Porton Down investigates Syria

British MI6 operation

 * moved from Category talk:Chemical Weapons --CE (talk) 01:40, 9 January 2017 (UTC)


 * MI6 tests smuggled Syria soil for nerve agent This report by Tom Coghlan and Michael Evans is the first press report of the MI6 operation to collect CW samples.

''Government scientists at Porton Down are examining a soil sample smuggled out of Syria after a suspected nerve gas attack on rebels in the country's civil war. The sample was obtained in a covert mission involving MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service. Experts at the Ministry of Defence's chemical research establishment in Wiltshire are testing the soil for traces of sarin nerve agent. Syrian rebels claim that they have been attacked with chemical weapons by the Assad regime's forces but have failed to produce any proof. US defence officials are trying to gather evidence and the UN has announced its own investigation into the alleged chemical attack near Aleppo on Tuesday.''

Note that this report, and the accompanying photo, imply that the samples are from the Khan-al-Assal attack on 19 March. Later press reports and government statements imply that the samples are from Uteybah near Damascus, where (after the first reports from Khan-al-Assal attack indicated a rebel attack on a Syrian army post) the opposition alleged a CW attack on rebel positions on the same day as the Khan-al-Assal attack Pmr9 (talk) 21:19, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

I did not know British agents were operating in Syria:
 * Chemical weapons used in Syria: the first evidence – The Times, April 13 2013 (Original source)
 * Forensic evidence of chemical weapons use in Syria has been found for the first time in a soil sample smuggled out of the country in a secret British operation.
 * Defence sources, who declined to be named, said yesterday that conclusive proof that “some kind of chemical weapon” had been fired in Syria had been established by scientists at the Ministry of Defence’s chemical and biological research establishment at Porton Down in Wiltshire.
 * ''The discovery, which had not been made public, will put pressure on the United States to consider punitive action against President Assad. The White House warned in December that any use of chemical weapons would be viewed in Washington as a "red-line" issue.


 * The soil sample is thought to have been taken from an area close to Damascus, where there had been fierce fighting between pro-regime forces and rebels.


 * The Porton Down experts established beyond doubt that the traces related to chemical weapons rather than, for example, substances used to control riots. They could not tell whether Mr Assad's forces, or rebels, had fired them. The scientists were unable to ascertain whether the findings indicated widespread use. "There have been some reports that it was just a strong riot-control agent but this is not the case — it's something else, although it can't definitively be said to be sarin nerve agent," one source said.


 * The British mission to smuggle out the soil sample was revealed by The Times last month. The Ministry of Defence would not confirm the Porton Down finding.

Additional text added so the above quote is now the complete text of the first six paragraphs. Note that although this is reported to be the same sample as that obtained in March, the location is now "near Damascus" i.e. Uteybah rather than Khan-al-Assal. Pmr9 (talk) 17:35, 22 January 2017 (UTC)


 * British scientists 'find evidence of Syrian chemical attack' – The Telegraph, April 12 2013
 * The tests at Porton Down reportedly concluded that the chemical traces were from a weapon rather than gas sometimes used by the Syrian security forces to put down protests.
 * The sample was reportedly smuggled out of Syria in a mission involving MI6 last month...
 * It was not clear whether the sample was from Aleppo, Syria's largest city, where more than 20 people were alleged to have been killed in a chemical attack last month.

Sentence above added. The Telegraph report makes clear that the original report was by Michael Evans in the Times, which must have been on 12 April but was updated online on 13 April. The Telegraph reports that it was "not clear" whether the sample was from Khan-al-Assal. All other reports - probably copied from the updated version give the site as near Damascus i.e. Uteybah. But they all agree at this stage that the sample was soil, not physiological. Pmr9 (talk) 17:35, 22 January 2017 (UTC)


 * UK ‘confirms’ use of chemical weapons in Syria after secret MI6 op – report – RT, April 13, 2013
 * The UK Ministry of Defense has claimed that chemical weapons were used in the Syrian conflict. Forensic evidence was collected after scientists analyzed soil smuggled out of the country in a secret British operation, the Times reported.
 * The sample was reportedly extracted from a neighborhood on the outskirts of Damascus in March by MI6 agents operating within Syria, the Australian reported at the time.


 * Arutz Sheva, 4/14/2013 UK Finds Proof of Use of Chemical Weapons in Syria – Arutz Sheva, 4/14/2013
 * UK says that chemical weapons were used in the Syrian conflict, after scientists analyzed soil smuggled out of the country.


 * ‘Soil sample proves chemical weapons used in Syria’
 * The sample, said to be taken from a neighborhood on the outskirts of Damascus, was delivered to the UK Ministry of Defense’s chemical and biological research establishment at Porton Down in Wiltshire, where it was identified as containing traces of “some kind of chemical weapon.”

-- Petri Krohn (talk) 04:42, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

Excellent, Petri, thanks! Was not up to getting up to speed on this yet, this list helps. Porton Down and British spies snagging dirt were reported before, after Khan Al-Assal (March 19). There, no CW, just "super-power tear gas," they speculated, prior to completing the testing. Because otherwise, it looked like rebel chlorine ... Here, they scientifically and cautiously cannot say what chemical/molecules and stuff. Not for sure Sarin. But definitely a regime-type chemical, probably. Of course. The sample is from near Porton Down, I suspect. Maybe Watership Down, and it's rabbit poison. --Caustic Logic (talk) 14:05, 14 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Syria chemical weapons: MPs demand evidence of sarin use by Assad - The Telegraph, 22 April 2013


 * Central to the claims of chemical weapons use are positive tests for sarin both by the Pentagon and Ministry of Defence scientists at Porton Down. The American tests are understood to have been carried out on samples of hair and blood from those affected, while those at Porton Down were on soil samples. However, while scientists are said to have confidence in the findings, the quantities involved are "microscopic".


 * The Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Mr William Hague) Hansard, 20 May 2013
 * There is a growing body of limited but persuasive information showing that the regime used—and continues to use—chemical weapons. We have physiological samples from inside Syria that have shown the use of sarin, although they do not indicate the scale of that use. Our assessment is that the use of chemical weapons in Syria is very likely to have been by the regime. We have no evidence to date of opposition use. 

So by 20 May the soil samples have become "physiological samples", like the ones obtained by the Americans. An FCO spokesman confirms this to the Guardian on


 * The Foreign Office confirmed that "physiological samples" collected inside the country had tested positive for sarin after the Guardian learned of the results from other sources. "We have obtained physiological samples from inside Syria which have been tested at the Porton Down facility, and they tested positive for sarin," an FCO spokesman said.


 * The FCO would not confirm where or when the samples were collected, but British evidence of chemical attacks passed to the UN cites incidents in Homs in December, Aleppo and Adra, near Damascus, in March, and in Darayya, also near Damascus, and Saraqib, near Aleppo, in April.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/04/syria-nerve-agent-sarin-uk-france

On 14 June 2013 Cameron gave a press conference from which the transcript was published


 * There is credible evidence of multiple attacks using chemical weapons in Syria, including the use of the abhorrent agent Sarin. We have tested physiological samples at Porton Down. These include samples from Utaybah on the 19th March, and from Sheikh Maqsood on 13th April. We believe that the scale of use is sanctioned and ordered by the Assad regime. We haven’t seen any credible reporting of chemical weapons use by the Syrian opposition. However we assess that elements affiliated to Al Qaeda in the region have attempted to acquire chemical weapons for probable use in Syria. That is the picture as described to me by the Joint Intelligence Committee and I always choose my words on this subject very carefully because of the issues there have been in the past, but I think it is right that the Americans have said what they have said and I wanted to back that up with the information and the involvement that we’ve had in that assessment.

So now it's definitely Oteybah, and physiological samples. But they told the UN it was Aleppo or Adra, and soil samples. Pmr9 (talk) 19:07, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

See below

Syria crisis: UN to study soil samples for proof of sarin gas 24 April 2013, Guardian


 * It is understood that as well as visiting refugee camps and potentially taking hair and other biological samples from survivors of alleged chemical attacks, UN investigators will also analyse soil samples in the possession of British and French intelligence agencies


 * British officials are adamant that the source of the sarin was the government and that the exposure of Syrian army troops in the town of Khan al-Asal on March 19, as claimed by Damascus, was the result of "friendly fire", a government shell that had gone astray, rather than a rebel attack.

This article also gives more detail of the reluctance of Obama and Chuck Hagel to be drawn in, and their scepticism about the UK "evidence". It looks as if the MI6 operation was directed primarily at drawing the US government into an attack on Syria. This contrasts with the situation in the run-up to the Iraq war, where the US government had already decided to attack and MI6's role was to provide the "evidence" (Niger uranium hoax) that the Bush administration wanted but couldn't get its own intelligence agencies to sign off on.

Hamish de Bretton-Gordon's role in collecting samples for MI6
In a comment on the SicSemperTyrannis blog, David Habakkuk, a retired television producer and historian of intelligence services, reveals an interesting discovery:-

"Also of interest are contributions to the ‘Brown Moses Blog’ by a former British Army CBRN expert called Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon. From his entry on the ‘Military Speakers’ website, and other material, it seems likely that he was instrumental in providing ‘environmental’ samples from incidents prior to Ghouta in which sarin was used to Porton Down. This has quite large implications. (See http://www.militaryspeakers.co.uk/speakers/hamish-de-bretton-gordon-obe/"

It's clear that Bretton-Gordon (HBG) had a key role in the MI6 operation to collect samples for Porton Down that was reported in the Times and Telegraph during April 2013.

Another comment in the same thread by Martin Jerrett is of interest:-

''"H de B Gordon, you mentioned, is more open and has been funded by UK government since 2012 at least to develop a network of people in Syria to work on collecting samples among other tasks. " '' Jerrett is an Arabic speaker who has had a string of short-term jobs with UK NGOs working in the Arab world. In 2012 he was coordinator of the Syria Development Network funded by the Asfari Foundation (also funds the Syria Campaign), so he's likely to know HBG professionally and to be simply repeating in good faith what HBG has told him. The accounts filed at UK Companies House by HBG's now defunct start-up companies (SecureBio founded in 2011, SecureBio Forensics founded in 2012) support Jerrett's statement that some entity was funding HBG "since 2012 at least", but indicate that the source of this funding was concealed behind nominee directors who made "loans" that were never repaid. If this was MI6, they were remarkably prescient in anticipating before any reports of alleged CW use in Syria that they would need to "develop a network of people in Syria to work on collecting samples".

In another comment on the same thread DH notes a comment by HBG on the Brown Moses site that makes clear he was present with Ian Pannell at the site of the alleged chemical attack in Saraqeb (29 April), reported on the BBC on 16 May.

‘I covered the Sarin attack with the BBC’s Ian Pannell and concluded without doubt, that the Regime was responsible, and we didn’t have any detailed chemical analysis kit with us.’

But the BBC report presents HBG as an independent expert who was not at the scene. Readers of Robert Stuart's blog will be familiar with the evidence of fabrication in Ian Pannell's reporting of the alleged napalm attack in Urm-al-Kabra on 26 August for the BBC. His report was first broadcast on 29 August during the House of Commons debate, but too late to shift the vote

So this ties the MI6 operation in 2013 with a funding scheme that began a year earlier, and with a related infowar operation involving the BBC. It's clear from the press reports and HBG's statements that he provided Porton Down with environmental samples within a few days of the Khan-al-Assal sarin attack on 19 March 2013. These were at first described as being from Khan-al-Assal, but later as being from the alleged attack in Uteybah on the same day. Some time around mid-May 2013 someone seems to have realized that the chemical profile of the environmental samples (which the Russians reported as kitchen sarin with no stabilizers) would give the game away. Subsequent government statements refer to physiological samples (which can establish sarin exposure but don't reveal anything about how it was made). Pmr9 (talk) 00:30, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

HBG's comments on the Sheikh Maqsood incident
Article on opposition website dated 17 April.


 * “Atropine is the antidote to nerve agent poisoning, so it’s used widely [to treat poisoning] in the UK and the US. It’s the recognized antidote,” said Hamish de Bretton-Gordon OBE, a chemical weapons expert and the founder and COO of London-based SecureBio. The British Foreign Security William Hague mentioned in the House of Commons on Monday that they had very strong evidence that chemical weapons were being used in Syria. On Sunday, we saw a number of reports that those three people were killed in Aleppo. We were sent a load of photos, a load of stuff. The symptoms that were described would be similar to nerve agent poisoning, and the use of atropine would have been an effective method to treat these people.”


 * He said that though certainty was impossible, the likely answer was that improvised chemical weapons had been used, and that they are possibly being used by both sides — “by the regime to show that the opposition are using chemical weapons, and by the opposition to show that the regime is using them. Obviously if the regime is using them, then a red line is crossed and things are changed.”


 * Improvised chemical weapons are a term for chemical phosphates, a key component to pesticides that have the same biological structure as nerve agents. “I think that a lot of these events have been organic phosphates or pesticides which have been blown up,” de Bretton-Gordon said, adding that “thousands” of people die around the world from these each year. 

Why is he talking about organophosphate pesticides? This was four days after Michael Evans had been briefed that the samples supplied to Porton Down from the 19 March incidents showed "something else although it can't definitively be said to be sarin nerve agent". As HBG supplied these samples, he's presumably been told something of the results. The Russians were later to report that their analyses of what was presumably the same batch of sarin, obtained from the impact site at Khan-al-Assal, showed low concentrations of sarin produced under "cottage industry" conditions and containing DIFP (diisopropyl fluorophosphate). DIFP is an organophosphate much less toxic than sarin, widely used as a pesticide. It sounds as if Porton Down found this also. HBG isn't sure how to spin this - he even suggests a possible opposition false flag.

[Note: from asking an organic chemist, I understand that DIFP can be produced from the same raw ingredients as sarin, but only if the ingredients are added in reverse order. Unlikely that this would happen through simple incompetence: one possible explanation is that Nusra's chemist was a captive working under duress who deliberately sabotaged the synthesis to send a message that something odd was going on. Another possible explanation could be to use DIFP as a low-grade CW agent, but this would not make sense if the objective was to implicate the regime.]

So at this stage I think we can infer that Porton Down had obtained similar findings to the Russian lab, and that HBG had been told some of these findings. The only difference is that at this stage Porton Down is still not reporting a positive test for sarin: they might have reasons for withholding such a result if they don't trust MI6 or HBG.

HBG's reference to a statement by William Hague in the Commons "on Monday" (i.e. 15 April 2013) is incorrect - no record of this in Hansard. He may be referring to a letter sent to the UNSG about this time Pmr9 (talk) 21:38, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

HBG interview with PRI on 14 June 2013
In this interview, which from the context appears to be on 14 June 2013, HBG indicates that the only samples that he has "seen" are environmental samples, and that the sites from which these were collected include Saraqeb, where he has told us that he was present with Ian Pannell. Pmr9 (talk) 22:09, 22 January 2017 (UTC)

http://www.pri.org/node/42516/popout


 * Werman: And talk about the samples. What kind of samples are you referring to?


 * Bretton-Gordon: Well certainly the ones I've seen have been soil samples and masonry collected from the likes of Aleppo and Saraqib and Damascus. I think there have also been some clothing samples. And it's also been widely reported that blood and hair samples have been taken off refugees and people that have escaped from those areas.

In an interview discussing the Saraqeb attack posted on the BrownMoses blog HBG again suggests that the sarin was low quality.


 * Sarin would normally be delivered by air dropped munitions or artillery shells, causing mass casualties i.e. Halabja. However, it is pretty clear that samples from Saraqeb have tested positive for Sarin, so there would appear to be very small amounts of Sarin contained in the canisters, probably of a low quality. This would account for the relatively few casualties. It is certainly not textbook delivery but has presumably achieved the effect which the perpetrator wanted – confusion and derision amongst the International Community.

HBG appears to suggest that the use in Sheikh Maqsood and Assad of riot control grenade canisters as chemical munitions was a devilish plot by Assad to confuse and discredit Eliot Higgins, who had been posting about them. But more interestingly, HBG appears to be trying to construct an explanation for why the regime is using low-quality sarin. Pmr9 (talk) 01:21, 24 January 2017 (UTC)

HBG article on 28 April 2015
Only a no-fly zone can curb chemical attacks in Syria


 * Chemical weapons first appeared in the Syrian conflict at Sheikh Maqsoud in March 2013, and that was when I first became involved in trying to collect evidence of their use. There are still some people who dispute that chemical weapons were or are used in Syria, and more who do not believe Assad is to blame. However, as an expert with 27 years’ experience in this field, having been to Syria a number of times and analysed samples from these attacks, I have no doubt that chemical weapons are being used, and that the Assad regime is responsible. Samples from Sheikh Maqsoud and Saraqeb in May 2013 did eventually find their way to French and UK government laboratories and tested positive for the nerve agent sarin, with David Cameron saying as much in the summer of 2013.

So by 2015 HBG has forgotten the incidents in Khan-al-Assal and Uteybah on 19 March 2013 and his role in collecting samples that were reported to be from one of them. Instead he states that Sheikh Maqsood, wrongly dated as March, was the first incident.

We can reasonably conclude that the results on the soil samples supplied to Porton Down around 20 March, purportedly from Khan-al-Assal or Uteybah, were awkward enough that HBG and whoever he was working for wanted to erase them from the record. Pmr9 (talk) 00:59, 24 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I'll suggest that by March he might have meant Khan al-Assal, and just got the names mixed up. And forgot Ateibah. Then he puts the same attack (or name) in May, along with Saraqeb (which was almost in May). Here he might refer to the one in Sheikh Maqsoud on April 13, but then, wouldn't he notice he just used the same name for two different places? Sort of a mess - is he being hard to understand on purpose, so as to be hard to clearly debunk? Anyway, it would be a somewhat suspect omission, in line with erasing/fuzzing away the actual events and findings from March 19. --Caustic Logic (talk) 09:46, 24 January 2017 (UTC)

The pushback: the scientists and the generals
To be continued Pmr9 (talk) 22:42, 22 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes, please! :) --Caustic Logic (talk) 03:40, 23 January 2017 (UTC)