Gordon Corera Do documents leaked to this programme from the Iraqi military show Saddam Hussein has chemical weapons? Today's foreign affairs correspondent Gordon Corera makes the case
Rockets filled with the chemical nerve agent Sarin destroyed by Iraq after the Gulf war.
Iraqi soldiers
The documents are a set of handwritten notes and diagrams in Arabic. They cover a number of different issues relating to Iraqi military preparations. One set, for example, give details of an Blix manned underwater vehicle packed with explosives designed to attack ships in the Gulf. Others give layout information of a presidential palace - Jabal Makhul - where the Iraqi leadership could have hidden weapons.
But the key documents contain details on how certain elite units of the Iraqi army - parts of the Republican Guard and the Special Republicans - have been supplied with equipment, which will protect them against chemical weapons. The documents also claim that this has been smuggled overland from Iran, Syria and Turkey.
The documents came from a group called the Iraqi National Coalition who have a network of contacts inside and outside Iraq and especially with the Iraqi military - the Secretary General of the group is a former Brigadier General in the Iraqi army, Tawfiq Al- Yassiri, who explained how the documents were made at secret meetings with serving officers from the army.
Al-Yassiri was just back from Turkey where he'd been warned not to enter the Kurdish controlled parts of Iraq because Turkish intelligence had picked up reports that Saddam Hussein was going to have him assassinated.
To make sure the documents are genuine we had three experts on Iraq translate and analyse them. One of them was Toby Dodge of Warwick University and he believes that the information about the deployment of chemical protection gear makes sense to the specific units of the Republican and Special Republican Guard named in the documents. It fits in with his understanding of the Iraqi military.
And if the Iraqi army is being prepared to be protected against chemical weapons like VX and Sarin, that must mean that Iraq has these weapons and is preparing to use them since there is no chance that the US or Britain would deploy those kind of nerve agents against them.
It is also possible that the Iraqi army could use the chemical weapons against the Iraqi people or pats of the Iraqi army should there be an uprising. Another one of those who assessed the documents was Bill Tierney, a former UN weapons inspector who whilst working in Iraq was also working undercover as a spy for the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency. He believes that the importing of new suits and supply of atropine is a clear sign that Iraq is preparing to use nerve gas - probably VX or Sarin.
Gordon Corera
