From February 24 through March 12, 1996, the U.N. weapons inspectors supervised a team of Iraqi workers who excavated six sections of the collapsed administration building, using large cranes and special drilling and cutting equipment flown in from abroad. After several days of work, the structure was finally safe enough for the inspectors to enter. Amid the debris of the shattered offices, Wolterbeek and his team discovered more than five thousand pages of classified Iraqi documents, including memos, organization charts, official letters, records, computer disks, and scientific papers. One particularly useful item was a telephone directory listing the scientists and senior managers who had worked in the Iraqi chemical weapons program. The U.N. inspectors also recovered a safe from the office of the former director of Muthanna and forced it open. Inside were several technical reports dealing with VX production, including the purchase of raw materials and the development of manufacturing processes. This new evidence suggested that prior to the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Iraq had produced as much as fifty to a hundred tons of VX, all of which remained unaccounted for.
Another legacy of the Gulf War took more than five years to come to light. Immediately after the war, a U.S. engineering battalion had blown up Iraqi munitions bunkers at the Khamisiyah ammunition depot in southeastern Iraq. On June 21, 1996, the U.S. Department of Defense disclosed new information obtained by UNSCOM that one of the destroyed bunkers and an open pit had contained roughly eight tons of artillery rockets filled with a mixture of Sarin and Cyclosarin. The explosions had sent up huge plumes of tainted smoke and dust that had drifted downwind. Initially, the Pentagon estimated that only about four hundred American soldiers had been “presumed exposed” to low levels of nerve agents. Subsequently, however, computer modeling of the incident suggested that the prevailing winds could have carried the Sarin/Cyclosarin plume in a southerly direction as far as 300 miles from the blast site, dropping toxic fallout on as many as 100,000 U.S. troops deployed in southern Iraq, Kuwait, and northern Saudi Arabia.
In the wake of this stunning revelation, an intense controversy developed over the possibility that low-level exposures to nerve agents from the Khamisiyah incident might be responsible for some of the chronic health problems reported by roughly 100,000 of the 696,000 U.S. troops who had fought in the Gulf War, including fatigue, muscle and joint pain, memory loss, and severe headaches. Shortly after the bunker demolitions at Khamisiyah, chemical agent alarms had gone off, but the concentration of nerve agent in the air had been too low to produce acute signs and symptoms of exposure such as pinpoint pupils or shortness of breath. Factors complicating the effort to establish a possible causal link between nerve agent exposure and Gulf War illnesses were the puzzling variety of symptoms reported by sick veterans, the paucity of reliable epidemiological data on chemical exposures during the war, and the lack of scientific evidence that low-level doses of nerve agents could cause delayed or chronic health problems in humans. Some researchers hypothesized that “synergistic” exposures to nerve agents, organophosphate pesticides, pyridostigmine bromide (PB), and other chemicals that inhibit cholinesterase might produce such effects, however.
Given these uncertainties, it seemed unlikely that the medical debate over the possible role of nerve agent exposures in the cause of Gulf War illnesses would ever be resolved conclusively. Nevertheless, an intrepid biomedical researcher named Robert W. Haley, M.D., at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, ventured into this political minefield. He did a systematic study of sick Gulf War veterans and found that a high percentage of those suffering from severe cognitive symptoms (such as mental confusion, memory loss, and dizziness) reported likely exposures to nerve agents in Iraq. In addition, MRI scans of these individuals indicated that they had suffered physical damage to specific areas of the brain that were functionally related to their mental deficits. Finally, Haley found that sick Gulf War veterans tended to have low levels of an enzyme called type Q paraoxonase, which helps to break down nerve agents, making such individuals more susceptible to harm from low-level exposures.
These findings clearly refuted the claims that sick Gulf War veterans were either malingerers or were suffering from the psychosomatic effects of “stress.” Because the Veterans Administration had refused for many years to fund Haley’s research, he had been supported initially by private grants from the eccentric Texas billionaire Ross Perot, who was a strong believer in the reality of Gulf War illnesses despite the intense skepticism of the Pentagon, the VA, and a series of blue-ribbon committees.
IN THE SPRING OF 1997, the United States faced a moment of truth with respect to its participation in the Chemical Weapons Convention. Although the Republican leaders of the Senate had finally scheduled a vote on CWC ratification in September 1996, the Clinton administration had withdrawn the treaty after calculating that it would not pass by the required two-thirds majority. According to a provision written into the CWC, it would automatically go into effect 180 days (approximately six months) after it had been ratified by sixty-five states. When Hungary became the sixty-fifth state to ratify the treaty on October 31, 1996, the clock began ticking down to the target date of April 29, 1997. If the United States did not ratify the CWC by that deadline, it would not become an original state party and hence would be deprived of an influential role in shaping the future treaty organization. Yet because of the uncompromising attitude of Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Helms, the odds of making the April deadline seemed increasingly slim.
Belatedly recognizing the high stakes involved, the Clinton administration launched a full-court press to get the treaty approved. In order to win the support of conservative Republican senators who were skeptics on arms control, it was clear that the administration would have to address their concerns. To this end, Robert Bell, the senior director for arms control on the National Security Council staff, began to negotiate with Senator Helms’s foreign policy aides.
Helms and other conservative Republicans demanded the inclusion of thirty-three conditions in the ratifying legislation for the CWC. One of the more troublesome conditions was that samples collected at chemical plants in the United States could not be removed from U.S. territory for analysis in foreign laboratories because of the potential loss of industrial trade secrets. The Republican skeptics also wanted the future implementing legislation for the CWC to contain a provision authorizing the president to deny a request for an on-site inspection if it could “cause a threat to U.S. national security interests.” Clinton administration officials protested that other countries would respond by enacting similar exemptions, weakening the ability of the CWC inspectorate to verify that member states were complying with their treaty obligations.
Despite these concerns, Senator Helms refused to budge. Because he effectively held the fate of the CWC hostage, the Clinton administration had little choice but to accept twenty-eight of the Republican conditions in the ratifying legislation. Helms took further advantage of his political leverage to force the elimination of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), a small but dedicated bureaucracy that President John F. Kennedy had created in 1961 to negotiate and implement arms control treaties. According to the Helms plan, ACDA’s functions would be folded into the Department of State, eliminating a separate institutional voice for arms control with the U.S. government.
On April 23, 1997, the CWC finally came up for a ratification vote on the Senate floor. After a heated debate that ran late into the night, the Senate approved U.S. participation in the treaty—with the Republican conditions—by a margin of 74 to 26, seven more votes than the required two-thirds majority. On April 25, President Clinton signed the U.S. instrument of ratification, which was immediately couriered to the treaty office at United Nations headquarters in New York. As a result, the United States met the ratification deadline by a whisker, becoming an original party to the CWC only days before the treaty entered into force on April 29, 1997.
Washington was now committed to forswear any future d
evelopment or production of chemical weapons and to destroy its existing stockpile over ten years, with a deadline of April 29, 2007. Although Congress had ordered the elimination of obsolete unitary chemical munitions back in 1982, this effort was proceeding slowly because of the difficulty and expense of destroying blister and nerve agents in a safe and environmentally responsible manner. Moreover, because of public opposition to transporting chemical weapons across state lines, they would all have to be destroyed at the U.S. Army depots where they were already stored. JACADS, on Johnston Island, was the first of nine planned chemical weapons destruction facilities. The other eight would be built at Army storage depots scattered across the continental United States: Umatilla, Oregon; Tooele, Utah; Pueblo, Colorado; Newport, Indiana; Aberdeen, Maryland; Lexington, Kentucky; Pine Bluff, Arkansas; and Anniston, Alabama. At some of the storage sites, local opposition to the use of high-temperature incinerators slowed the pace of weapons elimination by forcing the Army to develop alternative destruction technologies, such as chemical neutralization.
The chemical weapons destruction facility on Johnston Island, known as the Johnston Atoll Chemical Agent Disposal System (JACADS), operated from the spring of 1990 through November 2000. Its purpose was to destroy obsolete U.S. chemical weapons transferred to the island from Okinawa and West Germany.
U.S. chemical weapons are stored in earth-covered concrete igloos like the one shown at the Umatilla Chemical Depot in Umatilla, Oregon. Under the Chemical Weapons Convention, which went into force in 1997, all 31,000 tons of chemical weapons in the U.S. stockpile must be destroyed.
By the end of 1997, several other important countries had ratified the CWC, including China, Russia, Iran, India, Pakistan, and all of the members of the European Union. Russia, which had inherited the vast Soviet chemical weapons stockpile, now faced the daunting task of destroying, within a decade, some 40,000 metric tons of blister and nerve agents stored at seven far-flung depots on its territory. In contrast to the United States, Moscow opted for a two-step destruction process involving chemical neutralization followed by “bitumenization,” or mixing the neutralized waste product with asphalt to form giant blocks, which would then be buried in landfills. Because the BDA had never entered into force, the planned U.S.-Russian bilateral verification mechanism did not exist. As a result, all on-site inspections of U.S. and Russian chemical weapons storage and destruction facilities would have to be performed by the international CWC inspectorate.
As of early 1998, several countries of chemical weapons concern remained outside the CWC, including Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Syria, and North Korea. Although Saddam Hussein refused to join the new treaty, Iraq continued to be subjected to highly intrusive monitoring by UNSCOM. In April and May 1998, for example, U.N. weapons inspectors dug up fragments of twenty “special” Al-Hussein warheads, which Iraq had unilaterally destroyed after the 1991 Gulf War and buried in two pits near the town of Nibai. UNSCOM took wipe samples from the warhead fragments and sent them for analysis at three laboratories in the United States, France, and Switzerland. The results of the analyses were inconsistent. Although the U.S. laboratory identified traces of VX degradation products and a VX stabilizer, the French and Swiss labs were unable to confirm this finding. In an effort to clarify the contradictory results, UNSCOM convened a Technical Evaluation Meeting at its New York headquarters on October 22–23, 1998, attended by twenty-one chemical weapons experts from seven countries. After much discussion and debate, they agreed unanimously that the analyses indicating the presence of VX on the warhead fragments had been “conclusive and valid,” raising new questions about Iraq’s earlier denials that it had loaded VX into missile warheads.
In December 1998, after a series of escalating confrontations with Saddam Hussein over access to presidential palaces and other sensitive sites in Iraq, UNSCOM withdrew its inspectors at the request of the United States and Britain. The two countries then carried out a bombing campaign against Iraq to punish Baghdad for its defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions and failure to cooperate fully with the inspections process. After this military action, which was dubbed Operation Desert Fox, a furious Saddam refused to let the U.N. weapons inspectors back into the country.
ISRAEL’S DECISION not to ratify the CWC was also troubling. Unlike the frontline Arab states, which had boycotted the signing ceremony in Paris in January 1993, Israel had been among the first group of countries to sign the treaty, and Israeli experts and diplomats had participated actively in the four years of PrepCom deliberations in The Hague. During the brief period of optimism that followed the Oslo peace process and the famous handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993, the Israeli government had planned to submit the CWC to the Knesset, or parliament, for ratification. Treaty supporters argued that ratification would improve Israel’s international position, demonstrate its willingness to pursue arms control, and enable the United States and others to pressure the holdout Arab states to join, benefiting Israeli diplomatic and strategic interests. Conversely, a failure to ratify the CWC would subject Israel’s chemical industry to international trade restrictions on certain dual-use chemicals covered by the treaty, imposing potentially significant economic costs.
By 1997, however, the Oslo peace process had failed to live up to its promise and Israel’s Arab neighbors were continuing to stockpile nerve agents and missile delivery systems at a frightening pace. Some Israeli analysts argued that chemical weapons were not an essential element of the nation’s deterrence equation and could be abandoned, but others countered that doing away with the chemical option would force Israel to rely on nuclear weapons to deter a Syrian or Iranian chemical attack, dangerously lowering the nuclear threshold. Israeli opponents of the CWC also expressed concern that other countries might request “frivolous or abusive” challenge inspections at the Dimona reactor complex in the Negev Desert, where the Israeli nuclear weapons program was based. Because of these drawbacks, Israel announced that it would not move to ratify the CWC until after all of its Arab neighbors had joined. For their part, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Lebanon continued to boycott the CWC until Israel acceded to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Since Israel had no intention of giving up its nuclear deterrent, the stalemate continued.
In 1998, an investigation into the mysterious crash of an El Al cargo plane in Amsterdam six years earlier focused attention on Israel’s activities in the chemical weapons field. Although Israel accused its Arab neighbors of stockpiling chemical arms, it had never acknowledged possessing a chemical arsenal of its own. Some reports suggested, however, that in 1955 the Jewish state had launched an urgent effort to develop chemical weapons as a stopgap deterrent until it acquired nuclear arms. Other evidence indicated that France had provided technical assistance, such as the fact that Israeli scientists had visited the French chemical weapons testing site in Algeria in 1960. Unconfirmed reports also suggested that in 1969, two years after the Six-Day War, Israel had expanded its production of chemical weapons to counter Egypt’s growing arsenal, and that Iraq’s use of nerve agents during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s had caused Israel to upgrade its capabilities further.
The facility linked most closely to the Israeli chemical warfare program was the Israel Institute for Biological Research (IIBR), a top secret government laboratory near the town of Nes Ziona, about twelve miles southeast of Tel Aviv. IIBR had been founded in 1952 as an offshoot of the Weizmann Institute of Science and consisted initially of a single building hidden in an orange grove. In the early 1960s, the institute’s Organic Chemistry Department began to conduct research on organophosphorus nerve agents, and a paper published in 1963 described several steps in the synthesis of V agents. Over the years, IIBR gradually expanded into a cluster of low buildings on several acres of land, with a staff of about 300 chemists, biologists, and other scientists. The institute was subordinated directly to the Israeli prime minister’s office and remained so secret that it was not
shown on local or aerial survey maps. Protection of IIBR and its information was the responsibility of the Bureau of Security of the Defense Establishment, known by its Hebrew acronym MALMAB. The institute compound was ringed with a six-foot-high concrete wall topped with intrusion-detecting sensors, and government security vehicles continually patrolled the perimeter road outside the fence.
A tragic accident offered a rare glimpse through the dense veil of secrecy surrounding IIBR. On October 4, 1992, El Al cargo flight 1862 to Tel Aviv, originating at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, departed from Schiphol Airport on the outskirts of Amsterdam. Approximately ten minutes after takeoff, the Boeing 747 developed serious mechanical problems and began to lose altitude. Schiphol air-traffic control repeatedly urged the Israeli pilot to attempt an emergency landing in nearby Ijsselmeer Lake, but he ignored these instructions and instead turned back toward the airport. Falling short of the runway, the cargo plane plowed into a cluster of high-rise apartment buildings in the suburb of Bijlmermeer and burst into flames. The crash and ensuing fire destroyed or damaged hundreds of apartments and killed all three crew members on board and forty-three people on the ground.
From the outset, the El Al disaster was wrapped in mystery and intrigue. Israeli and Dutch officials claimed that the flight had been transporting “perfumes and gift articles” from the United States to Israel via Amsterdam. Yet for several hours after the accident, local residents saw men in white hazardous-materials suits and respirators picking through the smoldering crash site and removing certain items. Over the next few years, more than a thousand emergency workers and residents of Bijlmermeer began to suffer from a variety of chronic medical and psychological conditions that they attributed to exposure to unknown toxic materials from the crash. Finally, the Dutch Parliament launched a formal inquiry into the incident and the allegations of a cover-up.
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