Iraq's chemists bought anthrax from America

Saddam's bio-warfare scientists were trained in Britain and sent off for bacteria by mail order, reports Roger Highfield

THE intelligence community has focused on Iraq as a possible source of the anthrax used in the bio-terrorist attacks in America.

If Iraq is the culprit, it is likely that Saddam Hussein would have used one of 21 strains of the anthrax bacterium which his scientists bought by mail order from America in the 1980s.

In a further irony, most of the leading scientists in the Iraqi bio-warfare programme, including its project chief, Rihab Rashida Taha, were trained in Britain.

In 1995, three years before the United Nations special commission weapons inspectors were forced to pull out of the country, Iraq admitted that it had produced 2,000 gallons of anthrax.

The UN destroyed most of those supplies, but officials believe that Baghdad hid four times as much as was discovered.

Iraq still has the best biological expertise in the region and experts agree that, since the UN inspectors left, Saddam has been back in the bio-warfare business.

Britain has played an unwitting role in arming Iraq, although a spokesman for the successor to Unscom - the UN monitoring, verification and inspection commission - said: "There is not an awful lot of difference between making vaccines and making bio-weapons - it is a bit unfair to mark those who supplied Iraq as guilty."

British companies exported to Iraq large quantities of the growth media in which biological weapons are cultivated and its leading scientists were trained here.

The covert biological weapons research programme was directed by Gen Amer Saadi, who obtained a masters degree in chemistry at Oxford, and Rihab Taha, who studied microbiology at the University of East Anglia, said Richard Spertzel, the UN's former chief biological inspector.

Overall supervision was conducted by Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, the director of Iraq's Military-Industrial Corp, and Ahmed Murthada, a British-trained engineer.

The country's biological weapons programme is believed to have started in 1974 at Salman Pak in the al-Hazan Ibn al-Hathem Institute, where Dr Taha arrived in 1980.

Five years later, Salman Pak was taken over by the Technical Research Centre and, in 1987, Dr Taha moved her team into the new al-Hakem facility at Salman Pak, where construction of facilities for production of anthrax began, among other agents.

At the time of the Gulf war, Iraq later acknowledged the large-scale production of anthrax spores and to have filled 50 bombs and five missile warheads with anthrax.

However, even in its "full, final and complete declaration" regarding its BW programme, submitted in September 1997, Baghdad continued to present the UN weapons inspectors with a false picture.

Iraq approached Porton Down in Britain for the Ames strain of the anthrax bacterium, said Dr Spertzel. "That [request] was fortunately denied," he said.

Iraq obtained much of its anthrax supply from the American Type Culture Collection. Between 1985 and 1989, it obtained at least 21 strains of anthrax from ATCC and about 15 other class III pathogens, the bacteria that pose an extreme risk to human health.

One strain had a British military pedigree and three of the other strains were listed as coming from the American military's biological warfare programme.

This came as a shock, said Dr Spertzel, although he added that at that time the ATCC had a policy to supply laboratories with credible reputations. The anthrax strains were ordered by the University of Baghdad and then diverted to the bio-warfare effort.

Mohamed Atta, the September 11 hijacker, reportedly had encounters with an Iraqi operative in Prague as recently as April and there have been reports of meetings between Iraqi agents and associates of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.

However, Dr Spertzel added that what took place in these encounters, and whether bio-warfare was discussed, was a matter of speculation.

"Saddam's bio-warfare scientists were trained in Britain and sent off for bacteria by mail order"

THE MENA ANTHRAX POISONING CASE
"Last Fall a news team from a British television program called "The Big Story" traveled through Mena. The anchor for the show told Welch that he had worked for three years in South Africa. He said that sending biological warfare agents through the mail was a commonly used weapon during a particular ongoing war in that part of the world. After Welch got out of the hospital he never again received any torn envelopes."

Do any of you know who was on that news team?

Clinton donor's biowarfare deal Trie helped Chinese government to set up germ weapons operation
"Zhang visited Little Rock and, in November 1992 -- after Clinton was elected president -- he and Trie set up what appears to be a shell company called United Biotech. The company had a bank account and a Little Rock address, but no business plan or real income. The firm was dissolved a year later.

But in that time, Trie helped Zhang procure a 132-gallon "medical fermentation tank" from a New York-based manufacturer, according to the FBI.

"He got them the fermenting equipment to grow the bugs" used in germ warfare, a senior Pentagon official told WorldNetDaily. Special agents worry that the Chinese government may have used the apparent shell company to acquire other biotech equipment.

"Trie was asked if he thought it possible, considering the high priority the People's Republic of China gave to acquiring advanced biotechnology, that the United Biotech corporate name and address may have been used by PRC purchasing agents to make purchases (from manufacturers) elsewhere in the U.S.," FBI agents said in the report. Though Trie denies that happened, United Biotech isn't the only trading company he has set up.

A search of Arkansas secretary of state records for DBAs, sole proprietorships and incorporations registered under Trie's name turns up no less than six import-export or international consulting businesses. They include Jesco International Inc., Asian Pacific International Inc., Daihatsu International Trading Inc., Premier International Investment Inc. and T&L International Inc. At least one, Jesco International, traded with China before going out of business.

According to the FBI report, the 50-year-old Trie had an ethnic-Chinese "silent partner" -- Dr. Peter P. Fu -- who invested in Daihatsu International. An FDA toxicologist, Fu met Chinese scientist Zhang in Little Rock after Clinton was elected. Fu works for the National Center for Toxicological Research in Jefferson, Ark., which is about halfway between Little Rock and Pine Bluff, Ark.

The federal lab, on a 496-acre campus, conducts experiments in biochemical toxicology, genetic toxicology, neurotoxicology, microbiology and molecular epidemiology, its website says. Some pathology labs do studies of "microorganisms multiplying and producing infections." The center has an active lab-to-lab scientific exchange program with a medical institution in China. And in 1993, it hosted an "international group of inspectors interested in Biological Weapons Treaty issues."

Aha. Here we are:

Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.

BRITISH TV JOURNALIST FINISHES FILMING MENA AIRPORT 'SECRETS' REPORT ER CALLS TALE OF DRUGS, ARMS FOR CONTRAS 'FASCINATING' RODNEY BOWERS, Democrat-Gazette State Reporter Arkansas Democrat-Gazette NEWS; Pg. 4B August 26, 1995, Saturday

MENA --
A British journalist said Friday that he found the "secrets and allegations" of drugs and arms smuggling at the Mena airport "fascinating."

"I found a man in my motel room in the middle of the night," he said. Baxter said the man explained that he had been sleepwalking and theorized he entered Baxter's unlocked door.

"It's a fascinating story that we think will interest British viewers," said David Baxter, an associate producer for the independent film company 20-20. "If that sort of thing happened in the United Kingdom, it would be amazing" and warrant extensive national media reporting, which he said "strangely" has not occurred here.

Baxter's London-based film crew spent three weeks in Arkansas this month investigating allegations that convicted drug smuggler Barry Seal shipped "hundreds of pounds" of cocaine into the state through the Mena airport in the early 1980s. They also investigated allegations that Seal flew illegal firearms out of the airport to the Nicaraguan Contras during Bill Clinton's tenure as governor. The film crew also looked into allegations that Seal funneled his drug money through Clinton associates and state agencies. Seal, who cooperated as a federal Drug Enforcement Administration witness, died in a hail of gunfire in February 1986 as he returned to a halfway house in Baton Rouge, La., where he was serving a sentence in a federal drug case. Authorities later arrested and convicted a group of Colombians in the assassination.

It also was the October 1986 crash of one of Seal's cargo planes -- a C-123K based for a time at Mena -- that led to the unraveling of a covert U.S. operation to arm Contra rebels against the communist government in Nicaragua.

Baxter said he expects the report to air Sept. 7 or 14 as part of "The Big Story," a "60 Minutes"-type program on the British television network ITV.

Baxter said he found the account of a former Clinton security guard particularly interesting, adding, "We're very pleased with our interview with L.D. Brown." Brown has claimed he left the governor's security force in 1984 to work for the CIA and that he participated in Seal's drugs flights at Mena.

"Obviously, if L.D. Brown is to be believed -- and he certainly comes across to me as honest -- Clinton knew about what was going on," Baxter said. "I'm certainly startled by that."

Clinton, however, has disputed Brown's story, calling him a "pathological liar."

During the course of the group's investigation, Baxter said, "We spoke to people who claimed they were interviewed by (Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth) Starr ... concerning the Arkansas Development and Finance Authority" and the possibility that Seal and others laundered drug money through that organization.

Others interviewed by the British crew for their television report included:

-- Terry Reed, a former Little Rock businessman who recently claimed that Iran-Contra figure Oliver North recruited him to train Contra pilots at Mena and that Clinton knew of the drugs and arms smuggling at the airport.

-- Bill Duncan, a former IRS agent who investigated Seal's admitted money-laundering at Mena.

-- Russell Welch, a state police investigator who looked into Seal's smuggling activities at the airport.

-- John Brown, a former Saline County sheriff's deputy who investigated the 1987 deaths of Bryant teen-agers Don G. Henry and Larry K. Ives and thought them to be linked to the Mena operation.

A federal grand jury meeting in the late 1980s in western Arkansas did not return any indictments in its Mena investigation. Several people associated with the investigation have claimed the U.S. attorney's office withheld information from the grand jury.

J. Michael Fitzhugh, the former U.S. attorney who oversaw the investigation, has denied the allegation.

Baxter said he and the film crew had several unusual experiences while in Arkansas, including seeing an Air Force helicopter land at the Mena airport for "no apparent reason."

Also while in Mena, he said, city police twice pulled over members of the film crew and asked for identification and their reason for being there. Baxter said that did not bother him as much, however, as an incident at Little Rock.

"I found a man in my motel room in the middle of the night," he said. Baxter said the man explained that he had been sleepwalking and theorized he entered Baxter's unlocked door.

While it "turned out to be quite innocent and amusing," Baxter said, "a certain percentage of me still thinks that it may have been something more."

Likewise, Baxter said he believes there might be more to the Mena story. "I would very much like to come back and have a more thorough investigation," he said.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.