In Tell-All Book, OPCW Whistleblower Reveals Deep Corruption and U.S. Manipulation.

In A New Book "Inspector A", Ian Henderson From the OPCW reveals how the West Co-Opted the organization to justify their war in Syria.

Pictured Above: OPCW headquarters in the Hauge.

Note to Readers: If you are not familiar with the OPCW-Douma controversy I would highly recommend reading the documents on Wikileaks pertaining to it and the reporting from journalist Aaron Mate in The Nation and The Grayzone on it.

Introduction

On the 7th of April 2018, graphic images and videos were posted on social media of murdered civilians from Douma, a rebel-held suburb in Damascus. The bodies were seen lying in a pile of an apartment and foaming at the mouth. This massacre was alleged by rebel groups to have been a chlorine attack done by the Assad regime.

Rebels posted images of chlorine cylinders on a bed and on the roof of the apartment where the massacre took place and alleged they were dropped from an Assad regime helicopter.

The US, UK, and France bombed Syria in relation to this attack, before inspectors from the OPCW (Organization For The Prohibition Of Chemical Weapons) - the UN’s chemical weapons watchdog- were able to investigate the Douma massacre to find out what actually happened.

However, in March of 2019, when the OPCW released its report on Douma it matched up with the Western allegation that Douma was a chlorine attack done by the Assad regime.

A few months later however, documents were sent to WikiLeaks from the OPCW, that showed this report did not match up to the facts the inspectors found in Douma.

Their investigation found that they found no evidence of a Sarin gas attack and insufficient evidence to prove a Chlorine attack. Furthermore, they found that the symptoms of victims in the videos did not match up to those of a chlorine attack and that the chlorine cylinders were more likely placed at the scene rather than dropped from an Assad regime helicopter.

The two inspectors- Inspector A (Ian Henderson who did the engineering report) and Inspector B (Brendan Whelan who did the toxicology report and the original interim report), alleged that their actual findings were covered up in order to justify the Western bombing of Syria.

This story has been the subject of (often very heated) debate amongst journalists, geopolitical pundits, and open-source researchers.

Since the fall of the Assad regime mainstream media outlets have interviewed alleged witnesses who claim it was a Chlorine attack in Douma done by the Assad regime. This, while certainly worth noting, still does not tie up the scientific questions around what actually happened in Douma, especially given the fact that witness testimony could easily be coerced or biased in a divided war-torn country like Syria.

Now, “Inspector A” (Ian Henderson the inspector behind the engineering report) has written a new book titled “The Syria Scam: An Insider Look into Chemical Weapons, Geopolitics and the Fog of War” where he details exactly what happened at the OPCW and defends his assessment that the cylinders were likely placed at the scene in Douma from criticism.

I would highly recommend the book, it contains endless important revelations and Henderson writes well and explains complex engineering and toxicology issues well for laymen (like myself), making it an enjoyable and engaging read.

In this article, I will review some of the most important revelations featured in the book.

The Khan Shaykhun Cover-Up

Douma wasn’t the first time the West bombed Syria over an alleged chemical attack. The first time was when Donald Trump bombed Syria in April of 2017, over a Sarin gas attack against civilians in the Syrian town Khan Shaykhun.

U.S. intelligence publicity blamed Assad for the attack but journalist Seymour Hersh reported that they were less confident with this assessment behind the scenes.

There have been multiple alternative theories about what actually happened at Khan Shaykhun. However, Henderson confirms that there was indeed a Sarin attack at Khan Shaykhun and that the OPCW FFM (fact-finding mission) which alleged this was correct writing:

The FFM report on Khan Shaykhun was released on 29 June 2017. It was mostly factual and measured, and I could find little fault with it.

Further clarity had been provided when the FFM visited Damascus from 8-10 June, and received portions of environmental samples that the Syrians said had been provided to them by trusted agents who were present in AOG territory at Khan Shaykhun. The Syrians themselves had analysed the samples at their laboratories at Barzah SSRC; their analysis showed essentially the same results as had been detected by two OPCW-designated laboratories on samples provided by witnesses to the FFM, supported by the results of analysis on biomedical samples. Subsequent analysis of the Syrian sample aliquots at the OPCW laboratory, and at two designated laboratories, confirmed this. There had undoubtedly been a release of sarin nerve agent or something similar.

(emphasis: mine)

However, Henderson revealed that the OPCW manipulation over the Khan Shaykhun Sarin attack came later from the JIM (Joint Investigative Mechanism), the OPCW body that investigates which party is responsible for the attack.

Henderson revealed that the JIM team visited “Damascus” and the “Shayrat airbase” where the Sarin attack was alleged to have been launched by the Assad regime. Henderson revealed that after this investigation, the team did not believe that the Assad regime had launched a Sarin bomb attack from this base as the United States had claimed writing:

I can state with confidence that, around 11 October 2017, after weeks of investigation, when the JIM team was on their way back to The Hague, having visited Damascus and the Shayrat airbase, they were certain about their findings. They were convinced that the release of sarin had not been a result of a bomb dropped from a Syrian Su-22 jet.

Henderson revealed that the OPCW JIM team later reversed this conclusion based on what Henderson thought was likely the political pressure writing (presumably from the US):

Then, over the next week and a half, as described to me, ‘something changed’. I don’t know exactly what, but I wonder whether it included political pressure and the receipt of new ‘expert assessments’, and they had to make a call. The call was described by a key person as ‘the most difficult decision of my life’, suggesting that the conclusions were far from clear. Perhaps it could have gone either way.

The West Knew Their Bombing Target Was Not a Chemical Weapons Facility.

Before, Douma, Henderson played a leading role in the OPCW’s inspections of the Assad regime’s “SSRC (Social Science Research Centre) facilities to make sure they were not mass-producing chemical weapons.

One of the sites Henderson and the OPCW team searched extensively was the “Barzah Research and Development Center in Damascus” which was alleged by the West to have been mass-producing chemical weapons. Henderson gets into the extent of his inspection there writing:

We continued scouring the site for the presence of underground structures, examined one of them, and clarified its purpose. We went anywhere and everywhere, at times leading to bewildered expressions from our hosts and remarks such as: ‘Do you actually want to go down there? Are you sure? We won’t be able to follow you down but if you really need to climb down that pit, go ahead.’ The senior site representatives were circumspect about what exertions weren’t wise; I was less circumspect, and I ended up with lots of bruises, aches and pains after those couple of days.

Henderson and the OPCW team found that there was nothing representing a violation of the chemical weapons convention in any of the sites they visited writing:

We had covered all the main parts of the two SSRC sites, and there was obviously nothing going on that could represent a serious non-compliance.

Henderson revealed that after issuing this report, the West bombed multiple sites in response to the alleged chemical attack in Douma, that they knew for a fact -based on the report- were not chemical weapons facilities. As he wrote:

… I saw the reports of retaliatory missile strikes by the US, UK and France against targets in Syria (in April 2018). The biggest shock was the announcements by the three belligerents that the main target of the attack had been the SSRC facility at Barzah. …this was disturbing. Having completed two intrusive inspections of that facility, we in the OPCW were clearly aware that there had been nothing related to chemical weapons at that facility. It was disturbing for me in particular, because I was the SSRC expert and Team Leader, and had driven the Syrian government hosts to distraction by demanding access to everywhere and everything during onsite inspections there, and had gone to great lengths and discomfort to crawl all over the place to make sure we could not be faulted for being less than thorough.

…the SSRC inspections had been mandated to establish whether there were current activities that weren’t in compliance with the provisions of the (chemical weapons) Convention. We had been clear: there were none. So why on earth did they bomb the place?

(emphasis: mine)

The Douma Cover-Up

I don’t want to make this article too long but after the OPCW team deployed to Douma which Henderson joined, their key finding were:

• No Evidence of A Sarin Attack.

• Insufficient evidence of a Chlorine attack

• Symptoms did not match up with those of a chlorine attack

• Chlorine Cylinders seemed more likely to be manually placed than delivered by aircraft.

These were the key findings of the OPCW’s original Interim report which is now available to read on Wikileaks.

After telling the story of how Henderson and the OPCW team got the necessary information on the ground in Douma (chemical samples, measurement, etc.) he explained that they wrote this interim report.

However, this report was doctored to match up to the Western narrative that there was a Chlorine attack done by the Assad regime. For the first time, Henderson revealed how this happened.

He notes that “Inspector B” (Brendad Wheelan the author of the toxicology and original interim report), “walked into my office, livid and sputtering” and went on to “describe how someone, possibly the Team Leader, had taken the interim report out of the final editorial workflow and secretly modified it, now reflected a completely changed conclusion.”

Henderson describes that:

Inspector B (Brendad Wheelan) described how he had fortuitously – almost accidentally – intercepted the doctored interim report before it was published. This had led to the blow-up in which he confronted the Team Leader.

He noted that the response was that:

The response from the Chief of Cabinet was that the secret, last-minute modifications to the interim report had not been done at the behest of the Office of the Director-General.

Henderson asked the question of who had “been behind the changes?” from the first report which “represented the consensus of all the FFM team members” to the new report which “brought in contrived and contradictory conclusions” and better matched up with the Western narrative that was used to bomb Syria.

Henderson speculated that the doctored report could have been “part of British influence in the OPCW” or “direct intervention from the US and UK delegations” (to the OPCW) .

Perhaps the most important revelation from the book was a conversation Henderson recalled between him and an American OPCW inspector who was mediating between the OPCW Douma team and the leadership that doctored the report.

Henderson revealed that the inspector told him “we’ve been told by the first floor (OPCW leadership) that we’ve got to make it sound like we found something.” After looking at his notes from the meeting, Henderson found he wrote that the inspector told him “DG (Director General) says we need something positive to imply it was a CW (Chemical Weapons) attack to maintain credibility.

Henderson also confirmed the story,- originally reported by Middle East correspondent Jonothan Steele- that an American delegation met with the OPCW team to try to convince them of their narrative on Douma.

Henderson recalled that:

I noticed the Team Leader got an incoming phone call. On putting down the receiver, he announced to the room in general, something along the lines of: ‘Right, we are all called downstairs for a meeting at the first floor.’

Henderson wrote that once at the meeting “there were three people sitting at the table” who turned out to be “from Washington” and “we're here to assist by providing information”.

Henderson revealed that the information recounted in this meeting was highly questionable analysis which the OPCW team had already looked at and discounted.

An example cited by Henderson was “a small, magazine-sized local chronicle article about the Graniteville railcar chlorine accident”. The U.S. delegation tried to say this article proved that the symptoms in the Douma victims matched up to chlorine because “the article quoted the fire or police chief saying ‘it was crazy, people running around foaming at the mouth!”. Henderson noted that the OPCW team was “less than impressed by the level of scientific or medical peer review on this ‘reference”

Henderson noted that while the American delegation were not “CIA bully boys, as later commentator accounts may have implied”, it was strange that “They said they were related to either the US delegation to the OPCW, State Department, government agency or chemical industry” something that he was “still a bit sketchy on” given the fact that “No business cards were exchanged”.

Henderson noted that this was also clearly political interference into the team's investigation, writing that it “left us with a clear idea on the expectations from the US government when it came to the Douma investigation and what we would be publishing in the report.”

Henderson then got into how after the OPCW chief was replaced by Fernando Arias, the original team that was deployed to Douma began to be sidelined for a new “FFM Alpha and Bravo core teams” consisting of inspectors who did not go to Douma and who Henderson said “appeared to be a little on the light side”.

Henderson was then dismissed from his initial task of doing ballistics analysis of the Chlorine Cylinders that he took measurements for on the ground in Douma for this new “core team”.

Worried that this new team would not “be allowed to do a proper job” on the ballistic analysis, he successfully convinced the OPCW Chief of Cabinet that he was “the only qualified person on the FFM team to coordinate the cylinder engineering and ballistics analysis with experts”.

This led to the OPCW Chief of Cabinet approving Henderson to conduct a ballistics study to go along with the one being conducted by the “core team”.

After getting approved, Henderson contacted “a professor at a university” which “had led to meeting a second professor at another university” both of whom agreed to “do the (ballistics) work, at no cost to the OPCW.”

After months of testing and research the Professors “said their study was finished and they were drafting the report” and “on seeing the draft findings I found there wasn’t much, if any, need for comment or corrections.”

This report was the infamous engineering assessment now published on Wikileaks which found “there is a higher probability that both cylinders were manually placed at the two locations rather than delivered from aircraft”.

Pictured Above: Screenshot of a rough draft of the assessment published on Wikileaks

This is when the trouble started for Henderson. Because the report’s conclusion did not match up with the Western narrative, Henderson has issues getting the OPCW leadership to even look at it.

After having trouble getting the new Douma team to even look at the study, Henderson left the report with the DRA (Declaration Assessment Team) “to make sure the document was acknowledged as an FFM document on Syria that needed to be held securely and handed to the appropriate person.”

After this, a senior OPCW official agreed to meet with Henderson to discuss the report. Henderson believed he “had succeeded in forcing people to recognize the existence of the engineering report.”

However, the OPCW went ahead and published their final FFM (Fact Finding Mission) report on Douma without even acknowledging Henderson’s study.

Henderson wrote that he was “prepared to acknowledge the possibility that we’d be wrong if an alternative explanation was presented” but after reading the report found that it had “inconsistent logic and assumptions, along with what appeared to us to be glaring mistakes”.

The professor that Henderson worked with on the study told him that they were “shocked and disappointed” that their work was ignored for the OPCW final Douma report.

Henderson then sought advice from many of his OPCW colleagues on how to get the leadership to acknowledge his study and was faced with many ominous responses.

An OPCW secretariat branch head told him “This is really serious, but it’s too big, and it’s too late now to try and do anything about it.”

He recounted when talking to the OPCW’s Head of the Office of Confidentiality and Security he “remembered his shock and concern, and the responses that were to become remarkably familiar: it’s too late, and the other frequent this is too big.”

Henderson was invited for a formal meeting with the “Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague” and after telling him the details of the Douma cover-up, he was told “You realize this will have to go higher, much higher.” which was followed by “But you realize we won’t be able to do anything about it”.

Hendersons colleagues speculated that this was because “the Dutch officials were bound by their role in a Western government that was a NATO member, to dutifully follow the position directed by the US, regardless of the issue.”

Henderson also spoke to an OPCW official about the repression of his study who told him “This is too big; it’s too late now. We can’t do anything as it would damage the OPCW reputation and credibility.” The official also stated they didn’t want the study to get out because “it would play into the Russian narrative”.

In a last-ditch attempt, Henderson attempted to have the issues resolved by the OPCWs Office of Internal Oversight to no avail.

Finally, Hendersons’ report was leaked by an unknown person in the OPCW and was published and written about in multiple news outlets, though ignored by almost every mainstream one.

Despite the fact that Henderson was not the one who leaked the document he was “walked to the building exit with my security escort” and removed from his position at the OPCW.

Henderson Defends The Accuracy Of His Report.

There have been several attempts to refute Henderson’s engineering study by the U.S. government-funded outlet Bellingcat, The New York Times, and a 2023 report from the OPCWs IIT (Investigation and Identification Team).

In the book, Henderson responds to all of these reports as well as the claims in the OPCWs FFM report in 2019.

For starters, Henderson revealed that the professors who did the ballistics actually began with the belief that there was a Chlorine attack in Douma carried out by the Assad regime, but changed their mind after doing the research writing

Their initial expectation appeared to be that the Syrian regime was responsible for a chemical attack, and I didn’t argue against that. To their credit, they did the work properly and reported the outcome with integrity, despite that outcome being different from what they had initially expected.

Furthermore, he revealed that all his OPCW colleagues were pleased with the study and its accuracy writing:

Nobody in the Douma team expressed disagreement or serious doubts; on the contrary, most were enthusiastic about having had a proper analysis conducted on the cylinders. I remember the feedback I got from one guy on the team. He was quite animated when saying, ‘This is what we’ve been supposed to be doing all along with these FFMs; why hasn’t anyone done this before?’

There has also been, to date, no refutation of the toxicology analysis presented in the original OPCW report.

As Henderson noted, the OPCW team met with a “panel of four NATO toxicologists” who “discounted chlorine as the cause of victims’ apparent symptoms.”

He also noted that:

alleged witnesses interviewed in Turkey (provided by rebel aligned groups) provided descriptions of nerve gas symptoms, whereas sample analysis showed no presence of nerve agent or degradation products.

In the following section, I will list several talking points that are often repeated to discredit Henderson’s study and his refutation of them in the book.

For reference, below are pictures of the two Chlorine cylinders that were alleged to have been dropped by Assad regime helicopters in Douma. The first is referred to as the “location 2 cylinder” and the second is referred to as the “location 4 cylinder”.

Henderson Only Went Down To 500 Feet.

A common talking point against Henderson’s study is that his simulation only tested what would happen if the Chlorine Cylinder was dropped from a helicopter from a range of 500 feet in the air or higher. Through these simulations, they found that the way the Canisters were found was not consistent with it being dropped from the air.

The OPCW IIT and official FFM report allege that the cylinders were actually dropped from 128 feet in the air. Henderson explains why this is a highly unlikely scenario writing:

It is difficult to take seriously the suggestion of a helicopter flying a mere 128 metres above the Douma rooftops. The case of a low-flying helicopter like this had not been reported previously and, as any military type will tell you, would be unlikely. For a helicopter of the type assumed to be dropping barrel bombs or alleged chemical weapons from that low altitude, we must assume there wouldn’t be simultaneous artillery bombardment or airstrikes in the area. Therefore, we have a noisy, slow-moving, unprotected helicopter flying low above enemy-occupied urban territory – an invitation for disaster. That height would bring the aircraft into range of ground fire by anti-aircraft weapons, heavy machine guns, RPGs and even the ubiquitous AK-47, leading to a perilous situation for the helicopter crew.

All accounts were telling us the Syrian pilots never did this. Furthermore, even should this abnormally low height have been the case, one would expect at least one witness to have reported the unusual incident. But nobody did.

Furthermore, Henderson explained that even if the helicopters were flying that low for some reason, it still would not explain the minimal damage found on the cylinders, pointing out that the cylinder should have been more damaged after it hit the metal rebar on the roof, no matter how low the drop was.

Pictured Above: What the cylinder should have looked like after hitting the metal rebar.

Henderson argued that the “official” OPCW report either found the simulations “were worryingly different from the deformation observed on the Location 2 cylinder at the scene” and therefore left it out of the report or the “simulation was superficial and did not deliver any predicted cylinder deformation.”

The Criss Cross Pattern

Another common talking point is that the “criss-cross” pattern shown on the cylinder above proves that the cylinder hit a metal fence that was over the roof of the balcony- meaning it was dropped from the air. Henderson revealed that the OPCW team discounted this argument because:

We (The OPCW inspectors) found it hard to understand, as it would have required the cylinder to have been falling near-vertically, then through the glancing blow to have changed and hit the wire mesh in a near-horizontal configuration, after which it would have needed to go near-vertical again to impact the roof.

Henderson also revealed that he found the same “criss-cross” pattern on the other side of the cylinder as well ,writing:

We found it hard to understand, as it would have required the cylinder to have been falling near-vertically, then through the glancing blow to have changed and hit the wire mesh in a near-horizontal configuration, after which it would have needed to go near-vertical again to impact the roof.

Henderson later wrote that:

it was hard to see how such an imprint would be made on a cylinder arriving in a near-vertical (even 45-degree) angle.

The Autorefirgeration.

This is another common talking point that uses the above image of the chlorine cylinder looking white, in a video taken the night of the alleged attack. The talking point alleges that the reason it is white is due to “auto-refrigeration”, the process where a cylinder frosts at the tip after Chlorine release. Outlets such as Bellingcat often argue that this was somehow missed by the original OCPW inspectors.

Henderson confirmed that the OPCW team had indeed seen this video and thought it was more likely a result of a flashlight shining on the object at night writing:

we have quite a few photographs taken in a room upwards towards a crater, where the over-exposure as a result of light, either the outside sunlight or the reflection of flashlights at night, can lead to a similar ghostly appearance of the object.

Furthermore, Henderson noted that even if this was Autorefirgeration, it does not explain the inconsistencies between the alleged airdrop and the condition of the cylinder. He also noted it could be possible that the cylinder was placed and Autorefirgeration could have happened after the valve was knocked off. As he wrote:

If the engineering analysis was aimed at investigating whether the cylinders could have come flying out of the sky, presumably dropped from helicopters, it didn’t matter whether there was auto-refrigeration, because the Location 2 cylinder could have been carried up to the terrace and then the valve knocked off.

Finally, Henderson noted that despite the fact that the OPCW was fully aware of this talking point it was “completely absent in the official FFM report” and was only later brought up in the 2023 ITT report. Henderson noted:

I was surprised that the IIT dredged this up into their report, seeing as the official FFM report had decided to steer clear of this whole story, suggesting that even as they were promoting the chemical attack narrative, they had doubts about this bit.

Black, Chlorine Induced Corrosion.

This talking point alleges that the “blackened appearance at the front of the Location 2 cylinder was a result of chlorine-induced corrosion”.

This talking point was quickly discounted by Henderson and the OPCW team because

There was an uncomplicated answer to this question. On 3 June 2018, almost two months after the alleged Douma chemical attack, I attached tags and seals to the cylinder. While doing so, I scratched my finger along the black sooty deposit at the front of the cylinder. Underneath the soot, the cylinder yellow paint was as good as new.

The Roof Crater

The official narrative is that the chlorine cylinder created the crater on the roof. This was also heavily questioned by Henderson and the experts he consulted. As he wrote:

No FEA simulations, either from the FFM report or engineering studies, replicated the characteristics of the observed crater underside. Engineers and ballistics experts I consulted (the latter from both within the Secretariat and outside) were unanimous in identifying the crater as more likely having been formed by an explosive mechanism, thought to be probably a mortar bomb, artillery shell or rocket artillery round.

Henderson also noted that:

the inspectors took a sample of concrete dust from the crater edge, and analysis of this showed the presence of 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene (residues of the explosive TNT).

The Cylinder On The Bed

This is one of the more nonsensical theories posited by the “official” OPCW FFM report and IIT report which alleges the cylinder seen in “location four” crashed through the roof and bounced off the floor landing on the bed.

Henderson noted that he found this theory highly implausible. He noted that

Calculations showed that the cylinder would reach a height of around 20 centimetres, only half the height needed to get onto the bed.

He also noted that

The FFM team, including me, examined the roof and crater, as well as the walls, floor, and objects in the room to identify the source of this, and in the subsequent analysis, we spent much time and effort in seeking a solution. We could not explain the alleged cylinder bounce.

Conclusion

I will admit, that I don’t have anywhere close to the expertise needed to determine what actually happened in Douma. But the facts not up for debate is that 43 civilians were killed in some horrible way, and the OPCW censored their own inspector’s investigation raising the possibility of the murders being a false flag.

There is a simple solution to this issue, have the dissenting inspectors meet with other experts from the OPCW so they can have their questions resolved.

So far, this has yet to happen and likely will not. The current Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard has previously spoken up for the OPCW whistleblowers, but given the fact that her boss, Donald Trump, was involved in the OPCW cover-up it is unlikely that she will do anything about it in her current position.

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