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NEW
YORK (AP) -- Egypt secretly supplied crucial
help - both technology and expert manpower - to the
chemical weapons program of Saddam Hussein's Iraq in
the 1980s, U.S. arms investigators have found.
The CIA's Iraq Survey Group says Egyptian
specialists helped the Iraqis make "technological
leaps" on poison gas at the height of the Iran-Iraq
War, when Baghdad used nerve agents to kill
thousands of Iranian soldiers and Iranian and Iraqi
civilians.
The U.S. report is the most authoritative and
detailed since such collaboration between the Arab
nations was first rumored in the late 1980s.
The Cairo government rejected those earlier
allegations, and Egypt's Washington embassy
reiterated that denial when asked by The Associated
Press about the CIA report. But in AP interviews,
United Nations arms inspectors who scoured Iraq's
files and facilities in the 1990s corroborated the
U.S. finding.
Like former enemy Israel, Egypt has long been
believed to possess chemical weapons. Experts say
there's strong evidence Egyptian warplanes
repeatedly used mustard-gas bombs against royalist
forces during Cairo's intervention in the Yemen
civil war of the 1960s.
In 1981, after the outbreak of war with Iran,
President Saddam's Iraqi government paid Egypt $12
million "in return for assistance with production
and storage of chemical weapons agents," the U.S.
weapons hunters say in a little-noticed annex of
their Comprehensive Report, a 350,000-word document
issued last October.
The Iraq Survey Group, led by CIA special adviser
Charles A. Duelfer, had spent 20 months in 2003-2004
searching for evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction, cited by President Bush as the
rationale for invading Iraq two years ago.
The U.S. arms teams discredited Bush's claims,
finding that Iraq had dismantled its advanced
weapons programs under U.N. inspection in 1991. In
the process, the Americans uncovered previously
unreported details of the programs, such as the
findings on Egypt and chemical arms.
"During the early years, Egyptian scientists
provided consultation, technology and oversight
allowing rapid advances and technological leaps in
weaponization," the Duelfer report says.
From 1983 to 1988, the Iraqis repeatedly used
mustard gas, tabun, sarin and possibly other
chemical agents against the Iranians. Most
notoriously, in 1988, Iraqi aircraft dropped sarin
and mustard gas on Iranian-held villages in
rebellious Iraqi Kurdistan, killing up to 5,000
Iraqi Kurdish civilians.
The Duelfer report says that in the mid-1980s
Baghdad had invited Egyptian chemical weapons
experts to Iraq to help with production of sarin, a
nerve agent that when inhaled can produce symptoms
within seconds - convulsions, paralysis, respiratory
failure and possibly death.
From five tons in 1984, Iraqi sarin production rose
to 209 tons in 1987 and 394 tons in 1988, the report
says.
The U.S. arms hunters specify two other instances of
critical Egyptian help:
-In 1983, the Egyptians modified the Iraqis' Grad
122mm multiple-launch rocket system to enable
warheads to carry chemical agents. That powerful
weapon system can launch 40 rockets with a range of
12 miles.
-A year later, the Egyptians supplied Iraq with
9-foot-long Grad rockets pre-equipped with plastic
inserts in the warheads to hold the poisons.
The Duelfer findings were unsurprising to
experienced U.N. inspectors, who first entered Iraq
in 1991, after it was defeated by a U.S.-led
coalition in the Gulf War, to destroy its chemical
and biological weapons and dismantle its project to
build nuclear bombs.
"We were aware from back in 1991 that there was a
link between Iraq and Egypt on chemical weapons,"
said Ron G. Manley of Britain, a former senior U.N.
adviser on chemical weapons. He said the warhead
inserts, known as an Egyptian design, were an early
clue.
The U.N. inspectors pinned down details of the
connection through extensive searches of scientists'
and government offices, downloading of Iraqi
computer files and, finally, through "open and
frank" discussions with officials in Egypt, said
another expert familiar with the U.N. work.
This specialist, who spoke with AP on this "very
sensitive matter" on condition he not be named, said
much has yet to be made public about Egyptian-Iraqi
dealings on chemical weapons.
"It represents a small piece of a long history of
cooperation," he said of the Duelfer disclosures.
The U.N. inspectors never publicly divulged the
Cairo connection, in keeping with a policy of not
naming companies and countries that helped Iraq, to
encourage them to cooperate in investigations. Nor
have the CIA or U.N. agencies made documentary
evidence of the Egypt link public.
In Washington, Egyptian Embassy spokesman Hisham
Elnakib repeated a long-standing official denial:
"Egypt had no relation whatsoever with Iraq in the
field of chemical weapons."
Iraq's actions violated the 1925 Geneva Protocol
banning use of chemical weapons, but Egyptian aid,
strictly speaking, would not have been a violation,
said a leading scholar in this field, Jonathan
Tucker of California's Monterey Institute of
International Studies.
However, "it definitely is a violation of an
emerging norm against chemical warfare," he said.
AP
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