CZESTOCHOWA, Poland — Desperate for missile technology in the summer of 2001, Iraq's arms brokers and spies homed in on the military scrap yards of this former Soviet Bloc nation. They operated out of this town, scavenging and assembling decades-old parts that were shipped to Syria, then trucked across deserts and mountains toward Baghdad.
Documents were forged and lies were told in an elaborate network built to evade United Nations sanctions.
The shipment of up to 380 missile engines from Poland was critical to Saddam Hussein's covert program to extend the range of his new Al Samoud 2 missile beyond the limit of 150 kilometers -- 93 miles -- imposed on Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Such capabilities would have threatened regional stability by enabling Iraq to target Israel, Kuwait and Iran.
The godfather of Iraq's missile program, Modher Sadeq-Saba Tamimi, had for nearly a decade deceived U.N. weapons inspectors about illicit missile projects. But a year ago, as the United States geared up for war, the inspectors discovered the Volga/SA-2 engines smuggled from Poland.
Their existence was crucial evidence for the Bush administration as it attempted to convince a skeptical U.N. Security Council of the need to topple Hussein. Documents taken from Iraq's military-industrial complex after the war and recently obtained by The Times reveal details about one of Baghdad's primary weapons systems and why the Al Samoud 2 was a high-profile concern for Washington.
In his dramatic U.N. speech Feb. 5, less than two months before the March 20 invasion, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell highlighted Iraq's procurement of the Volga/SA-2 engines as one reason for war.
"Their import was illegal," Powell said of the engines, adding that the U.N. arms embargo prohibited "all military shipments to Iraq."
The scheme to smuggle missile engines epitomized Iraq's relentless quest to arm itself in spite of international sanctions. It shows how Baghdad often reconfigured its arsenal. Iraq, which had been firing Volga/SA-2 missiles at British and U.S. warplanes patrolling the "no-fly" zones in the north and south, also sought the missile engines to construct a modified surface-to-surface weapon.
