Dark Actors by Robert Lewis

Author:Robert Lewis [Lewis, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857209191
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

The discussion had hardly begun when Amin offered that yes, Iraq had conducted military biowarfare research, and it had been at Salman Pak.

Kelly began probing into its goals. Was its research offensive or defensive?

‘Well,’ said Amin, with a candour that would evaporate over the coming months, ‘a military programme covers both aspects, doesn’t it?’

Around the room a few eyebrows were probably raised, but Amin was not being disingenuous. He was casually wrestling with the problem that had beset biological inspectors and researchers ever since the Cold War. Where and how do you draw the line? In the fifties, Porton Down did it by cynically erasing the word ‘warfare’ from its official language and replacing it with the word ‘defence’. Kelly worked for the Microbiology Defence Division at the Chemical Defence Establishment for the Ministry of Defence. Even so, it was still a classified, high-security military laboratory where scientists bound by the Official Secrets Act engineered lethal pathogens and assessed their viability as weapons. In Russia, as Kelly had found out, Biopreparat had been staffed by thousands of scientists who had been told, who believed, and who argued that they were only protecting their country.

‘Well,’ asked Kelly, who had spent most of the previous year frantically trying to protect British servicemen from whatever biological weapons Iraq might have developed, ‘have you produced any vaccines? What are you giving your own troops?’

‘We vaccinate them for cholera and for typhoid,’ said Amin, ‘and that’s all.’ Kelly nodded, simply to register the answer, which, again, was something he already knew. The British had taken enough Iraqi prisoners that February to find that out for themselves.

Eventually Amin handed over a typed statement covering half a single page. It explained that ‘for military purposes’ Iraq had researched anthrax, Clostridium perfringens (or gas gangrene) and botulinum toxin at Salman Pak. None of these agents were surprising subjects of study. They were the most commonly researched biological warfare agents in Porton Down, and Kelly had spent time on all of them in the eighties.

What wasn’t present on that list was plague. Of all the injections Kelly’s lab had sent out to the Gulf, the plague vaccine was the most controversial, and the most hurried. The last booster jabs arrived within days of the ground attack, and, as mentioned earlier, they were so debilitating that several commanding officers refused to issue it to their troops: Major General Rupert Smith of the 1st Armoured Division was one, and Lieutenant Colonel Charles Rogers of the Staffordshires another.

Neither Kelly nor the Ministry of Defence ever publicly admitted their mistake. After UNSCOM had pulled out of Iraq, and the inspectors had little to do but PR about the dangers of Iraqi germ warfare, Kelly would give an authorised (and probably instructed) interview to Tom Mangold for his book Plague Wars. 28 By then, UNSCOM had been in Iraq for over eight years, and had never found any evidence of weaponised plague.

‘Iraq denies working on plague but I find its absence conspicuous,’ Kelly told Mangold, having visited Iraq thirty-seven times without uncovering any plague whatsoever.

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