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Dr. Kay Had Maps with Coordinates of
WMD Hiding Places in Syria
DEBKAfile Exclusive
Report and Analysis
February 2, 2004, 3:33 PM
(GMT+02:00)
Setting up an inquiry commission is
the political leader’s favorite dodge for burying an
embarrassing problem until the pursuit dies down.
President George W. Bush will this week bow to
election-year pressures from Democrats and his own
Republicans alike and sign an executive order to
investigate US intelligence failings regarding Saddam
Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction on the eve of war.
Both his senior war partners, the Australian and British
prime ministers, face the same public clamor ever since
WMD hunter Dr. David Kay resigned, declaring there were
probably no stockpiles in Iraq and “we were all wrong.”
At the same time, the CIA and other
intelligence bodies accused of flawed performance do not
look particularly dismayed by the prospect of facing
these probes. They point to the cause of the political
flap, Dr Kay, as contradicting himself more than once in
the numerous interviews he has given since he quit as
head of the Iraq Survey Group.
In the last 24 hours, DEBKAfile
went back to its most reliable intelligence sources in
the US and the Middle East, some of whom were actively
involved in the subject before and during the Iraq war.
They all stuck to their guns. As they have consistently
informed DEBKAfile and DEBKA-Net-Weekly
, Saddam Hussein’s unconventional weapons programs were
present on the eve of the American-led invasion and
quantities of forbidden materials were spirited out to
Syria. Whatever Dr. Kay may choose to say now, at least
one of these sources knows at first hand that the former
ISG director received dates, types of vehicles and
destinations covering the transfers of Iraqi WMD to
Syria.
Indeed the US administration and its
intelligence agencies, as well as Dr Kay, were all
provided with Syrian maps marked with the coordinates of
the secret weapons storage sites. The largest one is
located at Qaratshuk at the heart of a desolate and
unfrequented region edged with marshes, south of the
Syrian town of Al Qamishli near the place where the
Iraqi, Syrian and Turkish frontiers converge; smaller
quantities are hidden in the vast plain between Al
Qamishli and Az Zawr, and a third is under the ground of
the Lebanese Beqaa Valley on the Syrian border.
These transfers were first revealed
by DEBKAfile and DEBKA-Net-Weekly
in February 2003 a month before the war. We also
discovered that a Syrian engineering corps unit was
detailed to dig their hiding places in northern Syria
and the Lebanese Beqaa.
A senior intelligence source
confirmed this again to DEBKAfile,
stressing: “Dr. Kay knows exactly what was contained in
the tanker trucks crossing from Iraq into Syria in
January 2003. His job gave him access to satellite
photos of the convoys; the instruments used by spy
planes would have identified dangerous substances and
tracked them to their underground nests. There exists a
precise record of the movement of chemical and
biological substances from Iraq to Syria.”
Armed with this knowledge, Kay was
able to say firmly to The Telegraph’s Con Coughlin on
January 25: “We are not talking about a large stockpile
of weapons. But we know from some of the interrogations
of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to
Syria before the war, including some components of
Saddam’s WMD program. Precisely what went to Syria and
what has happened to it, is a major issue that needs to
be resolved.
Yet in later interviews, the last
being on February 1 with Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s Late
Edition - and for reasons known only to himself - Kay
turned vague, claiming there was no way of knowing what
those convoys contained because of the lack of Syrian
cooperation.
What caused his change of tune?
Since he began talking to the media,
interested politicians have been rephrasing his
assertions on the probable absence of stockpiles, by
dropping the “probable” and transmuting “no stockpiles”,
to “no WMD.” These adjustments have produced a telling
argument against Bush’s justification for war and a
slogan that has deeply eroded public confidence in US
credibility in America and other countries. Tony Blair
and John Howard will no doubt set up outside inquiry
commissions like Bush. In Israel too, opposition
factions have seized the opportunity of arguing that if
Israel’s pre-war intelligence on Iraq’s arsenal was
flawed, so too was its evaluation of Yasser Arafat’s
role as the engine of Palestinian suicidal terror. The
fact that intelligence was not flawed - UN inspectors
dismantled missiles and Iraq fired missiles at Kuwait -
is easily shouted down in the current climate.
By the same token, no connection is
drawn between the Iraqi WMD issue and the grounding this
week of transatlantic flights from Europe to America by
credible intelligence of an al Qaeda plot. The
Washington Post spelled the threat out as entailing the
possible spread of anthrax or smallpox germs in the
cabin or planting of poison chemicals in the cargo.
It was also suggested that suicidal
pilots might crash an airliner on an American city and
drop payloads of toxic chemicals and bacteria.
Two questions present themselves
here. One: if minute quantities of weaponized biological
and chemical substances dropped by Osama bin Laden’s
killers from the air are menacing enough to trigger a
major alert, why would Saddam need stockpiles to pose an
imminent threat to world security and his immediate
neighbors? Would not a couple of test tubes serve his
purpose? Two: Where did al Qaeda get hold of the WMD
presumed to be in its possession and who trained its
operatives in their use?
Once again, DEBKAfile’s
senior intelligence sources recall earlier revelations.
The ex-Jordanian terror master Mussab al Zarqawi is key
director of al Qaeda’s chemical, biological and
radioactive warfare program. In late 2000, we reported
him operating WMD laboratories under the supervision of
Iraqi intelligence in the northern Iraqi town of Bayara.
Since then, the same Zarqawi has masterminded some of
the deadliest terrorist attacks in Iraq, such as the
blasts at the Jordanian embassy and the murder of
Italian troops in Nassariya.
Zarqawi is and was the embodiment of
the link between Saddam and al Qaeda going back four
years, long before the American invasion of Iraq - which
indicatges the source of Osama bin Laden’s
unconventional weapons purchases.
In another interview, the former ISG
director expanded on his statement that Iraq was falling
apart “from depravity and corruption.” The Saddam
regime, he said, had lost control. Saddam ran projects
privately and unsupervised, while his scientists were
free to fake programs.
A senior DEBKAfile
source commented on this assertion:
”That’s one way of describing the
situation – and not only on war’s eve but during all of
Saddam Hussein’s years of ruling Iraq. We are looking at
institutionalized corruption of a type unfamiliar in the
West; it was built up in a very special way in Iraq.”
The country was not falling apart, but it was being
looted systematically. Just imagine, he said, Saddam and
the two sons the Americans killed in July 2003 had their
own secret printing press for running off Iraqi dinars
and other currencies including dollars for their own
personal use. The central bank went on issuing currency
in the normal way, unaware that it was being undermined
from within by the ruler’s private press. “Saddam’s
corruption was structured, a hierarchical pyramid with
the ruler, his sons and inner circle at the top and the
petty thieves at the bottom making off with worthless
paper.”
Some of our sources challenged two
more of Dr. Kay’s assertions to Wolf Blitzer: a) After
1998 when the UN left, there was no human intelligence
on the ground, and b) “There were no regular sources of
information, not enough dots to connect.” If this is
true, how does he explain another statement in the same
interview that the US entered the war on the basis of “a
broad consensus among intelligence services – not just
the CIA, but also Britain, France and Russia?”
On what did this consensus rest if
there were no informants on the ground?
And furthermore, how were the
American and British invading armies able to advance at
such speed from Kuwait to Baghdad with no obstructions
and without blowing up a single bridge, road or other
utility, including oil fields, ports and military air
fields? Every obstruction had clearly been removed from
their path by intelligence agents on the ground ,
who reached understandings with local Iraqi commanders
before the war began.
In the face of this evidence, the
question must be asked: Why does Bush take David Kay’s
assaults and demands with such stoicism instead of going
after Damascus - as defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld
has proposed from time to time?
One theory is that he does not trust
any of the evidence. Saddam was famous among UN
inspectors for his deception techniques; he may have
practiced a double deception. Hard and fast facts are
likewise hard to come by in Damascus. Above all, Bush
may simply be determined to adhere to his plan of action
come what may, whatever crises happen to cross his path,
in the confidence that his path will lead to a November
victory at the polls.
Three inquiry commissions will most
likely be set up to examine the American, British and
Australian intelligence assessments of Saddam’s weapons
of destruction in the run-up to the Iraq war. In the
meantime, the actual weapons will continue to molder
undisturbed in the ground of Syria and Lebanon
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