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Sudan Plant Was Probed
Months Before Attack

By Vernon Loeb, Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writers
September 1 1998; Page A14

The Sudanese pharmaceutical factory destroyed in last month’s U.S. cruise missile attack was singled out as a possible target months earlier, during a covert operation in which U.S. intelligence agencies inserted an agent to obtain one of several soil samples used later to justify the strike, senior intelligence officials said yesterday.

The operation, part of an effort to investigate Sudan’s nascent chemical weapons capability, ultimately linked Al Shifa to Iraq’s chemical weapons programs and produced a soil sample, tested three times at a private U.S. laboratory, showing high concentrations of EMPTA, a known chemical precursor to deadly VX nerve gas, the officials said.

Since the operation, the officials said, the intelligence agent who gathered the sample has been “vetted and polygraphed” to make sure he followed exactly the instructions of his American handlers. “So this is not somebody who we do not have a high degree of confidence in,” one official said.

The senior officials recounted the operation in an effort to counter denials by former employees of the plant and its current owner of any link to chemical weapons production or to Osama bin Laden, the terrorist financier who is the prime suspect in the Aug. 7 attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The Al Shifa plant was bombed in response to those assaults.

With international skepticism continuing, intelligence officials yesterday went far beyond the generally strict practice of U.S. intelligence agencies not to divulge any details about the sources and methods they use to obtain information.

A week ago, trying to squelch such skepticism and counter a concerted campaign by Sudanese officials, intelligence officials disclosed the existence of a soil sample showing high concentrations of EMPTA. Yesterday, the officials said the soil sample from Al Shifa contained 2 1/2 times the amount of EMPTA necessary for a laboratory to report its presence in the soil.

They said that while samples were gathered from other suspected chemical weapons sites in Sudan, only the sample from Al Shifa contained EMPTA, which officials have described as part of Iraq’s nerve gas formula.

U.S. suspicions about a connection between the plant and Iraq’s own chemical weapons program deepened last year, the officials said, when the factory’s chairman visited Iraq to see the man American analysts regard as “the father of Iraq’s VX program,” Emad Ani, who himself headed a pharmaceutical company. The ease with which officials from the Sudanese plant were permitted to deal directly with their Iraqi counterparts, rather than go through government representatives, struck U.S. analysts

“We see a connection with this plant and the Iraqis — that draws our attention to it,” one senior intelligence official said. “We go and sample — and we get a hit on the most powerful precursor, EMPTA, for VX that we can identify. That’s the web.”

In any intelligence situation, the official said, “you’re always dealing with a mixture of evidence and inference ... and we think in this case, as you add it all up, it’s a very strong case.”

The official acknowledged that U.S. authorities had been able to establish only an indirect connection between the plant and bin Laden before the attack. They knew for certain that bin Laden had contributed to Sudan’s Military Industrial Corp., which in turn helped finance the plant, and that he was interested in acquiring chemical weapons. But they lacked proof of a direct financial stake in the factory.

New evidence obtained since the attack, one official said yesterday, starts to make the link between the plant’s current owner, Salaheldin Idris, and bin Laden “more direct.” Some reports that U.S. intelligence has gathered suggest that Idris, who purchased the plant in March, may have done so on bin Laden’s behalf, officials said.

“What we’re learning about [Idris] leads us to suspect that he’s involved in money laundering, that he’s involved in representing a lot of bin Laden’s interests in Sudan,” one official said.

The officials said they still cannot explain whether the presence of EMPTA outside the Khartoum factory indicated the substance had been produced inside, stored there or parked or dropped outside.

“All we know is that it was there,” one official said.

Citing published reports about the possibility that EMPTA could have commercial uses other than the manufacture of VX gas, the officials said a search of international sources has produced no such case.

“We’re aware of placeholder patents that posit theoretical uses,” one official said, “but we could find no evidence that anyone ... has attempted to use it commercially.”

The United States has resisted a call by Sudan and other countries for the United Nations to send inspectors to search the rubble in Khartoum for signs of chemicals related to VX. Asked whether a search could produce evidence of EMPTA, the officials yesterday said they could not say, adding that it would depend on whether the chemical had been produced there or simply stored there briefly and moved.

 

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