The U.S. government may be
considering military action
in response to chemical strikes near Damascus. But a generation ago,
America’s military and intelligence communities knew about and did
nothing to stop a series of nerve gas attacks far more devastating than
anything Syria has seen,
Foreign Policy has learned.
In 1988, during the waning days of Iraq’s war with Iran, the United
States learned through satellite imagery that Iran was about to gain a
major strategic advantage by exploiting a hole in Iraqi defenses. U.S.
intelligence officials conveyed the location of the Iranian troops to
Iraq, fully aware that Hussein’s military would attack with chemical
weapons, including sarin, a lethal nerve agent.
The intelligence included imagery and maps about Iranian troop
movements, as well as the locations of Iranian logistics facilities and
details about Iranian air defenses. The Iraqis used mustard gas and
sarin prior to four major offensives in early 1988 that relied on U.S.
satellite imagery, maps, and other intelligence. These attacks helped to
tilt the war in Iraq’s favor and bring Iran to the negotiating table,
and they ensured that the Reagan administration’s long-standing policy
of securing an Iraqi victory would succeed. But they were also the last
in a series of chemical strikes stretching back several years that the
Reagan administration knew about and didn’t disclose.
U.S. officials have long denied acquiescing to Iraqi chemical
attacks, insisting that Hussein’s government never announced he was
going to use the weapons. But retired Air Force Col. Rick Francona, who
was a military attaché in Baghdad during the 1988 strikes, paints a
different picture.
"The Iraqis never told us that they intended to use nerve gas. They didn’t have to. We already knew," he told
Foreign Policy.
According to recently declassified CIA documents and interviews with
former intelligence officials like Francona, the U.S. had firm evidence
of Iraqi chemical attacks beginning in 1983. At the time, Iran was
publicly alleging that illegal chemical attacks were carried out on its
forces, and was building a case to present to the United Nations. But it
lacked the evidence implicating Iraq, much of which was contained in
top secret reports and memoranda sent to the most senior intelligence
officials in the U.S. government. The CIA declined to comment for this
story.
In contrast to today’s wrenching
debate
over whether the United States should intervene to stop alleged
chemical weapons attacks by the Syrian government, the United States
applied a cold calculus three decades ago to Hussein’s widespread use of
chemical weapons against his enemies and his own people. The Reagan
administration decided that it was better to let the attacks continue if
they might turn the tide of the war. And even if they were discovered,
the CIA wagered that international outrage and condemnation would be
muted.
In the documents, the CIA said that Iran might not discover
persuasive evidence of the weapons’ use — even though the agency
possessed it. Also, the agency noted that the Soviet Union had
previously used chemical agents in Afghanistan and suffered few
repercussions.
It has been previously reported that the United States provided
tactical intelligence to Iraq at the same time that officials suspected
Hussein would use chemical weapons. But the CIA documents, which sat
almost entirely unnoticed in a trove of declassified material at the
National Archives in College Park, Md., combined with exclusive
interviews with former intelligence officials, reveal new details about
the depth of the United States’ knowledge of how and when Iraq employed
the deadly agents. They show that senior U.S. officials were being
regularly informed about the scale of the nerve gas attacks. They are
tantamount to an official American admission of complicity in some of
the most gruesome chemical weapons attacks ever launched.
Top CIA officials, including the Director of Central Intelligence
William J. Casey, a close friend of President Ronald Reagan, were told
about the location of Iraqi chemical weapons assembly plants; that Iraq
was desperately trying to make enough mustard agent to keep up with
frontline demand from its forces; that Iraq was about to buy equipment
from Italy to help speed up production of chemical-packed artillery
rounds and bombs; and that Iraq could also use nerve agents on Iranian
troops and possibly civilians.
Officials were also warned that Iran might launch retaliatory
attacks against U.S. interests in the Middle East, including terrorist
strikes, if it believed the United States was complicit in Iraq’s
chemical warfare campaign.
"As Iraqi attacks continue and intensify the chances increase that
Iranian forces will acquire a shell containing mustard agent with Iraqi
markings," the CIA reported in a top secret document in November 1983.
"Tehran would take such evidence to the U.N. and charge U.S. complicity
in violating international law."
At the time, the military attaché’s office was following Iraqi
preparations for the offensive using satellite reconnaissance imagery,
Francona told
Foreign Policy. According to a
former CIA official, the images showed Iraqi movements of chemical
materials to artillery batteries opposite Iranian positions prior to
each offensive.
Francona, an experienced Middle East hand and Arabic linguist who
served in the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence
Agency, said he first became aware of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons
against Iran in 1984, while serving as air attaché in Amman, Jordan. The
information he saw clearly showed that the Iraqis had used
Tabun nerve agent (also known as "GA") against Iranian forces in southern Iraq.
The declassified CIA documents show that Casey and other top
officials were repeatedly informed about Iraq’s chemical attacks and its
plans for launching more. "If the Iraqis produce or acquire large new
supplies of mustard agent, they almost certainly would use it against
Iranian troops and towns near the border," the CIA said in a top secret
document.
But it was the express policy of Reagan to ensure an Iraqi victory in the war, whatever the cost.
The CIA noted in one document that the use of nerve agent "could
have a significant impact on Iran’s human wave tactics, forcing Iran to
give up that strategy." Those tactics, which involved Iranian forces
swarming against conventionally armed Iraqi positions, had proved
decisive in some battles. In March 1984, the CIA reported that Iraq had
"begun using nerve agents on the Al Basrah front and likely will be able
to employ it in militarily significant quantities by late this fall."
The use of chemical weapons in war is banned under the
Geneva Protocol
of 1925, which states that parties "will exert every effort to induce
other States to accede to the" agreement. Iraq never ratified the
protocol; the United States did in 1975. The
Chemical Weapons Convention, which bans the production and use of such arms, wasn’t passed until 1997, years after the incidents in question.
The initial wave of Iraqi attacks, in 1983, used mustard agent.
While generally not fatal, mustard causes severe blistering of the skin
and mucus membranes, which can lead to potentially fatal infections, and
can cause blindness and upper respiratory disease, while increasing the
risk of cancer. The United States wasn’t yet providing battlefield
intelligence to Iraq when mustard was used. But it also did nothing to
assist Iran in its attempts to bring proof of illegal Iraqi chemical
attacks to light. Nor did the administration inform the United Nations.
The CIA determined that Iran had the capability to bomb the weapons
assembly facilities, if only it could find them. The CIA believed it
knew the locations.
Hard evidence of the Iraqi chemical attacks came to light in 1984.
But that did little to deter Hussein from using the lethal agents,
including in strikes against his own people. For as much as the CIA knew
about Hussein’s use of chemical weapons, officials resisted providing
Iraq with intelligence throughout much of the war. The Defense
Department had proposed an intelligence-sharing program with the Iraqis
in 1986. But according to Francona, it was nixed because the CIA and the
State Department viewed Saddam Hussein as "anathema" and his officials
as "thugs."
The situation changed in 1987. CIA reconnaissance satellites picked
up clear indications that the Iranians were concentrating large numbers
of troops and equipment east of the city of Basrah, according to
Francona, who was then serving with the Defense Intelligence Agency.
What concerned DIA analysts the most was that the satellite imagery
showed that the Iranians had discovered a gaping hole in the Iraqi lines
southeast of Basrah. The seam had opened up at the junction between the
Iraqi III Corps, deployed east of the city, and the Iraqi VII Corps,
which was deployed to the southeast of the city in and around the hotly
contested Fao Peninsula.
The satellites detected Iranian engineering and bridging units being
secretly moved to deployment areas opposite the gap in the Iraqi lines,
indicating that this was going to be where the main force of the annual
Iranian spring offensive was going to fall, Francona said.
In late 1987, the DIA analysts in Francona’s shop in Washington
wrote a Top Secret Codeword report partially entitled "At The Gates of
Basrah," warning that the Iranian 1988 spring offensive was going to be
bigger than all previous spring offensives, and this offensive stood a
very good chance of breaking through the Iraqi lines and capturing
Basrah. The report warned that if Basrah fell, the Iraqi military would
collapse and Iran would win the war.
President Reagan read the report and, according to Francona, wrote a
note in the margin addressed to Secretary of Defense Frank C. Carlucci:
"An Iranian victory is unacceptable."
Subsequently, a decision was made at the top level of the U.S.
government (almost certainly requiring the approval of the National
Security Council and the CIA). The DIA was authorized to give the Iraqi
intelligence services as much detailed information as was available
about the deployments and movements of all Iranian combat units. That
included satellite imagery and perhaps some sanitized electronic
intelligence. There was a particular focus on the area east of the city
of Basrah where the DIA was convinced the next big Iranian offensive
would come. The agency also provided data on the locations of key
Iranian logistics facilities, and the strength and capabilities of the
Iranian air force and air defense system. Francona described much of the
information as "targeting packages" suitable for use by the Iraqi air
force to destroy these targets.
The sarin attacks then followed.
The nerve agent causes dizziness, respiratory distress, and muscle
convulsions, and can lead to death. CIA analysts could not precisely
determine the Iranian casualty figures because they lacked access to
Iranian officials and documents. But the agency gauged the number of
dead as somewhere between "hundreds" and "thousands" in each of the four
cases where chemical weapons were used prior to a military offensive.
According to the CIA, two-thirds of all chemical weapons ever used by
Iraq during its war with Iran were fired or dropped in the last 18
months of the war.
By 1988, U.S. intelligence was flowing freely to Hussein’s military.
That March, Iraq launched a nerve gas attack on the Kurdish village of
Halabja in northern Iraq.
A month later, the Iraqis used aerial bombs and artillery shells
filled with sarin against Iranian troop concentrations on the Fao
Peninsula southeast of Basrah, helping the Iraqi forces win a major
victory and recapture the entire peninsula. The success of the Fao
Peninsula offensive also prevented the Iranians from launching their
much-anticipated offensive to capture Basrah. According to Francona,
Washington was very pleased with the result because the Iranians never
got a chance to launch their offensive.
The level of insight into Iraq’s chemical weapons program stands in
marked contrast to the flawed assessments, provided by the CIA and other
intelligence agencies about Iraq’s program prior to the United States’
invasion in 2003. Back then, American intelligence had better access to
the region and could send officials out to assess the damage.
Francona visited the Fao Peninsula shortly after it had been
captured by the Iraqis. He found the battlefield littered with hundreds
of used injectors once filled with atropine, the drug commonly used to
treat sarin’s lethal effects. Francona scooped up a few of the injectors
and brought them back to Baghdad — proof that the Iraqis had used sarin
on the Fao Peninsula.
In the ensuing months, Francona reported, the Iraqis used sarin in
massive quantities three more times in conjunction with massed artillery
fire and smoke to disguise the use of nerve agents. Each offensive was
hugely successful, in large part because of the increasingly
sophisticated use of mass quantities of nerve agents. The last of these
attacks, called the Blessed Ramadan Offensive, was launched by the
Iraqis in April 1988 and involved the largest use of sarin nerve agent
employed by the Iraqis to date. For a quarter-century, no chemical
attack came close to the scale of Saddam’s unconventional assaults.
Until, perhaps, the strikes last week outside of Damascus.
Click to the next page to read the secret CIA files.
Situation report on the Iran-Iraq war, noting that each side is preparing for chemical weapons attacks (July 29, 1982)
Top secret memo documenting chemical weapons use by Iraq, and discussing Iran’s likely reactions (Nov. 4, 1983)
Memo to the director of Central Intelligence predicting that Iraq will use nerve agents against Iran (Feb. 24, 1984)
CIA predicts "widespread use of mustard agents" and use of nerve agents by late summer (March 13, 1984)
CIA confirms Iraq used nerve agent (March 23, 1984)
CIA considers the consequences for chemical weapons
proliferation now that Iraq has used mustard and nerve agent (Sept. 6,
1984)
Intelligence assessment of Iraq’s chemical weapons program (January 1985)
