Iraq, gli Usa gettano la spugna: niente armi di distruzione di massa

[Carlo Gubitosa <c.gubitosa@peacelink.it>]

Frustrated, U.S. Arms Team to Leave Iraq

Task Force Unable To Find Any Weapons

By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 11, 2003; Page A01

BAGHDAD -- The group directing all known U.S. search efforts for weapons of 
mass destruction in Iraq is winding down operations without finding proof 
that President Saddam Hussein kept clandestine stocks of outlawed arms, 
according to participants.

The 75th Exploitation Task Force, as the group is formally known, has been 
described from the start as the principal component of the U.S. plan to 
discover and display forbidden Iraqi weapons. The group's departure, 
expected next month, marks a milestone in frustration for a major declared 
objective of the war.

Leaders of Task Force 75's diverse staff -- biologists, chemists, arms 
treaty enforcers, nuclear operators, computer and document experts, and 
special forces troops -- arrived with high hopes of early success. They 
said they expected to find what Secretary of State Colin L. Powell 
described at the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 -- hundreds of tons of 
biological and chemical agents, missiles and rockets to deliver the agents, 
and evidence of an ongoing program to build a nuclear bomb.

Scores of fruitless missions broke that confidence, many task force members 
said in interviews.

Army Col. Richard McPhee, who will close down the task force next month, 
said he took seriously U.S. intelligence warnings on the eve of war that 
Hussein had given "release authority" to subordinates in command of 
chemical weapons. "We didn't have all these people in [protective] suits" 
for nothing, he said. But if Iraq thought of using such weapons, "there had 
to have been something to use. And we haven't found it. . . . Books will be 
written on that in the intelligence community for a long time."

Army Col. Robert Smith, who leads the site assessment teams from the 
Defense Threat Reduction Agency, said task force leaders no longer "think 
we're going to find chemical rounds sitting next to a gun." He added, 
"That's what we came here for, but we're past that."

Motivated and accomplished in their fields, task force members found 
themselves lacking vital tools. They consistently found targets identified 
by Washington to be inaccurate, looted and burned, or both. Leaders and 
members of five of the task force's eight teams, and some senior officers 
guiding them, said the weapons hunters were going through the motions now 
to "check the blocks" on a prewar list.

U.S. Central Command began the war with a list of 19 top weapons sites. 
Only two remain to be searched. Another list enumerated 68 top "non-WMD 
sites," without known links to special weapons but judged to have the 
potential to offer clues. Of those, the tally at midweek showed 45 surveyed 
without success.

Task Force 75's experience, and its impending dissolution after seven weeks 
in action, square poorly with assertions in Washington that the search has 
barely begun.

In his declaration of victory aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 
President Bush said, "We've begun the search for hidden chemical and 
biological weapons, and already know of hundreds of sites that will be 
investigated." Stephen A. Cambone, undersecretary of defense for 
intelligence, told reporters at the Pentagon on Wednesday that U.S. forces 
had surveyed only 70 of the roughly 600 potential weapons facilities on the 
"integrated master site list" prepared by U.S. intelligence agencies before 
the war.

But here on the front lines of the search, the focus is on a smaller number 
of high-priority sites, and the results are uniformly disappointing, 
participants said.

"Why are we doing any planned targets?" Army Chief Warrant Officer Richard 
L. Gonzales, leader of Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha, said in disgust to a 
colleague during last Sunday's nightly report of weapons sites and survey 
results. "Answer me that. We know they're empty."

Survey teams have combed laboratories and munitions plants, bunkers and 
distilleries, bakeries and vaccine factories, file cabinets and holes in 
the ground where tipsters advised them to dig. Most of the assignments came 
with classified "target folders" describing U.S. intelligence leads. 
Others, known as the "ad hocs," came to the task force's attention by way 
of plausible human sources on the ground.

The hunt will continue under a new Iraq Survey Group, which the Bush 
administration has said is a larger team. But the organizers are drawing 
down their weapons staffs for lack of work, and adding expertise for other 
missions.

Interviews and documents describing the transition from Task Force 75 to 
the new group show that site survey teams, the advance scouts of the arms 
search, will reduce from six to two their complement of experts in missile 
technology and biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. A little-known 
nuclear special operations group from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, 
called the Direct Support Team, has already sent home a third of its 
original complement, and plans to cut the remaining team by half.

"We thought we would be much more gainfully employed, or intensively 
employed, than we were," said Navy Cmdr. David Beckett, who directs special 
nuclear programs for the team.

State-of-the-art biological and chemical labs, shrunk to fit standard cargo 
containers, came equipped with enough supplies to run thousands of tests 
using DNA fingerprinting and mass spectrometry. They have been called upon 
no more than a few dozen times, none with a confirmed hit. The labs' 
director, who asked not to be identified, said some of his scientists were 
also going home.

Even the sharpest skeptics do not rule out that the hunt may eventually 
find evidence of banned weapons. The most significant unknown is what U.S. 
interrogators are learning from senior Iraqi scientists, military 
industrial managers and Iraqi government leaders now in custody. If the 
nonconventional arms exist, some of them ought to know. Publicly, the Bush 
administration has declined to discuss what the captured Iraqis are saying. 
In private, U.S. officials provide conflicting reports, with some hinting 
at important disclosures. Cambone also said U.S. forces have seized "troves 
of documents" and are "surveying them, triaging them" for clues.

At former presidential palaces in the Baghdad area, where Task Force 75 
will soon hand control to the Iraq Survey Group, leaders and team members 
refer to the covert operators as "secret squirrels." If they are making 
important progress, it has not led to "actionable" targets, according to 
McPhee and other task force members.

McPhee, an artillery brigade commander from Oklahoma who was assigned to 
the task force five months ago, reflected on the weapons hunt as the sun 
set outside his improvised sleeping quarters, a cot and mosquito net set 
down in the wreckage of a marble palace annex. He smoked a cigar, but 
without the peace of mind he said the evening ritual usually brings.

"My unit has not found chemical weapons," he said. "That's a fact. And I'm 
47 years old, having a birthday in one of Saddam Hussein's palaces on a 
lake in the middle of Baghdad. It's surreal. The whole thing is surreal.

"Am I convinced that what we did in this fight was viable? I tell you from 
the bottom of my heart: We stopped Saddam Hussein in his WMD programs," he 
said, using the abbreviation for weapons of mass destruction. "Do I know 
where they are? I wish I did . . . but we will find them. Or not. I don't 
know. I'm being honest here."

Later in the conversation, he flung the unfinished cigar into the lake with 
somewhat more force than required.

Team members explain their disappointing results, in part, as a consequence 
of a slow advance. Cautious ground commanders sometimes held weapons 
hunters away from the front, they said, and the task force had no 
helicopters of its own.

"My personal feeling is we waited too long and stayed too far back," said 
Christopher Kowal, an expert in computer forensics who worked for Mobile 
Exploitation Team Charlie until last week.

'The Bear Wasn't There'


But two other factors -- erroneous intelligence and poor site security -- 
dealt the severest blows to the hunt, according to leaders and team members 
at every level.

Some information known in Washington, such as inventories of nuclear sites 
under supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, did not reach 
the teams assigned to visit them. But what the U.S. government did not know 
mattered more than what it did know. Intelligence agencies had a far less 
accurate picture of Iraq's weapons program than participants believed at 
the outset of their search, they recalled.

"We came to bear country, we came loaded for bear and we found out the bear 
wasn't here," said a Defense Intelligence Agency officer here who asked not 
to be identified by name. "The indications and warnings were there. The 
assessments were solid."

"Okay, that paradigm didn't exist," he added. "The question before was, 
where are Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological weapons? What is the 
question now? That is what we are trying to sort out."

One thing analysts must reconsider, he said, is: "What was the nature of 
the threat?"

By far the greatest impediment to the weapons hunt, participants said, was 
widespread looting of Iraq's government and industrial facilities. At 
nearly every top-tier "sensitive site" the searchers reached, intruders had 
sacked and burned the evidence that weapons hunters had counted on sifting. 
As recently as last Tuesday, nearly a month after Hussein's fall from 
power, soldiers under the Army's V Corps command had secured only 44 of the 
85 top potential weapons sites in the Baghdad area and 153 of the 372 
considered most important to rebuilding Iraq's government and economy.

McPhee saw early in the war that the looters were stripping his targets 
before he could check them. He cut the planning cycle for new missions -- 
the time between first notice and launch -- from 96 to 24 hours. "What we 
found," he said, was that "as the maneuver units hit a target they had to 
move on, even 24 hours was too slow. By the time we got there, a lot of 
things were gone."

Short and powerfully built, McPhee has spent his adult life as a combat 
officer. He calls his soldiers "bubbas" and worries about their mail. "It 
ain't good" that suspect sites are unprotected, he said, but he refused to 
criticize fighting units who left evidence unguarded.

"You've got two corps commanders being told, 'Get to Baghdad,' and, oh, by 
the way, 'When you run across sensitive sites, you have to secure them,' " 
he said. "Do you secure all those sites, or do you get to Baghdad? You've 
got limited force structure and you've got 20 missions."

A low point came when looters destroyed what was meant to be McPhee's 
headquarters in the Iraqi capital. The 101st Airborne Division had used the 
complex, a munitions factory called the Al Qadisiyah State Establishment, 
before rolling north to Mosul. When a reporter came calling, looking for 
Task Force 75, looters were busily stripping it clean. They later set it 
ablaze.

An Altered Mission


The search teams arrived in Iraq "looking for the smoking gun," Smith said, 
and now the mission is more diffuse -- general intelligence-gathering on 
subjects ranging from crimes against humanity and prisoners of war to 
Hussein's links with terrorists.

At the peak of the effort, all four mobile exploitation teams were devoted 
nearly full time to weapons of mass destruction. By late last month, two of 
the four had turned to other questions. This week, MET Alpha, Gonzales's 
team, also left the hunt, at least temporarily. It parted with its chemical 
and biological experts, added linguists and document exploiters and recast 
itself as an intelligence team. It will search for weapons if leads turn 
up, but lately it has focused on Iraqi covert operations abroad and the 
theft of Jewish antiquities.

The stymied hunt baffles search team leaders. To a person, those 
interviewed during a weeklong visit to the task force said they believed in 
the mission and the Bush administration accusations that prompted it.

Yet "smoking gun" is now a term of dark irony here. Maj. Kenneth Deal, 
executive officer of one site survey team, called out the words in mock 
triumph when he found a page of Arabic text at a former Baath Party 
recreation center last week. It was torn from a translated edition of 
A.J.P. Taylor's history, "The Struggle for Mastery in Europe." At a "battle 
update brief" last week, amid confusion over the whereabouts of a British 
laboratory in transit from Talil Air Base, McPhee deadpanned to his staff: 
"I haven't a clue where the WMD is, but we can find this lab."

Among the sites already visited from Central Command's top 19 are an 
underground facility at North Tikrit Hospital, an unconventional training 
camp at Salman Pak, Samarra East Airport, the headquarters of the Military 
Industrialization Commission, the Baghdad Research Complex, a storage site 
for surface-to-surface missiles in Taji, the Amiriyah Serum and Vaccine 
Institute, a munitions assembly plant in Iskandariyah and an underground 
bunker at the Abu Ghurayb Palace.

The bunker, toured several days later by a reporter, withstood the palace's 
destruction by at least two satellite-guided bombs. The bombs left six-foot 
holes in the reinforced concrete palace roof, driving the steel reinforcing 
rods downward in a pattern that resembled tentacles. The subsequent 
detonation turned great marble rooms into rubble.

But the bunker, tunneled deep below a ground-floor kitchen, remained 
unscathed. The tunnel dropped straight down and then leveled to horizontal, 
forming corridors that extend most of the breadth of the palace. Richly 
decorated living quarters were arranged along a series of L-shaped bends, 
each protected by three angled blast doors. The doors weighed perhaps a ton.

In a climate-control room, chemical weapons filters and carbon dioxide 
scrubbers protected the air and an overpressure blast valve stood ready to 
vent the lethal shock waves of an explosion. And a decontamination shower 
stood under an alarm panel designed to flash the message "Gas-Gaz."

"Is it evidence of weapons of mass destruction?" asked Deal. "No. It's 
probably evidence of paranoia."

"I don't think we'll find anything," said Army Capt. Tom Baird, one of two 
deputy operations officers under McPhee. "What I see is a lot of stuff 
destroyed." The Defense Intelligence Agency officer, describing a "sort of 
a lull period" in the search, said that whatever may have been at the 
target sites is now "dispersed to the wind."

All last week, McPhee drilled his staff on speeding the transition. The 
Iraq Survey Group should have all the help it needs, he said, to take 
control of the hunt. He is determined, subordinates said, to set the stage 
for success after he departs. And he does not want to leave his soldiers 
behind if their successors can be trained in time.

"I see them as Aladdin's carpet," McPhee told his staff. "Ticket home."


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