Ihsan Barbouti

Rabta

Ihsan Barbouti was an Iraqi-born architect living in London. In discovery in a federal suit in Oklahoma his opponents obtained an agency contract between him and the Libyan Secretary of Atomic Energy. A co-investor in his American real estate, Mike Peress of Metropolitan Life, testified that he "heard Dr. Barbouti admit to being the architect and procurer of material for a plant in Libya that Dr. Barbouti classified as a pharmaceutical plant," and that Barbouti said a shipper, Joseph Gedopt of a company called Crosslink, could "redirect, camouflage, or change manifests on any shipment Dr. Barbouti saw fit." William Webster, the director of central intelligence, reported to Congress in 1989 that the complex at Rabta would give Libya "the largest chemical warfare agent production plant in the third world." A Dallas pipeline consultant who worked for Barbouti's companies, Bruce Munden, heard in January 1989 that American intelligence believed the plant made chemical weapons, and flew to London to ask him. Munden testified that "Dr. Barbouti stated that he had designed the plant at Rabta for Colonel Ghadafi," that "no one could prove that he had anything to do with chemical weapons," and that "if the U.S., the Soviet Union and Israel could have chemical weapons, there was no reason why Colonel Ghadafi could not have them either." After the plant became public, Munden said, Barbouti's son Haidar told the executives of IBI "to search their files and to purge them of any documents relating to Libya."¹

TK-7

In 1987 Barbouti sought an interest in TK-7 Corporation, a maker of fuel additives in Oklahoma City headed by Moshe Tal. At a meeting in Zurich that September he asked Tal to buy a "vessel load of certain chemicals in the United States and prepare them for shipment to Europe." Some were ingredients of the company's product and others were unfamiliar to Tal. Barbouti explained that he had been delayed in Libya, where he had a contract with the Ministry of Atomic Energy. In New York that November Tal asked whether the Libyan government had a financial interest in the venture. Barbouti said that it did and that it was "none of your business." The plaintiffs' chemist testified that the list "contained precursors for nerve gases and explosives." The trial court directed a verdict for Barbouti's estate on the ground that the company's seven million dollars in lost profits were speculative, and the Tenth Circuit affirmed in 1993 without deciding whether there had been a conspiracy.¹

Houston

The family owned two retail centers in Houston. On February 21, 1992, the Houston Chronicle reported that the Defense Intelligence Agency was examining a letter dated October 27, 1990, from Iraq's State Establishment for Textile to IBI Services in London, addressed to Haidar Barbouti and the lawyer Arie David and signed for Raja Hassan Ali: "We expect the assistance that you promised to the Enterprise For Pesticide Production. Additional supplies of the raw materials will insure future funding by the foreign minister. Abudul Senoussi knows our requirements." Raja Hassan Ali, director general of the economic department of Iraq's Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization, was a defendant in the Atlanta indictment in the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro case. Abdullah al-Senoussi, a brother-in-law of Muammar Gaddafi, had been named by French investigators in the bombing of a UTA airliner in September 1989. The Houston Chronicle reported that the pesticide enterprise was a front for the chemical weapons complex at Samarra. The newspaper added that the family was the subject of a Customs investigation into exports of dual-use technology to Libya and Iraq, and that Ihsan Barbouti "allegedly died on his 63rd birthday in July 1990, but some former business associates believe he feigned his death to avoid prosecution or even death by Israeli intelligence."²

On March 6, 1992, the paper reported that a Houston jury had found Haidar Barbouti and three family companies liable for more than 12 million dollars to Munden, whose pipe-coating technology, with "military and nuclear as well as industrial uses," had been taken and exported. Judge Scott Brister did not allow the jury to be told that the destinations were Libya and Iraq. Munden was described as a grand jury witness in a federal investigation of father and son. Haidar Barbouti, then 24, sued the newspaper for libel, swearing that he had promised no assistance to the pesticide enterprise. The Texas court of appeals, sitting en banc in 1996, held both articles substantially true.²

Homs and Boca Raton

Barbouti "had made a fortune in Libya and Iraq, supplying industrial complexes through an international network called IBI Industries." He told Moshe Tal, whose rocket fuel company he was trying to buy, "that IBI stood for Ihsan Barbouti International and that he generally modeled his logo after IBM," and that his many companies existed "merely to hold ostensible ownership of individual investment properties," while "the real ownership of the investment property always went into the Barbouti family trust." Tal said that Barbouti, drunk, told him that "Colonel Qaddafi wanted a plant to produce heavy water in order to be able to construct an atom bomb," and was "considering a scheme whereby Qaddafi would smuggle an atomic device into United States waters aboard a commercial shipping vessel and blow up an American port city with a nuclear blast, in retaliation for the United States' raid on Tripoli." Barbouti was working on a heavy water plant at Homs and had put together the Rabta plant with Jürgen Hippenstiel-Imhausen of West Germany. Among those at his London meetings in the fall of 1987 was Sabawi Ibrahim al-Tikriti, a half-brother of Saddam Hussein. Tal's account went to the attorney general of Arizona, then to Senator Dennis DeConcini, who passed it to William Webster. The Belgian shipper Josef Gedopt was arrested in January 1989.³

At Boca Raton Barbouti put 5.3 million dollars into Product Ingredient Technology, a company of Louis Champon. A byproduct of his process was ferric ferrocyanide, which can be converted to hydrogen cyanide. "Dr. Barbouti kept insisting that we take the byproduct and ship it to West Germany," Champon said. "I kept refusing, and then the money stopped."³

Ben-Menashe

The former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe is the only source for the following. He wrote that Barbouti obtained artillery casings in West Germany for chemical munitions made in Santiago by Carlos Cardoen; that he had an interest in Cardoen's chemical plant in Paraguay, which drew materials from Florida and Texas; that in the 1950s he had arranged for former Nazi scientists to work on missiles in Egypt; that he staged his death to escape Mossad, reappeared in the United States, and made an arrangement with the CIA; and that an Israeli intelligence committee put him on a list for execution, which Yitzhak Shamir suspended.⁴