Dead Dogs, Surveillance : Vigilance, Luck Expose Libya Plant

WASHINGTON —  The first satellite pictures in 1985 only added to the mystery. On an isolated patch of Libyan desert about 70 miles from Tripoli, a major construction project was under way. Curiously, it was in the middle of nowhere--no roads, no electricity, no ready labor force.

Then came the intelligence reports. A shadowy Arab businessman surfaced as a major supplier, using front companies and oddly circuitous routes to ship equipment to Libya. Ominously, in his dossier was information linking him to construction of a chemical weapons plant in Iraq.

More pictures from space focused on the plant’s oversized ventilation equipment, a highly sophisticated system associated with production of deadly micro-toxins. As months passed, suspicion and alarm mounted among U.S. intelligence analysts.

Then the dogs died.

Accidental Spill

The lifeless bodies of a pack of wild desert dogs were detected, apparently exposed to an accidental toxic spill at the mysterious plant last August. In panic, the Libyans rushed to telephones and, in a major breach of security, used open international phone lines to seek emergency advice from the West German chemical firm that had helped build the plant.

Sophisticated electronic intelligence equipment plucked the conversations from the air, and Washington at last had what it considered solid proof: Libya was secretly preparing to make chemical weapons.

On such scattered and fragmented clues rests the nation’s efforts to detect and curb the proliferation of chemical and biological warfare. Despite success in Libya, however, no one is claiming that the United States has developed an infallible monitoring system.

“We’ve got a long way to go before any of us can take comfort,” said Stephen D. Bryen, recently retired deputy undersecretary for trade security policy at the Pentagon. “We’ve still got to get better organized. The fact is that no government is very well organized to deal with this problem.”

Surveillance and Luck

Indeed, the combination of high-tech surveillance, old-fashioned spying, meticulous analysis and luck that were used to unravel the Libyan mystery demonstrates the difficulty of tracing the chemical gases and biological toxins that form the most insidious weapons in the modern arsenal of war.

Success, conceded one intelligence source, is “sometimes due to a damn good system; sometimes it’s a matter of blind luck.” And sometimes, even its supporters acknowledge, it does not come at all.

For example, a decade of concern and suspicion by Western intelligence analysts that Iraq was developing chemical weapons was not confirmed until the gruesome killings of Iranian soldiers and Kurdish civilians by mustard gas and nerve agents late in the brutal Iran-Iraq War.

Although Iraq continues to deny the use of the gases, both U.N. and U.S. agencies now believe the charge is true.

“We’re doing better because our technical (surveillance) ability has improved . . . and we know better how to use our human agents,” said Robert Kupperman, an expert on arms and terrorism at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

But the fundamental problems are staggering: The ingredients of chemical weapons are literally garden-variety compounds that go into making everything from fertilizer and pesticides to the ink for ballpoint pens. Of necessity, they move freely in world commerce by the thousands of tons.

Nor is the manufacturing equipment necessarily a tell-tale clue. Although some pieces of equipment--notably the oversized ventilating system--were compatible with chemical weapons facilities, such systems are also used increasingly to curb air pollution from innocuous plants.

Few Share Zeal

Compounding the problem of monitoring and deterring chemical weapons proliferation is the fact that only a handful of nations--not including such critical European allies as West Germany--share this country’s crusading zeal on the subject.

Resources for the effort are more limited in Europe than in this country. Europe’s trade with the Mideast is vastly greater and thus harder to watch. And European nations--traditionally more dependent on trade than the United States--are leery about policing efforts that might interfere with the flow of commerce or stir resentment among important customers.

“Despite belated European Community measures against Libya . . . many countries are still dragging their feet,” said Paul Wilkinson, a leading expert on terrorism at Aberdeen University in Scotland.

Despite the odds, the U.S. government continues to try to ferret out evidence of chemical weapons production and the movement of materials that could contribute to such production.

Intelligence Windfall

The dead dogs of August represented an extraordinary intelligence windfall. For the first time, U.S. monitoring had exposed a clandestine chemical warfare facility before it had even begun full production.

The Libya success came at a crucial juncture in the increasingly important U.S. effort to monitor a little-noticed but escalating Middle East arms race. When operational, the new Libyan plant will be capable of producing tons of mustard gas and other toxic agents.

As in other cases, this investigation began with a question: What was being built in the desert at Rabta?

Libyan officials called it a pharmaceutical plant. And officials from some of the West German industrial firms helping build the multimillion-dollar project stood by that claim.

Obstacles to disputing those claims were substantial, especially without routine access to the processing operation inside. Agents investigated the foreign sellers and suppliers, gathering tell-tale signs.

It was learned, for example, that metal-machining equipment of a kind deemed unnecessary in a pharmaceutical plant--but critical for producing chemical artillery shells or the canisters that hold toxins in other munitions--had been shipped from Japan.

Overhead, satellites and reconnaissance aircraft followed the progress of construction. At listening posts scattered around the Mediterranean, agents of the United States, Britain and other allies monitored the communications--telephone and telefax, for example--of people and business firms linked to the project.

Spies Among Workers

On the ground, spies moved among the foreign construction and engineering workers from more than a dozen European, Asian and Middle East countries, collecting details about developments concealed inside the sprawling complex. Descriptions of equipment, plant layout and supplies all contributed to inconclusive evidence that something more sinister than aspirin might be planned for the production line.

The investigative focus turned to London-based Ihsan Barbouti, 61, an Iraqi businessman whose Frankfurt, West Germany-based engineering firm--Ihsan Barbouti International (IBI)--was a conduit for personnel, supplies and construction plans on the Rabta project.

The West German magazine Stern recently reported that Barbouti’s operation involved about 30 German companies, several Austrian engineers and Swiss banks. The magazine said that chemical equipment shipped by the Hamburg office of one firm, for example, was supposedly shipped to the West German company’s Hong Kong subsidiary but ended up in Libya instead.

Much of the equipment and supplies sent to Libya apparently left European ports under false export documents. Two weeks ago, the Belgian government revealed criminal action against an Antwerp shipping agent who confessed to falsifying freight documents for chemicals shipped to Libya.

IBI, now defunct, is the subject of a West German criminal investigation, as are other chemical and shipping firms linked to the Libyan project. Last week Barbouti told the London Observer that he helped build a section of the plant that was supposed to produce medicine.

Skepticism Expressed

“I saw a plan to produce about 50 different drugs,” he said, expressing disbelief that chemical weapons production had begun since his last visit 18 months ago.

“I don’t think they could have built a chemical weapons factory without my knowledge,” Barbouti said. He wasn’t asked, however, about the previously unreported deaths of the wild dogs.

That happened last summer during a trial run at the plant. The new production line had created the factory’s first batch of toxic wastes. As it was being transferred for disposal outside the plant, sources told The Times, there was an accident. Toxic material leaked out, killing the dogs.

It was then that alarmed Libyan officials rushed to telephones for emergency advice from a West German chemical firm involved in building the plant. The only available circuits were open international phone lines.

It is not clear which intelligence agency intercepted the calls, but in addition to U.S. monitoring stations, there are two well-placed British listening posts in nearby Cyprus.

Sources have confirmed British-U.S. cooperation in the Libyan surveillance, including independent British confirmation from their own intelligence sources that the Rabta plant was capable of manufacturing chemical weapons.

Evidence Clear to Most

Transcripts of the Libyan phone calls to Europe were given to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl during his visit to Washington in the fall. To all but the West German government, apparently, the evidence was clear: The mysterious plant in Rabta was not making aspirin; it was making mustard gas.

And the evidence is still coming in. Last fall, within weeks after the dogs died, space cameras transmitted pictures showing extensive anti-aircraft missile defense systems to protect the plant, and sources say that defense system is still being installed today.

In some ways, the activities at Rabta were a comparatively easy mark for intelligence gatherers. Libya’s sparse population--3 million people--and its limited industrial development make it comparatively easy to monitor by high-tech intelligence. Since the vast desert nation is dependent on foreign expertise and labor, the continued presence of outsiders offers another source of information.

But nations such as Syria, Iraq, Iran and Israel--and more than a dozen others in Asia, Africa and Latin America that are believed to be developing chemical weapons--are intrinsically more difficult to monitor simply because production facilities are easier to hide in more heavily industrialized areas.

Such countries also are more likely to be involved in producing pharmaceuticals and fertilizers, which can be used to disguise chemical warfare efforts.

Focus of Scrutiny

Furthermore, Libya has been an object of special American attention for more than a decade. In the 1970s, Col. Moammar Kadafi attempted to acquire access to nuclear weapons. He also emerged as a major supplier of weapons to international terrorist groups.

The disclosures about Libya and Iraq come as officials say the regional arms race in such weapons has reached a peak. New attempts to develop biological weapons--bombs that carry the lethal germs of cholera, typhoid fever and anthrax, for example--are the latest apparent escalation of that race.

Biological weapons pose some of the most difficult detection problems since the manufacturing facilities can be substantially smaller and less conspicuous. A batch of anthrax that could kill millions of people could be concocted in “a room the size of a broom closet,” Kupperman said.

But, using spies and technology, the United States has also identified at least three suspected Iraqi biological weapons sites, including one in the city of Salman Pak.

Early clues came from surveillance photographs that revealed a large fermentation vat. It was old-fashioned detective work and covert agents, however, who obtained sufficient details to prompt American officials to express “concern and displeasure” to the Baghdad government.

Sources said American agents have even identified an Iraqi woman who is said to be directing the germ warfare program at the facility.

U.S. analysts said last week that they now believe earlier, unsubstantiated claims by Kurdish insurgents that Iraq had experimented with biological weapons in skirmishes last spring with rebels along the Iranian border.

Long-Held Suspicions

U.S. suspicions about Iraq’s germ and gas weapons capabilities date back about 15 years. In the mid-1970s, Baghdad was accused of using chemical weapons against its own Kurdish population, but that was never confirmed by independent sources.

After the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War in 1980, Iran charged that the regime of President Saddam Hussein deployed mustard gas in 1981. However, that was never independently confirmed either.

Not until a U.N. commission was dispatched to Iran in 1984 did the outside world learn that Iraq had developed a massive capability. Over the next three years, other U.N. teams reported further usage. In effect, substantive confirmation of Iraq’s chemical arsenal took more than a decade to prove despite use of the same techniques that were applied in Libya.

Three years ago, in the wake of revelations that Iraq had built its chemical weapons plant, a group of 19 Western nations and representatives of the European Community formed an association called the Australian Group. The little-known body sets informal chemical licensing and export standards and is generally supported by the United States and most West European nations.

Even so, actual controls fall well below the group’s recommendations. Of the 40 chemicals targeted by the Australian Group as warranting some form of export control, West Germany and France--Europe’s two largest chemical producing nations--subject just eight compounds to strict export licensing. The U.S. government imposes controls on 17.

Only One Prosecution

To date, only one European company, the Dutch trading firm Melchemie, has been successfully prosecuted for chemical export control violations. Two years ago the company was fined the equivalent of $48,000 for its role in the shipment to Iraq of phosphorus oxychloride, a nerve gas ingredient.

Enforcing license controls is said to vary considerably within the European Community. One knowledgeable European source classified Italy and Greece among the most lax and Britain and the Netherlands among the toughest.

“The Australian Group has worked pretty well . . . “ this source said. “The problem is that not everyone has the practical resources to police the agreed procedures, and with this kind of trade, if you have one country falling down, the whole exercise becomes useless.”

The official was referring to the sophisticated methods of shipping materials, often through several countries, before they leave for a politically sensitive destination.

Fundamental differences between the United States and its European allies regarding controls have caused friction in the past, with American efforts to restrict high technology going to the East Bloc and to impose punitive sanctions against countries such as Syria and Libya, where evidence of government-supported terrorism exists.

When Europeans have gone along, it has tended to be with reluctance.

Special Inspections

Ironically, West Germany, apparently a pivotal supplier to both Iraqi and Libyan weapons ventures, is under special scrutiny. It is still subject to post-World War II international inspections to ensure that no chemical weapons or capacity to produce them exists anywhere in the country. However, West German export of such capacity is not monitored.

Even before the Bonn government was embarrassed by disclosures of West German links to the Libya plant, one West German company was supplying major components for four separate pilot chemical production plants in Iraq.

At the time, according to sources, that firm--Karl Kolb GmbH & Co.--had significant business ties to Arab businessman Barbouti, now a central figure in the Rabta investigation.

Nations concerned with stopping the proliferation of chemical weapons are pressing for ratification of a bilateral chemical weapons treaty that would have to include extraordinary provisions for verification. Unlike other weapons systems, verification of chemical weapons requires almost daily monitoring.

A simple twist of a chemical plant valve can alter the end product--changing what had been insecticide into a nerve agent, for example.

Continuous verification is essential, U.S. officials say, since no one is ready to rely on the continuing sacrifice of packs of wild dogs.

Times staff writers Tyler Marshall in London and Robert Gillette in Washington contributed to this article.