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Iraq: Defectors Describe Camp Where Weapons Were Made Two Iraqi defectors said yesterday that they had worked at a covert Iraqi government camp that produced biological weapons and trained Islamic terrorists. At the site at Salman Pak, terrorists trained to carry out attacks against neighboring countries, and even Europe and the United States, the defectors said. An Iraqi group that wants to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein introduced the two men to the New York Times, the newspaper reported. “We were training these people to attack installations important to the United States,” said one defector, a lieutenant general and a former senior official in the Iraqi intelligence service, the Mukhabarat. “The Gulf War never ended for Saddam Hussein. He is at war with the United States. We were repeatedly told this.” Inside Salman Pak was a highly guarded compound headed by a German, where Iraqi scientists worked to create biological agents, according to the defectors. The German had been described as “the man who caused all our problems in 1991,” the general said. The compound where the biological agents were said to be produced was bombed during the Gulf War, he said. The general said there was a lot he did not know about the workings of Salman Pak. “We were forbidden to speak about our activities among each other, even off duty. But over the years you see and hear things. These Islamic radicals were a scruffy lot,” he said. Iraq had told U.N. inspectors that the camp was an anti-terrorism training camp for Iraqi special forces, said Richard Sperzel, former head of the U.N. biological weapons inspection teams in Iraq. “But many of us had our own private suspicions,” Sperzel said. “We had nothing specific as evidence. Yet among ourselves we always referred to it as the terrorist training camp” (Chris Hedges, New York Times, Nov. 8).
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