Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had a secret plan for a biological weapons strike early in the Gulf War, but failed to launch it because his reconnaissance planes got shot down, newly declassified Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents show.
The documents, made public over the weekend by the National Security Archive, a non-governmental research organization, also indicate the CIA woefully misjudged Baghdad's long-term intentions, predicting less than two years before Iraq swallowed neighboring Kuwait that Baghdad would adopt "relative moderation."
A 1992 CIA dispatch detailing the bioweapons strike did not disclose its target or the type of agent to be used.
But researchers at the archive suggested the operation was probably aimed at Israel, where Iraq fired dozens of conventionally armed Scud missiles during the 1990 to 1991 Gulf War in hopes of fracturing an international coalition of Western and Arab countries determined to eject Iraq from Kuwait.
The biological strike, conceived by Saddam in the fall of 1990, was to begin with a reconnaissance mission by three Iraqi Soviet-made MIG-21 fighter jets carrying conventional ordnance, the CIA document showed.
"If these aircraft were able to penetrate air defenses and successfully bomb, then a second mission was to take off within a few days of the first."
The second phase of the operation was to include three conventionally-armed MIG-21s to divert enemy air defenses from a single SU-22 fighter-bomber that was to deliver a biological agent.
The strike plane was to follow the same route as the MIGs but would have flown at an altitude of only 50m to 100m, presumably to avoid radar and make dispersion of its deadly cargo more effective, according to the dispatch.
But the operation suffered a dramatic, early setback.
The three reconnaissance MIGs were shot down over the Persian Gulf after taking off from Tallil Airfield, according to the dispatch.
As a result, the bioweapons mission and a plan to launch decoy flights was scrapped, the document said.
The declassified documents also include a CIA assessment of Baghdad's pre-war national security goals, which shows the US spy agency was unable to read Saddam's mind in the run-up to the Gulf War.
The assessment, written by CIA analysts in December 1988 pre-dicted only "severe tensions" between the two countries over the islands of Warbah and Bubiyan.
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