TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/012389/01238900.037

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 8KB | 147 lines

WORLD, Page 30

WEST GERMANY

On Second Thought

A tale of intrigue and deceit unfolds over Libya's chemical-arms

plant


    The turnaround may not have been quite 180 degrees, but it was
close enough -- and sudden enough -- to qualify as a mighty abrupt
about-face. After first insisting that his government could find
nothing to substantiate U.S. charges that West German companies
helped the Libyans build a chemical-weapons factory in the desert
outside Tripoli, Chancellor Helmut Kohl last week admitted that
Washington might, after all, know what it was talking about. He
changed his mind, Kohl said, after the government examined "certain
documents" that had been "seized in the past few days." As
prosecutors opened a criminal investigation of the West German firm
Imhausen-Chemie and the case produced its first arrest, the growing
scandal profoundly embarrassed the West German government and
underscored once again the difficulty of controlling the
development of chemical weapons.

    The day before Kohl's admission, delegates from 149 nations
concluded a meeting in Paris aimed at extending the 1925 Geneva
Protocol, which bans the use -- but not the production and
stockpiling -- of chemical weapons. The diplomats made all the
right noises about the need to rid the world of poisonous gases,
but in the end did little more than reaffirm the protocol. While
the delegates expressed "serious concern at recent violations" of
the protocol, they did not even specifically condemn Iraq and Iran,
whose use of toxic weapons in the gulf war helped bring about the
Paris conference.

    U.S. officials had no trouble understanding why Kohl would
refrain from moving against a West German company until Washington
backed up its charges with solid evidence. What mystified the
Administration was why West German officials stoutly denied the
charges when the country's own intelligence agency had offered them
evidence of Imhausen-Chemie's complicity as early as last October.
Whatever the reason for Bonn's foot-dragging, the U.S. welcomed the
change of tune. "The objective now is to let the Germans climb down
without further embarrassment," said a senior White House official.
"We want to prevent further shipment of German equipment and
further participation of German personnel. We're persuaded that
without them the plant will never go into production."

    By early 1987 U.S. intelligence officials had become concerned
that Libya's mercurial leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, was
developing a chemical-weapons capability. By mid-1987 U.S. analysts
were convinced that a facility at Rabta, 50 miles southwest of
Tripoli, which began showing up in satellite photos in 1985, was
indeed a chemical-weapons plant. Code-named "Pharma-150" by the
Libyans, the plant was built under tight security conditions, with
a 1,300-man force of cheap labor imported from Thailand. Foreign
consultants entered the country without visas and left no hotel or
other records of their stay in Libya.

    One important piece of evidence pointing to the participation
of West German firms was obtained last August when U.S.
intelligence intercepted telephone conversations between Libyan
plant operators and officials of Imhausen-Chemie, which has its
headquarters in the Black Forest town of Lahr. The calls reportedly
took place after a toxic spill resulted from a bungled attempt by
the Libyans to manufacture a test quantity of chemical-weapons
material at the still uncompleted plant. In a frantic effort to get
advice on cleaning up and repairing the plant, Libyan officials
spoke at length with Imhausen-Chemie personnel. Those conversations
left no doubt that employees of the West German firm were just as
aware as the Libyans that the plant was being used to produce toxic
gas.

    Kohl's sudden turnabout last week touched off a rash of
inquiries in West Germany to establish who knew what and when. On
Friday government spokesman Friedhelm Ost said the country's
intelligence agency had given Bonn in mid-October "serious
information" about Imhausen's possible role in the Libyan project.
Whether or not Kohl received those details, he was definitely
informed about the U.S. case against Imhausen when he visited
Washington in mid-November. Says Deputy Assistant Secretary of
State Charles Thomas: "When Kohl left here, he was absolutely
convinced." A Kohl adviser was not quite as sweeping but admitted,
"He heard the name and had it in his notes when he returned."

    But the West German Finance Ministry did not even begin an
audit of Imhausen until the U.S. stepped up its pressure on Bonn
around Christmas. The delay occurred, says Ost, because "some
things have to be pursued in a discreet manner." Discretion,
however, quickly gave way to finger pointing. Press reports
obviously based on leaks from U.S. officials began appearing on New
Year's Day. The next day, through a spokesman, Bonn issued the
first of several denials, claiming that "we have no evidence so far
that German firms or persons have been involved" in the Libyan
project.

    West German officials may have dug in their heels in part
because of what they called "a media campaign" in the U.S.  Bonn
took special umbrage at a New York Times column by William Safire
calling the desert chemical plant "Auschwitz-in-the-sand."

    At last week's Paris conference, U.S. Secretary of State George
Shultz met with his West German counterpart, Hans-Dietrich
Genscher, and offered to provide a panel of West German officials
with a full intelligence briefing in Washington. Perhaps seizing
on that proposal as a diplomatic way to take a new tack, Genscher
agreed not only to send such a delegation but also to tighten West
Germany's notoriously loose regulations governing the export of
potentially dangerous products, including chemicals. Two days later
Bonn announced plans to increase the number of customer nations
whose purchases are monitored and to impose more stringent
reporting requirements for exporting firms.

    Bonn's denials also began to erode in the face of a series of
embarrassing disclosures in the West German press. The most
detailed appeared last Thursday in the weekly Stern, which traced
the Libyan project to I.B.I. Engineering, a now defunct firm.
I.B.I. had set up an office in Frankfurt through which the firm's
chief, an exiled Iraqi arms merchant named Ihsan Barbouti, 64,
orchestrated the involvement of Imhausen and as many as 30 other
firms and individuals from West Germany, Switzerland and Austria.
At least some of the equipment shipped to Libya was ostensibly
purchased by I.B.I. for a Hong Kong firm called Pen-Tsao, which has
a Hamburg subsidiary founded by Imhausen's president, Jurgen
Hippenstiel-Imhausen. Earlier, Hippenstiel-Imhausen had not only
denied any involvement in the project but gone so far as to say,
"I don't even know where (Libya) is."

    Other West German press reports led to Joseph Gedopt, 44,
managing director of an Antwerp shipping company named Cross Link
Group. Last week, acting on information supplied by West German
customs officials, Belgian authorities arrested Gedopt for
falsifying bills of lading on a shipment of Imhausen equipment that
left Germany addressed to Pen-Tsao in Hong Kong but was later
diverted to Libya through Antwerp. Gedopt reportedly admitted
making many such diversions, for Imhausen and other companies, but
denied knowing that any shipments he handled had been destined for
a chemical-weapons facility.

    Even Libya, while continuing to claim that the huge desert
plant was built strictly as a pharmaceutical facility, had a small
role in documenting West Germany's participation in the project.
The Libyan Ambassador to the United Nations, Ali Treiki, confirmed
that West German firms "did help us, not only in this plant, in
other plants also."

    International negotiations on chemical weapons are scheduled
to resume in Geneva under United Nations auspices on Feb. 7. George
Bush, for one, promised last week to make control of such arms a
major foreign policy objective of his Administration. As the
controversy over the Libyan facility vividly demonstrates, however,
controlling the behavior of a terrorist state -- and of Western
firms willing to do business with such countries -- is not easy.