West Germany On Second Thought

By William R. Doerner

The turnaround may not have been quite 180 degrees, but it was close enough -- and sudden enough -- to qualify as a mighty abrupt about-face. After first insisting that his government could find nothing to substantiate U.S. charges that West German companies helped the Libyans build a chemical-weapons factory in the desert outside Tripoli, Chancellor Helmut Kohl last week admitted that Washington might, after all, know what it was talking about. He changed his mind, Kohl said, after the government examined "certain documents" that had been "seized in the past few days." As prosecutors opened a criminal investigation of the West German firm Imhausen-Chemie and the case produced its first arrest, the growing scandal profoundly embarrassed the West German government and underscored once again the difficulty of controlling the development of chemical weapons.

The day before Kohl's admission, delegates from 149 nations concluded a meeting in Paris aimed at extending the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which bans the use -- but not the production and stockpiling -- of chemical weapons. The diplomats made all the right noises about the need to rid the world of poisonous gases, but in the end did little more than reaffirm the protocol. While the delegates expressed "serious concern at recent violations" of the protocol, they did not even specifically condemn Iraq and Iran, whose use of toxic weapons in the gulf war helped bring about the Paris conference.

U.S. officials had no trouble understanding why Kohl would refrain from moving against a West German company until Washington backed up its charges with solid evidence. What mystified the Administration was why West German officials stoutly denied the charges when the country's own intelligence agency had offered them evidence of Imhausen-Chemie's complicity as early as last October. Whatever the reason for Bonn's foot-dragging, the U.S. welcomed the change of tune. "The objective now is to let the Germans climb down without further embarrassment," said a senior White House official. "We want to prevent further shipment of German equipment and further participation of German personnel. We're persuaded that without them the plant will never go into production."

By early 1987 U.S. intelligence officials had become concerned that Libya's mercurial leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, was developing a chemical-weapons capability. By mid-1987 U.S. analysts were convinced that a facility at Rabta, 50 miles southwest of Tripoli, which began showing up in satellite photos in 1985, was indeed a chemical-weapons plant. Code-named "Pharma-150" by the Libyans, the plant was built under tight security conditions, with a 1,300-man force of cheap labor imported from Thailand. Foreign consultants entered the country without visas and left no hotel or other records of their stay in Libya.

One important piece of evidence pointing to the participation of West German firms was obtained last August when U.S. intelligence intercepted telephone conversations between Libyan plant operators and officials of Imhausen-Chemie, which has its headquarters in the Black Forest town of Lahr. The calls reportedly took place after a toxic spill resulted from a bungled attempt by the Libyans to manufacture a test quantity of chemical-weapons material at the still uncompleted plant. In a frantic effort to get advice on cleaning up and repairing the plant, Libyan officials spoke at length with Imhausen-Chemie personnel. Those conversations left no doubt that employees of the West German firm were just as aware as the Libyans that the plant was being used to produce toxic gas.

Kohl's sudden turnabout last week touched off a rash of inquiries in West Germany to establish who knew what and when. On Friday government spokesman Friedhelm Ost said the country's intelligence agency had given Bonn in mid- October "serious information" about Imhausen's possible role in the Libyan project. Whether or not Kohl received those details, he was definitely informed about the U.S. case against Imhausen when he visited Washington in mid-November. Says Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Charles Thomas: "When Kohl left here, he was absolutely convinced." A Kohl adviser was not quite as sweeping but admitted, "He heard the name and had it in his notes when he returned."

But the West German Finance Ministry did not even begin an audit of Imhausen until the U.S. stepped up its pressure on Bonn around Christmas. The delay occurred, says Ost, because "some things have to be pursued in a discreet manner." Discretion, however, quickly gave way to finger pointing. Press reports obviously based on leaks from U.S. officials began appearing on New Year's Day. The next day, through a spokesman, Bonn issued the first of several denials, claiming that "we have no evidence so far that German firms or persons have been involved" in the Libyan project.

West German officials may have dug in their heels in part because of what they called "a media campaign" in the U.S. Bonn took special umbrage at a New York Times column by William Safire calling the desert chemical plant "Auschwitz-in-the-sand."

At last week's Paris conference, U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz met with his West German counterpart, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and offered to provide a panel of West German officials with a full intelligence briefing in Washington. Perhaps seizing on that proposal as a diplomatic way to take a new tack, Genscher agreed not only to send such a delegation but also to tighten West Germany's notoriously loose regulations governing the export of potentially dangerous products, including chemicals. Two days later Bonn announced plans to increase the number of customer nations whose purchases are monitored and to impose more stringent reporting requirements for exporting firms.

Bonn's denials also began to erode in the face of a series of embarrassing disclosures in the West German press. The most detailed appeared last Thursday in the weekly Stern, which traced the Libyan project to I.B.I. Engineering, a now defunct firm. I.B.I. had set up an office in Frankfurt through which the firm's chief, an exiled Iraqi arms merchant named Ihsan Barbouti, 64, orchestrated the involvement of Imhausen and as many as 30 other firms and individuals from West Germany, Switzerland and Austria. At least some of the equipment shipped to Libya was ostensibly purchased by I.B.I. for a Hong Kong firm called Pen-Tsao, which has a Hamburg subsidiary founded by Imhausen's president, Jurgen Hippenstiel-Imhausen. Earlier, Hippenstiel- + Imhausen had not only denied any involvement in the project but gone so far as to say, "I don't even know where ((Libya)) is."

Other West German press reports led to Joseph Gedopt, 44, managing director of an Antwerp shipping company named Cross Link Group. Last week, acting on information supplied by West German customs officials, Belgian authorities arrested Gedopt for falsifying bills of lading on a shipment of Imhausen equipment that left Germany addressed to Pen-Tsao in Hong Kong but was later diverted to Libya through Antwerp. Gedopt reportedly admitted making many such diversions, for Imhausen and other companies, but denied knowing that any shipments he handled had been destined for a chemical-weapons facility.

Even Libya, while continuing to claim that the huge desert plant was built strictly as a pharmaceutical facility, had a small role in documenting West Germany's participation in the project. The Libyan Ambassador to the United Nations, Ali Treiki, confirmed that West German firms "did help us, not only in this plant, in other plants also."

International negotiations on chemical weapons are scheduled to resume in Geneva under United Nations auspices on Feb. 7. George Bush, for one, promised last week to make control of such arms a major foreign policy objective of his Administration. As the controversy over the Libyan facility vividly demonstrates, however, controlling the behavior of a terrorist state -- and of Western firms willing to do business with such countries -- is not easy.

With reporting by Ken Olsen/Bonn and Jay Peterzell/Washington