War of Nerves

by Jonathan Tucker

  On September 30, 1998, six years after the crash of El Al flight 1862, the Rotterdam daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad published a lengthy report on its own investigation. According to freight documents obtained by the paper, the cargo on the ill-fated flight had been destined for IIBR in Nes Ziona and had included three precursor chemicals used in the production of Sarin: ten plastic drums, each containing 18.9 liters of DMMP (dimethyl methylphosphonate), as well as smaller quantities of isopropyl alcohol and hydrogen fluoride. The 189 liters of DMMP, enough for the production of 270 kilograms of Sarin, had been manufactured by Solkatronic Chemicals of Allentown, Pennsylvania. Although DMMP was a dual-use chemical that was subject to strict export controls, the U.S. Department of Commerce had granted Solkatronic a license to export it to Israel. Several weeks after the accident, a company called Shalom Chemicals of Nes Ziona had ordered an identical shipment from Solkatronic, which again received an export license from the U.S. government. According to the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, no one had heard of Shalom Chemicals, which was believed to be an IIBR front company.

  Rescue workers pick through the wreckage of an El Al 747 cargo plane that crashed into an apartment complex near Schiphol Airport outside Amsterdam in October 1992. An investigation by the leading Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad uncovered the contents of the plane’s cargo: 189 liters of a Sarin precursor for an Israeli research institute.

  In response to the NRC Handelsblad exposé, David Bar-Ilan, a media adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, adamantly denied that the El Al flight had carried precursor chemicals for Sarin. Twelve hours later, however, he was contradicted by an El Al spokesman, who admitted that the flight had carried DMMP and the other chemicals but claimed that the shipment had been intended for strictly defensive purposes, such as the testing of gas masks and protective filters. “We fly sugar, which can be used for cake,” he explained. “But that doesn’t mean we’re flying a cake.”

  Israel’s preoccupation with chemical defense was not surprising given the fact that several of its neighbors had advanced chemical warfare programs. Syria, for example, had SS-21 missiles armed with nerve agent warheads that could reach Tel Aviv and other cities on Israel’s densely populated coastal strip. Ze’ev Schiff, a leading Israeli journalist, warned in 1999 that the growing chemical arsenals of Syria and Iran “could seriously alter the regional balance of power.” Nevertheless, it remained an open question whether Israel’s chemical weapons program was strictly defensive or included offensive R&D and perhaps an active stockpile.

  DESPITE THE GREAT normative and legal significance of the CWC, it was partially obsolete even before it entered into force. A product of the Cold War period during which it had been negotiated, the treaty was based on the assumption that the primary threat of chemical weapons came from large military stockpiles of traditional agents produced by nation-states in large, highly visible facilities. Yet the end of the Cold War in 1991, followed by the Sarin attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995, called this traditional paradigm into question. Whereas the West no longer saw the former Soviet chemical arsenal as a military threat, the acquisition of chemical weapons by subnational actors, such as insurgents and terrorists, was becoming a major concern—one that a traditional arms control treaty among sovereign states was not fully capable of addressing.

  The fear of chemical terrorism became more acute with the rise of Islamic extremism, in particular the Al-Qaeda network founded by terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. Born in 1957 into a large and wealthy family in Saudi Arabia, bin Laden grew up under comfortable circumstances, but as a young man he began to identify with pan-Arab and Islamist ideology. Within days after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, he joined the Afghani resistance and rose to prominence by financing the recruitment, training, and transportation of Arab volunteers to fight alongside the local mujahidin. In 1988, bin Laden founded a network of Islamist recruits called Al-Qaeda (“The Base”) and organized paramilitary training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. After the Soviets withdrew their forces from Afghanistan in 1989, bin Laden returned to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to work in his family’s construction company while continuing to support militant Islamist groups throughout the region.

  At the end of 1990 Saudi Arabia expelled bin Laden, and he and his associates relocated to Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. That country was attractive because it was geographically close to the Arab world and had a radical Islamist government, the National Islamic Front (NIF), which had taken power in a bloodless coup in 1989. The leader of the NIF, Hasan al-Turabi, and bin Laden quickly established a close working relationship. Over the next several months, the Saudi financier embarked on numerous business ventures with wealthy members of the NIF, including a construction company, an import-export firm, a bank, and a financial operation called Taba Investments. Bin Laden also bankrolled civil infrastructure development projects on behalf of the regime, such as an airport and a road linking Khartoum with Port Sudan, and he supported the development of an indigenous armaments industry under the Sudanese Military Industrial Corporation.

  During and after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, bin Laden viewed the permanent stationing of U.S. military forces in Saudi Arabia as a grave threat to conservative Islam and the sanctity of the Muslim holy places. He therefore turned against the United States, his former ally in fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, and committed himself to driving American military bases and cultural influences out of the Middle East. Bin Laden also continued to expand his network of militant veterans of the Afghanistan War, financing the travel of more than three hundred of them to Sudan in May 1993. During this period, U.S. intelligence agencies learned that Iraqi chemical weapons experts were visiting Khartoum, raising concern that Iraq might transfer chemical weapons production technologies to Sudan so as to hide them from the UNSCOM inspectors. Other intelligence suggested that the Sudanese government was seeking chemical weapons for its brutal war against non-Muslim rebels in southern Sudan. It was also rumored that bin Laden had requested al-Turabi’s help in obtaining nerve agents for terrorist attacks against U.S. military personnel in Saudi Arabia. After bin Laden moved to Afghanistan in 1996, he remained on good terms with al-Turabi, who allowed Al-Qaeda to use Sudan as a safe haven.

  One of the projects partially funded by the Sudanese Military Industrial Corporation with suspected financial involvement by bin Laden was the Al-Shifa Pharmaceutical Factory, a joint venture by a Sudanese engineer and a Saudi Arabian shipper. From 1992 to 1996, the sprawling chemical plant rose in a mixed residential-industrial district of northern Khartoum. The production equipment was imported from the United States, Sweden, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, India, and Thailand. When the Al-Shifa Factory began operation in 1996, it employed over 300 workers and supplied more than half of Sudan’s pharmaceutical needs, including antibiotics, pain relievers, drugs for malaria and tuberculosis, and veterinary medicines. The U.S. intelligence community, however, received reports suggesting that the Al-Shifa plant was secretly linked to the manufacture of nerve agents. In 1997, a CIA informant stated that three sites in Khartoum, including Al-Shifa, were involved in chemical weapons production. The U.S. National Security Agency, which specializes in electronic eavesdropping, also intercepted telephone conversations between the general manager of Al-Shifa and a senior scientist in Baghdad: Dr. Emad Husayn Abdullah Ani, the “father” of the Iraqi VX program.

  In December 1997, the CIA obtained what appeared to be a highly incriminating piece of evidence. Agency officials reasoned that if the Al-Shifa Factory was producing nerve agents or related precursors, trace amounts of these chemicals would escape into the air or the liquid runoff from the plant and be deposited on the ground nearby. Accordingly, the CIA sent a trained Egyptian operative to take a soil sample about sixty feet from the main entrance of Al-Shifa. This sample was flown to the United States, where it was split into three parts and sent to private contractor laboratories for analysis. The CIA later claimed that all three analyses
had detected an organophosphate compound called EMPTA, which was known to be an intermediate in the Iraqi process for manufacturing VX.

  Although EMPTA has peaceful applications in the production of fungicides, nothing suggested that any facility in Sudan was using it commercially for that purpose. Based on the intelligence findings, Clinton administration officials suspected that the Sudanese government had hired Iraqi chemical weapons scientists to manufacture nerve agents in Khartoum. According to this hypothesis, EMPTA had either been produced or stored at the Al-Shifa factory and then moved to another location for conversion into VX and loading into artillery shells.

  Meanwhile, Al-Qaeda was preparing a devastating attack against U.S. interests in East Africa. On August 7, 1998, suicide terrorists from the bin Laden network carried out near-simultaneous bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. In both cities, trucks packed with conventional explosives rammed into the embassy building and exploded, killing a total of 224 people, including twelve Americans, and injuring about 5,000 others. Stunned Clinton administration officials debated how to respond. On August 10, three days after the embassy bombings, National Security Adviser Samuel “Sandy” Berger convened a high-level meeting in the White House Situation Room to discuss options for military retaliation. Held under conditions of extreme secrecy, the meeting was limited to six top officials known as the “Small Group.” Sitting around a mahogany conference table in the Situation Room, the six—President Clinton, Berger, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, JCS Chairman General Henry H. Shelton, and Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet—reviewed the evidence obtained by the CIA Counterterrorism Center, which had attributed the two embassy bombings to Al-Qaeda.

  President Clinton and other senior officials agreed with a recommendation by General Shelton to rule out U.S. military operations involving ground troops or piloted aircraft. Instead, the retaliatory strike would be carried out with unmanned Tomahawk cruise missiles. Because Al-Qaeda had targeted U.S. embassies in two countries, Berger wanted to retaliate against two separate locations. He suggested bombing the terror network’s six main training camps in Afghanistan in the hope of killing bin Laden, and a related site in a second country. General Shelton presented a list of possible targets in Sudan, and the Al-Shifa Factory was high on the list.

  Because the evidence linking Al-Shifa to bin Laden and VX production was circumstantial, President Clinton faced a difficult decision. Should he order an attack against an ostensibly civilian pharmaceutical plant in a country with which the United States was not at war? Several members of the Small Group argued that the threat of chemical terrorism justified preemptive military action against Al-Shifa, even though the case was less than airtight. If the Islamic regime in Sudan was manufacturing VX at the facility, it might be prepared to share the deadly agent with Al-Qaeda for use in terrorist attacks against the United States. As Berger pointed out, “What if we do not hit [Al-Shifa] and then, after an attack, nerve gas is released in the New York City subway? What will we say then?”

  After further discussion, the members of the Small Group agreed unanimously to target Al-Shifa and a second facility in Khartoum that had been linked to chemical weapons production, and President Clinton signed off on the decision. Less than twenty-four hours before the operation was to begin, however, Clinton had second thoughts and decided to drop the second facility from the target list. Not only were its links to Al-Qaeda fairly tenuous, but it was located in a densely populated area where a missile strike might cause high civilian casualties.

  On August 20, less than two weeks after the U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa, President Clinton gave the final order to proceed with the retaliatory strike against Al-Qaeda, code-named Operation Infinite Reach. U.S. Navy warships in the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea moved into position and fired a total of seventy-five Tomahawk cruise missiles, each worth about $750,000, at the designated targets in Afghanistan and Sudan. Thirteen cruise missiles targeted on the Al-Shifa Factory were launched in rapid succession from vertical tubes beneath the decks of two destroyers in the Red Sea. The missiles roared into the sky on plumes of flame and smoke. Once aloft, their turbofan engines and sophisticated guidance systems switched on, carrying them on programmed flight paths toward the target at 400 miles per hour.

  At approximately 7:30 p.m. local time, the whine of low-flying jet engines filled the air over northeast Khartoum. Suddenly a swarm of winged cruise missiles appeared, skimming low over the industrial zone and homing in on the Al-Shifa Factory. Screaming out of the sky in a blur of metal, the missiles exploded into a series of brilliant fireballs that shook the ground like an earthquake. The blasts ignited an intense blaze that gutted the factory, leaving it a smoking ruins. Although the timing of the strike had been chosen to minimize “collateral damage,” a security guard was killed and ten other Sudanese civilians were injured, five of them seriously.

  After Operation Infinite Reach had been carried out, President Clinton gave a televised address in which he claimed that the Al-Shifa Factory had been linked to bin Laden and involved in the production of VX nerve agent, one of the deadliest poisons ever invented. “I ordered our armed forces to strike at terrorist-related facilities in Afghanistan and Sudan because of the imminent threat they presented to our national security,” the president explained. “Our target was terror. Our mission was clear: to strike at the network of radical groups affiliated with and funded by Osama bin Laden, perhaps the preeminent organizer and financier of international terrorism in the world today.”

  As it happened, the cruise missile attack on the terrorist training camps in Afghanistan missed the primary target because bin Laden had left the area a few hours earlier. Critics also began to second-guess the strike on the Al-Shifa Factory, casting doubt on the U.S. government’s evidence for VXRELATED production at the site. Journalists who visited the ruins of the plant reported that it had not been under heavy security prior to the attack, had manufactured urgently needed medicines for the civilian population, and was a simple formulation and packing facility that lacked the specialized equipment needed to produce a complex chemical such as EMPTA. The CIA was also forced to admit that it had been unaware that the original owners had sold the Al-Shifa plant for $32 million in March 1998 to Salah Idris, a Sudanese-born businessman and adviser to Saudi Arabia’s largest bank. Some Republican critics accused President Clinton of attacking an innocent country in order to distract attention from the Monica Lewinsky scandal. This allegation was called the “ ‘Wag the Dog’ scenario” because it resembled the plot of a popular movie by that name.

  The ruins of the Al-Shifa Pharmaceutical Factory in Khartoum, Sudan, after a U.S. cruise-missile strike on August 20, 1998. President Bill Clinton’s administration alleged that the Sudanese government had plotted with Osama bin Laden to produce a VX precursor at the civilian plant.

  Three years later, new evidence emerged supporting the Clinton administration’s claim that Al-Qaeda had sought to produce nerve agents in Sudan, although not necessarily at the Al-Shifa Factory. During the 2001 trial in New York City of several suspects in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings, a former Al-Qaeda operative named Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl was the chief prosecution witness. Under questioning by Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald, he testified that his job had been to shuttle back and forth between Afghanistan and Sudan to supervise Al-Qaeda’s involvement in the Sudanese chemical weapons program. Al-Fadl said that in late 1993 or early 1994, he had accompanied Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, a top bin Laden lieutenant, on a visit to a large compound owned by the Sudan National Security Agency in the Hilat Koko district of northern Khartoum. According to al-Fadl, Salim had told him that Al-Qaeda was planning to help the Sudanese ruling party, the National Islamic Front, manufacture chemical weapons at the compound in Hilat Koko.

  Because the Al-Shifa Factory was located a few miles away from Hilat Koko, al-Fadl’s testimony suggested that the United States
might have hit the wrong target. But Richard A. Clarke, the White House coordinator for counterterrorism, testified before a closed session of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees on June 11, 2004, that he continued to believe that the Al-Shifa Factory had been involved in VX production. According to Clarke’s heavily censored testimony, Al-Shifa “was the type of plant that you would use to make the precursor [and it] appeared there was no other plant in the area where you would make that precursor.” He also noted that Al-Shifa had been targeted because it could be destroyed with little collateral damage.

  THE HORROR and devastation of the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa were dwarfed by the Al-Qaeda attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. One week later, the first of two sets of letters contaminated with anthrax bacterial spores was sent through the U.S. mail. Targeting an odd assortment of media and political figures, the tainted letters ultimately killed five people, infected seventeen others, and frightened millions of Americans. Although the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks remained unknown, there were no obvious links to Al-Qaeda; the only individual that the FBI identified as a “person of interest” in the case was a former government scientist who had worked in the U.S. Army’s biodefense lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Nevertheless, President George W. Bush, who had taken office eight months before, began to emphasize the threat that Al-Qaeda terrorists might use chemical or biological weapons against American cities. In his January 2002 State of the Union address, Bush made the case for invading Iraq because Saddam Hussein had retained stockpiles of unconventional arms and could provide them to terrorists. “I will not wait on events while dangers gather,” Bush declared. “I will not stand by as peril draws closer and closer. The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.”