Barton Gellman
In Search for Weapons, Army Team Finds Vacuum Cleaners
Sun May 18 11:39:28 2003
67.1.155.96

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4450-2003May17.html
Odyssey of Frustration
In Search for Weapons, Army Team Finds Vacuum Cleaners

By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 18, 2003; Page A01

BAGHDAD -- For once the team found a building intact.

The low stucco structure, one of several walled off from the street, was the 17th target of the war for Army Lt. Col. Charles Allison and the special weapons hunters under his command. Heavy crossbars sealed the doors. That, at least, was encouraging. There would not have been much left to lock if looters got here first.

U.S. intelligence called this place "Possible SSO Facility Al Hayat," after the Special Security Organization of President Saddam Hussein. It ranked No. 26 on a U.S. Central Command priority search list. Allison's team pulled up in six Humvees, not long before noon on May 1, to scout for biological and chemical arms.

"Go get the breach kit," ordered Army Maj. Kenneth Deal, second in command. A soldier returned with bolt cutters, a crowbar and a sledgehammer. Deal carried a digital camera. Army Sgt. 1st Class Will T. Smith Jr. and Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Shawn Anderson wielded chemical sensors that looked like oversized power drills.

Smashing padlocks and deadbolts, the men checked for booby traps as they felt their way by flashlight from room to room. They reached a murky stone passage, smelling of mold. Cement covered its windows. Steel doors, a dull orange, lined the hall.

Interrogation cells? Munitions vaults?

One last bolt snapped. The door creaked open and Deal stepped through. There, in the innermost chamber, he found a cache of vacuum cleaners.

So it goes for Site Survey Team 3, which today begins its ninth week in the hunt for illegal weapons. One of four such units assembled before the war, it has screened intelligence leads from Basra to Baghdad with discouraging, even darkly comic, results.

Allison's 25 men and women have dug up a playground, raided a distillery, seized a research paper from a failing graduate student and laid bare a swimming pool where an underground chemical weapons stash was supposed to be.

Built around a cadre of experts from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the unit is trained and equipped to identify nerve agents and choking agents, live pathogens and fermenters to grow them, nuclear enrichment technology and missiles that exceed Iraq's permitted range. But Washington has been unable thus far to send Team 3 anywhere it could apply those capabilities.

Team 3's odyssey through Iraq is a tale of frustration and disillusionment. Allison and his unit arrived with the firm belief -- and dread -- that Iraq possessed the weapons of chemical war. They expected U.S. intelligence to guide them, and they were secure in their own technology and skills. When probe after probe sank dry holes, and the team's mission appeared to have failed, a sardonic tone began to creep into discussions of their work.

"No weapons of mass destruction here, sir," Deal deadpanned to his boss at a bombed-out presidential palace annex, the day after the vacuum cleaner affair. Both men were standing with handfuls of scavenged faucets, strip lights and circuit breakers. Finding no weapons to inspect, they had turned their attention to getting repair parts for their war-damaged headquarters nearby.

The search is not over, and one major part of it -- interrogation of Iraq's senior scientists and leaders -- is concealed from view. Some of Team 3's counterparts have unearthed ingredients and gear -- including transportable biological laboratories -- that could be used to build illegal arms. Any such concealment breached Iraq's obligation, under U.N. Security Council resolutions, to disclose all "dual-use" facilities.

But no one has confirmed that Iraq actually manufactured or retained a biological or chemical weapon after the last ones accounted for by U.N. inspectors in 1998.

The experience of Allison's unit is typical of the weapons hunt as a whole. All four of the original site survey teams, including Allison's, are dedicating much of their time to "sensitive sites" that have no known connection to weapons of mass destruction. These sites are of interest to U.S. intelligence agencies for evidence of crimes against humanity or links to terrorists, among other subjects. Three of the four "mobile exploitation teams" -- another kind of search unit -- have also shed their weapons experts and moved on to other missions. Only one is still searching full time for weapons of mass destruction.

"Supposedly the weapons were a primary goal," said Anderson, a Navy cryptologic and nuclear specialist whose job at home is to verify arms control pacts. In comments echoed strongly by others, he added: "I mean, the president said, 'Go find the weapons of mass destruction.' But it has become a secondary mission."

For this account, a reporter lived and traveled with Team 3 for a week and consulted the personal records of team members. Interviews were conducted with 46 participants in the weapons hunt, including members of four other search teams and two higher-level headquarters units directing their work.

Collectively, the conversations portrayed a hunt without the means, so far, to flush its quarry. Team 3 was sent to some facilities without being briefed on inventories already known from years of U.N. inspections. At other sites, the team could not work effectively for lack of Arabic language skills. In a repository for disabled nuclear equipment, Allison and his inspectors had to labor side by side with looters too numerous to evict. More often, the looters had come and gone. Twice, the team found signs of machinery disassembled and expertly removed.

Of those interviewed, the great majority said they remained convinced of President Bush's charge that Hussein concealed forbidden weapons to the end. But many also said they no longer know how they will find proof.

"The way everybody was talking, the way the intel was -- we're still waiting to find it," said Smith, who normally works in biological and chemical arms treaty enforcement. "But we haven't even begun to scratch the surface of 1 percent of the land mass. It might be right next door."

Anthrax Alert


Three days into the war, Team 3's tactical radio squawked a summons. Marine combat troops reported finding anthrax in an abandoned building near Basra.

Allison had been expecting just such a call. Iraq's government admitted in 1995 that it secretly manufactured thousands of liters of anthrax. But Iraq also said it had disposed of all the stocks. U.N. inspectors could not verify that claim, and the Bush administration said it was a lie. Secretary of State Colin Powell told the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 that as many as 16,500 liters of Iraqi anthrax were unaccounted for.

A soft-spoken man who reads a bible by headlamp at night, Allison followed his father into the Army. He is 51 years old, lanky and tall, his neck and forearms three shades darker than they were before he left his suburban Virginia desk job for the desert.

After 15 years around nuclear munitions, he seldom displays strong emotion. But the March 22 summons, he recalled, "spun us up. It was really exciting."

Adrenaline surged for more reasons than one as the team boarded twin CH-46 helicopters. They were beating their way north to a front, where militiamen loyal to Hussein still fought with unexpected ferocity. Allison spent his early career in field artillery, and Deal, his executive officer, logged years in tanks. But Team 3 was not built for combat. "They kept saying 'permissive' and 'benign' " to describe the expected work environment, Allison recalled. "They didn't say anything about people shooting at us."

There was no shooting that day. What the team found when it landed was a lone Marine in a field.

"He informed us that he had what he thought was anthrax in his pocket," Allison reported later that day to his superiors.

The Marine was "CBRN officer" for his tank battalion, responsible for assessing chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear hazards. Clearing a building, one of his squads had found unidentified powder and called for help.

The Marine officer had collected a sample and taped it inside a glass jar. He wrapped the jar into the sturdy brown cover of a "meal, ready-to-eat." He taped that, too. Then he sealed the bundle in a Ziploc bag, stuffed it into his trousers and waited for the helicopters to land.

A suspicious-looking document in Arabic accompanied the package. Handwritten on lined paper, the manuscript included three sketches of laboratory flasks. Allison turned to Smith. Together they performed a rapid field assay, using reactive papers known as "bio-tickets." Nothing happened. A second test confirmed it: no anthrax, and no other toxin described in the assay's book of codes.

Still curious, team members took the Arabic manuscript back to Camp Commando for translation.

"It ended up being some kid's high school science project," Deal said.

Weapons Spotting


Eight days later, the arms hunters saddled up again. Marines had fought their way past an ammunition storage site near Nasiriyah and reported "indications" of chemical weapons. Details were vague, and a day elapsed before Team 3 got word.

A BBC television crew shot video at the site on March 29, finding it abandoned but largely undisturbed. By the time Team 3 arrived on March 30, looters had left a shambles. There was no way to guess whether ordnance was gone. The team could only take readings of what remained. Using a $16,000 flame spectrometer, resembling a slate gray steam iron with digital display, they found no trace of nerve or blister weapons.

Nasiriyah became an unhappy template for Team 3's search. The invading forces came and went, and Iraqis found opportunity in chaos. Sometimes looters stripped a building to its bare frame -- pulling even sockets and wiring from the walls. Sometimes they burned what they could not carry. Often enough, by the time Team 3 reached a site, someone had done both.

"We should have known from our experience of past wars that this would happen," said Christopher Kowal, who last week left the his military intelligence assignment and an assignment on Mobile Exploitation Team Charlie, one of Team 3's fellow search units. "A huge amount of intelligence just walked away."

The pace of work by Team 3 picked up as U.S. forces advanced, but not its progress. Some of the American combat units had been issued pocket-sized guides from the Pentagon to help soldiers and Marines turn up leads. Titled the "WMD Facility, Equipment and Munitions Identification Handbook," the guide offered descriptions and color pictures of the whole range of weapons programs that the Bush administration suspected Iraq still maintained. The theory was that otherwise untrained ground troops could serve as spotters. Encountering something suspicious, a soldier could pull out his handbook and compare what he saw to a centrifuge cascade, a pressurized sprayer, a freeze dryer, fermenter or vacuum pump. This was the origin of the April 1 report of Frog missiles with chemical warheads that were said to be parked under a tree. They were not Frogs, and not chemically armed. Another day brought "suspicious glass globes," filled, as it turned out, with cleaning fluid. A drum of foul-smelling liquid revealed itself as used motor oil.

Team 3 employed a pair of Fox reconnaissance vehicles, sealed against the outside air and equipped to detect any chemical warfare agent. Army Spec. Tanya Cowley, who drove one, said she frequently "set up for an over-watch" during early missions to warn the team of danger. "That's our mission," she said. "Check for gas, chemicals, vapors." Encountering none, Team 3 eventually stopped bringing the Fox along.

One intriguing tip came on April 6. Human intelligence -- the team did not know its origin -- described a chemical vault that Iraqi officials had buried in a schoolyard. Allison's team reached the Aziziyah middle school for girls and spent a full day and night watching excavators dig. "All we did is, we tore up some poor kids' playground," Lt. Shaun Gordon, Team 3's operations officer, recalled recently. Marine engineers found a geometry text in the dirt. The vault remained a mirage.

Top Nuclear Sites


On April 10, the day after Hussein's statue tumbled out of its boots on Firdaus Square in Baghdad, Allison was dispatched to two of Iraq's most important nuclear sites. One was called the Tuwaitha Yellowcake Storage Facility, where the International Atomic Energy Agency keeps track of tons of natural and partially enriched uranium. Close by stood the forbidding berm walls of the Baghdad Nuclear Research Center, where Israel bombed the Osirak reactor in 1981 and the United States bombed a Russian-built reactor 10 years later. Between them, the two facilities entombed most of Iraq's former nuclear weapons program.

Just that morning, according to U.S. and U.N. sources, the Vienna-based IAEA had sent an urgent message to Washington. The twin complexes at Tuwaitha, the message said, were "at the top of the list" of nuclear sites requiring protection of U.S. and British forces.

A Marine engineering company had found the sites abandoned a few days earlier. The captain in command reported looters to be roaming the compounds. Allison's task was to measure the radiation hazard.

"We couldn't get close because we were receiving too high a dose" of radiation, Allison recalled. But the team found disturbing signs, even from a distance. The door to a major storage building, one of three known jointly as Location C, stood wide open.

Deal's personal dosimeter warned him to leave the scene, but first he shot a few seconds of videotape, by reaching his hand with the camera around the doorframe. The jerky images showed office debris strewn alongside scores of buried drums. Those drums, and others nearby, were supposed to contain 3,896 pounds of partially enriched uranium and more than 94 tons of yellowcake, or natural ore.

Looters had plainly been inside. At a minimum, they had exposed themselves and their families to grave health risks. More ominously, they might have taken some nuclear materials with them.

"There were also containers of what looked like medical isotopes on the ground," Allison said. "We backed off because we didn't have the capability to deal with radiation that high."

Before Team 3 could complete its survey, Allison received a "frago" -- a fragmentary order -- to leave at once. Tuwaitha was at the center of an unresolved dispute between the Bush administration and the IAEA, which monitors compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and Bush's advisers were divided among themselves. Until it had clear instructions, the headquarters for U.S. ground forces in Iraq wanted nothing to do with the site.

Standing under the desert sun with an Iridium satellite telephone at his ear, Allison raised his voice in angry protest at orders to leave the nuclear center unprotected. Eventually his superiors agreed to allow Marines to stay. Allison's report later that day said that even so "the maneuver commander did not have sufficient forces to secure both sites."

"I hope somebody has done something," Allison said, recounting the story some time afterward, "because a lot of that [material] is just laying around."

Tuwaitha was not Team 3's last brush with nuclear chaos. On April 24, two weeks later, Allison received orders to survey a warehouse holding the disabled machinery of Iraq's former nuclear weapons program. The Ash Shaykhili Nuclear Facility was a kind of boneyard for bombed reactor parts, broken vacuum pumps and heat exchangers and gas centrifuges rendered inoperable by U.N. inspectors.

Allison's assignment was to focus on an underground facility at the site. Whatever U.S. intelligence suspected there, sources in Washington said it was enough to place Ash Shaykhili in 11th place on the priority list of Iraqi weapons sites to be surveyed.

When Team 3 arrived, it found a ni
 

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