The Info Web

#Iraq

22 entries

People (9)

  • Amir al-Saadi German-trained chemist with an honorary general's rank who ran Iraq's state war industries from 1975, its chemical weapons and missile programs under Hussein Kamel, and was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the BNL case.
  • Brent Scowcroft Vice chairman of Kissinger Associates, where he advised Banca Nazionale del Lavoro for fees, who as national security adviser kept agricultural credits flowing to Iraq in 1990 while his staff resisted measures singling Iraq out.
  • Hussein Kamel Son-in-law of Saddam Hussein who ran Iraq's military industries and their Western procurement network, went unindicted in the BNL case, defected in 1995, and told United Nations inspectors that all the weapons had been destroyed.
  • Ihsan Barbouti Iraqi-born London architect who designed Libya's chemical weapons plant at Rabta, sought nerve gas precursors through an Oklahoma company, held real estate in Texas, and was reported dead on his 63rd birthday in July 1990.
  • Karen Jansen Karen Jansen was a U.S. Army major and United Nations weapons inspector who reportedly carried remote viewing-derived sketches of suspected Iraqi biological weapons sites produced by Ed Dames of PSI Tech during the post-Gulf War inspection effort.
  • Lawrence Eagleburger President of Kissinger Associates while Banca Nazionale del Lavoro was its client, director of a Yugoslav bank that did a fifth of its business with BNL, and deputy secretary of state during the Iraq loans.
  • Saddam Hussein Saddam Hussein was president of Iraq from 1979 to 2003, a figure whose rise was facilitated by CIA support for the Ba'ath Party and whose regime became both a Cold War client and an adversary; his wars, arms procurement networks, and weapons programs intersect extensively with the vault's Iran-Contra, PROMIS, and intelligence-community subjects.
  • Safa al-Habobi Iraqi official who ran the London front companies of Hussein Kamel's military industry ministry, chaired Matrix Churchill, was indicted in Atlanta in 1991 with Christopher Drogoul, and was named Iraq's oil minister in 1993.
  • Wafai Dajani Jordanian grain trader close to King Hussein whom Atlanta prosecutors planned to indict in the BNL case in 1991 and who was named instead as an unindicted co-conspirator after the State Department noted his connections.

Organizations (5)

  • Banca Nazionale del Lavoro Italian state bank whose Atlanta branch lent Iraq billions off the books, whose head office was warned a year before the raid, and whose new chairman asked the American ambassador for damage control.
  • Commodity Credit Corporation Federally chartered corporation within the Department of Agriculture that supports farm prices and guarantees export credit, whose guarantees financed about five billion dollars of Iraqi purchases from 1983 to 1990.
  • Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization Iraqi ministry under Saddam Hussein's son-in-law Hussein Kamel, from 1988 in charge of weapons industrialization, which bought Western technology through the Al-Arabi front network with BNL-Atlanta loans.
  • Mukhabarat Mukhabarat (Arabic: intelligence) is the informal name for Arab state intelligence services, most prominently Egypt's General Intelligence Directorate and Iraq's General Intelligence Service under Saddam Hussein, central to CIA liaison relationships, Safari Club operations, and the BNL/arms-to-Iraq affair.
  • SerVaas Inc. Indianapolis company that sold Iraq a 40 million dollar brass recycling plant financed by BNL Atlanta, which its owner told Congress was for commercial products and Iraqi documents assigned to cartridge cases and artillery fuses.

Programs (1)

  • Commodity Credit Corporation Iraq Program Agriculture Department credit guarantees that backed about five billion dollars of Iraqi purchases from 1983 to 1990, financed largely through Banca Nazionale del Lavoro's Atlanta branch, and continued after the fraud there was found.

Events (5)

  • Arms-to-Iraq The Arms-to-Iraq affair was the British corollary to the same illicit Iraq weapons procurement networks examined in the Iran-Contra and BNL scandal investigations: British companies, licensed by the government, supplied precision machinery and military-relevant technology to Saddam Hussein's government during the Iran-Iraq War; the collapse of the Matrix Churchill prosecution in 1992 and the subsequent Scott Inquiry (1992-1996) documented government deception of Parliament.
  • BNL Scandal Discovery in 1989 that the Atlanta branch of Italy's Banca Nazionale del Lavoro had lent Iraq five billion dollars off its books, and a prosecution that Congress and the trial judge said shielded higher officials.
  • Iran-Iraq War The Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) was an eight-year conflict in which Western powers, the CIA, and Gulf states covertly supported Saddam Hussein's Iraq while the Reagan administration simultaneously ran secret arms to Iran; the war produced massive casualties, extensive use of chemical weapons against Iranian and Kurdish populations, and the arms procurement networks at the center of the Iran-Contra affair.
  • Osirak bombing 1981 Israeli air strike on the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak near Baghdad, carried out with U.S.-supplied F-16s and condemned internationally.
  • Project Babylon Iraqi program to build Gerald Bull's 131-foot gun, exposed when British customs seized its barrel sections at Teesport on April 12, 1990, three weeks after Bull was shot dead in Brussels.

Places (2)

  • Baghdad Baghdad is the capital of Iraq and the seat of Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist government; it was the destination of Donald Rumsfeld's 1983 envoy visit during the Iran-Iraq War, the primary recipient of the BNL scandal's Iraqi arms procurement financing, and the city whose fall in April 2003 ended three decades of Ba'athist rule.
  • Iraq Iraq is a country in the Middle East whose modern history intersects extensively with Cold War covert operations: CIA support for the 1963 Ba'ath coup, weapons transfers to Saddam Hussein's regime during the Iran-Iraq War, the BNL financial scandal, PROMIS software distribution to Iraqi intelligence, and the 2003 invasion on falsified WMD pretexts.