Washington, June 13: A covert US Army unit, operating in Iraq even before the war began, played a crucial but ultimately unsuccessful role in the hunt for weapons of mass destruction, a media report said. The 'Task Force 20', drawn from the elite Army Special Mission units known popularly as Delta Force "found no working non-conventional munitions, missiles or missile parts, bulk stores of chemical or biological warfare agents," said a report in a leading American daily.
It sent a stream of initially promising reports to a limited circle of planners and policymakers in Washington pointing to the possibility of weapons finds, the paper said. The reports helped feed the optimism expressed by President George W Bush and his senior national security advisers that proscribed weapons would be found.
The team captured Palestinian guerrilla leader Mohammed Abbas in Baghdad in mid-April and the Iraqi scientists nicknamed Mrs. Anthrax and Dr. Germ; it fought a bloody battle behind Iraqi lines to prevent a release of floodwaters from the Haditha dam; and it retrieved Jessica Lynch, an Army prisoner of war, from a hospital in Nasiriyah, it said. The Task Force 20's principal assignment is to "seize, destroy, render safe, capture, or recover weapons of mass destruction," a special operations mission statement said.
Its role in the search for illicit arms, military and intelligence sources said, turned out to be far more important than that of the search teams operating in the open. Bureau Report