TUESDAY 11 APRIL 2000

COLONEL TERRY TAYLOR AND DR TREVOR FINDLAY

  140. There is tremendous pressure growing politically and internationally to raise sanctions in one form or another on Iraq, to amend them, and the implication in your evidence was that it should be targeted at the regime. How can you target sanctions against a regime as opposed to a country at the same time preventing the sort of equipment and material required to restore or rebuild a WMD programme?
  (Colonel Taylor) I do not think you can target them in that way. Sanctions are a blunt instrument, as Dr Findlay said, and they are going to have a damaging effect on the Iraqi people as a whole, simply because you are damaging the economy. The biggest long term damage to Iraq, as someone who has been there regularly over a number of years, is the removal of the professional classes. The whole structure of business and so on has collapsed. The effect on the Iraqi people in terms of health and so on has been greatly exaggerated. I say that with some caution because I know that figures have been produced by the UN and other very conscientious and professional bodies but my observation does not bear out this, having been to all parts of Iraq. In terms of the effect on the people, I do not think it can be avoided. We are in a very different situation now, with the new inspection system that has been created. Iraq of course has not accepted this new inspection system. I do not think it will be as successful as the UN Special Commission was beforehand, because I think we are now embarked on a political process, rather than a technical, scientific process in terms of inspections in Iraq.

  141. Are you both saying that you can devise a sanctions regime which is WMD targeted but nevertheless can lift general economic or general socioeconomic sanctions? Can you be selective in that respect and effective, given that you say sanctions are blunt instruments? They are also very difficult to implement.
  (Dr Findlay) The reforms will have to start at the UN implementation side of it. At the moment, they have set up a sanctions committee composed of Member States' representatives. These bodies leak information; they do not move quickly enough; they do not have a strategic plan when they sit and meet for the first time. By this time, leaders have sent their funds out of the country in special accounts. They have taken measures to protect themselves. If you are going to get to the leadership of these places—for instance, the Bosnian Serbs—you have to do it very quickly and it has to be done in a very highly professional way, with the assistance of people who know about monetary transfers, for instance. The UN does it in a very amateurish way with a committee composed of Member States. It is not done at all professionally; it is not targeted; they have no rules of engagement, as it were. They reinvent the wheel each time unless a particular member has happened to have had sanctions experience before. The whole thing could be professionalised. I am not saying this would be 100 per cent effective, but it would certainly go a long way to improving the current situation and at least give sanctions more of a chance.

  142. Why would those prevent him rebuilding his WMD programme?
  (Dr Findlay) What you want to do is punish the leadership, obviously, so they will then comply with whatever resolutions the Security Council has passed or whatever demands the international community is making. It is the leadership that has to hurt, rather than the local people, particularly in non-democratic states where they do not have a say about who their leadership is.
  (Colonel Taylor) First of all, I think we have to move away from the concept of punishment because it just does not work with Saddam Hussein in terms of economic deprivation. The Iraqi regime has enough money and resources to sustain itself. The sanctions that have been in place already have very minimal effect, but there is a very elaborate and targeted import/export system that was built up by the UN Special Commission and will be taken over by the new system, the UN Monitoring, Verification and Implementation Commission, which lists all the technologies and all the capabilities in nuclear, biological, chemical and missile areas that have to be monitored carefully. I feel there is no answer but to move in that direction and perhaps in the end to have some partial lifting as we go down this pathway, provided Iraq accepts the inspection system, provided Iraq, in the implementation of the inspection system, does deliver as promised and so on. Then there will be this partial lifting, but there will need to be a great deal of political will and professionalism, as Dr Findlay has correctly pointed out, in implementing this very complex import/export system which has been very carefully worked out. I have been through it myself, as a Commissioner, through all the materials and so on that they are monitoring. It is a very elaborate system and it will take a lot of political will in order to make sure it is properly implemented. It is not a complete answer in itself, but it helps.

  143. Colonel Taylor, at the very outset you expressed surprise that in the earlier evidence session this morning the Committee had not addressed the issue of European funding of the removal of the Russian nuclear stockpile. For the record, we did have a very important session with the US Department of Energy on this when we were in Washington recently and they told us that the US assessment of the cost of removing just simply the extremely large Russian plutonium stockpile was US$1.5 billion. The US was looking for a significant EU contribution towards that. The Committee is very alive to that issue. Can I focus on the Convention to provide an inspection regime and a verification regime for biological weapons? In the memorandum we have received from the Foreign Office, it says that the draft protocol includes all the key elements which the United Kingdom considers essential to make it effective. On a number of important issues, there remain substantial differences between the negotiating parties which have yet to be resolved. We will be taking further evidence from the Foreign Office on this but I would like to hear from you both: what do you consider to be the main unresolved issues in this key negotiation on the verification regime for BW weapons and which are the countries in your view that are proving most difficult in securing an agreement to a verification regime on the lines of that wanted by the British government?
  (Dr Findlay) The key problem in Geneva is the question of visits to confirm declarations made by states about their BW related activities or holdings. The United Kingdom clearly wants visits that will be meaningful, that will help confirm or deny the veracity of declarations made. Other countries like the United States in particular want visits to be more of a "getting to know you" type of situation, quite far removed from confirming or denying a declaration. I see this as one of the major problems of the current negotiations and quite a stark difference between the British and American positions. Obviously, from my own personal point of view, I would prefer a system which did have a much stronger emphasis on checking the declarations against what is found by inspectors in each particular country so that you would have meaningful inspections, but obviously there seems to be a long way to go in the negotiations before this is resolved.
  (Colonel Taylor) I come from the direction that I do not have a great deal of faith in this verification protocol. In other words, the Committee needs to be very well aware of its limits. The United Kingdom government at the moment takes a too optimistic view over what can be achieved with an inspection system, along with its European partners in this respect. I am very worried by the differences between the United Kingdom and Europeans on the one hand and the United States on the other. One has to remember that any system you could devise that would be agreeable globally I do not think will reach and deal with the difficult cases like Iraq. It just will not do it. One has to have that as a starting point. What one can create is a very valuable confidence building measure regime that makes states make declarations. There can be visits that may check on things. It is a very marginal difference that will be achieved by achieving what the United Kingdom has said it wants to do along with its European partners and what the US has said. One has to remember that the US and the United Kingdom are the leaders in the biotechnology industry. In the case of the United States, they dominate the industry to a very large degree and the United Kingdom is the second biggest if you want to look at it in dollar terms. Therefore, the United Kingdom needs to be concerned about this as well. It takes up to ten years, for example, if we are looking at the therapeutic drug end of this industry, to develop a drug that can actually be used. It costs something between $300 million and $500 million, an enormous investment, and there is a great deal of correct concern about protecting that proprietary information. These concerns of the United States are not surprising at all to me. We should listen to them most carefully because they have the biggest industry and have the biggest amount to lose, if you like.

  144. Even if it drives a coach and horses through enforcement procedures?
  (Colonel Taylor) I do not believe that a verification protocol will be an enforcement procedure to any great degree. It will be important and it will have a contribution to make. I am not saying it is a waste of time but it is very, very limited.

  145. Could I ask particularly Dr Findlay as he made this point: are you saying to us that of the five permanent members of the Security Council the United States alone is resisting the wording of the inspection regime which the other four permanent members of the Security Council are willing to accept, or are you saying something different from that?
  (Dr Findlay) I am not saying that. The United States obviously has a very advanced negotiation position, a very large team that has put a lot of thought into this protocol and, as in many of these cases, other countries hide behind the position of the United States. It is the forerunner in trying to keep back the effectiveness of on-site inspections in this case, but I am sure that Russia and China have similar worries. It is just that they are not forced at the moment into the open to explain their concerns. The initial hurdle of course is US policy. Until that can be got around or got over, the negotiations will not be completed.

  146. In the previous evidence session—Dr Findlay, you were in the room—you heard our previous witnesses saying that the Chemical Weapons Convention verification regime was based on the red light principle. They expressed some concerns as to whether that was going to be achievable in relation to the equivalent regime for the Biological Weapons Convention. Could you both give us your judgment as to how tenaciously the British government and indeed the American government are prepared to support the red light system as opposed to a hugely weaker green light system?
  (Dr Findlay) It is my understanding that the United States prefers the green light system but it would seem to me that the United Kingdom government's position about red light is the one that should be adopted. There are sufficient safeguards already in the protocol to prevent frivolous and injurious on-site inspection requests and this really enables the system to work in a much smoother way, at the same time protecting the states' rights.
  (Colonel Taylor) As a principle of verification, of course one is in inclined to support the red light system because it is the most rigorous but in this particular case I do not think the advantages to be gained are significant enough, certainly not to damage transatlantic relations. We are looking at a different area of technology which is developing extremely rapidly, with wave upon wave of developments which we will see over the next 10, 15 or 20 years. Any system that could be devised with an international set of inspectors will be very quickly out of date in terms of what they are looking at. We already have this problem with the Chemical Weapons Convention. I think the situation will be far more difficult. I do not think we should be as wedded to the red light system as the position that we are taking at the moment.

  Sir John Stanley: Chairman, simply on a point of order for your consideration—and obviously one accepts exactly what your ruling might be—you have given our present pair of witnesses an opportunity to comment on the exchange that took place previously. I do not take into account any head movements that have taken place amongst those who may be listening to these proceedings but I wonder whether you might wish to consider, at the end of this particular session, inviting back to the table any of our previous witnesses who wish to make a comment on what has been said or express any views.

  Chairman: There is always a temptation to say "and this correspondence is concluded", but what may be a way out of this is that those who have heard this subsequent evidence may wish, perhaps by written memorandum, to comment.

  147. Colonel Taylor, you pointed out quite rightly that Iraq has not yet agreed that UNMOVIC should go in and then you said it would take a lot of political pressure to get that to happen. Is that international political pressure or should it be pressure from, say, Russia or pressure from the Secretary General? What is the most effective form of political pressure?
  (Colonel Taylor) It has to be through the permanent five. The pressure would have to come probably from Russia and France. Iraq will listen to the voice of Russia and probably to France. You have to remember that both those countries abstained in the vote on the new resolution 1244, the UN Security Council resolution which laid down the UNMOVIC inspection system and set up the new inspection system. Those two countries are probably the ones that are best placed to carry out the dialogue in this particular case, in persuading Iraq to accept this new system. My guess is that probably Iraq will in the end accept the system. They will quibble over the procedures because they will have this inspection system in place. All they have to do is behave themselves for 120 days and then there is a starting of the lifting of the sanctions procedure. Then they behave themselves for another 120 days to a certain extent and it would be politically very, very difficult to reimpose sanctions I think. If I was sitting in Baghdad, I know what I would do, but one cannot calculate what might happen.

  148. It has just been announced that on 12 June there will be a summit in Pyongyang between North and South Korea which obviously one hopes will move to a peace treaty there. Do you think the South Korean government will put into the negotiations the point that such a peace treaty must include something about weapons of mass destruction and rocketry and other things that North Korea has?
  (Colonel Taylor) I would expect that to be part of the negotiation. In fact, it should be, although I think in this opening round if you like it will be a very cautious thing. It is a very positive development and it demonstrates the heart of the security issues in the sense that it is through the framework agreement, through this summit that you have mentioned, that is really the major area, the cutting edge if you like, of preventing proliferation. It is these sorts of activities that need to be supported. Certainly it has shown that Pyongyang has been sensitive to the US easing US sanctions and not carrying out a missile test. Already there is an opening.

  149. Not carrying out?
  (Colonel Taylor) Delaying a missile test. They did not promise never to carry out one but they certainly put off a test that they had planned.

  150. That may be for wholly technical reasons unrelated.
  (Colonel Taylor) It may be, but at the same time the US did ease some of their sanctions in relation to North Korea.

  151. Do you think that, in the negotiations, South Korea will paddle its own canoe or will America say, "We will get in the canoe and help you paddle" as well?
  (Colonel Taylor) I think the South Koreans must realise they have to have the Americans on board. They certainly would not want to get too far out of step. I am just giving you that as a personal judgment.

  152. America is semi-paralysed until it is decided in November who is going to the White House.
  (Colonel Taylor) That is why I do not think we will see a great deal of progress in this particular meeting, but it is an encouraging step that it is taking place at all. One would look for future progress perhaps in 2001.

  153. You were involved in inspections in Iraq. You described it as a highly technical process but for Iraq it was a very political process. I wondered if you had anything to tell the Committee about your experience? One of the things that certainly in Iraq excited controversy was about the balance of people within the inspection teams, how they behaved in going about their inspection and also there were allegations flying about on the level of collusion between the inspectors and the CIA. Generally, I would like your comments on that.
  (Colonel Taylor) I do not know anything about your last point but I think you raise a very important question on the balance of inspectors. I was involved for nearly six years in this process, both as a commissioner and as an inspector. 44 countries took part in the inspection process in some way or another and I can remember leading inspection teams that had people from the Netherlands, Argentina, the US, the United Kingdom and a number of other European countries and countries in Asia as well. While Iraq has been very keen to portray the US domination and the United Kingdom as well, for that matter, there is a certain element of truth in that because these are the countries that have the expertise and knowledge to deal with these types of weapons. One needs to look very carefully at the inspection make-up and not believe the propaganda that says this is US/United Kingdom business, but I have to say that the US and the United Kingdom were dominant. They had the intelligence resources; they had the information, so there is no question but that they were dominant. One must be careful with the new inspection organisation that is being set up, where they are trying to have a more equitable geographic distribution of members. I worry on two counts. One, will the inspectors have the expertise to know what they are looking for and what they are looking at? This is not an issue which is widely known. For example, if you were to take biological weapons, people who have direct knowledge of biological weapons programmes are very few indeed. One certainly does not want to train others to have knowledge of these weapons because through the inspection system one can proliferate knowledge and capability. There has to be a balance in this system. You raise a very important point but inevitably those countries that have had these weapons programmes in the past will rightly be dominant in terms of providing the technical expertise and having some knowledge of what they are looking at. It cannot be avoided, I think.

  154. Colonel Taylor, you just raised the issue of the proliferation of knowledge and I of course understand you are referring to technical knowledge, but could I widen that to an issue which was raised in our last session in relation to the Chemical Weapons Convention, which is the whole issue of the wider public awareness of the sheer horror of these biological and chemical weapons. The present government, in a decision which I certainly very much welcome, clearly decided to declassify information about the impact on the civilian population of the use of biological weapons. The Foreign Secretary, in a paper which he placed in the library of the House of Commons on 4 February 1998 about the Iraq programme, said that 100 kilograms of anthrax released from the top of a tall building in a densely populated area could kill up to three million people. I would like to ask our witnesses what is your view as to the position which the British government and I am sure other governments in the free and democratic world should be taking in terms of trying to highlight the enormity of these appalling weapons, to try to produce a ground swell of opinion which would hopefully make it unacceptable for countries to hold these weapons and still less to use them; or do you believe that if governments around the world gave such attention to this it might tempt people to try and create their own weapons? Do you think it could be actually a factor in proliferation? I would like to understand what your view is as to how we can achieve the objective that I know we all share in this room, which is to try to secure the universal removal of biological weapons and also chemical weapons.
  (Dr Findlay) I think it could be a double edged sword. You clearly do not want to alarm the public. You do not want to over-exaggerate the extent of the problem. As we heard in the earlier session, the number of cases of actual use of biological and chemical weapons is small. These are rare instances and the Treaties are designed to cope with these rare instances. What does need more public attention is the instruments that can be used to cope with this problem. That is, treaties, verifiable treaties and, as Terry said, the demand side, helping states deal with their regional problems so that there is no demand for weapons of mass destruction in the first place. That has a much more positive ring about it and will not create the sort of public alarm that the sorts of statistics you are talking about may very well do. It has to be very carefully handled.
  (Colonel Taylor) I agree with those remarks in this regard. I think there has to be a balance. That was a rather unfortunate statement, although I suppose potentially and technically it is possibly true that three million people could be killed by the release of anthrax from the top of a building. I think there is a danger in saying these kinds of things which certainly the western public put to one side very quickly. I always remember Secretary William Cohen of the United States holding up a bag at one press conference saying, "There is enough in this bag to kill the whole population of the earth". These kinds of statements are not helpful.

  155. Are they true?
  (Colonel Taylor) In the case of William Cohen and the bag, I think that is not a true statement.

  156. Why do you say the Foreign Secretary's statement on 4 February 1998 was unfortunate?
  (Colonel Taylor) It is seen immediately as a kind of scare tactic and not related to the real world situation in which these weapons might be used. It is right that attention should be drawn to biological weapons, because they tend to be rather discounted, which is wrong because the biotechnological developments which we have all heard about make these weapons much more feasible, predictable and militarily useful than they were perhaps 10 or even 15 years ago. This kind of statement that either a bag or a release from the top of a building can kill three million people is on the limits of credibility, even technically and scientifically speaking. This agent that is being released has to somehow be delivered into the lungs of the three million people, some of whom will be inside buildings. A lot will depend on the weather and there are all sorts of other considerations. That would not be a way of delivering these kinds of weapons even by a terrorist organisation, in my view. How dangerous it is that certain countries might develop these weapons, might deliver them in missile form or some other form or the possibility that a terrorist group might use these things is important. You make an important point too about advertising the capabilities of these weapons. There has to be balance in these things. There are certain countries like Iraq and others who are looking for this terror weapon. They are not looking for a precise weapon. There is a proliferation element in the way that these statements are made. They need to be very strong but related to the real world and related to weapons delivering them in a realistic way, not in the rather journalistic style in which this one you referred to was made.

  157. You would agree that, whether the ceiling figure is three million or a somewhat lesser figure, the figure is a very large one and death by anthrax is an appalling way for anybody to die?
  (Colonel Taylor) I absolutely agree with that. The potential that hundreds of thousands of people could be killed by these weapons is absolutely true and needs to be made known to the public.

  158. Could you give us your views as to what verification regime should be established for the Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty?
  (Dr Findlay) Certainly it should be based on the current IAEA safeguards regime. It is really an enhancement of that but of course it would mean bringing the nuclear weapon states into a system where they have to declare their past production and their holdings of fissile material. It is a much more elaborate situation but the basic techniques, the basic forms of declaratory returns, would be very similar to those on which the IAEA already has a great deal of expertise. It would be an expansion of that, but that is not to say it will not be difficult because clearly the nuclear weapon states are very sensitive about this sort of information, even about exchanging it amongst themselves.
  (Colonel Taylor) I agree with Dr Findlay. It is an extraordinarily difficult task, particularly as any inspection organisation will have great difficulty in their accounting in knowing about past production. One has to remember this Treaty is only looking at material that was produced for military purposes. I think it will be a useful Treaty provided we can get all the states that need to be included in this, like India and Pakistan and others, but it will be a challenge because of the sensitivities of the nuclear weapon states. It will be interesting to see if it is able to be negotiated at all.

  Chairman: Under the rules of the House, Chairmen are not meant to see former witnesses shaking their heads in disagreement. I have not seen that. If there are supplementary comments which any of the witnesses would like to give to the Committee, the Committee would be extremely grateful. I know that your contribution is very much valued and the debate will continue.