An Unsolved Mystery
I met the former Director of the Mossad and head of the Israeli National Security Council, Efraim Halevy in the summer of 2005 in Israel. In a private meeting, I asked him directly, “What happened to Iraq’s WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction)? Why didn’t we find any large stockpiles in Iraq?” His response was equally direct, “You and I both know they moved them to Syria before the war.”
In October 2003, Retired Air Force General James Clapper, director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, told the New York Times and other reporters that satellite imagery from March 2003 showed a heavy flow of large trucks from Iraq into Syria just before the start of the war. Clapper’s assessment was that illicit weapons material “unquestionably” had been moved out of Iraq. I had seen those same satellite images and intelligence reports with my own eyes as a Marine Corps counterintelligence and human intelligence officer deployed to the middle east from October 2001 until September 2003 with a short trip home between deployments to attend the Army’s Imagery Intelligence Officer’s Course, affectionately called “squint school.”
Journalist and author Harvey Morris had collected and reported on-the-ground observations from that same period which corroborated Clapper’s assessment. As Morris drove from Damascus into Iraq in mid-March 2003, his Iraqi Kurdish source said many of the Kurdish truck drivers who regularly used that route observed “an unusual build-up of traffic out of Iraq in previous days. Closed convoys of unmarked trucks, which other drivers were forbidden from approaching or overtaking, had been streaming across the border into Syria.”
In January 2004, the Dutch newspaper, De Telegraaf reported on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and specifically chemical weapons, being hidden in Syria. An award-winning Syrian journalist, Nizar Nayyouf, defected to Europe and provided the newspaper with his notes and maps of what were believed to be the exact locations of where Iraqi chemical weapons were being secretly stored in Syria. Nayyouf provided detailed descriptions of the storage sites and information about his sources within Syrian security and intelligence that provided the information.
The Iraqi Survey Group (ISG) that was responsible for comprehensively investigating Iraq’s WMD programs published a 92-page addendum to their final report in March 2005 titled “Pre-war Movement of WMD Out of Iraq.” On the very first page of the report it states, “The declining security situation limited and finally halted this investigation. The results remain inconclusive, but further investigation may be undertaken when circumstances on the ground improve. The investigation centered on the possibility that WMD materials were moved to Syria.”
The report goes on to say, “Syria was involved in transactions and shipments of military and other material to Iraq in contravention of the UN sanctions…Whether Syria received military items from Iraq for safekeeping or other reasons has yet to be determined. There was evidence of a discussion of possible WMD collaboration initiated by a Syrian security officer, and ISG received information about movement of material out of Iraq, including the possibility that WMD was involved. In the judgment of the working group, these reports were sufficiently credible to merit further investigation. ISG was unable to complete its investigation and is unable to rule out the possibility that WMD was evacuated to Syria before the war.”
At this point, the investigation of Iraq’s WMD being in Syria died and therefore the public story died. It didn’t fit the over-arching media narrative of abject intelligence failures and lying politicians. Were there intelligence miscalculations on Iraq? Absolutely. Did politicians assert certainty where there were only probabilities and uncorroborated reporting? Definitely. Does that mean we should throw out all the evidence of WMD in Iraq? No. It is too black and white and wrong-headed to believe every intelligence agency got everything wrong about Iraq’s WMD programs. Even countries who opposed the Iraq war like Germany, France, Russia, and China believed Iraq possessed WMD in March 2003.
The CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate from October 2002 titled Key Judgments: Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction provided levels of confidence for their reporting. One of the assessments noted with higher confidence and multi-source reporting was Iraq’s chemical weapons program. “An array of clandestine reporting reveals that Baghdad has procured covertly the types and quantities of chemicals and equipment sufficient to allow limited CW [chemical weapon] agent production hidden within Iraq’s legitimate chemical industry.” “We assess that they possess CW bulk fills for SRBM [short-range ballistic missile] warheads, including for a limited number of covertly stored Scuds, possibly a few with extended ranges.”
My personal assessment was formed by my own experience looking for WMD in Iraq in 2003. An Iraqi Nuclear Biological and Chemical Officer we interviewed told us that he was ordered before the start of the war to hide, bury, or dispose of anything that could be construed as WMD. In fact, he had sadly buried radioactive material in his front yard that was making his wife sick. We safely removed the material and helped his wife get medical treatment. When we discovered shipping containers full of Soviet Frog-7 rockets modified to carry chemical payloads in an elementary school yard in Baghdad, it made sense that we didn’t find the chemicals to fill them. Hiding the chemicals was a much easier task than hiding these massive rockets. Additionally, I observed the close relationship between Iraq and Syria during the initial ground war as some of the foreign fighters who ambushed us were mercenaries recruited from Syria. It was highly plausible Iraq moved its chemical weapons to Syria.
All of this begs the question, “why would Saddam want to make it seem like he did not have WMD?” Saddam knew the absence of WMD would poison America’s and the coalition’s victory. The confirmed use of WMD by Iraq against us in the war or even the discovery of stockpiles in Iraq after the war would provide much sought after justification for the war. Saddam knew his forces would be easily defeated by us militarily, so he settled for giving us a Pyrrhic victory — where the cost of winning the war (at least in the court of public opinion) would be so high it effectively undermined our long-term success. The American public and the media were all too ready and willing to give Saddam exactly what he wanted — an unshakeable belief that there never were any WMD in Iraq after the Gulf War.
In May 2010, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an article titled, What Is Assad Hiding in His Backyard? The article reported on satellite imagery revealing a 200-square-kilometer area near Masyaf, Syria, containing at least five installations with concealed pathways leading into the mountains. The site aligned with one of the locations previously identified by Nizar Nayyouf, who claimed that Iraqi WMD were hidden in Syria. Nayyouf specified a tunnel in a mountain near Al-Baida, approximately one kilometer south of Masyaf, as a storage site for these weapons. While Syria was long suspected of having a chemical weapons program since the 1970s, they adamantly denied possessing any chemical weapons until they started using them on their own people in December 2012 starting with the Homs Attack followed by the Khan al-Assal chemical attack in March 2013 and then the much deadlier Ghouta chemical attack in August of 2013.
The 2013 attacks prompted the international community to pressure the Syrian regime to agree to the supervised destruction of their chemical weapons. Despite claiming complete disarmament in June 2014, the Syrian government kept hidden stockpiles of chemical weapons and carried out numerous chemical attacks on its own people between 2014 and today. Most notably the Khan Shaykhun chemical attack in April 2017 and the Douma chemical attack in April 2018. In February 2019, the German thinktank Global Public Policy Institute published a report that “credibly substantiated” 336 uses of chemical weapons in the Syrian war, 98% of them by the government and 2% by ISIL.
With the recent overthrow of the Assad regime, who is securing and destroying Syria’s remaining chemical weapons stockpiles AND while you are at it, can someone please check for me if any of it came from Iraq? Thank you.
