Global Policy Forum

By William J. Broad

The Bush administration yesterday made public its assessment of two mysterious trailers found in Iraq, calling them mobile units to produce deadly germs and the strongest evidence yet that Saddam Hussein had been hiding a program to prepare for biological warfare. "We're highly confident" of that judgment, an American intelligence official told reporters. The official said the administration's strong conviction was based mainly on the similarity between the testimony of Iraqi sources and the evidence found on the ground.

The Central Intelligence Agency posted the six-page assessment, "Iraqi Mobile Biological Warfare Agent Production Plants," on its Web site, www.cia.gov. The analysis was done in collaboration with the Defense Intelligence Agency. The report and briefing, given by four intelligence officials, revealed new details beyond what government officials had previously disclosed about the two mobile factories found by allied forces in April and May. For instance, the officials said they judged that each trailer could brew enough germs to produce, with further processing, one or two kilograms of dried agent each month.

While seemingly a small amount — a kilogram is 2.2 pounds — that weight in dangerous germs could cause major havoc if cast to the wind or into a subway. By comparison, the anthrax-tainted letters that killed 5 people and put 30,000 Americans on preventive antibiotics in 2001 each contained about a gram of dried anthrax spores. So the mobile factories, in theory at least, could make quantities of deadly agents up to thousands of times greater. "If you're looking at kilograms," an official at the briefing said, "you're talking about thousands of people."

The report called the discovery of the trailers "the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program." It also noted that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, in his testimony before the United Nations on Feb. 5 to generate support for a war in Iraq, had detailed such charges. Both the report and the briefing, a telephone conference call in which reporters asked questions, were careful and candid. Both had notable caveats, including the use of the words "probable" and "unlikely."

Both conceded that there were inconsistencies in the evidence and a lack of hard proof, like the presence of pathogens in trailer gear. The officials acknowledged that they had discovered neither biological agents nor evidence that the equipment had ever been used to make germ weapons. Moreover, they said the trailer's hardware presented no direct evidence of weapons use. The best evidence of that, they said, was the trailers' close resemblance to prewar descriptions of mobile germ plants given by Iraqi sources.

A technical assessment alone "would not lead you intuitively and logically to biological warfare," an official said of the trailers. Their gear was rusty, officials said, perhaps from sitting in the rain. And the mobile factories were poorly designed. For instance, one official noted, Iraqi biologists running the plants would have had a hard time getting raw materials into the production gear and removing multiplied colonies of deadly germs. "Relatively inefficient but ingenious" is how one analyst described the mobile factories.

Their inefficiency, he added, was probably rooted in a decision to design the plants with enough technical ambiguity so they could be disclaimed as germ factories if discovered. Iraqi scientists have said the units were used to produce hydrogen for weather balloons. But the intelligence officials dismissed that explanation as a cover story even while conceding that the equipment could, in fact, have been used occasionally to make hydrogen. With unusual frankness, the report listed four Iraqi sources it said had given the West its insights into the alleged mobile germ factories: a chemical engineer who managed a plant; a civil engineer who reported on a plant at an ammunition depot in Iraq; a third source who told of an animal feed cover story; and a defector from the Iraq Intelligence Service who told how Baghdad was making mobile plants.

While the trailers had many similarities to the prewar descriptions, the officials and the report said, the units also bore notable differences. For instance, the original plants were said to be mounted on flatbed trailers with reinforced floors. But the discovered plants were on heavy transporters intended for tanks, "obviating the need for reinforced floors," the paper said. In addition, the discovered trailers have a cooling unit not included in the original plant design — probably, the report said, to solve overheating problems that a source had described. "It's possible," one official added, that the two trailers, made in 2002 and 2003, were part of a new, more advanced generation of mobile gear "never used to manufacture agent." The report also made brief mention of a mobile laboratory found by American forces that intelligence officials said could have had civilian and military uses. The report took issue with an editorial in The New York Times on May 13 that cited experts who had suggested that the trailers might have been meant to produce biopesticides or to refurbish missile fuel. Those explanations, it said, made no sense.

American-led forces in Iraq are still hunting for other plants and their support vehicles, especially older models that might better match the descriptions of Iraqi sources. A skeptical view of the evidence presented yesterday came from Matthew S. Meselson, a Harvard expert on biological weapons who has advised the Central Intelligence Agency. He said the C.I.A. had made technical errors in the past and called on the government to turn over its Iraqi evidence to an independent panel. "The C.I.A. is under great political pressure," he said in an interview. "The evidence has to be given to an unimpeachable outside group of scientists, and they should be allowed any tests or measurements they want. They shouldn't be spoon-fed the data." Dr. Meselson suggested that an appropriate group might be the National Academy of Sciences, a prestigious organization in Washington that often advises the government.

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