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Iraq: New Film Documents How Iraq Acquired Western Technology By David Ruppe The film Stealing the Fire, which was produced by two U.S. journalists, is scheduled for public viewing later this month at a New York film festival, but Congressional staffers previewed it earlier this week. The film quotes a former senior executive of the German company Degussa, Michael Jansen, as saying that executives sold centrifuge equipment — which could be used for civilian or nuclear weapons purposes — to Iraq despite knowing it might be used for dangerous purposes. He added, though, that his company conformed to the letter of the law. “By German laws and German standards, there were no illegal deliveries,” Jansen said. Experts have said that such centrifuge technology could help Iraq overcome its biggest challenge to building a bomb: obtaining weapon-grade fissile material. The film also documents the case of Karl-Heinz Schaab, a German technician convicted of treason in 1999 for selling Iraq secret plans for building a centrifuge to enrich uranium to nuclear weapons grade. Schaab sold Iraq plans that he stole from the German company MAN. For that, he was convicted of high treason, fined $32,000 and ordered to serve a suspended five-year sentence. Blueprint for Future Efforts Experts have said they believe that such accounts may provide lessons about how restricted countries obtain weapons of mass destruction. “Probably the way proliferation will happen in Iran and Iraq is they way it happened with Iraq back in the 1980s,” David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, told Global Security Newswire. “From our point of view, the movie is important because it focuses attention on the way proliferation has happened and will continue to happen. Companies will continue to turn a blind eye to export controls or break the export control laws in their search for money.” “When I look at that video, it’s a lesson for the future,” he said. The London Times reported earlier this week that unidentified intelligence agencies believe Iraq has been smuggling nuclear related equipment of unspecified origin through humanitarian aid flights from Syria (see GSN, June 17). Albright said Germany has tightened export restrictions since the Gulf War, but Russia should remain a major source of concern for dual-use smuggling. “It is newsworthy that these companies were willing to help Iraq’s nuclear weapons programs, and I think it is what we’re going to face in Russia,” said Albright, who was quoted in the film. “They seem to be turning more toward Russia and the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, rather than Western Europe, these days, though there was a controversial German sale in recent years,” says Kelly Motz, editor of Iraq Watch, a website devoted to monitoring Iraq’s WMD program and a program within the Wisconsin Project for Nuclear Arms Control. She noted, however, a sale by the German company Siemens allowed by the oil-for-food program of machines called lithotriptors, the civilian use of which is to treat kidney stones. Iraq “ordered six machines, but they tried to get 120 spare electrical triggers ... one of which would detonate a nuclear weapon,” she said. “That’s enough spares to last you through the rest of your lifetime, and then some.” The company’s spokespeople said only eight of the devices were eventually sold, she said. Mostly Western Origin Following the Gulf War, U.N. inspectors in Iraq established that much of Iraq’s key equipment and technology for building nuclear weapons originated from German companies, including Degussa. U.N. inspectors in late 1991, in particular, reported acquiring hard evidence of numerous pieces of key German-manufactured equipment intended for processing uranium by centrifuging. One item of listed equipment originated from the U.S.-based company Dupont. In a December 1991 report, the inspectors described a “large” Iraqi procurement strategy that included buying directly from foreign manufacturers and indirectly through foreign intermediaries. They refrained, however, from pointing fingers at specific companies or countries. “Identification of a manufacturer does not necessarily mean identification of the supplier. As pointed out earlier, orders were often placed with manufacturers through intermediaries,” they said. The former head of Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, Khidhir Hamza, in his 2000 book Saddam’s Bombmaker, the Terrifying Inside Story of the Iraqi Nuclear and Biological Weapons Agenda, alleged that executives at Degussa and subsidiary Leybold offered to build Iraq a foundry for $120 million, which, he wrote, could be used for making “every bomb part except for the explosives.” Government Controls Citing various sources, the documentary further suggests that German officials tacitly allowed the controversial exports to go to Iraq. “Germany was an open field to us … no security, no hassle, unrestricted, uncomplicated,” said Hamza, quoted in the film. German reporter Hans Leyendecker alleged in the film that German officials were motivated by greed. Their policy was “Exports uber alles,” he said. Hamza wrote in his book that Western powers allowed nuclear trade because they saw strengthening pre-Gulf War Iraq as necessary for countering Iran, with which Iraq fought a bloody war throughout the 1980s. U.S. officials privately say that prior to the Gulf War, Iraq had developed an extensive WMD procurement network that extended to Switzerland, the Britain and the United States. It involved using official Iraqi government representatives, Iraqi majority-owned corporations in German, Britain and Switzerland, a network of buyers in London and third party procurers. “The whole [Iraqi] centrifuge program is based on German expertise, knowledge and supplies,” Hamza said in the film. “Without the Germans, there would be no centrifuge program.”
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