Did Russia help Iraq destroy WMD before war?

[igloo]

The Pacepa Accusation

Jay Bryant (archive)

August 23, 2003 | Print | Send

An article by Ion Pacepa, which appeared in Thursday's Washington Times is much too important to simply be left to stand alone.

Pacepa charges that General Yevgeny Primakov, a former Prime Minister of Russia and onetime head of the Soviet foreign intelligence service, ran Saddam Hussein's weapons program and personally oversaw the liquidation of the evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Pacepa doesn't quite say it directly, but his article implies that Russian President Vladimir Putin was aware of and approved Primakov's role in the WMD disappearance program.

If all this is true, it is the most important news about Iraq since the fall of Saddam's government, for two reasons: first, it indicts the anti-American axis of old Europe in complicity not just to prevent us from getting too big for our britches, but in a willingness to prop up the most dreadful dictator since Stalin in the process.

Second, it provides the real answer to the embarrassing question: why haven't you found any WMD's?

Who is this Ion Pacepa, and why should we believe him? Once deputy chief of Romanian foreign intelligence, he defected to the U.S. in 1978. He remains the highest- ranking intelligence officer ever to defect from the Soviet Bloc.

To me, that pedigree means two things: he knows a lot about intelligence, and he knows how to lie.

Is he lying about Primakov? Or perhaps he's not exactly lying; but perhaps his theory is simply wrong.

Here is Pacepa's case. The Soviets and their allies always had a "standard operating procedure" for getting rid of weapons of mass destruction. Pacepa himself implemented the S.O.P. in Libya.

Saddam had such a procedure in place; Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu "told me so," Pacepa says, and so did Primakov, who "in the late 1970's…ran Saddam's weapons programs." There is a problem with this assertion, because Saddam did not officially come to power until July of 1979, and Ceausescu certainly was not chatting up Pacepa after the latter's 1978 defection. However, Saddam was the power behind the throne of his cousin General Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, who assumed control of Iraq in a 1968 coup d'etat, so it all may be true at least de facto, if not de jure. But Pacepa needs to explain just how this part of the story works to have real credibility.

Primakov, according to Pacepa, worked with Saddam throughout the latter's reign, and it is true that he was closely involved with the Iraqi leader in 1991, earning the enmity of the administration of Bush the Elder.

Primakov's closeness to Saddam is attested by other sources as well. In 1999, when the general was Russian Prime Minister, journalist Seymour Hirsch published an article in the New Yorker alleging that Primakov had received an $800,000 Iraqi bribe hand-delivered by Tariq Aziz.

But the truly important piece of information in Pacepa's story is this: that Primakov was in Baghdad with two other former Soviet generals, Vladislav Achalov and Igor Maltsev, "from December [2002] until a couple of days before the war."

I have confirmed that he was there at least part of that time. On February 24, 2003, Condoleezza Rice was asked by a reporter what she thought Primakov was doing in Baghdad.

She didn't know, but she knew he was there, and referenced his parallel 1991 visit in her answer.

If Primakov spent anything like the three months before the Iraqi War in Baghdad, it is patently obvious that he was up to no good, and logical, given his expertise, to believe his mission may well have been orchestrating the deep-sixing of Saddam's WMD stockpile.

The worldwide press should pick up this story, investigate it thoroughly, and if it vets out make it front page news for a long time. They should smoke out Primakov – and his two cronies, too, perhaps even more so – and ask them to explain what they was doing on the banks of the Tigris in the winter of '03. Whatever lie they tell in answering, reporters should follow up on, disprove and write another week's worth of stories.

Putin, too should be made to feel the heat of this investigation. Primakov, Achalov and Matlsev may have been there on their own, without Putin's imprimatur, but I doubt it, and anyway, Putin should be put on the record with that claim, if he chooses to make it.

The world (not to mention the Democrats) is beating the Bush Administration about the head and shoulders with the accusation that there are no WMD's in Iraq. If the reason is because General Primakov implemented an old Soviet plan and liquidated the whole stockpile, then the world needs to know it

[seximofo2k]

this wouldnt suprise me if it was true

[ketaman]

no you fuckin idiot. Russia didnt destroy anything. it wasn't there to begin with. don't get me wrong, i love the fact that we destroyed Iraq, but we fabricated the entire reason why.

[bullseye]

Originally posted by ketaman

no you fuckin idiot. Russia didnt destroy anything. it wasn't there to begin with. don't get me wrong, i love the fact that we destroyed Iraq, but we fabricated the entire reason why.

are you for real??

[seximofo2k]

Originally posted by ketaman

no you fuckin idiot. Russia didnt destroy anything. it wasn't there to begin with. don't get me wrong, i love the fact that we destroyed Iraq, but we fabricated the entire reason why.

We know they were their cause we gave them to Iraq. The only possibility of them not being their is that they were destroyed by either Saddam or by the raids of 1998