During the late 1960s, the French Army became increasingly concerned about the expansion of the Warsaw Pact’s chemical warfare capabilities. Accordingly, President Charles de Gaulle decided to improve France’s chemical defense posture by testing new military equipment with “live” chemical warfare agents at B2-Namous. These experiments were conducted with “maquettes” (mock-ups) that realistically simulated weapon effects. Although only a few open-air trials with nerve agents were conducted each year, they enabled the French military to assess its vulnerabilities to chemical attack and develop improved defenses. Also during the 1960s, French and American military officials cooperated on chemical weapons research and development under a Mutual Weapons Development Data Exchange Agreement.
Although the vast stockpiles of nerve agents accumulated by the United States and the Soviet Union were sufficient to kill millions of people in the event of World War III, mutual deterrence prevailed in the East–West balance of terror. Nevertheless, each side sought to achieve a marginal advantage in the chemical arms race, at times resorting to deception to do so. According to a history by David Wise, from early 1966 until July 1969 the U.S. Department of Defense ran an intelligence operation called Operation Shocker, which involved providing the Soviets with disinformation on chemical weapons. Sergeant Joseph Cassidy, who worked at Edgewood Arsenal, was recruited by Soviet military intelligence (the GRU) and supplied his handlers with some 4,500 documents describing a purportedly successful effort by the U.S. Army to develop a nerve agent called GJ that was many times more potent than Sarin or Soman and existed in binary form.
In fact, Cassidy was a double agent engaged in a deception operation. Edgewood had attempted to develop agent GJ and failed, and the technical reports that Cassidy handed to the GRU had been partially falsified. The aim of Operation Shocker was to lead Soviet military chemists down a technological cul-de-sac, causing them to waste time and money on an illusory objective. Ironically, the operation later backfired when the Soviets, spurred on by the supposed U.S. breakthrough, successfully developed a new generation of supertoxic nerve agents in the 1970s. In the meantime, the technology and know-how to produce standard nerve agents was spreading to less stable regions of the world, where their actual use became more likely.
CHAPTER TEN
YEMEN AND AFTER
DURING THE EARLY 1960S, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, an ardent nationalist who aspired to leadership of the Arab world, decided to pursue an indigenous chemical weapons program under the code name “Izlis.” At first Egypt relied heavily on foreign technical assistance. High-ranking Egyptian Army officers traveled to Moscow for training in offensive chemical warfare tactics at the Red Army’s Academy of Chemical Defense. The Egyptian government also recruited a group of West German scientists and engineers, many of whom had developed weapons for Hitler during World War II. Although Nasser claimed that the Germans were working on peaceful projects such as a commercial jet engine, they were actually developing ballistic missiles and chemical arms.
In the fall of 1962, Egypt intervened in Yemen, a small country on the Arabian Peninsula, after the death of the country’s ruler, Imam Ahmed, and the succession to the throne of his thirty-five-year-old son, Imam Mohammed el-Badr. On September 26, a group of Yemeni military officers, with Egyptian support and encouragement, staged a coup d’état to replace the monarchy with a republican government modeled on the Nasser regime. Yemeni Army tanks bombarded the royal palace in the capital, Sana’a, forcing the young imam to flee to the mountains in the north of the country. There he mobilized loyal tribesmen to fight for the restoration of the monarchy.
Two days after the coup, an advance guard of Egyptian troops was airlifted to Yemen to bolster the republican forces. This initial deployment was followed by a larger contingent of 28,000 Egyptian soldiers, along with military aircraft. Meanwhile, the deposed imam solicited assistance from other Arab monarchies in the region. In October 1962, the government of Jordan flew 150 tons of light arms to Saudi Arabia for distribution to the royalist forces in Yemen. The Saudi royal family also became a major supplier of arms to the imam, despite a long history of conflict with the Yemeni monarchy.
The royalist insurgents in Yemen operated out of caves in the northern mountains that were largely invulnerable to attack with conventional bombs. In 1963, the Egyptian intervention forces, seeking to root the guerrillas out of their mountain redoubt, began to experiment with the use of chemical weapons delivered by Soviet-made Ilyushin-28 bombers. Although the initial chemical attacks involved tear gas, they soon escalated to bombs containing phosgene and mustard. These weapons were either old British munitions that had been abandoned in Egypt during World War II or new ones supplied by the Soviet Union, Egypt’s superpower patron. In June 1963, Egyptian aircraft dropped mustard-filled bombs on the royalist village of Al-Kawma, producing numerous casualties who suffered from nausea and skin burns.
On July 9, Saudi Arabia filed a formal complaint with U.N. Secretary-General U Thant that Egypt was using chemical weapons in Yemen. The U.S. and British governments began to investigate the allegation, and Britain asked the U.N. observer group in Yemen to conduct an inquiry. If the Saudi claim was true, the Egyptian chemical attacks were a clear violation of the Geneva Protocol, which Cairo had signed in 1925 and ratified in 1928. President Nasser, for his part, categorically denied the use of poison gas in Yemen.
Because of Saudi and Jordanian assistance to the royalist guerrillas, the Yemen civil war dragged on inconclusively for several years. Beginning in March 1966, Egypt launched a major offensive in northern Yemen. In December, Egyptian bombers dropped fifteen chemical bombs on the royalist village of Halbal, about thirty miles north of Sana’a. The journalist Marquis Childs of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported another chemical attack on January 4 and 5, 1967, against the villages of Hadda and Kitaf and nearby caves, killing more than a hundred people. At that time, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson told the House of Commons that he believed chemical weapons were being used in Yemen.
On January 29, 1967, a classified cable from the U.S. Embassy in Beirut to the State Department in Washington relayed an eyewitness account of the January 5 chemical attack on the village of Kitaf. The Associated Press correspondent David Lancashire reported that immediately after exposure to the toxic cloud, several victims had begun to vomit, collapse, and die. Such a rapid onset of symptoms suggested the presence of a nerve agent, perhaps combined with other chemicals to mask its identity. If Lancashire’s reporting was accurate, the Egyptian attacks may have involved the first combat use of nerve agents in history. The U.S. Embassy cable also stated that CIA agents had collected “bomb fragments and soil samples” from the vicinity of the chemical attack for analysis, although the results were not described.
Beginning in April 1967, the government of Saudi Arabia submitted a series of medical reports to the United Nations alleging that Egypt had employed nerve agents—described as “anticholinesterase gases of the organophosphorus family”—in its air strikes on northern Yemeni villages. The Saudis claimed that between January 4 and May 16, Egyptian aircraft had dropped bombs containing nerve agents at least four times, killing more than 400 persons. Some accounts suggested that the substance used in the attacks had been Sarin, but Marquis Childs wrote that samples of contaminated sand had been smuggled out of Yemen and analyzed at an independent U.S. laboratory, which had found traces of a V-series nerve agent. Reportedly, the agent was so new that it matched none of the thousands of chemical spectrographs on file with the Army Chemical Corps. British operatives also took soil samples but were unable to confirm the presence of a nerve agent.
Egyptian chemical attacks on royalist villages in north Yemen continued throughout the spring of 1967. On May 28, the town of Sirwah was bombed with a lethal gas and high explosives, causing at least seventy-two deaths and many wounded. About thirty of the injured were evacuated to Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, for medical treatment. Physicians who examined the victims confirmed
the use of nerve agents and sent reports to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), a nongovernmental organization based in Geneva that seeks to enforce the humanitarian laws of war. An ICRC team conducted its own investigation in north Yemen and found that a royalist village had been attacked with chemical weapons in early June and that some of the bomb fragments bore markings in Cyrillic letters. Subsequently, an Egyptian military aircraft attacked an ICRC convoy on its way to assist the victims of a chemical attack, provoking the organization to file a formal protest with the Nasser government.
The Cyrillic markings on bomb fragments suggested that the Soviet Union had furnished chemical weapons to Egypt. If that was the case, the Soviets may have intended to use Yemen as a testing ground to assess the military utility of nerve agents (possibly including the new Soviet V agent R-33) and to gauge the reaction of foreign governments, the United Nations, and world public opinion to the use of such weapons in a remote Third World conflict. Because the 1925 Geneva Protocol banned only the use in war of chemical arms and not their development, production, or transfer, the Soviet Union would not technically be in violation of the treaty if it shipped chemical weapons to Egypt for use in Yemen.
It is also possible that by 1967, Egypt had acquired an indigenous capability to manufacture nerve agents. Four years earlier, the Nasser government had opened a chemical weapons production facility called Military Plant No. 801 at Abu Za’abal, an industrial zone ten kilometers northeast of Cairo. The Egyptian Ministry of Defense operated this plant under the cover of a commercial entity called the Abu-Za’abal Company for Chemicals and Insecticides. Appearing at a congressional hearing on April 30, 1969, Harvard biochemistry professor Matthew Meselson testified, “I asked a British chemist who had spent time in Cairo whether he thought that his Egyptian chemist colleagues could have produced nerve gas in Egypt, and he said without doubt yes.”
Despite the credible reports of chemical warfare in Yemen, the international community appeared largely indifferent to Egypt’s flagrant violation of the Geneva Protocol. Neither U.N. Secretary-General U Thant nor any of the major powers demanded an official inquiry or referred the matter to the Security Council or to the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Although the United States and Britain both criticized the alleged Egyptian chemical attacks, they did so in a low-key manner. Tellingly, the U.S. diplomatic protest was delivered not by Secretary of State Dean Rusk but by an official from the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, a little-known bureaucracy. Behind the scenes, however, President Lyndon B. Johnson was quite concerned about Egypt’s apparent use of nerve agents. A secret briefing memorandum prepared for Johnson’s meeting with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin on June 16, 1967, included the following “contingency talking points”:
The International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva has confirmed the use of poison gas recently in Yemen.
US has evidence that supports the ICRC release, specifically, we know that UAR [United Arab Republic = Egypt] used lethal nerve gas in Yemen.
The use of lethal chemical agents by either party during recent crisis would have seriously increased risk of escalation of conflict.
Continued existence and use of such weapons of mass destruction in Middle East could lead others in area to decide they must acquire these or other weapons of mass destruction.
Express desire [to] discuss with Soviets ways of preventing acquisition and further use [of] such CW agents by states in area.
Although it is not known if President Johnson used the talking points during his meeting with Kosygin, they clearly indicate the U.S. government’s belief that Egypt had employed nerve agents in Yemen, most likely with Soviet assistance. Nevertheless, Washington declined to press these charges in public. On July 27, 1967, the State Department spokesman Robert J. McCloskey told reporters that the United States was “deeply disturbed” by reports of chemical warfare in Yemen, but he refused to confirm the allegations. “I think it’s fair to say that we have drawn no specific conclusions based on what we know,” he said. A few months later, however, the journalist Seymour Hersh interviewed an unnamed State Department official and asked if the U.S. government had concrete evidence that nerve agents were militarily effective. The official replied bluntly, “We know that nerve agent works. It worked in Yemen.”
Even though Egypt was the Soviet Union’s most important ally in the Middle East and U.S. relations with Nasser were poor, the Johnson administration was muted in its criticism of Egyptian chemical warfare in Yemen. Why? A possible explanation is that the White House was concerned that strongly condemning the Egyptian chemical attacks would provoke a backlash against the ongoing American use of tear gas and the herbicide Agent Orange in the Vietnam War, which had become a topic of bitter denunciations by the Soviet Union and its allies. Although the United States had not yet ratified the 1925 Geneva Protocol, Washington claimed that the treaty did not ban the combat use of tear gas or herbicides because these agents did not normally cause death or prolonged incapacitation. Few countries, however, supported the U.S. interpretation of the Geneva Protocol. Given this controversy, the Johnson administration may have decided to play down its public denunciations of the Egyptian chemical attacks. The unfortunate result was that several hundred Arab tribesmen in a remote desert country were abandoned to a cruel fate, and the international norm against chemical warfare was weakened.
AT THE SAME time that Egypt was escalating its war in Yemen, the Nasser regime launched a series of provocative actions that increased tensions with neighboring Israel. On May 15, 1967, Israeli intelligence learned that Egypt had massed large numbers of ground forces in the Sinai Peninsula. President Nasser accompanied this military buildup with two other threatening steps: he demanded the departure of U.N. peacekeepers patrolling the Sinai border between Israel and Egypt, and on the night of May 22, the Egyptian Navy blocked the straits at the end of the Gulf of Eilat to prevent the passage of Israeli ships. Other Arab states in the region also prepared for war. On May 30, Jordan joined the Egyptian-Syrian military alliance and placed its army under Egyptian command. Iraq quickly followed suit and agreed to send reinforcements.
In late May 1967, an Israeli military intelligence unit conducting a reconnaissance mission in the Egyptian-controlled Sinai Desert came across a reinforced concrete bunker near El-Arish containing six 105 mm chemical artillery shells. An Israeli mobile laboratory attached to the Sharon Division took samples from the shells for analysis and determined that they contained Sarin. Although the projectiles had fuses and were ready to fire, the small number of rounds raised doubts about their military purpose.
In response to the discovery of the Egyptian shells, the Israeli government launched a frantic effort to obtain enough chemical protective gear for the civilian population of Israel. As the threat of war loomed, Israeli agents purchased 20,000 gas masks from U.S. manufacturers and flew them to Tel Aviv aboard a chartered Boeing 707 jet. Israel also requested another 20,000 masks from West Germany. Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger and Defense Minister Gerhard Schröder debated whether gas masks should be considered “war matériel,” which would be banned for export under West German law. In the end, Kiesinger overruled his defense minister and authorized the immediate shipment of gas masks to Israel on June 2, only days before the war began. Israeli agents also purchased thousands of autoinjectors containing nerve agent antidotes. At the same time that the government of Israel stockpiled defensive equipment, it sought to deter any Arab use of chemical weapons by making veiled threats that it had the capability to retaliate in kind. Ever since 1960, when Israeli scientists had visited the French chemical weapons testing site in the Algerian desert, Israel had been suspected of pursuing a gas warfare capability, at least as a stopgap deterrent until it acquired a nuclear arsenal.
The rising tensions between Israel and its neighbors finally reached the breaking point on June 5, 1967. Shortly before the Arab armies attacked, Israel launched a preemptive air strike against the Egyptian Air F
orce and destroyed most of its planes on the ground. During the ensuing ground war, the Israel Defense Forces defeated the combined armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq in only six days. Fortunately, mutual deterrence and the short duration of the war prevented any use of chemical weapons. A few weeks later, Israel returned the 20,000 gas masks it had purchased from West Germany, unused.
After Egypt’s humiliating defeat in what became known as the Six-Day War, President Nasser could no longer sustain his intervention in Yemen. He therefore decided to withdraw his troops and pursue better relations with Saudi Arabia. Cairo’s last use of chemical weapons in northern Yemen took place in July 1967, shortly before the departure of the intervention force. The Egyptian attacks were severe and may have constituted a final, unsuccessful attempt to achieve a military victory.
IN 1968 the United States shut down its VX production program, and one year later the Newport Army Chemical Plant was officially mothballed. One reason for this decision was a severe shortage of empty bombs and artillery shells, nearly all of which were being filled with high explosives for the U.S. war in Vietnam. The Pentagon even raided its existing stockpile of chemical artillery shells for impact fuses to use in conventional weapons. Given the lack of empty munitions to fill with VX, large amounts of bulk agent continued to be stored in tanks and one-ton containers on the grounds of the Newport facility.
The U.S. Army Chemical Corps also faced a growing crisis over the M55 artillery rocket, which had a warhead that contained either Sarin or VX. M55 rockets had been filled with Sarin at Rocky Mountain Arsenal from 1961 to October 1965, and with VX at Newport from 1964 to 1965. Within two years of their production, many of the Sarin-filled rockets (but not the VX-filled ones) began to leak, creating a huge headache for the Army. In February 1966, the Chemical Corps established an M55 Action Team to investigate the problem. This committee found that some batches of Sarinfilled rockets had a higher rate of leakage than others because the nerve agent fill varied considerably in purity. Although laboratory studies had suggested that Sarin was compatible with the rocket’s thin aluminum shell, these experiments had been performed with pure agent synthesized in a pilot plant and not with the industrial-grade product.
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