| Daily Beast | - |
As the White House mulls whether Syria
has crossed President Obama's red line and used chemical weapons, the
U.S. military and intelligence community are quietly acknowledging that
the United States does not know where many of those weapons are ...
Content Section
Where Are Syria’s Chemical Weapons?
Multiple U.S. officials tell Eli Lake the scary truth: in many cases, we simply don’t know. Plus: irregular militias loyal to Assad have reportedly been training in how to use them.
As
the White House mulls whether Syria has crossed President Obama’s red
line and used chemical weapons, the U.S. military and intelligence
community are quietly acknowledging that the United States does not know
where many of those weapons are located.
The
judgment comes from top U.S. military commanders and is supported by
recent intelligence community assessments, according to three U.S.
officials who work closely on Syrian intelligence matters. At the heart
of the concern is that the Syrian military has transferred more and more
of its stock of sarin and mustard gas from storage sites to trucks
where they are being moved around the country. While U.S. intelligence
agencies first saw reports
that Syria was moving the weapons last year, the process has
accelerated since December, according to these officials. Also
worrisome, said two of the officials, is intelligence from late last
year that says the Syrian Scientific Research Center—an entity
responsible for Syria’s chemical-weapons stockpile—has begun to train
irregular militias loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in how to
use the chemical munitions.
The
assessment that Syria is moving large amounts of its chemical weapons
around the country on trucks means that if Obama wanted to send in U.S.
soldiers to secure Syria’s stockpiles, his top generals and intelligence
analysts doubt such a mission would have much success, according to the
three officials. “We’ve lost track of lots of this stuff,” one U.S.
official told The Daily Beast. “We just don’t know where a lot of it
is.”
The
large-scale movement of weapons, if it is in fact occurring, would
violate one of Obama’s earliest declared red lines concerning Syria.
Last August he said,
“We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players
on the ground, that a red line for us is, we start seeing a whole bunch
of weapons moving around or being utilized.”
The
recent assertions from U.S. officials build on statements made last
month by chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey and
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. After being asked by
Sen. John McCain on April 17 if he had confidence that the United States
could secure the stocks of chemical weapons in Syria, Dempsey initially
expressed vague confidence. But after McCain pressed him on this point,
he could not give the assurance McCain wanted: “Not as I sit here
today,” he said, “simply because they have been moving it, and the number of sites is quite numerous.” A week earlier, Clapper had also told
Congress that he did not know if the United States could secure Syria’s
chemical weapons. “It would be very, very situational dependent to
render an assessment on how well we could secure any or all of the
facilities in Syria,” he said.
“You have to remember that satellites are not unmanned aerial vehicles,” one official said. “We saw the trucks being loaded, but we did not see where they went.”
These
remarks struck a different tone from the one top Obama officials had
put forward last year. Leon Panetta, Obama’s last secretary of defense, acknowledged
in September that there had been “limited movement” of chemical
munitions, but he said that “the major sites still remain in place.”
Meanwhile,
not all U.S. officials agree with the worrisome intelligence
assessments recently relayed by the three officials. “Any effort to
secure Syria’s chemical-weapons would be complex, but we have good
visibility on Syria’s chemical-weapons stockpiles and are constantly
monitoring for any sign of movement,” a White House official told The
Daily Beast late Wednesday. “We believe that the stockpiles are secure.”
(A spokesman for the director of national intelligence declined to
comment for this story Wednesday.)
But
other U.S. officials said one of the problems in tracking the chemical
stocks in Syria once they were loaded onto trucks was finding out where
those trucks were headed. One official said U.S. spy satellites in
November picked up clear photographic evidence of trucks being loaded at
known chemical-weapons storage sites outside Damascus. But this
official also said the satellite did not track the movement of the
trucks in the country. “You have to remember that satellites are not
unmanned aerial vehicles,” this official said. “We saw the trucks being
loaded, but we did not see where they went.”
Meanwhile,
the intelligence assessment that irregular militias are being trained
in chemical warfare presents another problem—in part because the
intelligence community had launched an ambitious plan to communicate
directly with the midlevel Syrian officers in charge of chemical weapons
to dissuade these officers from launching a chemical attack. “We don’t know much about who the loyalists are,” the U.S. official said.
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