From: Bob Bartch 
Subject: SNET: A Dirty Business - The Sudanese Factory - Update!!!
Date: 25 Jul 1999 22:04:22 -0400
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     Source: The Washington Post
     Published: 7/25/99 Author: Vernon Loeb


A Dirty Business

Because of a cupful of soil, the U.S. flattened this Sudanese factory.
Now oneof the world's most respected labs, and some of
Washington's most expensive lawyers,say Salah Idris wasn't making nerve
gas for terrorists, just ibuprofen for headaches.

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 25, 1999; Page F01

For a man on vacation, Bill Clinton looked somber and drained. "Good
afternoon," the president said, peering into a bank of
television cameras. "Today I ordered our armed forces to strike at
terrorist-related facilities in Afghanistan and Sudan because
of the threat they present to our national security."

So the world first learned, one August afternoon almost a year ago, that
the United States had attacked the El Shifa
Pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan. Clinton interrupted his summer
vacation on Martha's Vineyard to make the dramatic
announcement, just two weeks after terrorist bombs had devastated two
U.S. embassies in East Africa.

Hours earlier, 66 Tomahawk cruise missiles had wiped out training camps
in the Afghan mountains and 13 demolished what the
president described as "a chemical-weapons-related facility in Sudan."
Both targets, the president said, were linked to terrorist
financier Osama bin Laden, believed to have masterminded the embassy
attacks.

"Today we have struck back," the president said.

Within a matter of days, however, Clinton's missile attack on El Shifa
would explode anew as evidence mounted indicating that
the facility was making pain medication, not nerve gas. A growing chorus
of critics around the world seemed unconvinced by
the administration's "compelling" evidence: a soil sample secretly
obtained by a CIA agent near the plant said to contain a
known precursor chemical to deadly VX nerve gas.

"Never before," former CIA official Milt Bearden would say months later,
"has a single soil sample prompted an act of war
against a sovereign state."

A world away, Salah Idris, a Saudi magnate who had purchased El Shifa
just five months before the attack, remembers
thinking there had been some terrible mistake. As problematic as the
episode would soon become for the Clinton
administration, it was a full-blown catastrophe for Idris--and losing a
$30 million factory was just the half of it.

"He went to bed a major businessman--a millionaire hundreds of times
over--and woke up a major terrorist," said his attorney,
George R. Salem, a partner at the powerhouse Washington law firm of
Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld. "He figured all the
administration needed to be told was--'This is Salah Idris, a prominent
Saudi businessman who owns the plant. You've made a
serious mistake. Let's deal with this quietly.' But it became
immediately clear that wasn't going to happen."

So Idris decided to fight back against the most powerful nation on
Earth--Washington-style. He took out his checkbook and
hired himself a $3 million dream team of former U.S. officials,
chemists, environmental engineers and public relations men,
including a former special assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy,
the CIA's former London station chief and a spin
doctor best known for his work on behalf of CBS and Mike Wallace during
the celebrated libel trial filed by retired Gen.
William Westmoreland.

Beyond the obvious international implications of firing volleys of
cruise missiles at impoverished Third World nations, this is a
story about how one very rich man maneuvered the Clinton administration
into federal court and watched it fold without a fight,
even as senior officials continued to defend the attack against all
criticism. And the battle may not be over.

Both the House and Senate intelligence committees are still probing the
missile strike. And the dream team is itching to get into
court one more time, having drafted a second suit aimed at fully
compensating Idris for the loss of his pharmaceutical factory,
and the loss of his name.

Back in Washington, shortly after Clinton announced the attack, a
reporter at the Pentagon asked Defense Secretary William
Cohen a question he was undoubtedly dreading:

"Some Americans are going to say this bears a striking resemblance to
'Wag the Dog.' Have you seen the movie?"

The film was about a president--caught in a sex scandal with a young
girl in the White House--who declares a phony war on
Albania to divert the nation's attention, which gave the film a certain
currency. Just three days before the missile strikes, Clinton
had met with prosecutors to answer questions about his extramarital
affair with Monica S. Lewinsky and then addressed the
nation about the relationship.

Cohen was stone-faced. "The only motivation driving this action today
was our absolute obligation to protect the American
people from terrorist activities," he said.

Asked about El Shifa, Cohen spoke with certitude. "What we do know is
the facility that was targeted in Khartoum produced
the precursor chemicals that would allow the production . . . of VX
nerve agent." He expressed no doubt about El Shifa's links
to bin Laden. "We do know that he has had some financial interest in
contributing to this particular facility."

A senior intelligence official soon followed Cohen to the lectern and
had more to say about El Shifa and its links to bin Laden.
"First, we know that bin Laden has made financial contributions to the
Sudanese military-industrial complex. That's a distinct
entity of which, we believe, the Shifa pharmaceutical facility is part.
We know with high confidence that Shifa produces a
precursor that is unique to the production of VX."

He added: "We have no evidence--or have seen no products, commercial
products that are sold out of this facility. The facility
also has a secured perimeter, and it's patrolled by the Sudanese
military. It's an unusual pharmaceutical facility."

Over at the White House, Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel R.
"Sandy" Berger, was referring to the "so-called
pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, which we know with great certainty
produces essentially the penultimate chemical to
manufacture VX nerve gas."

U.S. officials did not know at the time--by their own subsequent
admissions--who owned the plant. They literally did not know
whom they were dealing with.

Idris, in London at the time of the bombing, thought at first that his
factory had been accidentally destroyed during an American
attack on Khartoum. But soon, watching Clinton address the nation on
CNN, he realized the attack was no accident.

"When the president was addressing the nation, it was a very difficult
time for me," Idris later recalled in an interview. "I had
only owned this plant for five months. I was shaken for some time."

Idris said his first instinct was to come forward and tell the U.S.
government that he owned the plant, wasn't a terrorist and
wasn't making nerve gas. "I kept making every personal assurance of my
personal readiness to come to the States at any time,
to make myself available, to answer any personal concerns they might
have."

But the Clinton administration was unmoved. The Treasury Department
responded to his entreaties by sending a simple
one-page order to the Bank of America four days after the missile strike
freezing $24 million of Idris's assets on deposit in
accounts in the United Kingdom, "pending investigations of interests of
Specially Designated Terrorists"--bin Laden and his
presumed associates.

Idris hardly fit the profile of a terrorist. The son of a tailor from a
town in the north of Sudan, Idris, 47, graduated from the
University of Cairo's Khartoum branch, moved to Saudi Arabia in 1976 and
started working as an accountant at the National
Commercial Bank, where he became a protege of the bank's proprietor and
chief executive officer, Sheikh Khalid bin
Mahfouz. The Mahfouzes are a well-known business family in Jiddah and,
through the NCB, have banking connections to the
Saudi royal family, staunch U.S. allies who expelled bin Laden in the
first place.

Idris formed his own small export firm in 1983 and became ever closer to
bin Mahfouz. When his mentor became embroiled in
the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) banking scandal in
the early 1990s, Idris handled bin Mahfouz's
personal affairs and basically ran the bank. When bin Mahfouz resumed
his duties, he made Idris the bank's manager of
international accounts.

By the time Idris left the bank in 1998 and purchased El Shifa, he was a
very rich man--with a lot to lose. Immediately after the
missile attack, he called a prominent Saudi journalist and businessman,
Othman Al-Omair, at OR Media Ltd. in London.
Al-Omair happened to be meeting at the time with George Salem of Akin,
Gump. Both had known and worked with Idris for
years. "He came to us and said, 'Please help me.' That was the essence
of it," recalled Salem, a Palestinian American who had
served as solicitor of labor from 1985 to 1989, during the Reagan
administration.

Soon, Salem had John Scanlon, managing director of crisis communication
at DSFX International in New York, drafting Idris's
declaration of innocence for release to the media worldwide. Best known
for his spin-doctor work for CBS and Mike Wallace
during the Westmoreland trial, Scanlon detected an "aura of cynicism"
among his reporter friends, a willingness to believe Idris
and disbelieve the White House.

"The bombing took place on August 20, three days after the president's
grand jury testimony," Scanlon recalled. "And it was
clear at the outset that administration officials had all the facts
wrong."

In Khartoum, a day after the attack, Sudanese President Lt. Gen. Omar
Hassan Bashir mounted a podium in Martyr's Square
adorned with pictures of Clinton and Lewinsky. "Screw Monica, Not
Sudan," read a banner draped across the stage.

"This is a wicked president," Bashir told a crowd of 10,000. "This
president lied to the whole world and to his people," Bashir
said, "and he is still lying."

He and other Sudanese officials realized immediately that Clinton's
bombing of El Shifa gave their scorned government a rare
moment in the sun. They wasted little time challenging every claim
coming out of Washington about the plant, its purpose, its
ownership. El Shifa, they said, wasn't heavily guarded, and it clearly
did make an array of pharmaceuticals.

Indeed, the United Nations approved a contract eight months prior to the
attack for the purchase of veterinary pharmaceuticals
from El Shifa.

In the face of these assertions, Berger revealed three days after the
attack that the administration had "physical evidence" that
the plant had produced a nerve gas precursor. But he said he couldn't
reveal the evidence without compromising intelligence
sources.

The following day, with a parade of Western journalists trooping through
the bombed-out ruins of El Shifa and a stream of
television footage showing piles of dark brown ibuprofen bottles in the
rubble, a senior U.S. intelligence official did what Berger
had ruled out only the day before and revealed the evidence: a soil
sample scooped up by a CIA asset containing a chemical,
EMPTA, that was used only in the production of VX.

Its presence, the official said, led U.S. intelligence officials to the
"unambiguous conclusion" that El Shifa had been used to make
a chemical involved in nerve gas production.

But questions continued to mount as an American consultant, a British
engineer and an Italian pharmaceutical executive who'd
been intimately involved with aspects of the plant all stepped forward
and said there was no way it was making a nerve gas
precursor.

Their comments soon prompted the CIA to take a shot at stemming the
tide, revealing that it had obtained the soil sample from
a "vetted and polygraphed" intelligence agent from another country in
the Middle East as part of a lengthy covert operation that
had discerned ties between El Shifa and Iraq.

"We see a connection with this plant and the Iraqis--that draws our
attention to it," one senior intelligence official explained.
"We go and sample--and we get a hit on the most powerful precursor,
EMPTA, for VX that we can identify. That's the web."

In any intelligence situation, the official said, "you're always dealing
with a mixture of evidence and inference . . . and we think in
this case, as you add it all up, it's a very strong case."

At Akin, Gump's well-appointed offices just off Dupont Circle, Salem and
his partners were hard at work picking holes in the
government's case. They mixed evidence and inference and reached the
opposite conclusion. But representing a client who is
presumed guilty is not an easy thing to do.

"We decided very quickly that we had to establish in a way that was
provable in court that, number one, the man was clean,
and number two, the plant was clean," Salem recalled.

Conducting daily conference calls with Idris and his other advisers in
London, Khartoum and Jiddah, Salem peered out the
picture window of a prestigious corner office once occupied by Vernon
Jordan, senior partner and close friend of the president,
overlooking the garden of the Historical Society of Washington.

By late August, Salem had been joined on Idris's defense team by three
other Akin, Gump partners. William G. Hundley, a
defense lawyer in white-collar criminal cases and firm legend who made
his name as special assistant to Attorney General
Robert F. Kennedy, headed the team. He was then in the news for
representing Jordan in the Lewinsky case before special
prosecutor Kenneth Starr's grand jury.

Joining him and Salem were Mark J. MacDougall, a litigator who had
previously worked as a Justice Department bank fraud
prosecutor, and Steven R. Ross, a lawyer-lobbyist who had served as
general counsel to the House of Representatives from
1983 to 1993.

To fully investigate their own client's background, the lawyers quickly
hired E. Norbert Garrett, a former CIA station chief in
Kuwait, Cairo and London now working in the London office of Kroll
Associates, a leading private-eye firm. All the team
lacked was a chemist who could oversee the collection of a whole new set
of soil samples from the wrecked plant site in
Khartoum as part of an exercise to refute--or confirm, if worse came to
worst--the CIA's sample. In early September,
MacDougall chose Thomas D. Tullius, chemistry department chairman at
Boston University and one of the few experts he
could find who didn't have some kind of government contract related to
chemical weapons research.

In the back of everyone's mind at Akin, Gump were two troubling
possibilities that had to be ruled out: (1) Idris might have had
some inadvertent connection to bin Laden; (2) he might have purchased
the plant from a nerve gas manufacturer without even
knowing it.

"Had our tests come back with EMPTA in the soil, we all would have
looked a little foolish pushing this case," MacDougall
said. Had the firm not been able to refute the CIA's soil sample, he
said, it would have had real difficulty proceeding against the
government in court.

Tullius dispatched a British environmental engineer in October to take a
set of samples from the El Shifa site and instructed him
to document a precise "chain of custody" that would enable the defense
to show later in court exactly who had access to the
samples.

The engineer gathered samples, not only from the soil around the plant
but also from laboratory areas inside the plant that
remained covered by the plant's mangled roof. He also found the plant's
"soak-away," a collection tank through which all
drainage from the plant's laboratory areas passed.

The results came back in early January from two leading European
laboratories, including TNO Prins Maurits in the Hague, one
of the top dozen labs in the world for chemical weapons testing. All
were negative. Using the two most advanced techniques in
the world, neither laboratory found EMPTA in any of the samples. To
guard against the possibility that EMPTA could have
broken down into another compound in the soil, a scientist at TNO Prins
Maurits injected EMPTA into a sample of soil from
the plant. He discovered that EMPTA broke down very rapidly in soil from
the El Shifa plant into a substance called EMPA--a
substance that could then be expected to remain present in the soil for
years.

So TNO then tested all the samples again for the presence of EMPA. None
was found. The Prins Maurits scientist also
injected EMPTA into a sample of sludge from the plant's soak-away but
found that it did not break down in this environment.
Tullius said he considered this the key sample--a time capsule of
everything that went on in the plant.

Tullius concedes that all of his testing doesn't necessarily prove that
the CIA couldn't have found EMPTA in the soil outside the
plant. That would be virtually impossible to prove. "Somebody can always
say, 'We dug in the right place and you didn't,' " he
said.

What Tullius is prepared to testify to in court, however, is that one of
the best laboratories in the world failed to turn up
EMPTA or EMPA in any of the samples in minute traces measured in 10
parts per billion.

"We tried to find it, we did the extra studies and didn't just stop at
EMPTA," Tullius said. "There was no EMPTA or EMPA in
any of our samples."

The investigators at Kroll in London completed their work at just about
the same time, sending Akin, Gump a 318-page
investigative report on Idris's background. The report disputed, in
painstaking detail, every substantive point made by U.S.
officials against Idris and the El Shifa plant.

Garrett, having led a Kroll team that interviewed five dozen individuals
in Sudan, Jordan, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates,
found no evidence linking Idris to bin Laden or any other terrorist in
any way--and lots of evidence to the contrary. Idris told
them he'd never met bin Laden. "We had to review that claim," Garrett
said. "And it held up."

Kroll concluded that El Shifa was a legitimate pharmaceutical plant
designed to repackage imported pharmaceutical products
and could not possibly have manufactured any chemical, let alone EMPTA
or VX nerve gas. Kroll found no ties between the
plant and either the Iraqis or the Sudanese military industrial complex
and determined that the complex was lightly guarded by
unarmed men dressed in overalls.

A senior U.S. official scoffed at Kroll's findings. "It's hardly a
surprise that an investigation sponsored by Idris would conclude
that he is not linked to Sudan's chemical weapons program or to Osama
bin Laden's terrorist network," the official said.

But the Kroll investigation of Idris's background does not read like a
whitewash. Garrett concluded that Idris did not research
El Shifa thoroughly before purchasing the plant for $30 million. He also
noted the possibility that a prior investor in the plant
may have had commercial ties to bin Laden.

His most troubling conclusion, however, involved Idris's apparent
connections to Sudan's dominant political power, the
National Islamic Front, and its leader, Hassan Turabi, a man who
reportedly had close ties to bin Laden when the terrorist lived
in Khartoum in the early 1990s.

Garrett quoted numerous Western and Arab sources as saying that Idris
would not have been able to establish a business
empire in Sudan without some type of close working relationship with the
NIF. He also quoted sources as saying that Idris and
his entourage enjoy unprecedented freedom in traveling in and out of the
country.

But the evidence, they conclude, is inconclusive. Idris himself denies
ever having made a payoff to anyone in the NIF, and other
sources told Kroll investigators that Idris's wealth and position as a
dominant investor in the country were enough to afford him
the privileges he enjoys.

By late January, still hoping to negotiate some kind of settlement with
the Clinton administration, Hundley and MacDougall
invited representatives from the Justice Department, the Treasury
Department, the CIA and the House and Senate intelligence
committees to a presentation at Akin, Gump's offices.

Garrett flew in from London, and Tullius came down from Boston with his
PowerPoint slide presentation, eager to show those
assembled precisely where he had gathered soil samples, using an
architect's model of the El Shifa plant. But only a couple of
staffers from the House committee showed up.

Out of options, Akin, Gump filed suit on Idris's behalf three weeks
later, alleging that the Treasury Department had frozen $24
million of Idris's assets in the United Kingdom without designating him
a terrorist or formally declaring that he is linked to a
designated terrorist, as the law demands.

With his lawyers hard at work drafting a second suit demanding $30
million in compensation for the plant, Idris had chosen a
conservative, incremental approach by initially focusing only on his
frozen assets. But even his narrowly drawn suit had the
effect of daring the government to back up its claims and formally
declare him a terrorist.

The suit was pending when PBS's "Frontline" aired a documentary in April
about the August missile strikes. Interviewed on
camera, national security adviser Berger backed off substantially from
earlier claims that the plant was "producing" a precursor
to VX nerve gas.

"I don't think that--I think that is not necessarily the case," Berger
told "Frontline." "I think it is certainly true that the plant was
associated with chemical weapons."

Three weeks later, on the day in early May when the government's
response to Idris's lawsuit was due to be filed, MacDougall
got a call from a Justice Department attorney. MacDougall agreed to meet
the attorney in his office, figuring the government
would either ask for an extension or name Idris as a "specially
designated terrorist."

Instead the government lawyer told MacDougall matter-of-factly that
Treasury had just filed an order unfreezing Idris's assets. "
'I think the case is now moot,' " MacDougall remembers the lawyer
saying.

"I think you're right," MacDougall replied.

Just like that, Salah Idris had taken a giant step toward reclaiming his
reputation. But there would be no letter of exoneration
from Uncle Sam, no apology from the White House. Asked later in the day
whether the government's move finally cleared
Idris's name, a White House spokesman said absolutely not. Stopping well
short of linking him to bin Laden, the spokesman
said nonetheless that the administration continued to have "concerns"
about Idris, based on his business dealings in Sudan with
"reprehensible" partners.

"Our concerns regarding Mr. Idris are based on sensitive intelligence
sources and methods," the official said. "We're not
prepared to expose these sources for the purpose of blocking Idris's
money."

Lawsuit in hand, Akin, Gump waits for Idris to pull the trigger. But
Hundley understands why his client is taking his time.
"MacDougall and I are certainly prepared to try this case, but I can't
give Idris any assurances that we're going to win. I just
can't," Hundley said. "I recognize that there are real legal problems,
particularly when the government hides behind this national
security screen. And he doesn't want to be viewed as anti-American."

The wheels of justice grind slowly, meanwhile, up on Capitol Hill. Rep.
Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), chairman of the House
Intelligence Committee and a former CIA case officer, said he has yet to
discover what went on inside the Clinton
administration in terms of selecting El Shifa as a target--but he
intends to find out.

Goss said he recently sent out a reminder to those involved that he has
no intention of letting the matter drop. The next time a
president contemplates firing cruise missiles at terrorists, Goss said,
the government needs to have a clear system of
accountability in place.

Was El Shifa a legitimate target?

"I'm not sure that I know enough about the certification of the target
to make any kind of judgment on that yet," he said.

Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, said that he, too, has two basic unanswered
questions about the attack on El Shifa that he intends to have answered:

Did intelligence officials have any role in recommending El Shifa as a
target?

Did policymakers in the Clinton administration have sufficient evidence
to warrant a missile attack on a sovereign nation?

Given all that's transpired over the past 11 months, Shelby said he's
troubled by the fact that Idris has challenged the
administration's missile attack--and that the administration hasn't been
able to sufficiently respond.

What is to be made, in the end, of the CIA's claim that a soil sample
gathered near the plant contained EMPTA, in the face of
the extensive negative results obtained by one of the most respected
labs in the world?

"The strike at El Shifa was consistent with our national security
responsibility to protect American lives worldwide," said David
C. Leavy, a spokesman for the National Security Council. "We fully stand
behind it. We had solid evidence that there was
chemical-weapons-related activity going on at El Shifa."

The evidence, Leavy explained, included the soil sample containing EMPTA
and a string of associations linking bin Laden's
chemical weapons aspirations to those of the Sudanese regime.

Asked whether the government still believes Idris is a terrorist linked
to bin Laden, Leavy cited the possibility of further litigation
and said: "I'd rather not comment on that."

But Michael Barletta, a senior research associate at the Monterey
Institute of International Studies, concluded in a recent paper
on the El Shifa attack that the CIA's soil sample is hardly a "smoking
gun," since the agency failed to follow the most basic
testing protocols, including use of multiple labs to guard against false
positives.

Barletta also concluded that the CIA has never adequately explained "the
physical path or process by which U.S. officials
believe EMPTA would have been dispersed outside the plant." EMPTA isn't
volatile enough to travel in vapor form, he wrote,
and there's no plausible reason why a plant drainage system would
deposit EMPTA in the dirt so close to the facility.

More likely, according to Barletta, is that someone dumped a quantity of
EMPTA directly into the soil to trump up evidence.
But that possibility is problematic as well, he said, since a deliberate
spill would have produced a much higher level of EMPTA
than the CIA found.

In the end, Barletta concluded, El Shifa "may have been involved in some
way in producing or storing the chemical compound
EMPTA, which can be used in the production of VX nerve gas. However . .
. the evidence available to date indicates that it is
more probable that the Shifa plant had no role whatsoever in chemical
weapons production."

Patrick Eddington, a former CIA photo analyst, said he has reviewed
satellite imagery of the plant before and after the strike
released by the Pentagon and found no indications whatsoever of military
fortifications typical of chemical weapons installations.
His opinion: El Shifa was a pharmaceutical plant.

Milt Bearden, the former CIA station chief in Sudan and a leading critic
of the El Shifa attack, is far more blunt. "It doesn't take
Barry Scheck to call the science into question," he said, referring to
O.J. Simpson's expert in legal forensics.

And the fact that the agent who obtained the dirt reportedly came from
Egypt, Bearden said, also raises a red flag, given
Egypt's antipathy toward Sudan, a possible motive for providing false
evidence. But the real failure here, Bearden maintains, lies
with the White House for targeting the plant, not with the CIA and its
"handful of dirt."

Bearden believes the CIA never recommended targeting El Shifa, a
decision he attributes to policymakers at the White House
and Pentagon.

"There's something wrong here," Bearden said. "This won't go away."



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