It’s a fair bet that you have never heard of a guy called Dave Gaubatz.
It’s also a fair bet that you think the hunt for weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq has found absolutely nothing, nada, zilch; and that therefore there
never were any WMD programmes in Saddam’s Iraq to justify the war ostensibly
waged to protect the world from Saddam’s use of nuclear, biological or
chemical weapons.
Dave Gaubatz, however, says that you could not be more wrong. Saddam’s
WMD did exist. He should know, because he found the sites where he is certain
they were stored. And the reason you don’t know about this is that the
American administration failed to act on his information, ‘lost’ his classified
reports and is now doing everything it can to prevent disclosure of the
terrible fact that, through its own incompetence, it allowed Saddam’s WMD
to end up in the hands of the very terrorist states against whom it is
so controversially at war.
You may be tempted to dismiss this as yet another dodgy claim from
a warmongering lackey of the world Zionist neocon conspiracy giving credence
to yet another crank pushing US propaganda. If so, perhaps you might pause
before throwing this article at the cat. Mr Gaubatz is not some marginal
figure. He’s pretty well as near to the horse’s mouth as you can get.
Having served for 12 years as an agent in the US Air Force’s Office
of Special Investigations, Mr Gaubatz, a trained Arabic speaker, was hand-picked
for postings in 2003, first in Saudi Arabia and then in Nasariyah in Iraq.
His mission was to locate suspect WMD sites, discover threats against US
forces in the area and find Saddam loyalists, and then send such intelligence
to the Iraq Survey Group and other agencies.
Between March and July 2003, he says, he was taken to four sites in
southern Iraq — two within Nasariyah, one 20 miles south and one near Basra
— which, he was told by numerous Iraqi sources, contained biological and
chemical weapons, material for a nuclear programme and UN-proscribed missiles.
He was, he says, in no doubt whatever that this was true.
This was, in the first place, because of the massive size of these
sites and the extreme lengths to which the Iraqis had gone to conceal them.
Three of them were bunkers buried 20 to 30 feet beneath the Euphrates.
They had been constructed through building dams which were removed after
the huge subterranean vaults had been excavated so that these were concealed
beneath the river bed. The bunker walls were made of reinforced concrete
five feet thick.
‘There was no doubt, with so much effort having gone into hiding these
constructions, that something very important was buried there’, says Mr
Gaubatz. By speaking to a wide range of Iraqis, some of whom risked their
lives by talking to him and whose accounts were provided in ignorance of
each other, he built up a picture of the nuclear, chemical and biological
materials they said were buried underground.
‘They explained in detail why WMDs were in these areas and asked the
US to remove them,’ says Mr Gaubatz. ‘Much of this material had been buried
in the concrete bunkers and in the sewage pipe system. There were also
missile imprints in the area and signs of chemical activity — gas masks,
decontamination kits, atropine needles. The Iraqis and my team had no doubt
at all that WMDs were hidden there.’
There was yet another significant piece of circumstantial corroboration.
The medical records of Mr Gaubatz and his team showed that at these sites
they had been exposed to high levels of radiation.
Mr Gaubatz verbally told the Iraq Study Group (ISG) of his findings,
and asked them to come with heavy equipment to breach the concrete of the
bunkers and uncover their sealed contents. But to his consternation, the
ISG told him they didn’t have the manpower or equipment to do it and that
it would be ‘unsafe’ to try.
‘The problem was that the ISG were concentrating their efforts in looking
for WMD in northern Iraq and this was in the south,’ says Mr Gaubatz. ‘They
were just swept up by reports of WMD in so many different locations. But
we told them that if they didn’t excavate these sites, others would.’
That, he says, is precisely what happened. He subsequently learnt from
Iraqi, CIA and British intelligence that the WMD buried in the four sites
were excavated by Iraqis and Syrians, with help from the Russians, and
moved to Syria. The location in Syria of this material, he says, is also
known to these intelligence agencies. The worst-case scenario has now come
about. Saddam’s nuclear, biological and chemical material is in the hands
of a rogue terrorist state — and one with close links to Iran.
When Mr Gaubatz returned to the US, he tried to bring all this to light.
Two congressmen, Peter Hoekstra, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee,
and Curt Weldon, were keen to follow up his account. To his horror, however,
when they tried to access his classified intelligence reports, they were
told that all 60 of them — which, in the routine way, he had sent in 2003
to the computer clearing-house at a US airbase in Saudi Arabia — had mysteriously
gone missing. These written reports had never even been seen by the ISG.
One theory is that they were inadvertently destroyed when the computer’s
database was accidentally erased in the subsequent US evacuation of the
airbase. Mr Gaubatz, however, suspects dirty work at the crossroads. It
is unlikely, he says, that no copies were made of his intelligence. And
he says that all attempts by Messrs Hoekstra and Weldon to extract information
from the Defence Department and CIA have been relentlessly stonewalled.
In 2005, the CIA held a belated inquiry into the disappearance of this
intelligence. Only then did its agents visit the sites — to report that
they had indeed been looted.
Mr Gaubatz’s claims remain largely unpublicised. Last year, the New
York Times dismissed him as one of a group of WMD diehard obsessives. The
New York Sun produced a more balanced report, but after that the coverage
died. According to Mr Gaubatz, the reason is a concerted effort by the
US intelligence and political world to stifle such an explosive revelation
of their own lethal incompetence.
After he and an Iraqi colleague spoke at last month’s Florida meeting
of the Intelligence Summit, an annual conference of the intelligence world,
they were interviewed for two hours by a US TV show — only for the interview
to be junked after the FBI repeatedly rang Mr Gaubatz and his colleague
to say they would stop the interview from being broadcast.
The problem the US authorities have is that they can’t dismiss Mr Gaubatz
as a rogue agent — because they have repeatedly decorated him for his work
in the field. In 2003, he received awards for his ‘courage and resolve
in saving lives and being critical for information flow’. In 2001, he was
decorated for being the ‘lead agent in a classified investigation, arguably
the most sensitive counter-intelligence investigation currently in the
entire Department of Defence’ and because his ‘reports were such high quality,
many were published in the Air Force’s daily threat product for senior
USAF leaders or re-transmitted at the national level to all security agencies
in US government’.
The organiser of the Intelligence Summit, John Loftus — himself a formidably
well-informed former attorney to the intelligence world — has now sent
a memorandum to Congress asking it to investigate Mr Gaubatz’s claims.
He has also hit a brick wall. The reason is not hard to grasp.
The Republicans won’t touch this because it would reveal the incompetence
of the Bush administration in failing to neutralise the danger of Iraqi
WMD. The Democrats won’t touch it because it would show President Bush
was right to invade Iraq in the first place. It is an axis of embarrassment.
Mr Loftus goes further. Saddam’s nuclear research, scientists and equipment,
he says, have all been relocated to Syria, where US satellite intelligence
confirms that uranium centrifuges are now operating — in a country which
is not supposed to have any nuclear programme. There is now a nuclear axis,
he says, between Iran, Syria and North Korea — with Russia and China helping
to build an Islamic bomb against the West. And of course, with assistance
from American negligence.
‘Apparently Saddam had the last laugh and donated his secret stockpile
to benefit Iran’s nuclear weapons programme. With a little technical advice
from Beijing, Syria is now enriching the uranium, Iran is making the missiles,
North Korea is testing the warheads, and the White House is hiding its
head in the sand.’
Of course, we don’t know whether any of this is true. But given Dave
Gaubatz’s testimony, shouldn’t someone be trying to find out? Or will we
still be intoning ‘there were no WMDs in Iraq’ when the Islamic bomb goes
off?
Melanie Phillips is a Daily Mail columnist.
WEDNESDAY, 18TH APRIL 2007