Chemical Weapons The Mysterious

Spring 1984: Rolf Kiefer, owner of a small metal-construction firm in Wiesbaden, West Germany, receives a request to bid on the construction of a technology park in North Africa. The man soliciting the bids calls it a "big contract." Kiefer is intrigued, but as he says later, "when someone comes in with a suitcase full of money, you feel wary." When Kiefer learns that the "park" is to be built in Libya, he bows out. "I assumed from the outset that the man was talking about a weapons factory," recalls Kiefer, "and we didn't want to get involved."

February 1985: Imhausen-Chemie, a major West German chemical-supply company, contracts with a Frankfurt firm called IBI to supply certain materials for the technology park.

December 1987: The press reports that the U.S. has evidence that Libya is building a chemical-warfare weapons facility.

August 1988: IBI closes down its Frankfurt office.

September 1988: The U.S. State Department declares that Libya "has established a chemical-warfare production capability" at Rabta, 40 miles south of Tripoli. Colonel Muammar Gaddafi protests that Rabta is designed to manufacture only pharmaceuticals.

February 1989: The Bonn government discloses that its intelligence services warned nine years earlier that Gaddafi could be preparing to make chemical weapons "with help from unknown East and West German firms." This admission comes several weeks after authorities, prodded by the U.S., begin an official investigation and seize twelve boxes of IBI documents. Among them are letters of agreement between Imhausen-Chemie and the mysterious IBI -- Ihsan Barbouti International.

Question: Who is Ihsan Barbouti?

Seated in the coffee shop of a London hotel, the stocky, goateed 61-year-old Iraqi businessman tortures his well-worn black worry beads. "I don't want to lie to you," Ihsan Barbouti tells the interviewer in his charmingly imperfect English, then adds disconcertingly, "and I don't want to tell you the truth also at the same time." Asked whether he ever dealt in deadly weapons, he says, "I have done nothing bad. I don't deal with arms. Arms dealing is the opposite of my character. But I don't deal with something else. I don't deal with cigarettes, because I feel cigarettes is against the health."

What may be even more "against the health" is Libya's chemical-weapons plant, which U.S. intelligence officials say was masterminded by Barbouti. In an interview with a TIME correspondent, the amiable Dr. Barbouti, as he prefers to be called, readily admits he was the designer and prime contractor for the entire Rabta complex -- with the exception of what he describes as the "pharmaceutical" plant. Barbouti insists that his only involvement with this facility was to sell building materials to the Libyans and that he had no inkling the plant might be used for sinister purposes.