Former OPCW Chief Says US Bugged His Office While Pushing Iraq War

Monday, 19 October 2020, 5:12 pm
Opinion: Caitlin Johnstone

In an important new interview with The Grayzone's Aaron Maté, the first Director-General of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has revealed new insights into the way the US exerted control over the Organisation in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion and the suspicious way pro-US narratives appear to be dominating controversies in the supposedly impartial OPCW to this day.

The most significant piece of new information revealed in this interview with the acclaimed former OPCW chief José Bustani is his assertion that while the US was orchestrating his 2002 ouster due to the risk he posed of derailing the Iraq war agenda with successful negotiations, his office was packed with hidden surveillance equipment and that his American head of security vanished immediately after this was discovered.

After noticing suspicious phenomena and leaks coming out of his office, Bustani reports that he sent for a trusted security expert from outside the Organisation to investigate over the weekend.

“The fact was that the wall behind my desk, the wall behind the desk of the Director-General was full of equipment, listening equipment," Bustani reported. "He broke the whole wall and removed everything, and there were bugs in the drawer, my desk, phone. I was shocked I must say. But he did it immediately. It took him the whole of Saturday, half of the Sunday, he took it [away], he removed everything and nobody realized except me and my wife. On Monday when people came to my office, they were shocked with the way the wall was. It was a big hole.”

“And interesting thing is--and I never said this before--is that I had then a person that was the head of the security of the Organization," Bustani said. "He used to be an American. He had a large office full of equipment. I called him, the Monday after that happened, I called his office to check with him how come he didn’t know, he was in charge of security of the building, how come he didn’t know that there was such bugging equipment behind me. And he wasn’t there. And I was told that he was traveling to Germany, and I asked then, 'Who allowed him to go to Germany? I am his direct boss. He was my subordinate, he was directly subordinate to me.' Nobody could say anything. So I said ‘As soon as he returns tell him I want to have a word with him.' This was the Monday. You will not believe it Aaron, but on Tuesday as I got to the OPCW I am told that I should go up to the head of security office and when I got there the office was empty, and this person disappeared and never showed up again. Never showed up again."

This is a major revelation. When you've got an American infiltrator covertly surveilling a foreign official to advance US foreign policy agendas, what you have is a US spy. We don't know what agency that spy would have worked for, but what Bustani is describing is US espionage of an international watchdog organisation.

Bustani gave additional insights into the ongoing OPCW scandal surrounding the extremely suspicious practices that were implemented in the investigation of an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria in 2018 which preceded airstrikes against the Assad government by the US, UK and France. He stated emphatically that as Director-General he would "never" have allowed the Douma investigation team to be replaced with a "core team" who never went there or permitted a team of inspectors to meet with US officials during an active investigation, as reportedly happened after the Douma incident.

"This would have never happened if I were Director-General," Bustani said when asked if he'd have allowed a US delegation to lobby them to come to a specified conclusion in their investigation. "The Inspectors know themselves that they cannot. They cannot. They are not supposed to meet with delegations on issues like inspections in particular. I don’t know how it happened, maybe they were forced to or they were led to by… I don’t know how it in practice happened because if I were Director-General this would never happen."

Ex-OPCW chief José Bustani on the fact that the OPCW inspectors who investigated the alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria were sidelined and replaced with a so-called "core" team who never set foot there: "It would have never happened" under his watch. https://t.co/C6l24YkYdP pic.twitter.com/knPdl7Nh2U

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) October 18, 2020

“Absolutely not," Bustani said when asked if he'd have permitted a team of investigators to be replaced mid-investigation with another team who never visited the crime scene. "It would have never happened to me, unless there was a serious violation of the code of conduct on the part of the inspectors. Which fortunately never, never happened.”

Bustani said he knew the whistleblowers who sparked the OPCW scandal from his time at the Organisation, and decried the way they are being smeared, silenced and their anonymity removed for simply voicing objections to an investigation's methodology in the interest of protecting the OPCW's legitimacy. He voiced a great fondness for the Organisation and a grave concern for the suspicious abnormalities in its investigative practices involving the United States, and he expressed shock at the way the US, UK and France recently blocked him from offering comments to the UN about those concerns.

Maté pointed out that one highly suspect common denominator in both the current OPCW scandal and Bustani's 2002 ouster is John Bolton. As US ambassador Bolton is known to have been actively involved in arranging Bustani's removal as Director-General to such an aggressive extent that he reportedly threatened Bustani's children, and Bolton's stint as Trump's National Security Advisor began immediately before the 2018 airstrikes on Syria after the Douma incident. Bolton claims to have played a role in planning those airstrikes and was active at the highest levels of the US government's executive branch throughout the entirety of the OPCW Douma investigation.

The mountains of evidence that the US has been meddling in an investigation of an incident which led to an act of war by the United States and its allies keeps stacking higher. The way the US power alliance has been actively suppressing and avoiding that evidence is appalling, and the way the mass media have refused to report on this fact is even more so.

Former OPCW chief José Bustani on media silence over the OPCW Syria cover-up scandal, & how media coverage could make a difference in protecting the OPCW from political exploitation by US & other Western states.

cc @TheIntercept & @democracynow , who have ignored this story. pic.twitter.com/So8ybaZsH0

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) October 18, 2020

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Caitlin Johnstone

Rogue journalist

Caitlin Johnstone is a 100 percent crowdfunded rogue journalist, bogan socialist, anarcho-psychonaut, guerilla poet and utopia prepper living in Australia with her American husband and two kids. She writes about politics, economics, media, feminism and the nature of consciousness. She is the author of the illustrated poetry book "Woke: A Field Guide For Utopia Preppers."

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