[Mb-civic] Lacking Biolabs, Trailers Carried Case for War - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Lacking Biolabs, Trailers Carried Case for War
Administration Pushed Notion of Banned Iraqi Weapons Despite Evidence to 
Contrary

By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 12, 2006; A01

On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush 
proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small 
trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be 
long-sought mobile "biological laboratories." He declared, "We have 
found the weapons of mass destruction."

The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months 
afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go 
to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed 
powerful evidence that it was not true.

A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq -- not made public until now -- 
had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with 
biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission 
transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on 
May 27, 2003, two days before the president's statement.

The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks 
later were stamped "secret" and shelved. Meanwhile, for nearly a year, 
administration and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert 
that the trailers were weapons factories.

The authors of the reports were nine U.S. and British civilian experts 
-- scientists and engineers with extensive experience in all the 
technical fields involved in making bioweapons -- who were dispatched to 
Baghdad by the Defense Intelligence Agency for an analysis of the 
trailers. Their actions and findings were described to a Washington Post 
reporter in interviews with six government officials and weapons experts 
who participated in the mission or had direct knowledge of it.

None would consent to being identified by name because of fear that 
their jobs would be jeopardized. Their accounts were verified by other 
current and former government officials knowledgeable about the mission. 
The contents of the final report, "Final Technical Engineering 
Exploitation Report on Iraqi Suspected Biological Weapons-Associated 
Trailers," remain classified. But interviews reveal that the technical 
team was unequivocal in its conclusion that the trailers were not 
intended to manufacture biological weapons. Those interviewed took care 
not to discuss the classified portions of their work.

"There was no connection to anything biological," said one expert who 
studied the trailers. Another recalled an epithet that came to be 
associated with the trailers: "the biggest sand toilets in the world."

Primary Piece of Evidence

The story of the technical team and its reports adds a new dimension to 
the debate over the U.S. government's handling of intelligence related 
to banned Iraqi weapons programs. The trailers -- along with aluminum 
tubes acquired by Iraq for what was claimed to be a nuclear weapons 
program -- were primary pieces of evidence offered by the Bush 
administration before the war to support its contention that Iraq was 
making weapons of mass destruction.

Intelligence officials and the White House have repeatedly denied 
allegations that intelligence was hyped or manipulated in the run-up to 
the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. But officials familiar with 
the technical team's reports are questioning anew whether intelligence 
agencies played down or dismissed postwar evidence that contradicted the 
administration's public views about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. 
Last year, a presidential commission on intelligence failures criticized 
U.S. spy agencies for discounting evidence that contradicted the 
official line about banned weapons in Iraq, both before and after the 
invasion.

Spokesmen for the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency declined to 
comment on the specific findings of the technical report because it 
remains classified. A spokesman for the DIA asserted that the team's 
findings were neither ignored nor suppressed, but were incorporated in 
the work of the Iraqi Survey Group, which led the official search for 
Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The survey group's final report in 
September 2004 -- 15 months after the technical report was written -- 
said the trailers were "impractical" for biological weapons production 
and were "almost certainly intended" for manufacturing hydrogen for 
weather balloons.

"Whether the information was offered to others in the political realm I 
cannot say," said the DIA official, who spoke on the condition that he 
not be identified.

Intelligence analysts involved in high-level discussions about the 
trailers noted that the technical team was among several groups that 
analyzed the suspected mobile labs throughout the spring and summer of 
2003. Two teams of military experts who viewed the trailers soon after 
their discovery concluded that the facilities were weapons labs, a 
finding that strongly influenced views of intelligence officials in 
Washington, the analysts said. "It was hotly debated, and there were 
experts making arguments on both sides," said one former senior official 
who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.

The technical team's findings had no apparent impact on the intelligence 
agencies' public statements on the trailers. A day after the team's 
report was transmitted to Washington -- May 28, 2003 -- the CIA publicly 
released its first formal assessment of the trailers, reflecting the 
views of its Washington analysts. That white paper, which also bore the 
DIA seal, contended that U.S. officials were "confident" that the 
trailers were used for "mobile biological weapons production."

Throughout the summer and fall of 2003, the trailers became simply 
"mobile biological laboratories" in speeches and press statements by 
administration officials. In late June, Secretary of State Colin L. 
Powell declared that the "confidence level is increasing" that the 
trailers were intended for biowarfare. In September, Vice President 
Cheney pronounced the trailers to be "mobile biological facilities," and 
said they could have been used to produce anthrax or smallpox.

By autumn, leaders of the Iraqi Survey Group were publicly expressing 
doubts about the trailers in news reports. David Kay, the group's first 
leader, told Congress on Oct. 2 that he had found no banned weapons in 
Iraq and was unable to verify the claim that the disputed trailers were 
weapons labs. Still, as late as February 2004, then-CIA Director George 
J. Tenet continued to assert that the mobile-labs theory remained 
plausible. Although there was "no consensus" among intelligence 
officials, the trailers "could be made to work" as weapons labs, he said 
in a speech Feb. 5.

Tenet, now a faculty member at Georgetown's Edmund A. Walsh School of 
Foreign Service, declined to comment for this story.

Kay, in an interview, said senior CIA officials had advised him upon 
accepting the survey group's leadership in June 2003 that some experts 
in the DIA were "backsliding" on whether the trailers were weapons labs. 
But Kay said he was not apprised of the technical team's findings until 
late 2003, near the end of his time as the group's leader.

"If I had known that we had such a team in Iraq," Kay said, "I would 
certainly have given their findings more weight."

A Defector's Tales

Even before the trailers were seized in spring 2003, the mobile labs had 
achieved mythic stature. As early as the mid-1990s, weapons inspectors 
from the United Nations chased phantom mobile labs that were said to be 
mounted on trucks or rail cars, churning out tons of anthrax by night 
and moving to new locations each day. No such labs were found, but many 
officials believed the stories, thanks in large part to elaborate tales 
told by Iraqi defectors.

The CIA's star informant, an Iraqi with the code name Curveball, was a 
self-proclaimed chemical engineer who defected to Germany in 1999 and 
requested asylum. For four years, the Baghdad native passed secrets 
about alleged Iraqi banned weapons to the CIA indirectly, through 
Germany's intelligence service. Curveball provided descriptions of 
mobile labs and said he had supervised work in one of them. He even 
described a catastrophic 1998 accident in one lab that left 12 Iraqis dead.

Curveball's detailed descriptions -- which were officially discredited 
in 2004 -- helped CIA artists create color diagrams of the labs, which 
Powell later used to argue the case for military intervention in Iraq 
before the U.N. Security Council.

"We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on 
wheels and on rails," Powell said in the Feb. 5, 2003, speech. Thanks to 
those descriptions, he said, "We know what the fermenters look like. We 
know what the tanks, pumps, compressors and other parts look like."

The trailers discovered in the Iraqi desert resembled the drawings well 
enough, at least from a distance. One of them, a flatbed trailer covered 
by tarps, was found in April by Kurdish fighters near the northern city 
of Irbil. The second was captured by U.S. forces near Mosul. Both were 
painted military green and outfitted with a suspicious array of gear: 
large metal tanks, motors, compressors, pipes and valves.

Photos of the trailers were quickly circulated, and many weapons experts 
were convinced that the long-sought mobile labs had been found.

Yet reaction from Iraqi sources was troublingly inconsistent. Curveball, 
shown photos of the trailers, confirmed they were mobile labs and even 
pointed out key features. But other Iraqi informants in internal reports 
disputed Curveball's story and claimed the trailers had a benign 
purpose: producing hydrogen for weather balloons.

Back at the Pentagon, DIA officials attempted a quick resolution of the 
dispute. The task fell to the "Jefferson Project," a DIA-led initiative 
made up of government and civilian technical experts who specialize in 
analyzing and countering biological threats. Project leaders put 
together a team of volunteers, eight Americans and a Briton, each with 
at least a decade of experience in one of the essential technical skills 
needed for bioweapons production. All were nongovernment employees 
working for defense contractors or the Energy Department's national labs.

The technical team was assembled in Kuwait and then flown to Baghdad to 
begin their work early on May 25, 2003. By that date, the two trailers 
had been moved to a military base on the grounds of one of deposed 
president Saddam Hussein's Baghdad palaces. When members of the 
technical team arrived, they found the trailers parked in an open lot, 
covered with camouflage netting.

The technical team went to work under a blistering sun in 110-degree 
temperatures. Using tools from home, they peered into vats, turned 
valves, tapped gauges and measured pipes. They reconstructed a flow-path 
through feed tanks and reactor vessels, past cooling chambers and drain 
valves, and into discharge tanks and exhaust pipes. They took hundreds 
of photographs.

By the end of their first day, team members still had differing views 
about what the trailers were. But they agreed about what the trailers 
were not.

"Within the first four hours," said one team member, who like the others 
spoke on the condition he not be named, "it was clear to everyone that 
these were not biological labs."

News of the team's early impressions leaped across the Atlantic well 
ahead of the technical report. Over the next two days, a stream of 
anxious e-mails and phone calls from Washington pressed for details and 
clarifications.

The reason for the nervousness was soon obvious: In Washington, a CIA 
analyst had written a draft white paper on the trailers, an official 
assessment that would also reflect the views of the DIA. The white paper 
described the trailers as "the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was 
hiding a biological warfare program." It also explicitly rejected an 
explanation by Iraqi officials, described in a New York Times article a 
few days earlier, that the trailers might be mobile units for producing 
hydrogen.

But the technical team's preliminary report, written in a tent in 
Baghdad and approved by each team member, reached a conclusion opposite 
from that of the white paper.

Key Components Lacking

Team members and other sources intimately familiar with the mission 
declined to discuss technical details of the team's findings because the 
report remains classified. But they cited the Iraqi Survey Group's 
nonclassified, final report to Congress in September 2004 as reflecting 
the same conclusions.

That report said the trailers were "impractical for biological agent 
production," lacking 11 components that would be crucial for making 
bioweapons. Instead, the trailers were "almost certainly designed and 
built for the generation of hydrogen," the survey group reported.

The group's report and members of the technical team also dismissed the 
notion that the trailers could be easily modified to produce weapons.

"It would be easier to start all over with just a bucket," said Rod 
Barton, an Australian biological weapons expert and former member of the 
survey group.

The technical team's preliminary report was transmitted in the early 
hours of May 27, just before its members began boarding planes to return 
home. Within 24 hours, the CIA published its white paper, "Iraqi Mobile 
Biological Warfare Agent Production Plants," on its Web site.

After team members returned to Washington, they began work on a final 
report. At several points, members were questioned about revising their 
conclusions, according to sources knowledgeable about the conversations. 
The questioners generally wanted to know the same thing: Could the 
report's conclusions be softened, to leave open a possibility that the 
trailers might have been intended for weapons?

In the end, the final report -- 19 pages plus a 103-page appendix -- 
remained unequivocal in declaring the trailers unsuitable for weapons 
production.

"It was very assertive," said one weapons expert familiar with the 
report's contents.

Then, their mission completed, the team members returned to their jobs 
and watched as their work appeared to vanish.

"I went home and fully expected that our findings would be publicly 
stated," one member recalled. "It never happened. And I just had to live 
with it."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/11/AR2006041101888.html?referrer=email
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