War of Nerves

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War of Nerves Page 30

by Jonathan Tucker


  By early 1981, the momentum of the Iraqi offensive had stalled. To counter Iran’s reliance on superior numbers of troops, Saddam began to consider the use of chemical weapons as a “force multiplier.” On June 8, 1981, the development program at Al-Rashad, code-named “Project 922,” was transferred to the Iraqi Ministry of Defense and given a high priority. Iraq also signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Egypt and paid Cairo $12 million for technical assistance with chemical weapons production and weaponization. This arrangement included the building of chemical plants in Iraq by the Egyptian branch of the West German company Walter-Thosti-Boswau International, and the use of Egypt as a transshipment point for Iraqi imports of nerve agent precursors, such as hydrogen fluoride, from Western suppliers. In late 1981, the construction of a large pesticide production complex was under way on a stretch of empty, semiarid grazing land fifty miles northwest of Baghdad. The complex was given a benign cover name: the State Enterprise for Pesticide Production (SEPP).

  Over the next year, Iraq suffered a series of military setbacks. On March 17, 1982, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, or Pasdaran, defeated the Iraqi Third Army at Khorramshar, taking thousands of prisoners. By early summer, the Iranian forces had advanced to within a few miles of Basra, Iraq’s second largest city. During a battle near Basra in July, the Iraqi Chemical Corps used tear gas for the first time, panicking an entire Iranian division. Encouraged by this success, Iraq escalated in 1983 to the small-scale use of mustard agent. These chemical attacks, referred to as “special strikes,” could be launched only with the explicit authorization of the general commander, Saddam Hussein. Fearing the consequences of violating the 1925 Geneva Protocol, to which Iraq was a party, Saddam moved cautiously at first, limiting the number and scale of chemical attacks, but the lack of a harsh international response emboldened him.

  During the summer of 1983, the staff and equipment of Project 922 moved from Al-Rashad to SEPP. Construction at the new site continued at a feverish pace and resulted in five large research laboratories, pilot production plants for mustard and Tabun, and an administrative center. One of the labs had an inhalation chamber for testing chemical agents on experimental animals. Iraqi scientists preferred to use beagles imported from West Germany because the characteristics of the canine respiratory system were well understood.

  At first, the Iraqi chemical weapons program was heavily dependent on foreign suppliers. More than thirty Western firms sold specialized production equipment and 800 tons of precursor chemicals to Iraq, including fourteen companies in West Germany, three in the Netherlands, three in Switzerland, and two each in France and the United States. One of the U.S. suppliers was a small chemical company in Nashville, Tennessee, that shipped six and a half tons of potassium fluoride to SEPP without asking how the chemical would be used.

  Although Western assistance to the Iraqi chemical warfare program was at times unwitting, some unscrupulous businessmen sold chemicals or equipment to SEPP with full knowledge of the intended purpose. One such individual was Helmut Maier, the managing director of the West German firm Karl Kolb GmbH, a medium-sized chemicals producer based near Frankfurt Airport that had contracted with SEPP to build an entire chemical weapons complex. Working through a front company called Pilot Plant Chemical, Maier advised Iraqi officials on designing and equipping the “pesticide” plants and served as a go-between with other West German suppliers. From 1983 to 1986, Pilot Plant engineers built six production lines at SEPP for mustard and nerve agents. The Iraqi government also purchased from foreign suppliers 40,000 artillery shells, 20,000 artillery rockets, and 7,500 bomb casings that were subsequently modified for chemical delivery, along with machinery and components to produce its own chemical munitions.

  To operate the chemical weapons plants, the Iraqi government recruited the best graduates in chemistry and chemical engineering from the University of Baghdad and other leading universities. Young Iraqis who were “invited” to work at SEPP actually had little choice: the alternative was to be drafted and sent to the Iranian front. To preserve the secrecy of the chemical weapons program, scientists and technicians were issued fake work documents and sworn to secrecy. They were also kept under close surveillance by the Iraqi security services. Sometimes a government agent knocked on a scientist’s door in the middle of the night and ordered him back to work, either because the military had an urgent need for chemical weapons or simply to reinforce the fact that the scientists were at the beck and call of the authorities.

  DURING THE SUMMER OF 1983, the government of Iran sent letters to the U.N. Secretary-General alleging that Iraq had employed chemical weapons several times since the war began, in flagrant violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol. Tehran argued that a failure by the United Nations to sanction Iraq would undermine the credibility of the treaty and lead to a chemical arms race in the region.

  U.S. government sources secretly verified the Iranian charges. On November 1, the State Department’s Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs sent a memorandum to Secretary of State George Shultz recommending that the United States “approach Iraq very soon in order to maintain the credibility of U.S. policy on CW [chemical weapons], as well as to reduce or halt what now appears to be Iraq’s almost daily use of CW.” Three weeks later, on November 21, American diplomats delivered a démarche, or official diplomatic note, to the Iraqi Foreign Ministry in Baghdad. This message stated that Washington was aware of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons and strongly opposed it as a matter of principle. In response to the U.S. pressure, Iraq halted its chemical attacks temporarily, although they resumed several months later after a new Iranian offensive.

  Despite its concern over Iraq’s illicit use of chemical weapons, the Reagan administration was deeply conflicted because it believed that Iran posed a far greater threat to U.S. interests. Washington remained angry over the hostage crisis of 1979–81, when Iranian militants had held fifty-two U.S. diplomats and citizens captive in Tehran for 444 days, and also resented the vitriolic anti-American rhetoric emanating from the Khomeini regime. In addition, the Reagan administration feared that an Iranian victory over Iraq would destabilize key U.S. allies in the region such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and even Jordan, threatening the vital flow of oil from the Persian Gulf.

  Because of these geopolitical considerations, Washington made a strategic decision to abandon its officially neutral position on the Iran-Iraq War and “tilt” toward Iraq, while keeping its support low-profile. In December 1983, President Reagan named former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as his special envoy to Baghdad and dispatched him to meet with Saddam Hussein and discuss the normalization of U.S.-Iraqi relations. During a ninety-minute meeting with Saddam on December 20, Rumsfeld made no mention of Iraq’s repeated chemical attacks. In another session with Deputy Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, Rumsfeld reassured the Iraqi official that the U.S. government’s opposition to the use of chemical weapons was a matter of principle and that Washington’s interest in normalizing relations remained “undiminished.”

  Over the course of the war, Iraq’s use of chemical weapons became progressively more effective. Early chemical warfare operations were seriously flawed: pilots dropped their bombs from too high or too low an altitude, and ground troops fired chemical artillery shells and rockets in unfavorable weather conditions or failed to concentrate enough agent at the point of attack. In several instances, Iraqi aircraft inadvertently gassed their own ground forces by dropping chemical bombs near the frontline trenches, generating lethal clouds that were blown by the wind back over the Iraqi lines. As the war dragged on, however, the Iraqi forces learned to tailor chemical strikes to specific tactical situations, maintaining the momentum of a ground assault or denying terrain to the enemy.

  IN THE SOVIET UNION, the Foliant program continued to move forward. The Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Soviet Council of Ministers issued a secret decree on March 25, 1983, directing GosNIIOKhT to develop binary versions of the fourth-generation agents. The rat
ionale for this effort was to catch up with the United States, which already had three binary chemical munitions under development. In contrast to the U.S. program, which Congress had debated openly for years, Soviet binary development was conducted under extreme secrecy. One reason was that the Soviets sought to develop binary nerve agents whose components resembled ordinary industrial chemicals, with a view to circumventing the verification provisions of a future treaty banning chemical arms.

  The first binary formulation developed by the Foliant scientists was for R-33, the Soviet version of VX. This weapon was given the code name “Novichok” (pronounced no-we-shoke), the Russian word for “newcomer.” Subsequently, Igor Vasiliev and Andrei Zheleznyakov at GosNIIOKhT in Moscow developed a binary version of A-232 that they termed Novichok-5. Although the unitary form of A-232 was unstable and deteriorated rapidly in storage, limited shelf life was not a problem for the binary version because the agent would be synthesized en route to the target and would have to persist for only a short time to serve its intended military purpose.

  Novichok-5 had two binary components, one containing phosphorus and the other nitrogen. Both precursor chemicals had legitimate industrial uses and were relatively nontoxic, so that they could be produced at plants ostensibly designed to manufacture agricultural fertilizers or pesticides. This ambiguity would make it easier to conceal the illicit production of Novichok-5 components from international arms inspectors. Although the Soviets manufactured limited quantities of the two precursors for testing purposes at pilot plants in Volgograd and Novocheboksarsk, the chemicals were not stockpiled. Instead, wartime mobilization plans were developed for ramping up production of the binary components and loading them into munitions.

  In the mid-1980s, the Soviet Ministry of Chemical Industry began to construct new military production lines at the Pavlodar Chemical Plant in northern Kazakhstan. This plant had been built in 1965 on the banks of the Irtysh River as a dual-use factory capable of manufacturing both civilian chemicals and chemical warfare agents. The military section of the plant operated under tight security and was headed by a chief engineer who reported directly to Moscow. In order to replace the obsolescent factories at Volgograd and Novocheboksarsk that had been built after World War II, construction began at Pavlodar on a series of corrosion-resistant reactors made of high-nickel steel, in which the Soviet military planned to produce up to six types of Novichok binary precursors.

  THE UNITED STATES, the Soviet Union, and France were not the only countries to work on binary weapons during the 1980s. British scientists at Porton Down did collaborative research with their Edgewood colleagues on intermediate-volatility nerve agents that were more persistent than Sarin but less persistent than VX. In so doing, they took a second look at compounds such as the Tammelin esters, which had been rejected because they were too unstable to be stored for long periods but would have military utility if produced in a binary system shortly before use.

  Research and development on nerve agents also took place in a number of Warsaw Pact countries, including Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. Because of Czechoslovakia’s exposed position in the center of Europe, it had developed particular expertise in the field of chemical defense. At Research Institute No. 70 in the Czech city of Brno, military chemists did “threat assessment” studies on novel chemical agents being developed by NATO countries. After learning that the United States was developing an intermediate-volatility agent for the MLRS rocket system, Colonel Jiri Matousek, the director of research at the Brno institute, sought to synthesize a similar agent for testing the field detectors and personal protective gear used by the Czechoslovak Army and the civil defense.

  In May 1983, Matousek and his team of military chemists synthesized and characterized a new family of intermediate-volatility nerve agents that they termed “GV” because they combined characteristics of both the G-series and V-series agents. Several years later, Matousek published an unclassified paper describing this research. “The results presented,” he wrote, “show that a new group of supertoxic lethal organophosphorus compounds exist as candidates for new chemical warfare agents with possible use in binary system, possessing extremely high inhalation toxicity and very high percutaneous toxicity. This means that it will be necessary to include such or similar compounds within the framework of chemical defense and the known list of chemical warfare agents should never be considered as definitively closed.”

  IN EARLY 1984, the Iran-Iraq War continued to intensify. On February 15, Iran launched a major offensive called Operation Dawn V along a hundred-mile front north of Basra, with the aim of seizing the strategic Basra-to-Baghdad highway and cutting Iraq in two. The Iranian forces consisted of some 500,000 Pasdaran troops and People’s Army (Basij) volunteers, who ranged in age from nine to over fifty. Despite their poor equipment and lack of formal military training, the Basij militia were inflamed by propaganda, religious fervor, and the promise of martyrdom. Among them were tens of thousands of young boys who had been roped together in groups of twenty to prevent desertions. Supported by attack helicopters, the waves of Iranian infantry advanced steadily through the marshes north of Basra and approached within a few kilometers of the Basra-to-Baghdad highway. Between February 29 and March 1, the Iraqi Army counterattacked in one of the largest battles of the war. Massed Iraqi tanks and helicopter gunships slaughtered thousands of Iranian troops and pushed them back into the marshes, inflicting heavy losses for no gain in territory.

  Meanwhile, on February 21, an Iraqi government radio broadcast warned that Iran was preparing another major military offensive to seize Iraq’s land, violate its women, and colonize its population. To repel the invaders, the Iraqi Army would no longer confine itself to a static defense but would strike deep into enemy territory. The announcer concluded ominously, “The invaders should know that for every harmful insect there is an insecticide capable of annihilating it, whatever their number, and Iraq possesses this annihilation insecticide.”

  Despite the crushing defeat at Basra, Iran opened a second front farther north, in the Majnoon marshes near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Majnoon, the Arabic word for “crazy,” was an appropriate name for this eerie realm of shallow lakes crisscrossed with large sandbars, where the water level rose and fell with the seasons. The unmarked border between the two warring countries ran through the middle of the swamp. Along the western edge of the marshes, the Iraqis had dug a drainage canal, creating two thin strips of dry land called the Majnoon Islands that controlled the northern approaches to Basra. Iraqi prospectors had discovered a rich oil field on the islands with the potential to produce 800,000 barrels a day for thirty-five years. In preparation for drilling, the Iraqis had built an administrative base camp consisting of seven large blue-and-white bungalow sheds and offices, with two more under construction.

  In early March 1984, some 15,000 Iranian troops crossed the marshes at night, traveling on foot and in shallow-bottomed fiberglass boats, and attacked the Majnoon Islands. Catching the Iraqi sentries guarding the levees by surprise, the Iranian forces seized the administrative base camp and the surrounding oil field. By dawn, both islands were firmly under the control of the Iranian troops, who dug reinforced trenches and built a pontoon bridge across the canal to bring in supplies and reinforcements. A few days later, they replaced the temporary bridge with a dirt causeway linking the island to the mainland, and expanded the defending force to 30,000 men.

  Because of the strategic and economic importance of the Majnoon Islands, the Baghdad regime was determined to dislodge the Iranian defenders and drive them back across the border. The Iraqi Army’s Abu Nawar Brigade launched an assault on the islands with amphibious tanks, but the marsh reeds fouled the vehicles’ propellers and made them vulnerable to Iranian antitank fire, forcing a retreat. After this setback, the Iraqi commander requested permission to use chemical weapons against the Iranians’ fortified positions to break their morale, and Saddam Hussein gave his authori
zation. Once the special strike had been approved, the order was passed down the operational chain of command from the minister of defense to the chief of staff, the Army general headquarters, and finally the commanders in the field.

  Although it was early spring, the heat on the Majnoon Islands was already of furnacelike intensity. Gusts of dry, dusty wind blew over the desolate expanse of marsh and sand. Advancing from the west, Iraqi commandos and helicopter gunships assaulted the dug-in Iranian positions. In the midst of the battle, four Iraqi fighter-bombers thundered over the Iranian trenches at a height of 750 feet and dropped a dozen 250-kilogram bombs. The weapons burst on impact with a muffled thump, some releasing a dirty-white vapor, others spewing a yellowish smoke with a sharp garlicky odor. Carried on the brisk wind, the toxic cloud enveloped the Iranian defenders before they had time to run. The Basij militia lacked any chemical protective gear, and although the Pasdaran carried gas masks, their heavy beards precluded an airtight seal. Finding shelter in bunkers and trenches was impossible because the poisonous vapor was heavier than air and pooled in low-lying areas.

  Within minutes of exposure to the toxic cloud, the Iranian troops began to sweat profusely and gasp for breath. Their noses ran with thin, watery mucus and the pupils of their eyes narrowed to pinpoints, darkening and blurring their vision. Those who had absorbed a lethal dose began to twitch uncontrollably and fell to the ground, convulsed by violent spasms. Dark patches of urine and feces soaked through their uniforms. Finally they stopped breathing, although their hearts continued to beat for a few minutes before ceasing. In the aftermath of the attack, between fifty and a hundred Iranian dead lay scattered over the battlefield in grotesque postures, some arched in rigid contraction, others sprawled in flaccid paralysis.

 

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