Posted on 03/06/2010 3:37:18 AM PST by sukhoi-30mki
The Secret History Part I: The C-802 Cruise Missile: Iran’s Threat in the Persian Gulf
05 March 2010
Written by Joseph Trento
Scores are still being settled from the Iran Iraq War in the 1980s. It is no wonder. If anyone has any doubt about Iran’s ruthless use of all its human resources at the Mullahs’ disposal, let me describe for you what I witnessed on the marshes in the swamps along the Shatt Al Arab near Al Qurna, Iraq, in February 1984 when CNN sent me to cover the Iran Iraq War. As I approached the front on an old Soviet helicopter, I saw what I thought was a huge sandstorm. But, as I got closer, I realized I was witnessing a human wave attack from Iran. What unfolded was a huge and furious battle.
After transferring to another, smaller helicopter, used to find targets for Iraqi artillery, I got a closer view of how poison gas and every other lethal tool available to Saddam Hussein – all with American approval – were being employed. Hussein’s U.S.-provided arms supplier, Sarkis Soghanalian, had done his job well. As I landed in an abandoned schoolyard at the front a few miles from al-Qurna, where the Garden of Eden supposedly once existed, and crossed by flatboat in the canals Saddam’s army had dug to flood the marshes, I witnessed the endless line of corpses of very old men and adolescents, some children, in tattered Iranian uniforms. The Iranian Mullahs’ defense of the 1979 Revolution and Saddam’s invasion ended festering in Iraqi mud. A million people died in the Iran Iraq War. Almost no one in the United States paid any attention.
More than two decades and two Gulf Wars later, the United States, Saudi Arabia and Israel face the same Hobson’s choice – this time with an insular and defensive Iran. By removing Saddam Hussein, we created a more powerful and ambitious Iran. The 1979 Revolution has turned into a military dictatorship. Internal opposition and other pressures have forced the Mullahs to play the nuclear card to survive domestically. Last month’s International Atomic Energy Commission report on Iran’s nuclear weapons program has American and Israeli defense planners trying to figure out how the Iranian nuclear program can be stopped if Iran does not succumb to international pressure and continues to reprocess uranium until it reaches weapons-grade levels.
While the Obama administration prepares for a military conflict with Iran, it is important for us to understand some of the secret history between Iran and the United States that complicates the planning and unnecessarily puts our soldiers and sailors in harm’s way. What follows is one story about how that happened.
Iran has been preparing for an attack since 1988, after a U.S. Navy ship, the USS Vincennes, illegally operating inside Iran’s territorial waters, accidentally shot down Iran Air Flight 655. (See DCBureau’s 10-part series on the United States and Iran’s secret history) After the shoot down, the Iranian leadership began a weapons buying spree to counter the threat posed by the powerful American fleet in the Persian Gulf that threatened them and could attack at will.
Sometimes reporters end up in the middle of a story. That is what happened to me. I was in France in June 1997 to attend the Paris Air Show. One of my sources, arms dealer Sarkis Soghanalian, had shifted his operations to Paris after being sent to jail by the George H.W. Bush administration for doing the United States’ bidding in Iraq and serving as the Reagan administration’s arms dealer of choice to Saddam Hussein. He was released after helping the Clinton administration combat Hezbollah’s counterfeiting operations in Lebanon.
During my visit to Paris, a representative of the China Precision Machinery Import and Export Corporation (CPMEIC), the Chinese Army-owned company and the manufacturer of the C-802, an anti-ship missile, showed up at Soghanalian’s luxurious apartment at Rond-point. Soghanalian introduced me to M. Ping, the CPMEIC representative, who was, in fact, a Chinese intelligence official. Soghanalian told Ping that I was a Canadian who was repairing his assistant, Veronique Paquier’s, computer. As Veronique and I pretended to repair an antiquated electric typewriter, Ping ignored his host’s awkward lie and, instead, talked business with Soghanalian. I grabbed a nearby, small video camera and turned it on, hoping to capture Ping’s pitch to the arms dealer.
Ping enthusiastically described the new missiles he wanted Soghanalian to peddle. The missiles were cheap ($60,000) and so were the launch and support equipment. The missiles were as good as any in the U.S. arsenal and could be equipped with nuclear, chemical, biological or conventional warheads. Ping told Soghanalian that components for hundreds of the missiles had been shipped to Iran and, within weeks, would be operational against all shipping in the Gulf. The Chinese wanted Soghanalian to sell the systems throughout the world. (This meeting took place after China had promised the Clinton administration that it would cease construction of these systems.)
Understanding that these missiles represented a real threat to our own Navy—and seeing the potential for a great story—I quickly grabbed Ping’s files and missile brochures when Soghanalian and Ping left the apartment for lunch. I then urged Veronique to help me copy the material. Reluctantly, she agreed. While we were in a back office making copies, we heard the front door open down the hall. The arms dealer and Ping had returned because Soghanalian had forgotten his wallet. I quickly went to the kitchen and reached for a bottled water. I followed Soghanalian and Ping out, raced to my hotel the Mermoz, and called a U.S. weapons expert who was a longtime source. I asked him, “How many C-802s does the U.S. think Iran has?” The source called back a few minutes later with the answer: “Less than a dozen.” I told him that the Chinese had told Soghanalian, in my presence, that China had shipped key parts for just under 200 missiles. There was silence at the other end of the phone. My source asked: “Can you leave Paris for Washington?” I said that I had another few days of work.
Late that night I received a call from the front desk with a message to meet Veronique at a café around the corner from the Israeli Embassy in Paris. Over a drink, she handed me Ping’s file and said: “The French are involved in this missile deal. You need to be very careful. They are China’s hidden partner.”
My Pentagon weapons-expert source had suggested that I have no more conversations about this matter on French telephones. The source said the missiles represented a very serious situation that was “previously unknown to us.”
I did not open the envelope from Veronique until I was on the plane for Washington. It was the C-802 file and more. The file contained the information I needed to uncover a vortex of lies going back to the Reagan/Bush era.
In Washington, I set up a place for a secure meeting with my Pentagon source and began calling several longtime CIA sources. All the sources had spent years on Persian and Middle Eastern issues and were shaken by what I had learned. I asked one CIA official what the United States knew about the C-802. The answer was not reassuring: “The U.S. doesn’t have one. We don’t know how to defend [against] it.”
The next day, I had a meeting scheduled with Don Thasher, an ABC 20/20 producer, who had asked me for help with what I thought was an unrelated defense story. Over lunch Thrasher said he was working on a story about how secret Army computer research done on the Army Research Laboratory supercomputers ended up in the hands of Saddam Hussein to improve the accuracy and extend the range of his Scud missiles. Don wanted to know if I had a source who could talk about that. I said that Soghanalian might be able to help. I told him that, coincidentally, I had run into a more current and important story and laid out the details for him. Thrasher said, “Let’s leave for France and get Sarkis on camera.”
I returned to Paris, armed with details of everything the government then knew about the C-802, which was not much. Over the next five days, I would learn that in the early 1980s Sarkis had arranged for Iraq to use the U.S. Army’s supercomputers at Aberdeen, Maryland to redesign its Scud missiles. Sarkis had hired the renowned weapons designer Gerald Bull on behalf of Iraq. Bull, who had long before worked at the Army Research Laboratory prior to stints in prison, had close relations with the bureaucrats in charge of the laboratory. Coincidentally, Aberdeen had done the work on an early Israeli cruise missile called the Sampson. Information from that project, along with other sensitive material, was now in the hands of the Chinese and had gone into the improved C-802. Sarkis Soghanalian (middle). Photo: Joseph Trento
Sarkis Soghanalian (middle). Photo: Joseph Trento
Soghanalian had fired Bull for not producing after Iraq had paid him millions of dollars. But after Sarkis broke with Saddam in 1988, the Iraqis brought Bull back. Bull worked on the infamous Iraqi “supergun” until he was murdered in Brussels in 1990. Soghanalian said that Bull was not killed by the Israelis, as many suspected, but by the Iraqis who realized Bull had swindled them.
Soghanalian told ABC that Bull had free access to the Army computer lab and had even placed visiting Chinese scientists in the secret laboratory over the years. During the week Thrasher and I spent with Soghanalian, the arms dealer met again with M. Ping. This time Ping had a new enticement for Soghanalian. Ping brought with him plans for a yacht that had been built for the president of China for the ceremony celebrating the handover of Hong Kong. It was bigger than Queen Elizabeth’s yacht, Britannia. Ping explained that the Chinese were offering the yacht to Soghanalian at a “special price” as an inducement to represent its new line of Chinese artillery and cruise missiles.
Veronique Pacquier, Soghanalian’s French intelligence-supplied assistant, was not getting along with the arms dealer. He ordered her not to speak to me or Thrasher any further. Two days before we were scheduled to fly back to the United States, she called me at the Mermoz for another late night meeting. We met at a café where she gave me a list of all the Chinese officials with whom the arms dealer had done business, including the woman who ran Chinese intelligence in Paris.
The Sunday before I was to fly home to Washington, Soghanalian asked me to stop by his apartment. When I arrived, I found the rotund arms dealer in a pensive mood. He wanted to talk on the noisy balcony, which had amazing views of Paris, obviously worried about electronic listening devices.
“This missile you expressed concern about is worse than you know,” Sarkis said. “The Chinese have put a greater range on it than they have claimed. They are getting over-horizon capability for the weapon. . . . I am in a bad position here. I have to do what I am doing. There are things I can’t tell you, but tell the Navy that I can still get them an 802 through Jordan. All I need is the cost. $60,000. They can take it apart, study it, and then I will deliver it to the king.”
I brought the offer back to my sources in Washington. They, in turn, took the offer to the Pentagon’s non-proliferation office. That office quickly went to the Office of Naval Intelligence but got no response. They then went to the Directorate of Operations at the CIA. The CIA said that because Soghanalian was a convicted felon, they did not want to deal with him. My source was puzzled when the CIA officer called him back a few days later and said that the CIA believed that Soghanalian was retired and living in Miami. Not surprisingly, their intelligence was neither up to date nor accurate.
Independently, I obtained documents from sources in and out of the United States that indicated that the DOD and CIA had little knowledge of the C-802’s design. With this information I began to put together a picture of what had happened.
Not long after the Vincennes incident in 1988, the Iranian Revolutionary Council turned to terrorism through Libya and Hezbollah for retaliation. Simultaneously, they began to explore ways to increase Iranian defenses against U.S. ships. The first efforts included increased purchases of advanced Chinese Silkworm missiles.
China proposed to Iran that they enter into a contract for a new defense, an anti-ship cruise missile. I was not surprised that China and Iran, both embargoed countries, would work together on such a project. But two components for the missile involved technologies beyond China’s capability. A more technologically advanced nation had to be recruited to obtain these crucial elements. That nation was France. Message traffic intercepted by the United States and Britain through the ECHELON eavesdropping system proved that China began working with France in the late 1980s to supply parts for Chinese weapons systems. Subsequently, French companies agreed to supply precision parts that China could not produce on its own. China also enjoyed a relationship with Israel that gave both countries great advantages in weapons development. After Beijing crushed the pro-democracy movement in 1989, the United States and Europe embargoed arms shipments and technology to China. France ignored the embargo. So did Israel.
Israel and Iraq had two things in common. Both had a close relationship with China and both had exclusive access to the U.S. Army Laboratory at Aderdeen, home to our main weapons supercomputers at the time. Because China was working closely with the Iraqis (and Gerald Bull who had close connections to the laboratory), technology from the lab got into the hands of the Chinese.
By 2001 the Chinese had stopped shipping C-802s to Iran, but Iran had, by then, reversed engineered the missile and was successfully building a much more advanced version than China had in its own arsenal. The anti-ship missile can travel about 60 kilometers, has over-the-horizon radar capability and can carry a conventional, nuclear or chemical warhead. The C-802 can accelerate from zero to mach one in seconds. What gives Navy defenders against the missile problems is that a few kilometers before it encounters the target, the C-802 descends from an altitude of between 75 to 100 feet down to wave top, about nine feet above sea level before it punctures the hull of a ship. It is that kind of maneuverability that makes the C-802 so difficult to defend against, according to Navy weapons experts.
I learned that the Iranians felt cheated by the Chinese on the C-802 deal and had hired a notorious Syrian arms dealer to represent them against the Chinese. I obtained the official CIA biography of the arms dealer Monzer al-Kassar, who had been brought into the deal before Soghanalian. French intelligence, distrustful of al-Kassar, instructed Soghanalian to work with the Chinese after their falling out with Iran. The USS Cole. Photo: US Navy
The USS Cole. Photo: US Navy
On October 12, 2000, Soghanalian called from Jordon. The USS Cole had been attacked by terrorists in Yemen. Seventeen sailors had been killed, and the ship nearly sank. The Navy was providing no close-up pictures of the extensive 40-foot hole in the middle of the ship near the waterline. Mysteriously, a series of close-up Cole pictures came to me by e-mail. They were low resolution, but the damage was extensive. By the time I received the pictures and made them available to the media, the U.S. government had blamed Al Qaeda for the attack, saying they had used high explosives.
Navy sources said the explosive pattern looked like another kind of shaped explosive had caused the damage. I called Soghanalian and asked him to see what he could learn from his own sources in Yemen, where he had done many arms deals. I also asked him if he had supplied the mysterious pictures of the Cole. He said he had not.
A few days later Soghanalian called me back and said the Yemeni authorities said “the explosives used were a warhead from a C-802 missile.” The C-802 can be launched from patrol boats, trucks or helicopters. Soghanalian insisted the explosives the terrorists detonated against the hull of the USS Cole were not, as widely believed, some bundled plastic explosives but a C-802 warhead.
It seemed unlikely to me that Iran would sell such a valuable asset so easily traced back to them to Al Qaeda. Sarkis insisted the “Iranians are not that stupid and neither are the Chinese.” I asked him who had access to a C-802 warhead with ties to Al Qaeda. “The Israelis and French think it is Monzer.” Soghanalian said al-Kassar “has a history of selling to Hezbollah and other terrorist groups, especially in Latin America.” I called al-Kassar in Marbella, Spain, and asked him for an interview about his work on the C-802. He refused to talk to me and said, “I do not discuss customer business.” One of his best customers had close relations with Iran and Hezbollah.
Al- Kassar’s role may now be known to the U.S. government. He was arrested in Spain with his arms dealing partner during a Drug Enforcement Agency sting in 2008. He was extradited to the United States on the condition that he not be given a life sentence and on February 8, 2009, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison for selling missiles to FARC rebels in Colombia so they could shoot down U.S. helicopters.
It's like a can full of worms screwing.
One thing does seem to resonate with the FR thread on Luttwak's book about Byzantine intelligence: The CIA seems not to be attentive or on the ball.
Is someone telling us, in a mosaic sort of way, "heads up -- you're about to get hit because CIA is oblivious"?
Interesting...
Thanks sukhoi-30mki.
ping
Great read, regardless of how much of it is true or not. Very interesting.
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