09/30/2002 | Йванко

Saddam’s ‘Ukraine connection:’ how he may have beat the arms embargo
Shady Israelis suspected in clandestine operations
Former Soviet republic implicated as key stopover for gun-runners

Ed Blanche
Special to The Daily Star

Two years ago, the former Soviet republic of Ukraine opened an embassy in Baghdad and the Foreign Ministry in Kiev accepted the credentials of one Yuri Orshansky, described as a Ukrainian businessman, as an honorary consul for Iraq.
Seven years earlier, according to a July 2001 report by the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, a US nonprofit watchdog group, based on unpublished documents compiled by United Nations weapons inspectors, the same Yuri Orshansky signed a deal with Brigadier General Naim Bakr Ali, head of the guidance system division of Saddam Hussein’s ballistic missile program, to provide four types of guidance systems and to help develop anti-aircraft missile batteries for Iraq. The deal was co-signed by Yuri Ayzenberg from the Ukrainian electronics firm Khartron, which designs missile guidance systems.
Iraq has denied it ever received any of the components from Ukraine, and UN inspectors admitted that they never uncovered any of the equipment listed in the agreement before the UN teams were withdrawn in 1998. But according to the Wisconsin Project, some inspectors said that they were convinced Baghdad had taken delivery of some Ukrainian equipment and was using it in its clandestine missile program, which Western intelligence agencies believe has been revived since UN inspections were terminated.
Kiev has repeatedly denied allegations that it has violated UN sanctions to supply Baghdad with weapons. But last Tuesday, the Bush administration announced it was reviewing its policy toward Ukraine and was freezing $54 million in aid ­ about one-third of the $154.2 million in US aid provided under the Freedom Support Act ­ because it believed President Leonid Kuchma had personally approved the sale of an advanced air-defense radar system. It is supposed to be capable of detecting even stealth aircraft, a vital component of US airpower, at long range. If the system, known as Kolchuga, is as sophisticated as it’s made out to be, and if Saddam has it, that could be a potent weapon against US aircraft if George W. Bush unleashes a major assault.
By all accounts, Ukraine is not the only country allegedly supplying Saddam’s regime with weapons in violation of the United Nations arms embargo imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990. The Wisconsin Project and other sources say Romania, Belarus and Russia are doing so. Authorities in Serbia, India and Germany are investigating allegations that companies in those countries have supplied technology, weapons, machinery and spare parts to Baghdad, invariably through Jordan, since the 1991 Gulf War. High-level Iraqi delegations, usually camouflaged as trade or cultural missions, have made repeated visits to arms companies in Ukraine, Belarus, Romania and Russia in recent years.
In at least two of these countries, Ukraine and Romania, Israeli citizens have been deeply implicated in running weapons to Iraq, one of Israel’s greatest foes and which it is bracing to fight if the US invades. Over the years, Israeli governments have been involved in clandestine arms shipments to various regimes (usually internationally despised right-wing dictatorships) in Africa, Asia and Latin America and organizations, including Colombian drug cartels, often through front companies operated by former officers of the Israeli military.
In August, a cargo of tracks for armored personnel carriers shipped from Israel aboard an Israeli freighter was impounded in Hamburg after German authorities received intelligence it was bound for Iran. This is another of Israel’s bitterest foes to whom it has sold weapons in the past in covert operations that are often an extension of Israel’s cynical and murky diplomacy in which the game seems to be to play both ends against the middle.
Whether there is any direct links between the Israeli government and the involvement of Israeli arms dealers ­ there are some 2,000 registered in Israel ­ in the alleged sale of Ukrainian or other weapons to Iraq is not known. The state has sanctioned arms sales to some strange customers in the past, but it is difficult to see what could be gained in allowing the sale of arms to someone like Saddam, particularly a system like the Kolchuga, which would give Iraq a distinct advantage in the looming conflict.
We are told that the Kolchuga system, manufactured by the Topaz company in Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, can detect air or ground targets up to 800 kilometers distant but remains undetected itself because, unlike other systems, it emits no signals of its own which can alert pilots that they are being tracked.
“We’re not certain that these systems are in Iraq,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said. “On the other hand, there are some indications which suggest it may be there and we’ll continue to assess those.”
The Americans, who would be quite happy to buttress their propaganda campaign against Saddam by accusing him of violating UN sanctions to upgrade his military capabilities, claimed they decided to move against Ukraine because they had authenticated tape recordings on which Kuchma is purported to have agreed on July 10, 2000, to deliver four Kolchuga units to Iraq through a Jordanian middleman for $100 million.
This, said State Department spokeswoman Lynn Cassel, “has led us to re-examine our policy toward Ukraine, in particular toward President Kuchma. We view the recordings’ authentication with the utmost concern since it implicated Kuchma in seeking to transfer a sophisticated detection system to Iraq in violation of UN Security Council resolutions.”
The recordings, totaling some 300 hours, were made by a former Kuchma bodyguard, Mykola Melnychenko, who fled Ukraine in November 2000 and was given asylum in the United States in April 2001. In the July 2000 segment, Kuchma was talking with Valery Malev, then head of the state-run military export agency UkrSpetsExport.
Malev suggested that the deal be carried out through a “Jordanian intermediary” and should be conducted with the assistance of Ukraine’s security services. Malev suggested disguising the radar components as spare parts in crates marked “Kraz,” the name of a truck manufacturer in Kremenchuh.
“Then we will send out people there with forged passports to deploy the system and launch it,” he said, according to the tape transcript.
The existence of the tapes became known when Kuchma’s political opponents disclosed their contents in Parliament on Nov. 24, 2000, shortly after the headless corpse of one of Kuchma’s most implacable critics, Georgy Gongadze, editor of the Ukrainska Pravda (Ukrainian Truth) website, was found in a wood near Kiev two months after he had disappeared in the city on his way home. Gongadze had published material on Ukrainska Pravda, one of the few independent media outlets still functioning in the country, that linked Kuchma’s government to organized crime and high-level corruption.
The initial interest in the tape was a purported conversation between Kuchma, in his office, with the head of his office, Volodymyr Lytvyn, and Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko, two months before Gongadze’s disappearance. The president allegedly told Kravchenko: “I’m asking you to to kidnap him and take him out of the country.” The minister replied that he wanted to collect information on Gongadze’s contacts and when that was done “we’ll move in to do what you want.”
Kuchma denounced the tapes as forgeries, but in a country where several of his political opponents have been killed or injured in a series of unfortunate car accidents, most Ukrainians, fed up with his increasingly authoritarian rule, official corruption and a crumbling economy, were inclined to go along with the conspiracy theory.
Those suspicions deepened when the allegations about the secret deal to sell Iraq Kolchuga radars surfaced on March 13, 2002. Three days later Valery Malev, the director of the arms exporting company who had allegedly discussed the deal with Kuchma in July 2000, died in a car crash at the wheel of his Audi when it hit an oncoming Russian Kamaz tanker. The police suggested that he had fallen asleep at the wheel ­ at 10am.
Kuchma has repeatedly denied the allegations concerning Iraq. But in recent weeks these denials have become more muted and on Sept. 25, following the US announcement of the policy review, Ukraine’s foreign minister, Anatoliy Zlenko, said that Kuchma may have authorized the sale of the radars, but insisted they were never delivered. Oleksandr Moroz, leader of Ukraine’s Socialist Party, said on Sept. 25 that a parliamentary commission had found indications of illegal arms deals several years ago. The commission was later disbanded. “We concluded that there were many violations,” he said. “In fact, it was not arms sales, but arms theft, because state accounts did not receive anything.”
According to Foreign Report, a newsletter published by the Jane’s Information Group in London, corrupt Ukrainian officials sold large amounts of Soviet-era weapons to several countries throughout the 1990s. One shipment of 30,000 AK-47 assault rifles, 400 missiles, 10,000 anti-tank missiles and 32 million rounds of ammunition aboard the Ukrainian freighter Yadran Express bound for Croatia was impounded in Italy in 1994 and is being used as evidence by Italian authorities against an alleged Ukrainian gun-runner, Dymtro Strashynsky, who also holds Israeli citizenship.
He was extradited from Germany to Italy in 1999. Ukrainian officials say that authorities in Kiev initiated criminal proceedings against Strashynsky in April 1994 and cautioned all states from dealing with his Panama-based company, Global Technologies Inc., because of its dubious arms transactions. (In April this year, Ukrainians and Israelis linked to two Israeli-owned companies based in Panama and Guatemala were implicated in illegal arms scandal involving 3,000 AK-47s and 5 million rounds of ammunition smuggled to right-wing guerrillas in Colombia.)
Another Ukrainian-born Israeli, Leonard Minin, alias Leonid Bluvshtein, was arrested in Italy in 2001 while allegedly setting up other illegal arms deals out of Ukraine. Although neither has so far been formally implicated in selling weapons to Iraq, Ukraine’s counterespionage chief, Sergei Makarenko, claimed Kiev halted all arms sales to the Middle East in 2000 after discovering that some weapons were being re-exported to Iraq. Kiev has played down the Ukrainian origins of both men and officials have said that if any weapons sold to other countries were transferred to Iraq or elsewhere it was without the consent of Kuchma’s government.
The Wisconsin Project says defense companies in Romania, which alone among the Soviet bloc states had good relations with Israel before the end of the Cold War, signed contracts with Iraq in 1994-95. Aerofina agreed to provide 250 sets of missile-engine parts and 20 sample gyroscopes for missile guidance systems. The Industrial Group of the Army agreed to help develop the propellant for solid-fueled missiles. GIA-RA signed on to supply 100 missile engines and Romtechnica to provide engine-testing facilities. Bucharest denies this but says it will investigate.
Once again, Israeli citizens appear to have played key roles in these clandestine operations. On Aug. 30, 1999, Romanian police arrested an Israeli businessman, Shimon Naor, for smuggling weapons in 1997-99 to “a country subject to UN embargo” ­ unspecified but believed to be Iraq ­ through Nigeria and Eritrea, a route also allegedly used by the Ukrainian arms dealers. Naor’s Bucharest-based company, Corona International, did business with Romania’s state arms export firms. The following day, the head of a private Romanian airline was arrested on similar charges.
Naor, of Romanian origin and a former officer in the Israeli Navy, fled Romania to Israel in mid-2000 while out on bail. Romanian authorities issued an international arrest warrant for his lawyer, Lidia Peter, suspected of helping him escape. In July 2001, Bulgaria agreed to extradite Peter to Romania. In Israel, Naor moved around without hindrance and on July 18 attended a meeting in Tel Aviv with visiting Romanian Prime Minister Adrian Nastase. The presence of Naor and another Israeli-Romanian businessman also wanted in Romania caused consternation in Bucharest.