I'm not quite convinced--no, more than that, I'm highly skeptical--but that is one of the allegations made over the weekend at the Intelligence Summit. It looks like ABC News misled the nation when they claimed that the 12 hours of tape aired at the Intelligence Summit revealed no Saddam-WMD connection. However, as we have noted before, the Summit was not organized by the most reputable people in the world.

Renew America via Rocketsbraintrust:

The chief mischief-maker on the Russian side apparently was General Yevgeny Primakov, who headed the Soviet foreign intelligence service in 1990, served as Russia's minister of foreign affairs in 1996, and as prime minister in 1998. You may remember him as the post-Cold War general who was given to outrageous and threatening outbursts.

Despite Iraq's 8 billion dollar debt to Russia, Primakov convinced the Russian government to invest anew in rebuilding Iraqi military forces after Saddam's humiliating defeat in the Gulf War. "Secret agreements, signed between Iraqi intelligence and the Russian GRU, provided for clean-up operations to be conducted by Russian and Iraqi military personnel — to remove WMDs, materials for production, technical documentation, etc., from Iraq, so that the regime could announce that Iraq was 'WMD free.'"

Part of the plan — specifically dealing with chemical weapons — was described by a Romanian intelligence official now living in protective custody after briefing U.S. intelligence for three years. The Russians specified that all chemical/bio weapons were to be burned or buried at sea in the event of potential capture. Just before war against Iraq by the allied coalition, two Russian ships set sail for the Indian Ocean. Shaw says it's not known whether they then headed for Syria or were destroyed. The point is they were out of Iraq and out of the reach of any invasion force.

Posted by: Rusty at 08:01 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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