EXCLUSIVE
IRAQI efforts to buy sophisticated long-range missile guidance systems and other components on the international black market were foiled in May this year by Israeli and US agents monitoring illegal arms deals in Eastern Europe.
Sources say Iraqi officials set up meetings with two independent and one state-owned defence companies in Bucharest, Romania, and offered to pay well above
the asking price for equipment smuggled out of Russia.
Cash for the deal was to come from the estimated $2m a day Saddam Hussein earns by smuggling oil out of Iraq via the Kurdish-controlled north of the country. Kurdish warlords along the mountainous border with Turkey rake off $6 a barrel in return for safe passage and silence.
The Romanian firms reported the approach to their own security service and Mossad and the CIA moved in. Negotiations were abandoned and the Iraqi buyers fled empty-handed.
It was the second time Iraq had made contact with the government-sponsored Aerofina arms corporation. In 1995, the two sides actually signed a contract for the supply of missile guidance systems via a Jordanian intermediary sympathetic to Baghdad.
The Jordanian authorities subsequently intercepted and impounded two shipments of missile components and UN inspectors located and destroyed others which bore Russian markings.
But intelligence sources also claim that Iraq was ''only days away'' from conducting the first test-firing of a new battlefield missile when the first US Tomahawks struck selected military
targets on Wednesday night.
Under the terms of United Nations Security Council Resolution 687, Iraq is permitted to field surface-to-surface missiles if they have less than a 150-kilometre range. Despite the constant thwarting of UN arms inspection teams, the 1991 deal allowing ''defensive'' missiles has never been revoked.
UN inspectors believe the short-range tests were designed to disguise continuing research into rapid resumption of long-range missile production as soon as international scrutiny was
lifted.
During the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq extended the striking distance of its Soviet-supplied Scud missiles by reducing the size of the warhead and adding extra fuel tanks.
However, the makeshift variants had no guidance system after launch and only about half of those fired could be expected to land within two miles of their intended targets.
US and British concern over the last year focused on the
possibility that Saddam still had a secret cache of up to 18 unaccounted-for Scuds and might acquire the technology to let him to convert them to accurately strike from southern Iraq airfields in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia during the regular allied build-ups in the region.
They were also worried that such a strike might involve warheads carrying biological agents such as anthrax or botulism or be filled with lethal nerve gas.
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