FLASHBACK: "Russia Hid Saddam's WMDs" (Washington Times, 10/2/03)

The Washington Times (via FrontPageMag) ^ | October 2, 2003 | Ion Mihai Pacepa

[WhistlingPastTheGraveyard]

On March 20, Russian President Vladimir Putin denounced the U.S.-led "aggression" against Iraq as "unwarranted" and "unjustifiable." Three days later, Pravda said that an anonymous Russian "military expert" was predicting that the United States would fabricate finding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov immediately started plying the idea abroad, and it has taken hold around the world ever since.

As a former Romanian spy chief who used to take orders from the Soviet KGB, it is perfectly obvious to me that Russia is behind the evanescence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. After all, Russia helped Saddam get his hands on them in the first place. The Soviet Union and all its bloc states always had a standard operating procedure for deep sixing weapons of mass destruction — in Romanian it was codenamed "Sarindar, meaning "emergency exit." I implemented it in Libya. It was for ridding Third World despots of all trace of their chemical weapons if the Western imperialists ever got near them. We wanted to make sure they would never be traced back to us, and we also wanted to frustrate the West by not giving them anything they could make propaganda with.

All chemical weapons were to be immediately burned or buried deep at sea. Technological documentation, however, would be preserved in microfiche buried in waterproof containers for future reconstruction. Chemical weapons, especially those produced in Third World countries, which lack sophisticated production facilities, often do not retain lethal properties after a few months on the shelf and are routinely dumped anyway. And all chemical weapons plants had a civilian cover making detection difficult, regardless of the circumstances.

The plan included an elaborate propaganda routine. Anyone accusing Moammar Gadhafi of possessing chemical weapons would be ridiculed. Lies, all lies! Come to Libya and see! Our Western left-wing organizations, like the World Peace Council, existed for sole purpose of spreading the propaganda we gave them. These very same groups bray the exact same themes to this day. We always relied on their expertise at organizing large street demonstrations in Western Europe over America's "war-mongering" whenever we wanted to distract world attention from the crimes of the vicious regimes we sponsored.

Iraq, in my view, had its own "Sarindar" plan in effect direct from Moscow. It certainly had one in the past. Nicolae Ceausescu told me so, and he heard it from Leonid Brezhnev. KGB chairman Yury Andropov, and later, Gen. Yevgeny Primakov, told me so, too. In the late 1970s, Gen. Primakov ran Saddam's weapons programs. After that, as you may recall, he was promoted to head of the Soviet foreign intelligence service in 1990, to Russia's minister of foreign affairs in 1996, and in 1998, to prime minister. What you may not know is that Primakov hates Israel and has always championed Arab radicalism. He was a personal friend of Saddam's and has repeatedly visited Baghdad after 1991, quietly helping Saddam play his game of hide-and-seek.

The Soviet bloc not only sold Saddam its WMDs, but it showed them how to make them "disappear." Russia is still at it. Primakov was in Baghdad from December until a couple of days before the war, along with a team of Russian military experts led by two of Russia's topnotch "retired"generals: Vladislav Achalov, a former deputy defense minister, and Igor Maltsev, a former air defense chief of staff. They were all there receiving honorary medals from the Iraqi defense minister. They clearly were not there to give Saddam military advice for the upcoming war—Saddam's Katyusha launchers were of World War II vintage, and his T-72 tanks, BMP-1 fighting vehicles and MiG fighter planes were all obviously useless against America. "I did not fly to Baghdad to drink coffee," was what Gen. Achalov told the media afterward. They were there orchestrating Iraq's "Sarindar" plan.

The U.S. military in fact, has already found the only thing that would have been allowed to survive under the classic Soviet "Sarindar" plan to liquidate weapons arsenals in the event of defeat in war — the technological documents showing how to reproduce weapons stocks in just a few weeks.

Such a plan has undoubtedly been in place since August 1995 — when Saddam's son-in-law, Gen. Hussein Kamel, who ran Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological programs for 10 years, defected to Jordan. That August, UNSCOM and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors searched a chicken farm owned by Kamel's family and found more than one hundred metal trunks and boxes containing documentation dealing with all categories of weapons, including nuclear. Caught red-handed, Iraq at last admitted to its "extensive biological warfare program, including weaponization," issued a "Full, Final and Complete Disclosure Report" and turned over documents about the nerve agent VX and nuclear weapons.

Saddam then lured Gen. Kamel back, pretending to pardon his defection. Three days later, Kamel and over 40 relatives, including women and children, were murdered, in what the official Iraqi press described as a "spontaneous administration of tribal justice." After sending that message to his cowed, miserable people, Saddam then made a show of cooperation with UN inspection, since Kamel had just compromised all his programs, anyway. In November 1995, he issued a second "Full, Final and Complete Disclosure" as to his supposedly non-existent missile programs. That very same month, Jordan intercepted a large shipment of high-grade missile components destined for Iraq. UNSCOM soon fished similar missile components out of the Tigris River, again refuting Saddam's spluttering denials. In June 1996, Saddam slammed the door shut to UNSCOM's inspection of any "concealment mechanisms." On Aug. 5, 1998, halted cooperation with UNSCOM and the IAEA completely, and they withdrew on Dec. 16, 1998. Saddam had another four years to develop and hide his weapons of mass destruction without any annoying, prying eyes. U.N. Security Council resolutions 1115, (June 21, 1997), 1137 (Nov. 12, 1997), and 1194 (Sept. 9, 1998) were issued condemning Iraq—ineffectual words that had no effect. In 2002, under the pressure of a huge U.S. military buildup by a new U.S. administration, Saddam made yet another "Full, Final and Complete Disclosure," which was found to contain "false statements" and to constitute another "material breach" of U.N. and IAEA inspection and of paragraphs eight to 13 of resolution 687 (1991).

It was just a few days after this last "Disclosure," after a decade of intervening with the U.N. and the rest of the world on Iraq's behalf, that Gen. Primakov and his team of military experts landed in Baghdad — even though, with 200,000 U.S. troops at the border, war was imminent, and Moscow could no longer save Saddam Hussein. Gen. Primakov was undoubtedly cleaning up the loose ends of the "Sarindar" plan and assuring Saddam that Moscow would rebuild his weapons of mass destruction after the storm subsided for a good price.

Mr. Putin likes to take shots at America and wants to reassert Russia in world affairs. Why would he not take advantage of this opportunity? As minister of foreign affairs and prime minister, Gen. Primakov has authored the "multipolarity" strategy of counterbalancing American leadership by elevating Russia to great-power status in Eurasia. Between Feb. 9-12, Mr. Putin visited Germany and France to propose a three-power tactical alignment against the United States to advocate further inspections rather than war. On Feb. 21, the Russian Duma appealed to the German and French parliaments to join them on March 4-7 in Baghdad, for "preventing U.S. military aggression against Iraq." Crowds of European leftists, steeped for generations in left-wing propaganda straight out of Moscow, continue to find the line appealing.

Mr. Putin's tactics have worked. The United States won a brilliant military victory, demolishing a dictatorship without destroying the country, but it has begun losing the peace. While American troops unveiled the mass graves of Saddam's victims, anti-American forces in Western Europe and elsewhere, spewed out vitriolic attacks, accusing Washington of greed for oil and not of really caring about weapons of mass destruction, or exaggerating their risks, as if weapons of mass destruction were really nothing very much to worry about after all.

It is worth remembering that Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, chose to live in a Soviet gulag instead of continuing to develop the power of death. "I wanted to alert the world," Sakharov explained in 1968, "to the grave perils threatening the human race thermonuclear extinction, ecological catastrophe, famine." Even Igor Kurchatov, the KGB academician who headed the Soviet nuclear program from 1943 until his death in 1960, expressed deep qualms of conscience about helping to create weapons of mass destruction. "The rate of growth of atomic explosives is such," he warned in an article written together with several other Soviet nuclear scientists not long before he died, "that in just a few years the stockpile will be large enough to create conditions under which the existence of life on earth will be impossible."

The Cold War was fought over the reluctance to use weapons of mass destruction, yet now this logic is something only senior citizens seem to recall. Today, even lunatic regimes like that in North Korea not only possess weapons of mass destruction, but openly offer to sell them to anyone with cash, including terrorists and their state sponsors. Is anyone paying any attention? Being inured to proliferation, however, does not reduce its danger. On the contrary, it increases it.

[Cboldt]

Another WMD story resurrected from the past ...

UN Says: WMDs Smuggled From Iraq; Canadian PM Says in Terrorist Hands
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1159339/posts

[wildcatf4f3]

bttt

[RusIvan]

Who cares whether THEY dumped them, or WE confiscated them?

The result was the same - terminated.

Why can't the White House sell this simple message?===

Because Washington always talked about the threat of OPERATIONAL WMD of Saddam not about his WMD programs. Tony Blaer even scared the members of his Parlament with 20 or 45 minutes of readiness of Saddam WMD.
If you remember few month after Bagdad taking the special commands of militaries seached for "hot WMD".

Back down to just WMD programs is the confession that pre-war explainations was wrong.

[RusIvan]

If you ask them to prove that WMDs were not taken out, they can't.
We should start a new mantra to counter the "Bush lied" mantra: WMD were moved out.==

Better to ask them to prove that WMD did not exists:))). It is just like "guilty until proven innocent" formula:).

I would be interested what you answer if road police stopped you and tell "mister just prove us that you didn't break any rules".

[tentmaker]

bookmark

[Alia]

Link no longer found: www.adn.com/24hour/story/1245613p-8299749c.html, entitled: Russia boasts weapon to overcome U.S. Star Wars

snip:

MOSCOW (March 29 [2004], 5:17 am AST) - Russia has designed a "revolutionary" weapon that would make the prospective U.S. missile defense useless, Russian news agencies reported Monday, quoting a senior Defense Ministry official. The official, who was not identified by name, said tests conducted during last month's military maneuvers would dramatically change the philosophy behind development of Russia's nuclear forces, the Interfax and ITAR-Tass news agencies reported. If deployed, the new weapon would take the value of any U.S. missile shield to "zero," the news agencies quoted the official as saying.

The official said the new weapon would be inexpensive, providing an "asymmetric answer" to U.S. missile defenses, which are proving extremely costly to develop. Russia, meanwhile, also has continued research in prospective missile defenses and has an edge in some areas compared to other nations, the official said

--end snip

[eastforker]

I have been saying this all along. Now to have the WT report it is one thing, still speculation at this point, but our state department can not make these alegations without severe repercusions.

[wolfcreek]

Why can't the White House sell this simple message?


In order to do that, the WH would have to out Russia and others for their involvement. This alone could explain the WH's silence. (that damn Diplomacy again)

[Grampa Dave]

The question that no one is asking is how did the MSM and the rat politicians of America know before the first phase of the Iraqi war was over, basically no WMDs were in Iraq.

There is only one way the MSM and our rat $inators, who hasn't been correct on anything about Iraq could have known that basically there were no WMDS in Iraq.

They were told by $addam or who ever moved the WMDs out of Iraq, that they were no longer in Iraq.

[Grampa Dave]

CHENEY FIGHTS BACK Wed Nov 16 2005 18:56:46 ET Excerpts As Prepared For Delivery Tonight by Vice President Cheney

"What we’re hearing now is some politicians contradicting their own statements and making a play for political advantage in the middle of a war. The saddest part is that our people in uniform have been subjected to these cynical and pernicious falsehoods day in and day out. American soldiers and Marines are out there every day in dangerous conditions and desert temperatures – conducting raids, training Iraqi forces, countering attacks, seizing weapons, and capturing killers – and back home a few opportunists are suggesting they were sent into battle for a lie."

"The President and I cannot prevent certain politicians from losing their memory, or their backbone – but we’re not going to sit by and let them rewrite history."

"We’re going to continue throwing their own words back at them. And far more important, we’re going to continue sending a consistent message to the men and women who are fighting the war on terror in Iraq, Afghanistan, and many other fronts."

[cgk]

Thanks! No, I hadn't seen those posts, though I had read "some" background on the Iraq-Libya-Egypt-Iran-DPRK WMD linkages...

---

Reposting your links here, for later reading altogether:

Iraqi WMD Debate and Intelligence: the Links to Libya

The Iraq War ISSA Special Reports

Iraq, Iran, North Korea and WMD: Threat Activated

Libya, Iran, DPRK Discuss New Strategic Missile Procurement

Libyan NoDong SSMs Reported Targeting Southern NATO Sites and Israel (November 8, 2000 )

Weapons Grade Uranium Moving in Middle East; Iraqi WMD and Delivery Development Being Undertaken in Libya (October 1, 2002 )

[Light Speed]

Russia Tests Missile Designed to Overcome US Defense Shield

November 03, 2005 Moscow (CNSNews.com) - Russian media are hailing an intercontinental ballistic missile test, calling it a successful demonstration of the military's capability to pierce the U.S. anti-missile defense shield.

The Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missile has unique capabilities, making it virtually invulnerable, Russia's leading television broadcaster, Channel 1, commented Wednesday.
Trud, a pro-government daily, said the American anti-missile defense umbrella was no longer a problem for Russia because the test-launch demonstrated that the newest warhead could overcome it.
On Tuesday, Russia test-fired the new missile a new Topol, which boasts a range of some 10,000 kilometers. It was fired from a ground-based launcher and hit a target in a testing ground in neighboring Kazakhstan, the Defense Ministry reported.
Russia's Kommersant daily said the military claimed that "maneuvers" by the warhead during the final stretch of its trajectory would prevent missile defense systems from intercepting and destroying the incoming missile.
This would therefore be Moscow's "asymmetrical" response to the U.S. missile defense system, it said.
Deployment of the new warheads would begin next year, Strategic Missile Forces commander Gen. Nikolai Solovtsov announced last month.
Russia recently test-fired a Bulava missile from a nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine. The Bulava is a modified, sea-based version of the land based Topol-M.
If successful, Topol-Bulava missiles would be the first intercontinental weapon system Moscow has created since it withdrew from the SALT-2 treaty with the U.S. in response to the American missile defense plans.

[Alia]

Wow. Does Russia "issue" one of these releases a year? They are nearly identical.

[Alia]

After Oil4Food broke, I saw that official "Russia" had declared (via Pravda) they'd not used any of the illicit oil4food monies. That they had been above aboard. 2. At a later date Russia began wrangling at the US (again) making "dire" threats, and countries like Estonia, etc., clearly said they'd be facing their guns towards Russia, if Russia did not clean up its act.

Diplomacy via checkmate. No time at moment to bring up the links.

[csmusaret]

Bush disarmed Saddam.

[Light Speed]

Thanks for the ping and the links.

Guess their are alot of dissed countries who never stepped back to think that so much transport of material was bound to be noticed.
Next is Pakistan and the screw up AQ Khan.

Even China got caught running out N.K. missile parts and spares on flagged container ships and on airline.
Congress even sat for a day session just on China's sleazy manuveres.

some nations were taking their orders unfinished......ship it now as is before U.S. and Israel set up to interdict on the shipping lanes

The U.S. had to invade Iraq and send a message to Moscow,Bejing and where ever moon children are tuning in.
The level of transfer activity margined that soon enough Israel would get jittery and go on somebody.
The mideast would become another round of super power weapons sales.
Henry Kissinger comented on a Charlie Rose program a year or so back...that in the previous mid east wars,
The U.S. intention was to showcase the superiority of its weapons sytems via Israel and rub Moscows noses in it..allong with the salivating moon children.

Moscow must have freak out repeatedly after some of these quick smash Israeli wars.
In 1973 on the Golan,
Israel finally settled the Russian missile umbrella in Sinai and could then double up sorties of Skyhawks and Phantoms on Syrian mech divisions.

There's not much in the way of film stock or photo's.
The story line goes that Israel layed on the napalm and cluster muni's...coupled with refortified tank platoons decimated from the first week.
The Syrians finally broke and ran.
They left hundreds of intact tanks and mech assets idling in the sun and hoofed it home in a full scale sprint.
The battle area was called the Valley of Tears by the Israeli's.
Syrians just got slaughtered.
In 82...they got slaughtered again...especially their airforce.

In 82...IDF discovered that one group of moon children where a handfull and would stand and fight.
That being the Hezbollah in south Lebanon.
On a journal rehash program of the 82 war...was a film segment where a Lebanese Druze from the Suf mountains was being held up at an Israeli checkpoint.
Upset that he was not allowed to return home he yelled....

"Why can't I go home....there's no one up there...you've killed them all"!

The Israeli soldiers wearing Raybans just smiled.

On final

Some time back on CNN Robert Noval was freaking and spitting that Bush was in Iraq fighting Sharons war.
On the surface this is incorrect....yet not entirely untrue.
Lacking resource depth for a sustained conflict which could easily see Egypt and Syria involved...and maybe Jordan after their airspace is violated...maybe even the Saudi's.
Israel would have to lay it on heavy and quick.
The entire mid east would spiral away.
with Russia and China on the phones offering weapons systems for cash and oil futures.

[Light Speed]

Wow. Does Russia "issue" one of these releases a year? They are nearly identical.

LOL....it seems so : )

Maybe Russia is a little tenative now to crow about undertakings....especialy after the fiasco a year or so back when Brass showed up to watch missile launches during manuevers.
One missile flew off wildly and another glitched in the silo.
back to back screw ups.

Pravda made a gallant attempt to paint the reality a different color.
Then ran some articles later about the decline of Russia's military.
Wonder if someone went to a Gulag after that......maybe Joe Biden knows : )

Still...and apart from the **Canned news feeds.
Russia is about with advanced gen weapons which focus on jamming,multiple interface tie in on rotation in 4CI combat....and ya...3d movement

These weapons margin you cannot assure you have them down after engagement.
You are definitley on the defensive...and thats what an opponent is wanting in fluidic battle.

These weapons are not likely to have wopping punch unless they are micro boosted nukes.
Plasma and phasic discharge weapons are just around the corner.
you get EMP'd...burnt to a crisp...and the detonation value is high yeild.

Once energy module's which prime this type of system is scale'd down.....these are sure to be the hammer of choice.

Just around the corner could be 20 yrs.....or less.
Plasma guns allready exist and are being scaled down in components.

[Alia]

Thank you very much for this explanation; appreciate it. And yes, I think you are right that this will be "around the corner" before we know it: Plasma and phasic discharge weapons. These would be so much more manageable and portable than a missile booster.

Light Speed? You heard anything about Russia/France joint space programs? Few years back, I was digging into that; I was surprised at the time to see them working together.