Chemical Weapons The Mysterious

By Jesse Birnbaum

Spring 1984: Rolf Kiefer, owner of a small metal-construction firm in Wiesbaden, West Germany, receives a request to bid on the construction of a technology park in North Africa. The man soliciting the bids calls it a "big contract." Kiefer is intrigued, but as he says later, "when someone comes in with a suitcase full of money, you feel wary." When Kiefer learns that the "park" is to be built in Libya, he bows out. "I assumed from the outset that the man was talking about a weapons factory," recalls Kiefer, "and we didn't want to get involved."

February 1985: Imhausen-Chemie, a major West German chemical-supply company, contracts with a Frankfurt firm called IBI to supply certain materials for the technology park.

December 1987: The press reports that the U.S. has evidence that Libya is building a chemical-warfare weapons facility.

August 1988: IBI closes down its Frankfurt office.

September 1988: The U.S. State Department declares that Libya "has established a chemical-warfare production capability" at Rabta, 40 miles south of Tripoli. Colonel Muammar Gaddafi protests that Rabta is designed to manufacture only pharmaceuticals.

February 1989: The Bonn government discloses that its intelligence services warned nine years earlier that Gaddafi could be preparing to make chemical weapons "with help from unknown East and West German firms." This admission comes several weeks after authorities, prodded by the U.S., begin an official investigation and seize twelve boxes of IBI documents. Among them are letters of agreement between Imhausen-Chemie and the mysterious IBI -- Ihsan Barbouti International.

Question: Who is Ihsan Barbouti?

Seated in the coffee shop of a London hotel, the stocky, goateed 61-year-old Iraqi businessman tortures his well-worn black worry beads. "I don't want to lie to you," Ihsan Barbouti tells the interviewer in his charmingly imperfect English, then adds disconcertingly, "and I don't want to tell you the truth also at the same time." Asked whether he ever dealt in deadly weapons, he says, "I have done nothing bad. I don't deal with arms. Arms dealing is the opposite of my character. But I don't deal with something else. I don't deal with cigarettes, because I feel cigarettes is against the health."

What may be even more "against the health" is Libya's chemical-weapons plant, which U.S. intelligence officials say was masterminded by Barbouti. In an interview with a TIME correspondent, the amiable Dr. Barbouti, as he prefers to be called, readily admits he was the designer and prime contractor for the entire Rabta complex -- with the exception of what he describes as the "pharmaceutical" plant. Barbouti insists that his only involvement with this facility was to sell building materials to the Libyans and that he had no inkling the plant might be used for sinister purposes.

Western intelligence sources scoff, saying they have clear evidence that Barbouti was the key broker for the chemical factory. Though they have yet to find proof that he knew the Libyans planned to make nerve gas there, at least one official flatly labels Barbouti "the central villain" of the plot and "the subject of intense scrutiny for some time." In fact, both the Swiss and West German governments are conducting criminal investigations of his role in the Libyan project, and tax authorities in England and Scotland are looking into his Byzantine business affairs.

What is known about this nimble entrepreneur is that he is a rich man, with a fortune of perhaps $100 million. He claims to own companies in Switzerland, Greece, the Middle East and Thailand, as well as ten or 15 firms in England. "There's many people behind me," he says expansively. "If I phone now for $40 million, tomorrow I see the $40 million in my pocket. From friends -- Saudi, gulf, Iraqi. That's all like a consortium. I am a front man." He is also a man gifted in the ways of global dealmaking, Swiss bank accounts and multimillion-dollar real estate enterprises in a number of countries, including the U.S.

Since, as Barbouti explains, he wants neither to lie nor to tell the truth, the details of the story he relates may be subject to considerable refinement. He says he was born to a wealthy Iraqi family, studied architecture in Zurich and Vienna and received a doctorate in West Berlin (hence "Doctor"). He taught architecture at Baghdad University in Iraq, ran a private consulting business there, invested in banking, insurance and industry, and served as a sometime government adviser. In 1969, a year after the Baath Party came to power, Barbouti fled the country, fearing that he might be arrested as a spy because he had built a headquarters for a foreign-owned petroleum group. For nearly a decade he moved around the Middle East and Europe, finally settling in London with his wife and three children. Along the way, he picked up a multimillion-dollar fee as a broker in a Saudi crude-oil deal. That was just the beginning of his good fortune.

Early in 1984, he says, the Libyan government offered him a consultancy, and in June he signed a five-year contract with the energy ministry. His salary was $200,000 a year, plus periodic raises, bonuses and a commodious house in Tripoli. "I am working 365 days for them, any time they need me," he says. "And I have to make this Rabta project. I saw it as a nice object, very clean, a big one. And I say, 'Why not?' And I start planning with them the technology center." What Barbouti may not have known was that the Libyans had sought a chemical-weapons capability as early as 1978; by 1984 they had already bought the compounds needed to produce such weapons in bulk. Now Barbouti was about to help Gaddafi realize his dream.

Over a period of four years, Barbouti spent two or three days a month in Libya, designing and supervising construction of the "technology center." As prime contractor and chief procurement agent, he traveled the globe recruiting expertise and labor. For Rabta he provided Japanese-designed desalinization and electrical equipment, as well as plastic molding and precision machining plants, a foundry from a Danish firm, a metal-working plant, a power station, a water-treatment facility, a maintenance workshop and three warehouses. He had plenty of money to spend; one Rabta contract, he boasted to a friend, was worth nearly $2 billion.

By 1985 Barbouti's IBI had set up a network of offices stretching from Europe to Asia. In West Germany, where export-license rules have been hopelessly lax (but now, belatedly, are undergoing revision), he signed up Imhausen-Chemie as chief subcontractor for the project. Intelligence officials say Barbouti's newly opened offices in Hong Kong helped arrange a complex scheme by which material was sent to Imhausen's representative in Hong Kong and transshipped to Rabta. In this way, they explain, Barbouti managed to avoid arousing suspicions about Gaddafi's real intent.

While Barbouti acknowledges that he was aware of the chemical plant, he says he is sure it was not designed to turn out chemical weapons. "In four years, sitting with the engineers and technical people on committees, nobody has mentioned or hinted that something secret is there," he says. In fact, he argues, one Rabta building, code-named Pharma 150 and reportedly the center for poison-gas manufacture, was not even included in his original design. "I draw the site plan myself -- my hand," declares Barbouti, adding that Pharma 150 was built sometime in 1987, after he completed his work at Rabta.

Intelligence sources are more than skeptical about Barbouti's claim. They have reconnaissance photos showing that construction of Pharma 150 began at the same time as the rest of Rabta's buildings, and was "well along" by 1986, when Barbouti was still deeply involved in the project. Nor do Barbouti's protestations square with the fact that his company arranged for the supply of protective equipment for handling toxic chemicals at the plant and remained active in the project, according to one official, "well into 1988." Barbouti's case is not helped, moreover, by the fact that he shuttered his Frankfurt office shortly after the U.S. first informed Bonn that Imhausen- Chemie was implicated in the Rabta affair. Barbouti dismisses that as mere coincidence and not an attempt to hide his tracks.

To be sure, there are no hidden tracks. If intelligence authorities want to interrogate Barbouti, they will find him in London, fingering his worry beads. It is unlikely they will discover that he broke any laws. He was, after all, a legitimate Iraqi businessman who happened to be Libya's middleman and who knew nothing about the manufacture of chemical weapons. He won't lie, but he may not want to tell the truth either.

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