursor to it, would pose significant risks of scattering a deadly nerve agent during an attack.
Although the administration offered details about its evidence, there were still unanswered questions. The soil sample, which presumably measured either a spill or airborne particulars, did not prove that the attacked factory was the pharmaceutical plant that produced the precursor chemical, EMPTA.
"It's conceivable they were only storing EMPTA there, or it was just passing through there," the senior intelligence official said. "You could spin several scenarios."
While the administration maintains the evidence of VX production is clear, the links between the factory and Osama bin Laden, the Saudi exile whose network of terrorists was the target of last week's strike, is circuitous.
Bin Laden controls a sprawling web of companies underwritten by a fortune said to exceed $200 million, including ventures in the Sudan, where he made a home after his expulsion from Saudi Arabia in 1994 until he was forced to leave in 1996.
The officials said bin Laden has no direct investment in the pharmaceutical plant, but has financial ties to Sudan's state-run military industrial complex. They said that fact and bin Laden's suspected interest in obtaining chemical weapons was enough to warrant destroying the factory, along with a paramilitary training camp in Afghanistan.
"When you put all that together," the senior intelligence official said of the factory, "it all adds up to a source of real concern."
As administration officials laid out their case, new details emerged of the strike itself. A senior Pentagon official said on Monday that the cruise missiles that landed in Afghanistan heavily damaged or destroyed virtually every "soft" target at the sprawling mountain training camp, including barracks, communications equipment and arms stockpiles.
However, the United States did not bother striking fortified bunkers in the area, since Tomahawk cruise missiles, despite a 1,000-pound payload and remarkable accuracy, would not have destroyed them.
Officials at the Pentagon also confirmed on Monday that the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph Ralston, traveled to Pakistan before the strikes so he could be with Pakistani military leaders at the time of the attack. The reason for the visit, which was first reported on Monday in The Wall Street Journal, was to reassure Pakistan that the barrage of incoming missiles was not an attack by its archenemy, India.
