Posted on 02/13/2005 8:29:18 AM PST by SJackson
Russia Says It's Ready to Arm Saudi Arabia
Lyuba Pronina, Staff Writer Moscow Times February 10, 2005 No. 3103
[From David Isenberg's Weapons Trade Observer, http://lists.topica.com/lists/sento] [With thanks to www.mideastweb.org/mewnews1.htm ]
Moscow is preparing its first major defense contract with Saudi Arabia, the world's largest arms buyer that has traditionally spent its petrodollars on U.S.-made weapons. The deal is part of a strategy aimed at diversifying Russia's arms buyers away from China and India, Sergei Chemezov, general director of state-owned arms exporter Rosoboronexport, told reporters Wednesday.
Russia also signed an arms contract with Morocco last month, he said, the first since the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Chemezov refused to give any details, but said that Russia is stepping up negotiations with Middle Eastern countries for jointly developing air defense systems on the basis of the domestically produced S-300, Buk and Tor-M1 systems.
"If a contract with Saudi Arabia is signed, it will be a landmark event in Russian arms exporting," said Marat Kenzhetayev, an expert with the Center for Arms Control.
From 1991 to 2002, Saudi Arabia imported $ 93 billion worth of weapons, Kenzhetayev said, while Morocco imported $ 1 billion.
In that same period of time, Riyadh signed $ 40 billion worth of arms contracts, of which $ 28 billion flowed to the United States and not a penny went to Russia, he said.
After U.S.-Saudi relations dampened following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the situation now seems to be swinging in Russia's favor, Kenzhetayev said.
While Moscow already sells arms to Middle Eastern countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Iran, Kuwait and Algeria, a deal with the Saudis could push its neighbors Jordan and Oman to sign Russian contracts as well, Kenzhetayev said.
For Moscow, which sells arms to 59 countries, finding new customers is important as it tries to diversify away from major clients China and India, which account for 80 percent of Russian arms sales.
"We have reached the ceiling of $ 5 billion to $ 6 billion in annual arms sales abroad," Chemezov said. "We have to change something drastically." Last year, Rosoboronexport, which mediates over 90 percent of the country's arms deals, delivered $ 5.1 billion worth of arms out of $ 5.8 billion exported by Russia as a whole.
Rosoboronexport has orders of $ 12 billion through 2007, but Chemezov said that this year Rosoboronexport can expect to make $ 1 billion less in revenues.
"The reason? Our companies cannot produce more modern weapons. The industry is in need of investment either from private companies or from the state," he said. "Today we sell weapons that were designed in the late 1970s and early 1980s." Rosoboronexport plans to boost control over defense production by placing its directors on the boards of arms makers and buying stakes, Chemezov said.
Chemezov said that all sales are strictly in line with international agreements and do not violate any United Nations sanctions.
"However, if some country, including the United States, makes its own decision on sanctions , pardon us, we are not obliged to do as America says," Chemezov said.
Last month, Israel and the United States expressed concern about the possible sale of SA-18 surface-to-air missiles to Syria.
Asked whether any such contract was discussed during Syrian President Bashar Assad's recent visit or is planned, Chemezov said: "No."
"sounds like the IAF needs to buy more green and white paint... lots of little flags to be painted on lots of little fuselages in the near future."
LOL! ;)
I wrote notes from Bill Gertz's book Treachery. Give me a moment and I'll post a few of them from my Word file.
TREACHERY
Bill Gertz
In March 2003, Congressman Curt Weldon, PA., R pointed out that 4 years earlier, France did not seek UN support for its efforts to remove Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic from power because French officials knew that Russia, a traditional friend to Serbs, would have blocked the measure. Instead the French asked the US to help. Weldon said: “For the first time and only time in NATO’s history, along with our president, at that time Bill Clinton, they used a NATO military force to invade a non-NATO sovereign nation to remove a head of state.”
Chirac helped sell Saddam the two nuclear reactors that started Baghdad on the path to nuclear weapons. Chirac was so involved in Iraq’s first nuclear reactor, named Osirak, that those opposed to the sale referred to the reactor as “O-Chirac.”
John Shaw, the Deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security lived for a time in Paris and told Gertz it was well known in France that Chirac “has been kind of in a godfather relationship with Saddam” back to when France jump-started Iraq’s nuclear program. Shaw said it was accepted face in France that Chirac was getting financial help for his various political campaigns from Baghdad. The Army and Defense Department investigators had discovered that France was one of the largest weapons sellers to Iraq and that tons of armaments were st ill in bunkers spread out in the Iraqi desert.
US intelligence agencies were under fire over questions about pre-war estimates of Iraq’s stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. But intelligence on Iraq’s hidden procurement networks was confirmed. An initial accounting by the Pentagon in the months after the fall of Baghdad revealed that Saddam had acquired between 650,000 and 1 million tons of foreign conventional weapons covertly. The main supplies were Russia, China and France. By contrast, the US arsenal is between 1.6 and 1.8M tons.
By 2003, Iraq owed France $4 billion for arms sales. It was the massive debt that was one reason France was reluctant to military operations.
France has denied they knowingly permitted the arms sales. However, France’s government tightly controls its aerospace and defense firms, so it would be difficult to believe the transfers took place without their knowledge. Iraq’s Mirage F-1 was made by France’s Dassault Aviation. Gazelle attack helicopters were made by Aerospatiale, which later became part of a consortium of European defense companies.
Sen. Ted Stevens, Alaska Republican and chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee said that France’s selling military equipment was “international treason.” Congressman Weldon said the French were less trustworthy than the Russians.
In March 2003, US intelligence and defense officials confirmed that exporters in France had conspired with China to provide Iraq with chemicals used in making solid fuel for long range missiles. The sanctions bursting operation occurred in 8/02 as the US National Security Agency discovered through electronic intercepts.
The chemical l transferred to Iraq was a transparent liquid rubber called hydroxyl terminated polybutadiene, or HTPD. A French companies known as CIS Paris helped broker the sale of 20 tons of HTPD which was shipped from China to the Syrian port of Tartus and then sent by truck from Syria into Iraqi to a missile manufacturing plant.
Military intelligence teams found stacks of blank French passports that only confirmed what US intelligence already believed – that the French had helped Iraqi war criminals escape from coalition forces and thereafter escape justice.
Brand new French missiles were showing up in the hands of Saddam loyalists MONTHS after the fall of Baghdad. Officials in the State Department and CIA shielded Paris and offered implausible explanations that French companies had often made deals without the government’s knowledge or support.
On 4/24/03, Saddam’s deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, gave himself up to US authorities. He told interrogators that Saddam had misjudged the US because the French and Russian government had assured him that in late 2002 and early 2003 that the US would not attack. And they assured him that if we did try to attack, Paris and Moscow would take steps within the UN Security Council to block the war.
In 2003, US export control officials investigated a French company for supplying Iran with four specialty pumps made in the US. The dual use pumps, described as cryogenic fluid transfer pumps, were sold illegally and could be used as part of the cooling system for Iran’s nuclear reactors, which can be used to produce weapons grade materials.
In the early 90’s, US intelligence agencies became wary of French intelligence because the French spy services were conducting aggressive operating against visiting US officials and businessmen. French intelligence electronically intercepted phone calls, planted electronic listening devices in hotel rooms, broke into visitor’s hotel rooms and searched luggage and portable computers. The French have completely wired most hotels.
The French specifically targeted the following US firms: Allied Signal, Bell, Boeing, Ford Aerospace, General Dynamics, GTE, Honeywell, Hughes Aircraft, Lockheed, Los Alamos, McDonnell Douglas, NASA Space Centers, Northrop, Pratt and Whitney, Texas Instruments, United Technologies and Westinghouse, among others.
A German firm was one of 2 major companies behind Iraq’s poison gas efforts in the 80’s. The German company Karl Kolb, along with the French firm Protec, sold Saddam millions of dollars worth of sensitive equipment; it went to six separate Iraqi plants that were used for making mustard gas, nerve agents and others. According to intelligence estimates, these plants could produce hundreds of tons of nerve agent per year.
The Survey Group talked to two key Iraqi scientists involved in the nuclear arms program who confirmed that in November 2002, when the UN inspectors returned to Iraq after Saddam had barred them for 4 years, the Iraqis hid materials and documents relating to their nuclear weapons program.
David Kay said they had reestablished a large scale casting facility and were moving ahead for a 1,000 kilometer solid fuel missile. Kay’s group discovered that sometime in 1999 and 2000, Iraq switched gears and began developing a whole new family of missiles. The group theorized that Hussein, deciding to wait until sanctions were lifted to restart his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs, chose to focus on the delivery systems for the weapons. The survey group Chief, Charles Duelfer, believes that Iraq once had WMD and he will try to find out what happened to them.
Russia and Iraq had signed agreements to share intelligence and to help each other acquire visas for intelligence agents. Moscow was willing to share all kinds of information with Hussein, including a list of assassins and details of OBL’ s plans to fund terrorist training camps to support operations in Chechnya.
Yevgeni Primakov was the Kremlin’s top Middle East expert and later head of the KGB. He has hard line anti-American views. According to knowledgeable sources, Primakov and the two Russian generals were in Baghdad to help the Iraqis hide their weapons from the soon to be advancing US military forces. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the former head of the Romanian foreign intelligence service who defected to the US, said “as someone who used to take orders from the Soviet KGB” that he knew that Russia was behind Baghdad’s efforts to hide weapons in a post-Saddam Iraq.
Kay acknowledged that the Russians helping move weapons was one of 5-6 major hypotheses that they were working on. Another theory was that prior to the war the Iraqis had moved weapons to Syria.
In the fall of 2001, NSA revealed that two Chinese telecommunications companies were helping Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban build a major telephone system in Kabul, the Afghan capital. Communist China is one of the most dangerous suppliers of advanced conventional arms, dual-use products and materials for WMD. Almost all Chinese arms merchants are government or military officials.
China’s cooperation with AQ was not all indirect. Intelligence reports obtained by the Pentagon in December 2001 revealed that China had supplied arms to AQ AFTER the 9/11 attacks. Just a week after the attacks, the Taliban and AQ took delivery of a shipment of Chinese made surface to air missiles known as HN-5s, which was China’s designation for Soviet designed SA-7 missiles. So much for China’s claims to e cooperating with us on the WOT.
The Clinton administration created a number of obstacles for the GWB administration. Under Clinton, the US government treated China as a normal, friendly nation instead of the Communist dictatorship it is, and as a result, it compromised a great deal of intelligence to the Chinese. Moreover, Clinton severely degraded the US intelligence community’s ability to monitor deadly arms transfers. One senior US official told me the damage had been so sever and long lasting that “We just simply do not have the resources to be able to track these things.”
Iraq’s ties to AQ:
On 4/15/03, just after the fall of Baghdad, a key Iraqi official fled to Syria, where he hoped to find sanctuary. Faruq Hijazi, then Iraq’s ambassador to Tunisia – and a senior intelligence officer in Mukhabarat, Iraq’s political police and intelligence agency – flew from Tunis to Damascus. Hijazi had been head of external operations for the Mukhabarat in 1993, when Saddam’s regime attempted to assassinate former president George H.W. Bush during his visit to Kuwait. The Syrian government publicly denied that Hijazi was in its country, despite the fact that he was only one of the many fleeing Iraqis who were given safe passage and sanctuary in Syria. 9 days after Hijazi arrived in Damascus, US military forces captured him at the main border crossing from Syria to Iraq.
Hijazi provided US officials with new evidence supporting what earlier intelligence reports had indicated about Iraq’s links to terrorism and AQ specifically. Before the Iraqi war, intelligence reports showed that as Mukhabarat operation chief, Hijazi had met with al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Sudan and Afghanistan in the 1990s. A top secret Pentagon intelligence report from 2003 revealed that after his capture, Hijazi confirmed his contact with bin Laden. During a May 2003 custodial interview Hijazi disclosed that the AQ leader had asked him for Iraqi help in procuring Chinese manufactured antiship limpet mines and in establishing AQ training camps inside Iraq. The information about Hijazi and bin Laden is just one of 50 separate pieces of evidence of Iraq’s connections to terrorist groups contained in the top secret Pentagon report which the conservative magazine The Weekly standard uncovered in November 2003.
Liberals within the media and government sought to discredit the intelligence, claiming tha the Pentagon was guilty of cherry picking. But the document made a strong case for Iraqi links to AQ, a case first made by Bill Gertz based on earlier intelligence reports.
John Shaw, deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, told Gertz that based on intelligence reports he believes that Iraq’s WMD were moved to Syria. “One of my people who was out there said there were three reports in a single day of caravans, of trucks, going fully loaded with tarps over them to the main Baghdad-to Syria border road, coming back empty.”
Syria already has one of the most advanced chemical weapons stockpiles in the Arab world. It has a stockpile of the nerve agent sarin that can be delivered by aircraft of ballistic missiles and has engaged in research and development of more toxic nerve agents like VX.
America not to blame:
US arms and weapons are sold to allies and friends. The sales are part of a carefully crafted strategy to keep America’s friends free from danger, following Reagan’s adage that the best way to keep the peace is to remain strong enough to deter aggressors and foes.
The claims that the US willfully armed the Iraqi dictator’s military are greatly exaggerated or in some cases simply false.
In the late 90’s, the severe security problems at US nuclear facilities finally began to draw public attention. First, in 1999, a special congressional committee released a bipartisan report documenting how Communist China had stole US secrets to advance their nuclear program. Around the same time, there emerged a spy scandal involving a nuclear scientist suspected of but never charged with selling warhead secrets to China, which has been the key beneficiary of the compromise of US nuclear warhead secrets,
Many anti-American critics have accused the US of building up Saddam’s regime. But an examination of Iraq’s arsenal before both the 1991 and the 2003 war made clear that Iraq’s army was mostly equipped with Russian, French and Chinese weapons.
Anthony Cordesman, a military specialist with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, researched Iraq’s weapons purchase in the years before the ’91 Persian Gulf War and found that Iraq’ s main military suppliers were Russia, China and the “major West European” arms makers. From 87 to 90, Russia told $500M in arms to Iraq, China sold $700M in weapons. European nations combined for $1B in arms sales. US arms sales during the same period were zero.
In early 2003, Cordesman produced a comprehensive order of battle for Iraq showing that Iraq’s army had about 1,200 Russian and Chinese tanks and up to 3,700 Russian, French, Czech and Brazilian armored vehicles. The small number of US M-48 and M-60 tanks were captured from Iran or purchased illegally from other nations. Iraq’s warplanes were Russian, French, and Chinese.
Officially, The Reagan administration was neutral toward both Iraq and Iran but in reality, Iran made itself a foe of the US by seizing American hostages in 1979 and holding them for 444 days. The administrations opposition to Iran’s Islamist clerical regime led the US to adopt the policy of covertly supporting Iraq in the war against Iran.
The first Bush administration inadvertently helped build up Iraq as well by granting Baghdad $1B in agricultural credits under the Commodity Credit Corporation. Iraq was to use the credits to purchase American farm products but investigators discovered that the $$ went into Iraq’s military build up.
The US did send some anthrax samples to Iraq but for veterinary use. On 9/29/88, the American Type Culture Collection, a commercial firm near Manassas, Virginia, shipped 11 items to Iraq’s Ministry of Trade, including several strains of anthrax bacteria. The export was meant to help in dealing with the animal cases of anthrax.
The Center for Disease Control in Atlanta acknowledged it supplied Iraq with 14 agents that could have been used in biological warfare, including West Nile virus. That was all pre- 1991. We were not trying to improve Iraq’s biological warfare capabilities but to help with noninfection diagnostic reagents for detecting infections from mosquito-borne viruses.
Iraq’s biological weapons work began in secret around 1985. Iraqi biological weapons scientists interviewed after 2003, as well as documents found by military and inspectors in Iraq, revealed that Iraq ran a clandestine network of facilities for developing germ warfare throughout the 90’s.
Information was revealed that we found 1.7 linear miles of documents related to Iraqi arms acquisition efforts found that many US companies sold to Ukrainian dealers who in turn sold to Iraq.
In August 2001 we found that the Iraqis had ordered a large shipment of a chemical known as colloidal silicon dioxide from an unidentified supplier. The chemical wasnot on the UN’s Goods Review List and was a dual use product that can make glass but what worried the CIA is that the substance creates dusty chemical or biological agents. Mixing the fine powder with anthrax produces what the military calls a persistent agent which can penetrate protective gear.
The chemical makes it easy to disperse and get everywhere (like in the anthrax used in 10/01?)
In 2002, the State Department asked the UN not to send the shipment of that chemical to Iraq. But the UN, which had originally put the contract on hold, lifted the contract and the shipment went to Iraq. One intelligence official familiar with reports of the chemical sale said “The UN is helping the Iraqis to enhance their biological and chemical weapons.”
Gordon Oehler, who headed the CIA’s Nonproliferation Center before retiring in 1997, testified to Congress that Clinton administration policymakers used almost any measure to block intelligence judgments confirming that China had delivered 34 M-11 missiles to Pakistan in November 1992 (a deployment first disclosed by Gertz in the Washington Times). According to US antiproliferation laws, the weapons sale SHOULD have automatically triggered stiff economic sanctions against China. But Oehler told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee of how Clinton administration officials had summarily dismissed solid intelligence on the weapons transfer in order to protect the Chinese from sanctions.
The Clinton administration did not divert from its appeasement strategy despite the fact that China was caught twice transferring missile equipment to Pakistan in the space of two years.
Are they relevant to exchatology?
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That would be the socialist morons running the french government IMAO.
Nobody said that American weaponry is ineffective or inferior-the point is that you cannot class all Russian weaponry in the same category as obsolete or inferior.& I was not reading Marx,but did the Iraqis get SU-30s,Yakhont missiles,AA-12 Adders,Rafales????
Saudi Arabia having new RUSSIAN weapons is like my daughter owning a BMP.... you have to know what to do with it. I've been privy to the quality of Saudi military personnel and quite frankly there is nothing to fear from them no matter what Kind of weaponry they possess. They could hire all the AQ terrorist cells in their nation to train them up since they all use russian designed equipment
More media hype. Please list the weapons that Russia and France supplied to Iraq AFTER the Coalition went to war?
Please read the book. Bill Gertz was VERY specific with the exact weapons. It was a library book and I've returned it.
What are you doing...defending Russia, France and China? LOL
Even with imposed sanctions regimes can still obtain equipment that they are not allowed to have. Equipment sold legitmately by companies doesn't always up with the intended recipient. How do you think that the North Korean military ended up with US made helicopters in their inventory?
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