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Thanks to the general opposition to chemical weapons and the development of an awareness of the risks of proliferation, building a chemical weapons plant is not simply a case of phoning up an engineering company and asking for a poison gas plant. Some form of pretext is needed to justify developing the facility. For example, a tender might be issued asking for a plant to manufacture a class of substances, such as a useful commercial chemical. The tender will ask for performance criteria, such as reactor volume, operating temperatures and pressure, a number of feeds and flow rates, heating and cooling rates and so on that will encompass the performance needed to manufacture the agents.
An example of this that is also an indication that Iraq made a decision to develop a chemical weapons manufacturing capability in the 1970’s came in 1975 when it approached a US chemical engineering company, The Pfaudler Company of Rochester, NY to supply it with a pesticide manufacturing plant. This was some years before Saddam Hussein came to power.
From the outset of negotiations, Pfaudler were not happy about the nature of the pesticides to be manufactured and the scale of the plant. Iraq wanted to manufacture about 1200 tons a year of four organophosphorus pesticides:
All four had already fallen into disfavor in the US and Europe because of their toxicity to humans (see below). All four have the same target in insects (cholinesterases) as nerve gases do in human. Amiton:
is chemically almost identical to the nerve agent VX :
and is actually covered by some of the same patents and also has the NATO chemical weapon designation VG.
Iraq wanted to launch directly into full-scale manufacture of these materials rather than going through the customary practice of developing a pilot plant and gathering operating experience before going on to full-scale production. Negotiations were broken off by Iraq because of these concerns and it turned to the British chemical giant ICI for assistance. ICI recognized that the Iraqi plan required the supply of export-controlled materials involved in CW manufacture and rejected the approach out of hand.
After this, Iraq used a less direct approach. A long-term relationship was established with the medium-sized German chemical engineering company Karl Kolbe GmbH. Kolbe acted on behalf of Iraq as a manufacturer and a procurer, developing a network of suppliers. Learning from the experience with Pfaudler, Iraq went through the pilot plant route to the development of a CW manufacturing capability. The scale and complexity of the acquisition effort is shown by the chart below. This chart deals largely with the Iraqi BABYLON supergun and nuclear technology projects, but it shows the sort of effort involved.
The case of the Libyan chemical weapons plant at Rabta is instructive because of the details that have emerged. The German external intelligence service, the BND, had placed Libya under watch for many years when it began building the most heavily-defended and pharmaceutical plant in the world at Rabta, some 50 miles south of Tripoli.
A pretext is essential in justifying the transactions for the materials and equipment to be diverted. Iraq had been unsuccesful with its pesticide plant pretext. A fake project for this case was the less obvious development of a pharmaceutical factory in Hong Kong . Hong-Kong had very loose regulation of the import and export businesses upon which it thrived.
Libya used another mdeium-sized German chemical company, Imhausen, as a front company for the project. Imhausen set up a shell company in Hong Kong (Pen-Tsao-Materia-Medica Ltd., PTMM) as the prime contractor for the project which was to be developed in an empty building in the Yeun-Long district of Hong-Kong. PTMM shared an office building in Kowloon with Dee Trading Company, a major partner in Imhausen, and the proprietor of Dee Trading was also the proprietor of PTMM and long-time friend of the Imhausen family.
PTMM opened a branch office in Germany in the port city of Hamburg. The Hamburg office was to make use of a loophole in German export law. By selling to PTMM in Germany, Imhausen was not exporting equipment, and transfer of ownership from PTMM (Germany) to PTMM (Hong Kong) was not considered an export under German law. Reporting requirements that could have led to shipments being stopped were therefore not invoked.
From Hamburg the equipment was delivered to Libya using the full array of diversionary tactics including the following.
Imhausen were paid for their services by an equally complex money laundering operation that made use of Swiss banks and banking privacy laws. When the operation was completed, control of Pen-Tsao was transferred, unknowingly to the recipients, to another small company. This sophisticated operation, which appears to have used some 30 fronts, shows some of the most important features of front company acquisitions of prohibited materials:
Libya did not trust to a single source to build its chemical weapons capabilities and had no trouble finding willing helpers. There are plenty of people willing to break the law and supply technology to pariah statesif the price is right.
One such case is that of Hans-Joachim Rose, who was charged by the German government with the illegal export of gas scrubbers that "with a probability bordering on certainty" were intended for Libyan chemical weapons plants (more were delivered than would have been needed for the known complex at Tarhunah.) through his companies, the Stuttgart-based Rose GmbH and Decotec S.A. of Fribourg (Switzerland).
Rose appears to be a repeat offender: he has also been implicated in the delivery of identical equipments to the Rabta complex and had attempted to deliver chemical weapon precursors to Libya and Syria. Decotec had contacts with the Damascus-based "National Company for Security and Safety" a front for the Syrian intelligence services, and several of the deals that Rose was involved in were funded by the central banks of Libya or Syria. Material was passed from Rose GmbH to Decotec and then delivered to the Bombay company Vijay owned by Rose's accomplice Jitendra Salot and diverted from there to the end-user. The trail from Bombay seemed to lead to Libya and to Syria and perhaps also to Iran.
The BND tried to penetrate the Libyan procurement network and one of their operations ended up giving shelter to a major procurer. (This is a recurring problem - Britain recruited senior executives of an Iraqi front (Matrix Churchill) as they attempted to penetrate the Iraqi procurement network.) Berge Balanian, a Lebanese-born merchant based in Belgium, played a significant role in the acquisition of German equipments for Libya. He used his Belgian front company (SIM) to circumvent German export regulations and reporting requirements and had repeatedly appeared in BND reporting as a significant figure in Libyan technology acquisition. The BKA (Bundeskriminalamt - Federal Criminal Office) had also paid a great deal of attention to him and had handed over a lot of information about SIM to Belgian authorities in 1993 although Belgium did not act on it immediately.
When the Belgian authorities finally acted they searched his stud farm in Thirimont (near Malmedy). The search turned up extensive documentation including specification and switching diagrams for the Siemens Teleperm M chemical plant control computer. Immediately after the search he fled from Belgium to Libya to avoid a German arrest warrant. He was able to make good his escape because the Belgian authorities took three days to act on the warrant. The departure was so rushed that Balanian left behind some 10,000 pages of documentation that largely exposed Libyan procurement networks.
One of Balanians' contributions to this procurement effort was the delivery of 15 Teleperm Ms to Libya. This number of machines is more than capable of controlling a complex such as that believed to be secreted in the excavations at Tarhunah. The Teleperm M had been placed on a list of restricted technologies when the BND issued a warning about the Libyans interest in it in late 1990. Balanian had already had a tender to purchase Teleperm Ms rejected because he had been proscribed by Siemens. Hans-Joachim Rose also tried to obtain a number of Teleperm Ms. Balanian turned to two accomplices, who were subsequently held in investigative custody in Germany, Udo Buczkowski and Detlef Crusius. Balanian had become a silent partner in their companies (CSS Semiconductor Equipment GmbH and IDS (Indicator Datenmodul Service)) and used them to order the 15 Teleperm Ms. Apparently the silent partnership went unnoticed by Siemens. After CSS had taken receipt, they sold the controllers to Balanians' Belgian company in Malmedy whence they went by way of Antwerp to Tripoli. The acquisition was finally exposed three years after completion when a disgruntled former employee of CSS went to the BND with information about the roles of Buczkowski and Crusius in the illegal transfer.
In the field of chemical weapons manufacture, there are some fairly stringent requirments on the materials that are needed in the plant. Some of the chemicals used are extremely corrosive and can only be handled in reactors with special linings or made of special corrosion-resistant alloys called superalloys. Special pumps, tubings and seals also need to be used. There are only a few companies with the resources to manufacture such equipment and they can be monitored or are likely to be cooperative with authorities.
For biological weapons the problem is much more difficult. Much of the plant used in biological weapons manufacture can also be used in the food, pharmaceutical, or fermentation industries. It can be bought and sold and transferred from one country to another without comment. In the context of weapons proliferation, they are perhaps the ultimate dual-use technologies. This is a major problem in monitoring the proliferation of biological weapons technology.
The continued burgeoning of the biotechnology industry created a volatile mass of start-up companies with some venture capital and an idea. Some of these companies did not last a full business year and many only had funds to keep them afloat for more than one or two years. This is particularly true of the US biotechnology industry where a large fraction of the industry is permanently on the verge of bankruptcy. Only a handful of companies are paying their way and several once highly-touted names only live on as subsidiaries of larger companies. It can take seven years and more than $250 million dollars to develop a new drug and get it o the market.
There is therefore a continual flow of equipment between manufacturers, start-up companies, bankruptcy trustees and more frugal users. Auctions of fixed assets used by trustees to raise funds for creditors can be a cheap way to start up another company, or equip a BW production line. Alternatively, a start-up company could be as a conduit for acquisition of consumables and durables. A struggling company can be rescued by a backer that is an agent for a regime looking for the technology only to be closed down and stripped of its assets.
There are perfectly legitimate reasons to obtain fermentation plant: for the manufacture of food supplements, antibiotics or other complex organic chemicals, exploitation of petroleum fractions, and the manufacture of vaccines. Iraq had at least two vaccine plants and one for single-cell protein (a protein supplement for animal feed) and an infant formula plant as part of its BW complex.
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