SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin Laden (22 page)

As they approached the curb, both technicians could smell a sweet, flowery odor, not unpleasant, something like the smell of Juicy Fruit chewing gum. The first tech was close enough to see a puddle of amber colored liquid rolling against the curb. He knew immediately what it was, and he waved his partner back. By now, there was a ringing in his ears and his vision started to wash out—the sunlight seemed suddenly blinding, the result of his pupils dilating uncontrollably. The artillery shell placed against the curb did not contain high explosives, but a deadly nerve gas called sarin. And now both techs had been exposed.

The bomb tech tried to yell a warning, but could only stumble backward and fall. His partner grabbed him under the arms and dragged him back toward the Humvee. She laid him out and fumbled in the cargo pocket of her trousers for an atropine serette. The serette was a spring-loaded syringe containing valium, atropine, and obidoxime. It was now her only hope of saving him. His eyes rolled wildly, the pupils huge and black, and his hands began to shake and clutch as the muscles in his body locked up. The tech slammed the serette into his leg, and then pushed a second one into her own thigh. She told the infantry guys to get away from them—they were both now contaminated. She told the lieutenant to lead the patrol away, upwind, and radio battalion they had been exposed to nerve gas.

If they were lucky, very lucky, they all might still be able to get out of this alive.

This event was not taken from a Hollywood thriller. It happened on May 16, 2003, in the al Baya neighborhood of western Baghdad. The 155 mm shell discovered on the airport highway contained slightly more than a gallon of the nerve agent called GB or sarin—enough to kill ten thousand people.

The meteorological conditions were perfect—the nerve gas canister had been placed upwind of the target and the location had been chosen for maximum effect. Had the shell functioned as intended, it would have spread a mortal, invisible cloud over a dozen city blocks. Death would have come quickly for ten thousand Iraqi civilians living around the airport, and the three thousand coalition troops stationed at nearby Camp Victory. This attack, using a state-of-the-art nerve gas artillery shell, had been intended by Osama bin Laden to deal a humiliating defeat on the American forces stationed in Iraq.

That the bomb failed to detonate was due to the malfunction of a cheap, ten-dollar wristwatch.

Although the attack blipped on the media’s radar, the story was quickly quashed. The press wasn’t interested in stories about WMD in Iraq: They had already convinced themselves, and most of the American public, that Saddam Hussein didn’t have any chemical weapons. Since Saddam had none, Osama bin Laden couldn’t possibly have any.

That was the story line they were invested in. And it was dead, flat wrong.

Is a chilling fact that thousands of chemical weapons have been uncovered in Iraq. What’s worse, chemical weapons of Iraqi provenance have been transported through Iran and Pakistan into Afghanistan. These weapons have been used by Al Qaeda against coalition and NATO forces on dozens of occasions.

What’s so important about a handful of overlooked chemical munitions? To put these weapons into perspective, if two nerve gas artillery shells were detonated in a crowded football stadium, say, any Nebraska home game, the casualties could exceed those suffered by the United States during the
entire
Vietnam War. One artillery shell could fit easily into a large duffle bag. Nor do the means of delivery need to be overly complex: Concealed as a business delivery and wired to a cellular phone, an improvised chemical device could be delivered to the target by Federal Express. It is only a matter of time before improvised chemical weapons are used to produce a mass casualty incident within the continental United States. Bad actors do not need access to complex military hardware in order to stage a chemical attack. Chemical agents taken from warheads, shells, and bombs can be recycled. Terrorists have improvised chemical weapons using plastic bags, aerosol sprayers, and commercially available smoke generators. The technological barrier to entry is the production of effective and lethal chemical agents. Saddam has supplied the chemicals, in abundance; the means of delivery is left to the imagination of Al Qaeda. To be fair, this first use of terrorist chemical weapons was reported in the media. Both
The New York Times
and BBC reported that a chemical weapon had been used at al Baya. The story wafted over to academia, where it has been discussed in counterterrorism journals. Then nothing.

What is to be made of the deafening silence surrounding chemical weapons in Iraq? Why was the American public deliberately left with the impression that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? The story lost traction in mainstream news for a number of reasons, some of them political. The media turned a blind eye to continued reports of chemical weapon attacks partially because its own credibility was threatened. Several major outlets were deeply invested with the story line of an “unjustifiable war.”

What happened at al Baya was a paradigm shift in world history. The use of nerve gas by Al Qaeda in Iraq was the first time in the history of mankind that strategic weapons (in this case a chemical weapon) had been used on the battlefield by a nonstate actor. But editors and news producers did not bestir themselves. They hoped the story would go away. Not many people can bear to admit they were wrong, especially in print, and especially if they have been
very
wrong for a
very
long time.

To perpetuate the myth of “no WMD in Iraq” the media and the U.S. government has had to scrupulously ignore facts on the ground, the testimony of victims, half a dozen United Nations reports, and medical journal articles discussing the treatment of soldiers exposed to nerve gas. Clearly, big media in the United States wanted nothing to do with the issue. Presented with facts, it ignored them. The facts wouldn’t go away. Confirmation of the chemical attacks would come from a very unlikely source: the U.S. military itself. Enter Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks Papers.

In July 2010, three years after the nerve gas bomb fizzled in al Baya, WikiLeaks released 492,000 classified U.S. documents relating to the war in Afghanistan. WikiLeaks’ publicity-conscious director Julian Assange was quick to compare his disclosure to the 1970s publication of the Pentagon Papers. The WikiLeaks trove dwarfs its historical counterpart—both in vastness and in lurid detail. If the Pentagon Papers revealed a military leadership in disagreement about the Vietnam War, the WikiLeaks documents paint a picture of a pair of schizophrenic U.S. administrations who say one thing, do another, and continue to deny a terrifying and potentially world altering truth. Since 2004, Al Qaeda has carried out at least one hundred chemical attacks on coalition forces in Iraq. Most attacks used “repurposed” chemical warheads from Saddam’s arsenal—nerve gases and mustard gas. Although these incidents briefly found their way onto page one, pundits have failed to grasp their significance. The Obama administration, like the Bush administration before them, ignored the attacks and hoped no one else would notice.

If one believes the WikiLeaks trove, it confirms that Al Qaeda is in possession of chemical weapons, and they have been used against U.S. troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The largest part of the WikiLeaks documents consists of message traffic from forward-deployed U.S. forces to higher headquarters. These messages state that some of the chemical weapons discovered by U.S. troops were judged so dangerous that they had to be neutralized on site by “Technical Escort.” Also called TEU, Technical Escort Units are a top secret outfit trained in nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare. Technical Escort Units are not sent willy-nilly into the field; they deploy only when a chemical, biological, or nuclear threat has been confirmed. Technical Escort is mentioned eleven times in the WikiLeaks documents.

The “no WMDs in Iraq” myth has been allowed to persist because the truth is much more disturbing. Flaunting UN sanctions, and baffling UN inspection teams, Iraq maintained a considerable stockpile of biological and chemical warheads—up to and after the U.S. invasion in 2003. Saddam’s failure to account for his weapons of mass destruction was the
casus belli
of the Second Gulf War.

Where did these weapons go? What happened and where are they now?

Following the first Gulf War, UN resolutions demanded that Iraq surrender, dismantle, and destroy its Weapons of Mass Destruction. For almost a decade, television was filled with the Keystone antics of UN inspectors chasing down Iraqi military convoys, battling obstinate gate guards and launching surprise inspections at “Baby Milk” factories. Saddam’s farcical efforts to thwart UN compliance teams were, never the less, effective. The UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) and its successor, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) both had little to show for months of digging. The UN discovered no nuclear materials, only a few leaky chemical shells, and a number of dented biological warfare bombs and warheads. It was hardly an arsenal.

Early, cursory searches for Saddam’s weapons came up empty-handed. The conspicuous failure of UN inspections and sanctions was ridiculed in two high-profile books, one by former Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix, and the other by ex-National Security Council staffer Richard Clarke. Both expressed the opinion that Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction had been destroyed. Their arguments were well turned out but pivoted on the same dangerous piece of illogic: “We looked for weapons and didn’t find any— that means they don’t exist.”

If the WikiLeaks papers are searched for under the term “chemical warfare improvised explosive device (CWIED),” more than six hundred documents offer themselves for inspection. “Suspected chemical” yields an additional eighty-five. These are battlefield reports of hundreds of Al Qaeda chemical attacks. These include some of the deadliest substances known to man: VX, a persistent nerve agent; varieties of liquid and powdered mustard gas; the war gas phosgene; and blood agents like cyanogen chloride. By 2004 it was clear that Saddam’s “legacy” weapons were being repurposed as improvised explosive devices and that several Iraqi insurgent groups were working to create their own chemical and biological weapons—
for export
. Yet the chorus droned on: “There are no WMD in Iraq.”

Until the WikiLeaks confirmation, no dissenting analysis was to be heard in the commercial and mainstream media. In the face of such blithe indifference it was easy for many to forget that Iraq’s terror weapons were not a matter of speculation—they were historical fact. During the Iran-Iraq War, over 100,000 Iranians were killed, blinded, or mutilated by Saddam’s chemical weapons. From 1980 to 1988, these weapons were produced in Iraqi factories by the tens of thousands—then used on the battlefield. Iraq’s own paperwork indicates that it developed chemical and biological weapons to include nerve and mustard gas, anthrax, bubonic plague, and ricin. These were not samples burbling in some petri dish. Saddam produced bombs, missile warheads, and remote control aircraft to scatter these pathogens. In hindsight, it should have been obvious that Saddam would not, indeed he
could
not, destroy his arsenals. His military had been thrashed and scattered after the First Gulf War. Following his calamitous retreat from Kuwait, Saddam faced grave internal threats—Shiite uprisings in the south and Kurdish rebellion in the north. More ominous was the continued hostility of his well-armed neighbor and mortal enemy, Iran.

Even after defeat in the First Gulf War, Iraq concealed and sustained a wide-ranging chemical and biological warfare program. Despite UN Resolutions, surprise inspections, and crushing economic sanctions, Saddam continued to manufacture chemical weapons, and repeatedly used them against his enemies. In March 1991, Mi-8 Helicopters swooped over the cities of Najaf and Karbala; the anti-riot agent CS and the nerve agent VX were used to kill thousands of Shiite insurgents who had attacked Iraqi police outposts and Ba’ath party headquarters. Saddam kept his arsenal topped off. Documents discovered in 2003 indicated that Iraq stockpiled 21,000 chemical warheads following the Iran-Iraq war, and during the period of UN sanctions.

Despite mixed signals from the Obama administration and the continuing indifference of the press, the number and type of WMDs being recovered in Iraq has been
increasing
, rather than decreasing. Again, if the WikiLeaks documents are correct, Saddam’s WMD were not destroyed, but simply dispersed. These weapons are presently in the hands of Al Qaeda. Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, U.S. and coalition forces have located and destroyed more than five-hundred chemical weapons. Most of these have been 155 mm artillery shells. Most contained varieties of the vesicant HD, mustard gas. VX, sarin, tabun, cyclosarin, including advanced binary weapons, chemical aircraft bombs, mortar projectiles, sprayers, and bulk-produced agent have also been recovered and destroyed. It can be assumed that these weapons systems, too, are in the hands of Al Qaeda.

How did this happen? How are these weapons permitted to fall into the hands of Al Qaeda? In the chaos of the U.S. invasion in 2003, Saddam Hussein lost control of both his government and the widely scattered caches where he had dumped his WMD and chemical weapons. As American forces poured across the Iraqi frontier, members of Saddam’s intelligence services buried more than ten thousand serviceable chemical warheads. As the Iraqi insurgency coalesced, the location of these hidden caches was communicated to Osama bin Laden, who ordered the weapons to be collected and rehidden. A portion of these munitions were shipped secretly through Pakistan and Iran, then stockpiled near Bin Laden’s underground lair in Tora Bora, Afghanistan.

As recently as the twenty-second and twenty-third of February 2008, Osama bin Laden ordered truck bombs containing chlorine gas to be detonated in Baghdad. These were test runs for similar devices to be employed against U.S. cities. The effects, though horrendous, disappointed the Al Qaeda leadership. Casualties from the poison gas and from the blast effect killed or wounded slightly more than a hundred people in sequential attacks. Bin Laden had been hoping for casualties in the thousands. Al Qaeda bombers went back to the drawing board, to design the more devastating weapons.