Iraq buying arms in East Europe's black markets

"Eastern European countries are not very choosy about who buys their weapons, and their economies tend to be highly dependent on arms exports," Mr. Zantovsky says. "It is altogether possible that individuals within the civil service are involved in illegal deals. It may not be policy, but corruption is rampant."

Western experts on Iraq suspect that weapons from Central and Eastern Europe pass through Jordan and Syria to reach Iraq. Iraq appears to be paying for the weapons with unauthorized oil exports, which are reexported as Syrian oil. Syrian oil exports have unaccountably increased by 100,000-200,000 barrels per day in the past year.

"It is not that difficult to smuggle weapons to Iraq.... There is basically no control of ships coming into Syrian ports and trucks take the cargo over the border into Iraq," says a Western diplomat who is an expert on Iraq.

Iraqi Army deserters say they witnessed the delivery of Czech-made missiles and guidance systems to Iraq last February. "It involved weapons worth $800,000. The freight was unloaded in the Syrian harbor of Latakia and then transported to Iraq," three Iraqis told the British Guardian newspaper earlier this year.

The Iraqi government denies that it is importing weapons.

Large Russian and Ukrainian military delegations have visited Baghdad in recent months to assess Iraq's weapons needs. Officially, deliveries will only be made if UN sanctions are lifted. But recent smuggling scandals in both vendor countries point to illegal arms transfers. Iraqi Trade Minister Mohammed Mehdi Saleh told the visiting Russian delegation that Baghdad could order more than $10 billion worth of Russian weapons, according to press reports. A source within the Ukrainian delegation told Mr. Kupcinsky that they, too, were given a huge shopping list of weapons the Iraqis wanted, and then the Ukrainians sang "Happy Birthday" to Saddam.

Earlier this year Ukrainian bodyguard Nikolai Melnichenko revealed recordings of the private conversations of Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma to a court in San Francisco. The tapes, which were inspected by Virginia-based BEK TEK experts, captured a discussion in which Mr. Kuchma approved the sale of three Kalchuga radar systems to Iraq through a Jordanian middleman for $100 million. The Kalchuga is a mobile, passive radar system which can overcome US stealth technology and detect air and land targets up to 500 miles away.

Czech arms company Tesla Pardubice has produced a similar system, called Tamara, which brought down two US bombers during the 1990s Balkan wars. Czech arms dealers tried to sell Tamara systems to Iraq in 1997, but at least one deal was halted in Turkey.

During the cold war, Czech arms companies supplied much of the Third World, including Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and North Korea, with high-tech military equipment and explosives. Sanctions against clients have drastically cut into profits, but sales continue in various shades of gray. Last year, despite pressure from NATO allies, the Czech Republic officially sold 20 L-39 Albatross light jet fighters to Yemen, a country notorious for reselling weapons to embargoed states such as Sudan.

Meanwhile, several recent arrests suggest that the black-market trade in Czech-made Semtex, a virtually undetectable plastic explosive popular with terrorist groups, is booming.

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