Israel Had Chemical Weapons in the 1980s, Said the CIA

This FP piece linked to some useful intel documents about Iraq’s use of chemical weapons during its war with Iran. It didn’t look to me as if the documents contain much that we didn’t know before, but perhaps I missed something.

Anyway, this January 1985 CIA assessment, titled The Iraqi Chemical Weapons Program in Perspective, is useful because it sums up what the CIA knew about Iraq’s chemical weapons program at the time. However, it is also significant because it contains something one doesn’t see all that often: official confirmation that Israel had chemical weapons.

According to page 14 of the assessment, the CIA assessed that Iraq would be “restrained…in using chemical weapons outside its borders, particularly against states such as Israel or Syria, which have chemical weapons stockpiles.”

Read the whole thing.

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