The mystery of El-Al's chemical cargo

By Mouin Rabbani

Whereas the initial investigation concentrated on the causes of the disaster, and revealed disturbing information about the woeful condition of El-Al's aircraft and the recklessness of its pilots, a systematic yet incompetent tactic of obfuscation by the Israeli and Dutch authorities concerning the doomed flight's cargo led to mounting suspicion that LY 1862 was transporting more than the alleged "perfumes and gift articles".

Indeed, the past six years have witnessed a steady series of disclosures in the Dutch media relating to Israel's use of El-Al passenger and cargo flights to transport "strategic military goods" from the US to Israel via Amsterdam, as well as routine fraud by Israel's state airline with freight documents. The most shocking revelation so far was made on 30 September, when editors Harm van den Berg and Karel Knip of the prestigious Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad published incontrovertible documentation that, in addition to military equipment and munitions, LY 1862 was in fact transporting three of the four components required to manufacture Sarin nerve gas.

Sarin, a chemical weapon as lethal as it is illegal, was last used in the March 1995 Tokyo subway attack, in which several grammes of the gas killed 12 Japanese commuters and injured more than 5,000. It previously achieved notoriety when Saddam Hussein used it to wipe out the Iraqi Kurdish village of Halabja in 1988. According to documents uncovered by NRC Handelsblad, LY 1862 was carrying at least ten 18.9 litre plastic drums of Dimethyl Methylphosphonate (DMMP), and smaller amounts of Isopropanol and Hydrogen Fluoride. (No revelations have been made regarding thionylchloride, Sarin's fourth and final ingredient.) The 189 litres of DMMP, sufficient for the production of 270 kilogrammes of Sarin (but simply termed "flammable liquid" in freight documents subsequently provided to the Dutch authorities), had been supplied by Solkatronic Chemicals of Morristown, Pennsylvania, USA. Solkatronic also supplies Israel with the deadly CS and CN gases, which have been used by the military and police to kill dozens of Palestinian civilians (including many infants) in the Occupied Territories over the past decade. Indeed, "specialty gases" and "security-related products" are just a few of the items advertised on this death merchant's website (www.solkatronic.com).

Although DMMP is, in view of its lethal applications, subject to stringent export controls by the US government (see box), John Swanciger, executive vice-president of Solkatronic, confirmed to journalists that his firm applied for and received the required Department of Commerce licences to export its deadly concoction to Israel. Swanciger added that this was the case not once, but twice: after the initial consignment was inadvertently scattered all over Bijlmermeer, and despite a subsequent tightening of American export regulations, Solkatronic was permitted to replenish the Jewish state's chemical arsenal with an identical second shipment. Swanciger also stated that Israel is the only foreign country to have ordered DMMP from his firm.

According to the Shipper's Declaration of Dangerous Goods, revealed by NRC Handelsblad, the DMMP consignment was intended for use by the Israel Institute for Biological Research (IIBR, see www.iibr.gov.il) in Nes Ziona, near Tel Aviv. (The second batch was however ordered by the Orwellian-sounding Shalom Chemicals of Nes Ziona, a firm which, according to the 6 October 1998 edition of the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, nobody has ever heard of and is presumably but a product of IIBR's fertile imagination.) Among those concerned with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, it is common knowledge that IIBR is the Israeli military and intelligence community's front organisation for the development, testing and production of chemical and biological weapons. And, as demonstrated by Mossad's botched murder attempt on Hamas leader Khaled Masha'al in Jordan last year (in which IIBR supplied both the lethal poison and its antidote), it is also a pioneer in the field of medical warfare.

An anonymous biologist previously associated with IIBR, quoted by Uzi Nahmaini in the 4 October 1998 edition of The Sunday Times, states that "there is hardly a single known or unknown form of chemical or biological weapon which is not manufactured at the institute." Nahmaini adds that the highly secretive gas and germ factory is "surrounded by a 6ft-high concrete wall topped with sensors that reveal the exact location of any intruders, but [IIBR] is erased from local and aerial survey maps." He also notes that at least six of the installation's employees have been killed in "work accidents", and that even members of the Israeli parliament are denied entry to it. (In 1986, it was The Sunday Times which first published Israeli technician Mordechai Vanunu's documented revelations concerning Israel's massive nuclear weapons programme.)

The common view of IIBR's unsavoury activities is shared by residents of Nes Ziona and, apparently, Israel's Supreme Court as well; at the end of last month, the Nes Ziona local council, arguing that the poison plant poses a potentially catastrophic public health hazard, successfully obtained a Supreme Court injunction barring it from expanding by 14 acres.

LY 1862's cargo also explains why the doomed flight's pilot ignored instructions by Schiphol air traffic control to conduct an emergency landing in the direction of the nearby Ijsselmeer Lake, and instead made straight for Schiphol causing precisely the catastrophe ground personnel were desperately trying to prevent. According to chemical warfare experts, DMMP reacts "furiously" with water, and would have resulted in a catastrophe too frightening to contemplate.

True to form, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's media adviser, David Bar-Ilan, immediately issued an angry and categorical denial in response to the NRC Handelsblad scoop, emphasising in the strongest possible terms that LY 1862 was not carrying Sarin precursors. The Israeli Ministry of Defence, which also makes statements on behalf of IIBR, issued a more cryptic declaration that the flight was carrying no dangerous goods, but that "this statement only concerns cargo intended for the Ministry of Defence". Given the sheer weight of evidence combined with intense Dutch media scrutiny, however, Bar-Ilan's outright fabrications and the military's deliberate half-truths served only to add insult to injury and this particular hasbara ("disinformation") campaign collapsed altogether some 12 hours later. At that point, El-Al spokesman Nachman Kleiman, who since 1992 had remained steadfast in his tongue-tied account that El-Al was both unaware of the specific items transported on LY 1862 yet had fully disclosed these specifics to the Dutch authorities immediately after the accident, was forced to concede that the flight in question was indeed transporting Sarin components. Rather pathetically, he concluded by claiming that El-Al's activities were entirely consistent with relevant regulations. Other Israeli government agencies gave the habitual response designed to prevent further examination, namely the announcement of an investigation.

Among the immediate beneficiaries of the latest disclosures are the approximately 700 Bijlmermeer residents and emergency workers who continue to suffer from medical and psychological conditions not dissimilar to those experienced by soldiers and civilians after the 1991 Gulf War. Whereas initial suspicions have centred on exposure to incinerated radioactive material (presumed to be the depleted uranium used by Boeing in the construction process, although with El-Al one can never be sure), a major study is now underway to determine the role, if any, of exposure to the nerve gas ingredients aboard LY 1862. Needless to say, the affected individuals are outraged that a possible cause of their illnesses has been kept hidden from them for six years.

The investigation into the LY 1862 crash, which one Dutch researcher has likened to "a puzzle in which nearly half the pieces are missing, and most of the remaining pieces are heavily damaged," has already resulted in a number of official inquiries. Yet, on account of Israeli stonewalling and disinformation, and a campaign of obfuscation by Dutch government agencies, these inquiries have produced more questions than answers. Indeed, the LY 1862 investigation is reminiscent of the scandal surrounding the 1995 mass murders at Srebrnica, where a Dutch military battalion whose sole mission was to protect Bosnian civilians in a besieged United Nations enclave conducted itself so disgracefully that there was nothing left to protect except the careers of the Dutch officers and politicians responsible for the debacle. Thus, even before the latest disclosures, restive Dutch parliamentarians successfully passed a motion to begin a full inquiry into the El-Al affair.

Among the questions that remain unanswered are why neither of LY 1862's indestructible flight data recorders (black boxes) have yet to surface, and the related matter of the "men in white suits" whose presence at the crash site immediately and several hours after the disaster has been alleged in affidavits submitted by Bijlmermeer residents, emergency crew members and law enforcement personnel. According to these accounts, one group wearing thick protective clothing and a second dressed as "astronauts", waded unhindered through the inferno and, shunting aside those in command of the relief operation, disappeared with pieces of debris.

Although a June 1998 report by the then Justice Minister Winnie Sorgdrager (whose term was synonymous with mismanagement and scandal), did its best to minimise the allegations and dismiss them as figments of the imagination, it nowhere contains a clear and categorical denial of the actual allegations that have been made. The accounts, some of which claim that the second group arrived in vehicles bearing French licence plates, raise the possibility that operatives from Mossad's European headquarters in Paris were involved in the removal of evidence. Personnel attached to the Mossad station at Schiphol Airport, and covert Dutch (or NATO) emergency units may also be shown to have been involved if the allegations are ever seriously investigated.

Another aspect requiring clarification concerns the multiple and contradictory freight documents supplied to the Dutch authorities. Dutch television's Nova news programme earlier this year featured statements by former El-Al employees at Frankfurt Airport and elsewhere, which revealed that they regularly tampered with such documents on behalf of their superiors. In one corroborating example from the LY 1862 affair, the Amsterdam engineering firm Omegam, which investigated the crash site, discovered extensive traces of Tributylphosphate (TBP) and concluded that at least several hundred litres of the liquid must have been aboard. Yet the chemical is not listed on the aircraft's freight documents. According to NRC Handelsblad, TBP is a fairly common industrial chemical which is also used to recycle uranium and plutonium from spent fuel rods, similar to the process the jailed nuclear technician revealed is used by Israel.

The parliamentary inquiry is expected to concentrate on Israel's refusal to provide full and timely information to the Dutch authorities, including the fact that the nature of 20,000 kilogrammes of LY 1862's cargo has yet to be clarified. No less important, the Dutch government's own process of disclosure will also come under intense scrutiny. Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok's complaint about Israel's lack of cooperation in the wake of the latest revelations notwithstanding, there is considerable evidence that his government (and particularly the Ministry of Transport) at various points failed to make known the significance of technical and other information in its possession. Allegations that government and law enforcement agencies, perhaps in collaboration with their Israeli counterparts, worked to conceal the most explosive aspects of the affair may also be discussed.

It remains unclear whether the role of Amsterdam Schiphol Airport as the key transit point for the "strategic military goods" routinely flown by El-Al from New York to Tel Aviv will be critically assessed by the parliamentary inquiry; Holland's reputation for zealous devotion to Israel is entirely deserved, and had El-Al transported its morbid cargo through rather than on to Dutch territory (as may well have been the case with the second DMMP consignment), it would scarcely have raised an eyebrow. For the same reason, the functional extra-territoriality enjoyed by El-Al and Mossad at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, where the Dutch authorities as a rule neither ask questions nor monitor anything to do with the activities of their Israeli guests, effectively exempting the Israeli's from the applicable national and international laws and regulations, is likely to be studiously ignored. It is, therefore, ironic that shortly after the LY 1862 disaster, The Hague was chosen as the seat of the United Nations Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

More scandalous, is the role of the US in this affair. It now appears that during the same period that Washington has been using Baghdad's possession of weapons of mass destruction as a pretext to prolong the sanctions against Iraq, it has itself been actively engaged in chemical weapons proliferation in the Middle East. Given that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children have died excruciating deaths as a result of UN sanctions, the point is more than academic.

Other than the Dutch media, few people have expressed any interest in the LY 1862 crash and its implications. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, interviewed on 6 October 1998 by the Good Morning Egypt television programme, said the El-Al fiasco proves Israel has chemical weapons. Yet, he noted, "Nobody says a thing. It's as if nothing happened."