The Central Intelligence Agency, working with American troops during the occupation of Iraq,
repeatedly purchased nerve-agent rockets from a secretive Iraqi seller,
part of a previously undisclosed effort to ensure that old chemical weapons remaining in Iraq did not fall into the hands of terrorists or militant groups, according to current and former American officials.
The
extraordinary arms purchase plan, known as Operation Avarice, began in
2005 and continued into 2006, and the American military deemed it a
nonproliferation success. It led to the United States’ acquiring and
destroying at least 400 Borak rockets, one of the internationally
condemned chemical weapons that Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government
manufactured in the 1980s but that were not accounted for by United Nations inspections mandated after the 1991 Persian Gulf war.
Weapons Bought
The buying of nerve-agent rockets from an Iraqi seller in
2006 was the most significant recovery of chemical weapons until that
point in the Iraq War.
A New York Times investigation published in October found that the military had recovered thousands of old chemical warheads and shells in Iraq
and that Americans and Iraqis had been wounded by them, but the
government kept much of this information secret, from the public and
troops alike.
These
munitions were remnants of an Iraqi special weapons program that was
abandoned long before the 2003 invasion, and they turned up sporadically
during the American occupation in buried caches, as part of improvised
bombs or on black markets.
The
potency of sarin samples from the purchases, as well as tightly held
assessments about risks the munitions posed, buttresses veterans’ claims
that during the war the military did not share important intelligence
about battlefield perils with those at risk or maintain an adequate
medical system for treating victims of chemical exposure.
The
purchases were made from a sole Iraqi source who was eager to sell his
stock, officials said. The amount of money that the United States paid
for the rockets is not publicly known, and neither are the affiliations
of the seller.
Most
of the officials and veterans who spoke about the program did so
anonymously because, they said, the details remain classified. The
C.I.A. declined to comment. The Pentagon, citing continuing secrecy
about the effort, did not answer written questions and acknowledged its
role only obliquely.
“Without
speaking to any specific programs, it is fair to say that together with
our coalition partners in Iraq, the U.S. military worked diligently to
find and remove weapons that could be used against our troops and the
Iraqi people,” Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said
in a written statement.
Retired
Army Lt. Gen. Richard P. Zahner, the top American military intelligence
officer in Iraq in 2005 and 2006, said he did not know of any other
intelligence program as successful in reducing the chemical weapons that
remained in Iraq after the American-led invasion.
Through
the C.I.A.’s purchases, General Zahner said, hundreds of weapons with
potential use for terrorists were quietly taken off the market. “This
was a timely and effective initiative by our national intelligence
partners that negated the use of these unique munitions,” he said.
Not
long after Operation Avarice had secured its 400th rocket, in 2006,
American troops were exposed several times to other chemical weapons.
Many of these veterans said that they had not been warned by their units
about the risks posed by the chemical weapons and that their medical care and follow-up were substandard, in part because military doctors seemed unaware that chemical munitions remained in Iraq.
In some cases, victims of exposure said, officers forbade them to discuss what had occurred. The Pentagon now says hundreds of other veterans reported on health-screening forms that they believed they too had been exposed during the war.
Aaron
Stein, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, said
the belated acknowledgment of a chemical-rocket purchases, as well as
the potentially worrisome laboratory analysis of the related sarin
samples, raised questions about the military’s commitment to the
well-being of those it sent to war.
“If
we were aware of these compounds, and as it became clear over the
course of the war that our troops had been exposed to them, why wasn’t
more done to protect the guys on the ground?” he said. “It speaks to the
broader failure.”
The
first purchase under Operation Avarice, according to veterans and
officials familiar with the effort, occurred in early September 2005,
when an Iraqi man provided a single Borak. The warhead presented
intelligence analysts with fresh insight into a longstanding mystery.
During
its war against Iran in the 1980s, Iraq had fielded multiple variants
of 122-millimeter rockets designed to disperse nerve agents.
The
Borak warheads, which are roughly 40 inches long and attach to a motor
compatible with the common Grad multiple rocket launcher system, were
domestically produced. But no clear picture ever emerged of how many
Iraq manufactured or how many it fired during the Iran-Iraq war.
In confidential declarations in the 1990s to the United Nations,
Iraq gave shifting production numbers, up to 18,500. It also claimed to
have destroyed its remaining stock before international inspectors
arrived after the Persian Gulf war.
No
clear evidence ever surfaced to support Iraq’s claim, which meant that
questions about whether Boraks remained were “carried forward as one of
the big uncertainties,” said Charles A. Duelfer, a senior United Nations inspector at the time who later led the C.I.A.’s Iraq Survey Group. There was “a big gap in the information,” he said.
The
mystery deepened in 2004 and early 2005, when the United States
recovered 17 Boraks. The circumstances of those recoveries are not
publicly known. Then came Operation Avarice and its promise of a larger
haul. It began when the Iraqi seller delivered his first Borak, which
the military secretly flew to the United States for examination.
The Iraqi seller would then periodically notify the C.I.A. in Baghdad that he had more for sale, officials said.
The
agency worked with the Army intelligence battalion and chemical weapons
specialists, who would fly by helicopter to Iraq’s southeast and meet
the man for exchanges.
The
handoffs varied in size, including one of more than 150 warheads.
American ordnance disposal technicians promptly destroyed most of them
by detonation, the officials said, but some were taken to Camp Slayer,
by Baghdad’s airport, for further testing.
One
veteran familiar with the program said warheads were tested by putting
them in “an old cast-iron bathtub” and drilling through their metal
exteriors to extract the liquid sarin within.
The
analysis of sarin samples from 2005 found that the purity level reached
13 percent — higher than expected given the relatively low quality and
instability of Iraq’s sarin production in the 1980s, officials said. Samples from Boraks recovered in 2004 had contained concentrations no higher than 4 percent.
The
new data became grounds for concern. “Borak rockets will be more
hazardous than previously assessed,” one internal report noted. It added
a warning: the use of a Borak in an improvised bomb “could effectively
disperse the sarin nerve agent.”
An internal record from 2006 referred to “agent purity of up to 25 percent for recovered unitary sarin weapons.”
Cheryl
Rofer, a retired chemist for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, said
such purity levels were plausible, because Iraq’s sarin batches varied
in quality and the contents of warheads may have achieved an equilibrium
as the contents degraded.
Military
officials said that because the seller was a C.I.A. source they did not
know his name or whether he was a smuggler, a former or current Iraqi
official, a front for Iraq’s government, or something else. But as he
continued to provide rockets, his activities drew more interest.
The
Americans believed the weapons came from near Amarah, a city not far
from Iran. It was not clear, however, if rockets had been retrieved from
a former forward firing point used by Iraq’s military during the
Iran-Iraq War, or from one of the ammunition depots around the city.
Neither
the C.I.A. nor the soldiers persuaded the man to reveal his source of
supply, the officials said. “They were pushing to see where did it
originate from, was there a mother lode?” General Zahner said.
Eventually, a veteran familiar with the purchases said, “the guy was getting a little cocky.”
At least once he scammed his handlers, selling rockets filled with something other than sarin.
Then
in 2006, the veteran said, the Iraqi drove a truckload of warheads to
Baghdad and “called the intel guys to tell them he was going to turn
them over to the insurgents unless they picked them up.”
Not
long after that, the veteran said, the relationship appeared to dry up,
ending purchases that had ensured “a lot of chemical weapons were
destroyed.”
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