Word: tarhunah
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Dates: during 1996-1996
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...construction projects. The agency was able to develop a network of informants among the foreign workers, and one of them now reported that Gaddafi had big plans for the Rabta hardware. Much of it would eventually be moved to a new chemical-weapons plant inside a mountain near Tarhunah. CIA spy satellites immediately began pointing their cameras at the mountain. Secret cables went out to CIA stations worldwide ordering case officers to collect intelligence from foreign firms Gaddafi might have enlisted for the project...
...lanes split around a giant rock wall. The lanes rejoin on the other side into a huge chamber for the factory. Other chambers that connect to the main one are being dug. The Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees Delta Force and seal Team-6, studied the Tarhunah layout and concluded that a commando raid would be a suicide mission...
...only way to stop the Tarhunah project, the CIA decided, was to bog down its construction. Agency experts on chemical factories and tunneling used computers to build elaborate construction-flow charts that identified choke points. To buy equipment, Gaddafi had set up a purchasing network, operating through front companies and middlemen around the world. CIA and State Department officials persuaded governments in Italy, Switzerland, Japan, Denmark, Austria, Britain and Poland to stop deliveries of equipment Libya had bought from their companies...
...early 1993 a CIA team marched into the offices of German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and spread out before his aides their satellite photos and intelligence reports on Tarhunah. The analysts had identified a key part in the boring machines: the large bits at the front, which would quickly wear out as they cut a hole six yards high and eight yards wide into the mountain. These had to be constantly replaced. Stop the supply of spare bits, the CIA men told Kohl's advisers, and the boring machines would soon become useless. Embarrassed by revelations in 1988 that German companies...
...first thought disabling the boring machines would set the Tarhunah project back 10 years. But the agency has never had detailed intelligence on how much progress the Libyans had made with the tunneling before the drill bits wore out. Moreover, Gaddafi has skillfully found ways around Washington's roadblocks. When European sources for equipment dried up, Libya began prowling for suppliers in China, India and Southeast Asia, where export controls on chemical weapons-related equipment are loose. The State Department has found that Thai companies, operating behind their government's back, are still supplying construction workers for the plant. Westfalia...