GENEVA, September 12 (Matthew Lee, The Associated Press) – US Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Geneva on Thursday morning to test the seriousness of Russia’s proposal to secure Syria's chemical weapons.
Kerry and a team of US experts will have at least two days of meetings with their Russian counterparts on Thursday and Friday. They hope to emerge with an outline of how some 1,000 tons of chemical weapons stocks and precursor materials as well as potential delivery systems can be safely inventoried and isolated under international control in an active war zone and then destroyed.
Officials with Kerry said they would be looking for a rapid agreement on principles for the process with Russians, including a demand for a speedy Syrian accounting of their stockpiles.
One US official said the task is "doable but difficult and complicated."
The official said the US is looking for signs of Russia’s seriousness and thinks it will know in a relatively short time if the Russians are trying to stall. Another official described the ideas that Russia has presented so far as "an opening position" that needs a lot of work and input from technical experts. The US team includes officials who worked on the inspection and removal of unconventional weapons from Libya after 2003 and in Iraq after the first Gulf War.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publically on the sensitive negotiations, said the teams that eventually go into Syria to do the work would have to have an international mix, as would their security.
In an opinion piece published Thursday in The New York Times, Russian President Vladimir Putin wrote, "The United States, Russia and all members of the international community must take advantage of the Syrian government's willingness to place its chemical arsenal under international control for subsequent destruction."
Putin urged the US not to launch a military strike on Syria, saying, "It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States."
Kerry planned to meet Thursday with Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN-Arab League envoy for Syria, before sitting down with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
The hastily arranged meeting in Geneva comes as the White House tries to pin success or failure of the diplomatic track on Russia's willingness to take a tough line with its ally Syria. Syrian rebels, however, are disappointed at best in President Barack Obama's decision to forgo a military strike in favor of an agreement to take access to chemical weapons away from President Bashar Assad.
At the same time, the CIA has been delivering light machine guns and other small arms to Syrian rebels for several weeks, following Obama's decision to arm the rebels.
The agency has also arranged for the Syrian opposition to receive anti-tank weaponry like rocket-propelled grenades through a third party, presumably one of the Gulf countries that has been arming the rebels, a senior US intelligence official and two former intelligence officials said Thursday. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the classified program publicly.
The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal first reported the lethal aid.
Top rebel commander Gen. Salim Idris told National Public Radio on Thursday that rebels had received no such aid from the US. The CIA declined to comment.
The officials said the aid has been arriving for more than a month, much of it delivered through a third party, which could explain why the rebel commander Idris does not believe the US directly delivered the aid. The officials said the aid is delivered to commanders who have been vetted by the CIA, and the path of the weaponry is tracked through trusted parties within the country – though eventually, once they're in the hands of fighters, the US loses sight of where the weapons go.
The rebels continue to request sophisticated anti-aircraft weaponry to take out the Syrian regime's helicopters, but the officials said neither the US nor Syria's neighboring countries, like Jordan or Israel, wants the rebels to have weaponry that may fall into the hands of the al-Qaida-linked rebel group al-Nusra, or captured by Hezbollah fighters who are bolstering the Syrian army's effort.
The CIA program is classified as covert, which means it would be briefed to Congress's intelligence committees but not its defense committees. That explains why some senior lawmakers on the defense committees have complained the lethal aid was not arriving, two of the officials said.
