Baghdad Express
A subway
planned for Iraq's capital was never built -- or was it? Saddam's biggest secret
may be a weapon of mass transit.
By Richard
Muller
Nothing
undermines technical surveillance like an underground facility -- and the rogue
powers know it. Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya, and al Qaeda all made extensive
use of the subterrane to frustrate our remote study of their secret facilities.
Now there are rumors of a massive complex of tunnels under Baghdad, a possible
storage location for clandestine chemical and biological weapons.
The latest
revelation comes from Dr. Hussein Shahristani, the former head of the Iraqi
Atomic Energy Commission, who escaped in 1991, but has continued to sneak back
into Iraq to aid rebels. In an interview
with CBS News, he said that there are over 100 kilometers of tunnels under
Baghdad, laid according to the plans for a public subway, but converted to
military use. His knowledge is hearsay (he had direct contact with only one person
who worked in the tunnels) but plausible. The United Nations inspectors had
heard rumors of such a system, but have never been able to locate it. Tunnels
are relatively cheap, and extremely effective for hiding weapons and people.
Tunneling for
military purposes is almost as ancient as war itself. Originally, to
"undermine" was to breach or destroy a military wall from below.
Explosives placed in such mines eventually adopted the name mine for
themselves. The United States began the modern era of large, deeply buried
facilities with the completion of the Cheyenne Mountain complex in 1965 to hold
the Operations Center for the North American Air Defense Command. The man-made
cavern was deep enough to survive a hit by a small nuclear bomb. It holds 15 spring-suspended
buildings, eleven of which are three stories high. It holds resources to
sustain 800 people for 30 days. By that time the nuclear war would presumably
be over.
Despite its
own leadership in the underground, the military was shocked in 1974 by an
inadvertent discovery. Soldiers near the demilitarized zone separating North
and South Korea noticed steam leaking from the ground. They dug down, hoping to
find a hot spring, but discovered instead a tunnel that came from the north
under the DMZ and extended over a kilometer into South Korea. It was made of
reinforced concrete and had electric power and narrow-gauge rails. Three
additional tunnels have subsequently been found, the most recent one in 1990.
It is 145 meters below ground, 2 meters square. If used during a war, it could
have conveyed a full division of troops every hour, including equipment. Nobody
knows how many undetected tunnels still penetrate the DMZ. They are not easy to
find. (Photos of the tunnels can be found online in an excerpt from Major
General John Singlaub's book Hazardous Duty.)
Once, large
tunnels were dug by heroic miners called "sand hogs" who blasted with
dynamite and dug with pick and shovel. Today, the tunnels are ground and
scraped by tunnel boring machines, 150-ton monsters that resemble the giant
worms of Frank Herbert's novel Dune. These massive vehicles can dig up to 75 meters per day in soft
earth, but only a few meters per day in granite. A set of tunnel borers dug the
Chunnel in three years. When they finished, the machines were left near the
middle, buried deep under the English Channel. It was too expensive to back
them out.
Giant worm? A Tunnel boring machine at
Yucca
Mountain.
In the early
1990s, Libya began construction of a vast underground "fertilizer
factory" near the town of Tarhunah. It isn't clear why such a factory need
be underground; the U.S. suspected it was designed to make chemical weapons.
Indeed, in 1996 two German businessmen were convicted of exporting chemical
warfare equipment to the plant. U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry told
Congress that he would consider using "the whole range of American
weapons" to keep the facility from completion. Libya halted construction
shortly afterwards.
There were
once plans for a public subway system beneath the streets of Baghdad, but it
was never built -- unless you believe Shahristani. He says that Saddam took over
the project to construct a massive military complex under the city. Its 100
kilometers of tunnels are supposedly used not for transportation, but for
military operations, and to conceal Saddam's illegal weapons and materials.
Such tunnels
are remarkably difficult to locate. In remote regions, the addits (entrances)
can sometimes be spotted when debris is hauled away. If the tunnels are in use,
you can spot the infrared emissions from their warmth. You can find them using
ground-penetrating radar if they aren't too deep and the ground is dry and
uniform. In prior inspections in Iraq such radar found buried missile parts
that had been smuggled from Russia. When the UN inspection teams returned to
Iraq last November, they brought with them radar systems capable of penetrating
the dry desert to depths of 10 meters.
All these
methods are essentially useless in city clutter. Addits can be hidden in
warehouses; dirt can be hauled away through city streets without drawing
attention. The clutter of underground structures in city streets makes
ground-penetrating radar and infrared sensors worthless. Information comes only
from humint (human intelligence), the gleaning of information from those
willing to tell. To keep such secrets secret, you simply forbid interviews with
people who know.
Even if the
inspectors found tunnels under Baghdad, they would have trouble probing them.
Forbidden passageways are easily camouflaged with piles of rubble. Weapons
stores can be permanently loaded on rail, and moved kilometers at a moment's
notice, with no danger of overhead observation. As every spelunker learns, the
three dimensions of an underground complex make it hard to even find your way
out, let alone explore and inspect. It is hard to know where you are; the
Global Positioning System doesn't work underground. Theseus found his path back
out of the Labyrinth only by unraveling a thread (a gift from his girlfriend
Ariadne) behind him when he entered. The U.S. Naval Air Systems Command takes
the problem so seriously that it has established a Tunnel Warfare Center near
China Lake, CA, to train soldiers in underground movement and combat.
I don't know
if the Baghdad subway exists, or -- if it does -- whether the U.S. government knows
its layout. Shahristani says that an American firm designed part of the system.
Did Saddam follow the original design? According to CBS News, those plans are
now in U.S. possession. If that is true, then it must have been a difficult
decision by the United States to keep the plans secret from the U.N.
inspectors. Had the United States showed the plans, Saddam would have learned
the limits of our knowledge. That would be invaluable to him if the war reaches
Baghdad.
We know that
Saddam does have some structures deep under Baghdad. A member of the British
Parliament said that when he took an elevator to meet Saddam underground, it
went so far down that his "ears popped." A complex subway under
Baghdad is just what Saddam needs -- for illegal weapons storage, and -- if
necessary -- for his personal escape. He could afford to build such a complex. And
if he didn't build this subway, the question becomes, why not?
Richard A. Muller, a 1982 MacArthur Fellow, is a professor in the Physics Department at UC-Berkeley where he teaches a course entitled, "Physics for future Presidents." He is also a faculty senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.