STATES SEEKING to produce chemical weapons (CW) typically rely on the importation of intermediate chemicals called “precursors,” which have legitimate industrial applications but can also be converted into military–grade CW agents, such as mustard gas or sarin. The dual–use nature of precursor chemicals poses challenges for policy makers seeking to prevent CW proliferation. Under U.S. Department of Commerce regulations, manufacturers planning to export CW precursors to certain countries must obtain prior government authorization in the form of an export license. Yet despite significant improvements over the past decade in the export–control systems of the United States and...

During the 1980s, a Dutch businessman named Frans van Anraat became one of Iraq’s most reliable suppliers of CW precursors. He was born on August 9, 1942, in the town of Den Helder in north Holland. The son of a Navy man, he studied to become a laboratory technician but ended his studies early and took a job with a Swiss–Italian engineering company called Ingeco International, which was building oil–related facilities in Iraq. In 1977, Van Anraat moved to Baghdad, where he spent three years as a branch manager for Ingeco, overseeing the construction of refineries and other...

Although the Iranian forces suff ered hundreds of Iraqi chemical attacks during the Iran–Iraq War, Tehran’s repeated pleas for international sanctions against Iraq elicited no response from the United States or its European allies, which feared the strategic consequences of an Iranian victory. Tehran finally decided to take matters into its own hands by acquiring its own chemical arsenal as a deterrent. An Iranian diplomat named Sayed Kharim Ali Sobhani, stationed at the Iranian Embassy in Bonn, West Germany, was assigned the task of purchasing CW precursors from foreign suppliers.³⁵ In late 1986, Sobhani contacted Peter Walaschek at Colimex...

In parallel with the Walaschek case, Bass started to look into the Nu–Kraft file. Once the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Baltimore launched a grand jury investigation, Bass subpoenaed documents related to the purchases of Alcolac TDG. He also persuaded the U.S. Customs Service and the Department of Justice to request additional document searches overseas. The Swiss authorities executed search warrants at Van Anraat’s apartment and office in Lugano, while U.S. Customs attachés obtained information from the shipping lines that had transported the consignments of TDG to Rotterdam and Antwerp. These various sources yielded thousands of pages of telexes, faxes,...

Despite the passage of more than two decades, the lessons of the Van Anraat and Walaschek cases remain relevant today. Although U.S. export controls on dual–use materials and equipment related to nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons of mass destruction (WMD) have improved significantly since the 1980s, important weaknesses still exist that demand solution. The following sections describe the current status of U.S. dual–use export controls, identify gaps in the system, and suggest some possible remedies.

The key statute underlying U.S. export controls, the Export Administration Act of 1979, expired in August 2001 and has not been reauthorized by...