C.I.A. Secretly Bought and Destroyed Iraqi Chemical Weapons

Middle East • February 2015 • Views: 2,184

The Central Intelligence Agency, working with American troops during the occupation of Iraq, repeatedly purchased nerve-agent rockets from a secretive Iraqi seller, part of a previously undisclosed effort to ensure that old chemical weapons remaining in Iraq did not fall into the hands of terrorists or militant groups, according to current and former American officials.

More: C.I.A. Is Said to Have Bought and Destroyed Iraqi Chemical Weapons

Of course these were not the weapons being made on the famous mobile labs that Powell talked about. Still, it clearly was not true that Iraq had no chemical weapons.

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6 comments

Great White Snark Feb 16, 2015 9:28:18am

It’s a footnote, but glad to see the CIA keeping this from the likes of Daesh. Yeow.

cinesimon Feb 16, 2015 10:59:24am

“Still, it clearly was not true that Iraq had no chemical weapons.”
This is one of those weird refutations that is constantly argued against nobody.

team_fukit Feb 16, 2015 3:27:38pm

The question I have about this story is that if the CIA ended up buying the weapons, then doesn’t it seem more foolish that we went to war in the first place?

Bass Reeves Feb 16, 2015 6:57:22pm

re: #1 Great White Snark

I don’t see the connection. Or at least I don’t see how paying this unknown person untold amounts of money harmed Daesh, or IS, or whatever you want to call it. If we pay more than market value for that stuff, and the people we buy it from are less than honest, we are just continually funding our own opposition. I’ve seen it happen in both Iraq and Afghanistan on varying scales, and it’s not like we’ve seen the CIA be *smart* about anything in the last decade or so. Or couple decades.

Dark_Falcon Feb 17, 2015 4:47:36am

re: #4 Bass Reeves

I don’t see the connection. Or at least I don’t see how paying this unknown person untold amounts of money harmed Daesh, or IS, or whatever you want to call it. If we pay more than market value for that stuff, and the people we buy it from are less than honest, we are just continually funding our own opposition. I’ve seen it happen in both Iraq and Afghanistan on varying scales, and it’s not like we’ve seen the CIA be *smart* about anything in the last decade or so. Or couple decades.

Paying to acquire and get rid of this nerve agent didn’t directly harm any Islamist terror movement, but it kept them from getting their hands on it. ISIS has already used chlorine gas as a weapon, they’d use Tabun or Sarin (the nerve agents produced in Iraq under Saddam Hussein) in a heartbeat. This CIA action ensured they are not able to do that.

Bass Reeves Feb 17, 2015 5:24:50am

re: #5 Dark_Falcon

I’m sorry, I might have been unclear. In Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorists/insurgents have sold undesirable munitions to the US to buy more modern/effective munitions, under the Small Rewards program.

Many rockets were in poor condition and some were empty or held a nonlethal liquid, the officials said. But others contained the nerve agent sarin, which analysis showed to be purer than the intelligence community had expected given the age of the stock.

Neither the C.I.A. nor the soldiers persuaded the man to reveal his source of supply, the officials said. “They were pushing to see where did it originate from, was there a mother lode?” General Zahner said.

So if there was a large cache of stuff that the AQIZ people considered too unstable to use, by selling them to us, they would have easily been able to purchase better stuff. And since from the article it appears that no real rigor was applied to checking the background of the seller, I feel pretty confident that the purchases didn’t protect us in any significant way.

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