Iraq's chemists bought anthrax from America
(Filed: 18/10/2001)
Saddam's bio-warfare scientists were trained in Britain and sent off for bacteria by mail order, reports Roger Highfield
THE intelligence community has focused on Iraq as a possible source of the anthrax used in the bio-terrorist attacks in America.
If Iraq is the culprit, it is likely that Saddam Hussein would have used one of 21 strains of the anthrax bacterium which his scientists bought by mail order from America in the 1980s.
In a further irony, most of the leading scientists in the Iraqi bio-warfare programme, including its project chief, Rihab Rashida Taha, were trained in Britain.
In 1995, three years before the United Nations special commission weapons inspectors were forced to pull out of the country, Iraq admitted that it had produced 2,000 gallons of anthrax.
The UN destroyed most of those supplies, but officials believe that Baghdad hid four times as much as was discovered.
Iraq still has the best biological expertise in the region and experts agree that, since the UN inspectors left, Saddam has been back in the bio-warfare business.
Britain has played an unwitting role in arming Iraq, although a spokesman for the successor to Unscom - the UN monitoring, verification and inspection commission - said: "There is not an awful lot of difference between making vaccines and making bio-weapons - it is a bit unfair to mark those who supplied Iraq as guilty."
British companies exported to Iraq large quantities of the growth media in which biological weapons are cultivated and its leading scientists were trained here.
The covert biological weapons research programme was directed by Gen Amer Saadi, who obtained a masters degree in chemistry at Oxford, and Rihab Taha, who studied microbiology at the University of East Anglia, said Richard Spertzel, the UN's former chief biological inspector.
Overall supervision was conducted by Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, the director of Iraq's Military-Industrial Corp, and Ahmed Murthada, a British-trained engineer.
The country's biological weapons programme is believed to have started in 1974 at Salman Pak in the al-Hazan Ibn al-Hathem Institute, where Dr Taha arrived in 1980.
Five years later, Salman Pak was taken over by the Technical Research Centre and, in 1987, Dr Taha moved her team into the new al-Hakem facility at Salman Pak, where construction of facilities for production of anthrax began, among other agents.
At the time of the Gulf war, Iraq later acknowledged the large-scale production of anthrax spores and to have filled 50 bombs and five missile warheads with anthrax.
However, even in its "full, final and complete declaration" regarding its BW programme, submitted in September 1997, Baghdad continued to present the UN weapons inspectors with a false picture.
Iraq approached Porton Down in Britain for the Ames strain of the anthrax bacterium, said Dr Spertzel. "That [request] was fortunately denied," he said.
Iraq obtained much of its anthrax supply from the American Type Culture Collection. Between 1985 and 1989, it obtained at least 21 strains of anthrax from ATCC and about 15 other class III pathogens, the bacteria that pose an extreme risk to human health.
One strain had a British military pedigree and three of the other strains were listed as coming from the American military's biological warfare programme.
This came as a shock, said Dr Spertzel, although he added that at that time the ATCC had a policy to supply laboratories with credible reputations. The anthrax strains were ordered by the University of Baghdad and then diverted to the bio-warfare effort.
Mohamed Atta, the September 11 hijacker, reportedly had encounters with an Iraqi operative in Prague as recently as April and there have been reports of meetings between Iraqi agents and associates of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.
However, Dr Spertzel added that what took place in these encounters, and whether bio-warfare was discussed, was a matter of speculation.
It's interesting that in the '98 fas.org reference, Kelly is worried about the spraying of bio weapons by Iraq, but in recent testimony, he told Parliament that he could have told the BBC reporter there was only "a 30% chance" Iraq had WMD. Another Ritter maybe?