Global Policy Forum

By Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus

After weeks of delay, the United States within the past several days has begun providing United Nations inspectors with "significant" intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs that has enabled inspectors to become "more aggressive and to be more comprehensive in the work they're doing," Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said yesterday.

But Powell said in an interview that the Bush administration was still holding back some of its most sensitive information, waiting to see if inspectors "are able to handle it and exploit it. . . . It is not a matter of opening up every door that we have." Much of the intelligence is said to involve alleged sites of Iraqi weapons development and storage.

The increased U.S. assistance to the inspectors comes less than three weeks before Hans Blix, head of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Mohamed ElBaradei are scheduled to provide the U.N. Security Council with their first formal assessment of Iraqi compliance with U.N. disarmament demands. That assessment, to be delivered Jan. 27, is viewed by some Bush administration officials as a decision point on whether Iraq's cooperation has been sufficient to head off military action.

U.S. military preparations for such an assault have escalated in the past week, with increased troop and materiel deployments to the region. In the interview, Powell repeated the administration mantra that President Bush has made no decision about whether to go to war with Iraq. Asked to gauge the current probability of armed conflict, Powell said, "I think war is too serious to make those sorts of predictions." Bush, he added, "prefers a peaceful solution."

Powell, who played a major role in persuading Bush last summer to take the problem of Iraq to the United Nations, has advocated letting the inspection process run a course that inspectors have indicated could take many more months before any conclusions are reached.

"The deadline we have before us right now is on the 27th of January, [when] we will all receive a report from Dr. Blix and Dr. ElBaradei . . . and we will see what the inspectors have found or not found and what Dr. Blix and Dr. ElBaradei think with respect to the presence or absence, or 'we don't know yet,' of weapons of mass destruction," Powell said. "At that point, we will have to make some judgments as to what to do next. What's the next step. But it is not necessarily a D-day for decision-making."

Powell, a retired four-star general and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the military buildup was being handled in a "measured way, so that it can be calibrated, and the rates can be increased, modified, held at a certain level." Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and military chiefs, Powell said, "are very familiar with the sustainability of forces in the field far away from their homes and bases, as am I."

Today, Blix and ElBaradei are scheduled to give the Security Council their complete analysis of Iraq's Dec. 7 declaration of its weapons programs. The declaration was mandated in the November U.N. resolution ordering new inspections. The two inspectors are expected to repeat an interim evaluation, delivered last month, that the document is incomplete.

Powell said at the time that the weapons declaration "totally fails" to meet Iraq's obligation for "full, final and complete" disclosure of its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs and constituted a "further material breach" of Baghdad's international obligations. But Powell added that Iraq still had time to comply.

Despite stepped-up inspections in recent weeks, few Security Council members expect the Jan. 27 assessment to provide a definitive conclusion on Iraqi cooperation. More likely, said a diplomat from one of the five nations that have permanent Security Council seats, it will be a "gray zone, uncomfortable to everybody." In the search for more clarity, members have advocated presenting the Iraqi government with a list of specific questions designed to close some of the many gaps in the Iraqi declaration and test Baghdad's intentions.

Another council diplomat suggested that those governments that have already declared Baghdad uncooperative -- including the United States and Britain -- view the questioning as a means to prove Iraqi violations while others, such as France and Russia, believe it could prove the opposite.

Powell described the questioning, including demands for specific information on generalities the Iraqis have provided concerning the destruction of previously disclosed weapons stocks, as "the right course of action."

In another key area regarding Iraq, Powell said that the administration has provided UNMOVIC and the IAEA with an outline of how to carry out sensitive interviews with Iraqi weapons scientists and technicians outside of the country. "I don't know that it's all glued together yet, but I know that [the inspectors] know there are ways to do that," he said.

"There is reluctance on their [the Iraqis'] part," Powell acknowledged. "There is concern about where [the scientists] go, where they get resettled to, what papers can they get, what documents, what status are they in when they leave their country, who should come with them."

U.S. officials have met repeatedly with Blix on the interviews, including a session Tuesday evening in New York. UNMOVIC last week received a list of 500 scientists from Iraq, but is still in the relatively early stages of determining whom to talk to and where. "We are determining if an engineer who worked on missiles is now making bicycles," said one U.N. inspection official. "We will begin interviews, but they have not happened yet."

The IAEA tried to conduct two interviews in private inside Iraq, but both scientists insisted that Iraqi government officials be present.

UNMOVIC and the IAEA have complained of U.S. failure to provide intelligence information backing its insistence that Iraq maintains programs to develop weapons of mass destruction.

In recent days, U.N. sources said, Blix has been receiving new information, although it "is a little opaque," one source said. ElBaradei said Tuesday that his inspectors in Iraq still need "more specific information to act on" from Washington. "We are in contact with the administration," he said in an interview with ABC News, "and I hope in the next few weeks we'll be getting much more information for us to be able to zero in on any suspicious activities."

Powell declined to provide specifics on what intelligence the U.S. government was turning over to the inspectors, but said "we want to flood this up" with information that would help inspectors do their job. He made it clear that the administration was waiting to see how initial "items" were handled. "The means by which we get this information is so sensitive, and if it is not handled properly or exploited in the right way, we will lose that channel," he said.

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