Explosives may be on videotape in visit during Iraq invasion

By Sara Jean Green and Steve Miletich
Seattle Times staff reporters

AP A 101st Airborne Division soldier examines the contents of a barrel in a bunker in the Al-Qaqaa facility in Iraq in this video footage made by an embedded crew from Minneapolis ABC affiliate KSTP-TV on April 18, 2003. The station says the video shows soldiers examining explosives, but said it remained unclear whether these explosives were the high-energy explosives that are missing.

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The footage shows U.S. troops examining a large cache of explosives nine days after Saddam's fall. The video also shows a United Nations seal used to mark hundreds of tons of powerful explosives.

The footage was shot April 18, 2003, by a Minnesota news crew embedded with the military in Iraq. The crew included a journalist now working at Northwest Cable News in Seattle.

At a Pentagon press conference this morning, a former commander of an Army company that was in Iraq said that a unit removed 250 tons of ammunition from the Al-Qaqaa weapons depot in April 2003 and later destroyed it. And Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita said some was of the same type as the missing explosives that have become a major issue in the presidential campaign.

But those 250 tons were not located under the seal of the International Atomic Energy Agency — as the missing high-grade explosives had been — and Di Rita could not definitely say whether they were part of the missing 377 tons.

Maj. Austin Pearson, speaking at a press conference at the Pentagon, said his team removed 250 tons of TNT, plastic explosives, detonation cords, and white phosporous rounds on April 13, 2003 — 10 days after U.S. forces first reached the Al Qaqaa site.

KING 5: Footage of explosives · Unedited video - part 1 · Unedited video - part 2 · Unedited video - part 3 · Interview with Dean Staley · Staley's report on KING 5

"I did not see any IAEA seals at any of the locations we went into. I was not looking for that," Pearson said.

Di Rita sought to point to Pearson's comments as evidence that some RDX, one of the high-energy explosives, might have been removed from the site. RDX is also known as plastic explosive.

But Di Rita acknowledged: "I can't say RDX that was on the list of IAEA is what the major pulled out. ... We believe that some of the things they were pulling out of there were RDX."

Further study was needed, Di Rita said.

The timing of the disappearance has become a major issue in the presidential campaign, with John Kerry alleging that the Bush administration failed to protect the explosives, and President Bush criticizing Kerry for jumping to conclusions.

Bush has said the materials could have been removed before U.S. troops invaded, a position reiterated by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld earlier yesterday.

The missing explosives, which disappeared from bunkers at the Al-Qaqaa complex south of Baghdad, included HMX, an explosive powerful enough to ignite the fissile material in an atomic bomb and set off a nuclear chain reaction.

HMX also can be used to make plastic explosives but is not considered a weapon of mass destruction like nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

Monday, The New York Times and CBS reported that Iraqi officials had told the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) agency this month that the explosives were missing, and that they were looted after April 9, 2003, the day Baghdad fell.

David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector, told The Seattle Times last night that the television video appeared to show at least some of the missing explosives. He said he had interviewed the photographer who shot the Al-Qaqaa footage, Joe Caffrey, and also received still photos he showed to a colleague who had been inside the bunkers.

Albright is now president of the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Science and International Security, a nonprofit organization dedicated to stopping the spread of nuclear weapons, monitoring worldwide nuclear activities and reducing nuclear arsenals.

The seal is important, Albright said, because "the only thing they were sealing at Al-Qaqaa was HMX," one of the explosives "the administration is trying to say disappeared before the U.S. military showed up in early April."

"What's disturbing is how political it's all gotten," Albright said of the Al-Qaqaa controversy. "We're just trying to figure out what happened."

He believes the evidence shows "there were high explosives at that site after U.S. troops arrived at Al-Qaqaa."

One frame in the television video clearly shows a copper-colored disc with "IAEA" stamped in the metal.

IAEA inspectors sealed only nine of about 55 bunkers containing explosives, detonators and fuses at the Al-Qaqaa site, Albright said.

"What the embedded journalists found is important because it shows that on April 18, at least one door [to a bunker] still had an IAEA seal on it, indicating there was a significant amount of high explosives at Al-Qaqaa," he said.

Soldiers with the embedded journalists clipped that seal and inspected the bunker. The photographer's description of what he saw behind the bunker door is consistent with HMX, he said.

"He saw drums [containing] white powder in bags," Albright said. "That's the common description of HMX and the common way to store it."

Dean Staley, the reporter who was with Caffrey, the photographer, told the Times last night he also saw white powder in the drums, along with plastic bags of white powder on the floor.

Staley, an anchor at Northwest Cable News in Seattle, was working for KSTP television in St. Paul, Minn. He and Caffrey were embedded journalists with the 101st Airborne Division.

David Kay, a former American official who led the recent hunt in Iraq for unconventional weapons and visited the site, told The New York Times yesterday that the video is "consistent with what I know of Al-Qaqaa."

"The damning thing is the seals. The Iraqis didn't use seals on anything," Kay said. "So I'm absolutely sure that's an IAEA seal."

Albright said that before the war, U.N. inspectors chose to monitor Iraq's HMX stockpiles, but not RDX, which the Iraqis made themselves. Iraq imported HMX from several countries in the 1980s, he said.

Staley said the bunkers he visited were unguarded, but that he is not sure they were same bunkers that held the now-missing explosives. He said a thin wire with a seal was clasped on steel doors leading into the bunkers, which contained many barrels filled with explosives.

Staley, who visited the bunkers with a sergeant and a warrant officer, said no one used the term HMX to describe the explosives. He recalled seeing fuses, packed explosives and nose cones that are screwed into bombs.

"We came upon these bunkers and started going through them," he said. "Some were locked and some were not."

Staley said there were perhaps a dozen bunkers in the area he visited, but that there were many more bunkers in the large, abandoned complex.

"The bunkers were stacked with boxes and or crates, depending on what bunker," he said. "They were marked explosives."

Staley said he and Caffrey went to the bunkers because they were bored and looking for a story.

But at the time, Staley said, the focus was on weapons of mass destruction, leading him to conclude that the Army had eliminated the site as one for such weapons and moved on.

Earlier yesterday, Pentagon officials released a declassified surveillance photograph showing two Iraqi trailer trucks parked outside a bunker at Al-Qaqaa on March 17, 2003. Pentagon officials argue that the trucks are evidence of Iraqi military activity at the compound during the days just before the U.S.-led invasion.

But the photograph reveals little about the fate of the 377 tons of explosives, part of an estimated 600,000 tons of explosives believed scattered then around Iraq.

Rumsfeld argued that it was unlikely the tons of material could have been removed after U.S. troops occupied the country.

"Picture all the tractor trailers and forklifts and Caterpillars it would take to move 377 tons, and we had total control of the air. We would have seen anything like that," Rumsfeld said in an interview with WPHT radio in Philadelphia.

Also yesterday, the U.N. said U.S. officials were warned to safeguard the Al-Qaqaa site soon after the invasion began.

Alarmed by the rampant looting of Iraqi's main nuclear site, Al Tuwaitha, IAEA head Mohammed ElBaradei wrote an internal memo about the potential "explosives bonanza" available to terrorists, which was passed along to U.S. officials.

"We put it to the U.S. Mission in Vienna in April" of 2003, said Jacques Baute, the IAEA's chief inspector for Iraq. "We didn't hear anything back."

A year later, Iraqi officials say they warned coalition head L. Paul Bremer that Al-Qaqaa had probably been looted during the post-invasion period.

The IAEA also sought yesterday to clarify reports that the amount of missing explosives may have been far less than what the Iraqis said in an Oct. 10 report.

ABC News, citing IAEA inspection documents, reported Wednesday that the Iraqis had declared 141 tons of RDX explosives at Al-Qaqaa in July 2002, but that the site held only 3 tons when it was checked in January 2003. The network said that could suggest that 138 tons were removed from the facility long before the March 2003 invasion.

Vice President Dick Cheney seized upon the ABC report yesterday, telling supporters in Wisconsin that Kerry had gotten the facts wrong in criticizing the administration about the explosives.

Kerry is "just dead wrong. ... We know ... upwards to 125 tons had been removed" in January 2003 before the invasion, Cheney said. "He's just plain wrong on the facts."

But IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said most of the RDX — about 125 tons — was kept at Al-Mahaweel, a storage site under Al-Qaqaa's jurisdiction about 30 miles outside the main Al-Qaqaa site. She also said about 10 tons already had been reported by Iraq as having been used for non-prohibited purposes between July 2002 and January 2003.

The fact that the report was made public days before the U.S. election has caused critics to charge that the timing of the IAEA's disclosure was politically motivated by ElBaradei, whose nomination for a third term as the IAEA chief has been opposed by the Bush administration.

The IAEA denies the charge.

"The report originated from Iraq, not from us," said Baute, the IAEA official.

Sara Jean Green: 515-5654 or sgreen@seattletimes.com

Steve Miletich: 206-464-3302 or smiletich@seattletimes.com

Information about Donald Rumsfeld and the United Nations is from the Los Angeles Times. Information about Cheney is from The Associated Press.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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