United States intelligence agencies have concluded that two mysterious trailers found in Iraq were mobile units to produce germs for weapons, but they have found neither biological agents nor evidence that the equipment was used to make such arms, according to senior administration officials.

The officials said intelligence analysts in Washington and Baghdad reached their conclusion about the trailers after analyzing, and rejecting, alternative theories of how they could have been used. Their consensus was in a paper presented to the White House late Monday.
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Officials in Iraq and Washington emphasized in interviews that because the unit studied in greatest detail had been thoroughly decontaminated with a still-unidentified caustic agent, it was impossible to say whether it had ever produced agents for bioweapons.

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This trailer has been analyzed by at least three groups of allied intelligence and technical experts. After it was turned over last month to American soldiers by Kurdish forces near Mosul, three experts from a Pentagon chemical and biological intelligence support team conducted a four-day examination. Assisted by British experts, the team concluded that the trailer was a mobile biological production unit, its members said.

A second group of military and other experts from Washington was then flown to Baghdad, where further tests were conducted. In interviews, one of these experts said he too had concluded that the unit was intended to be a germ producer.
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One senior administration observed that the mobile laboratories were a violation of Security Council resolutions, whether or not they were used to produce weapons. "It was surely capable of producing biological weapons agent," he said. "Iraq never told the United Nations that it had made such units."
"Why would you have a covert program for filling weather balloons?" the official said.
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The big vessels in two of the units could be used to produce an estimated 500 liters of liquid anthrax and 50 liters of botulinum toxin per batch within two to three days -- millions of lethal doses.

"Those are definitely more than terrorist quantities of these agents," said David R. Franz, a senior scientist and former head of the Army defensive biological lab at Fort Detrick, Md.

The schematic diagram was prepared by American experts who have closely studied the most intact production unit. Aside from the central fermenter vessel, there was a tank they believe was for germ food, a compressor to feed air into the fermenter and a refrigeration unit to cool it. The diagram shows that the factory has a system of post-fermenter processing that consists of a compressor that experts said was to remove any gases and dangerous spores and bottle them up in tanks.

Civilian experts on Iraq's program and biological weapons said this gas-capture system appeared to be a hallmark of a clandestine facility, and strongly reinforced the idea that the mobile units were for the production of biological weapons. If spores and signature gasses from the germ food escaped the unit, experts said, inspectors down wind with sensitive detectors might be able to detect the illegal manufacturing.
After being shown some of this material, several civilian experts in biological weapons agreed with the government's consensus.

"There is no doubt in my mind," said William C. Patrick III, a senior official in the United States biological warfare program decades ago. "This is a very simple production facility for an easy-to-grow organism like anthrax."

» U.S. Analysts Link Iraq Labs to Germ Arms