Global Policy Forum

By Colum Lynch

As he nears the end of his three-year hunt for Iraq's biological and chemical weapons, Hans Blix, the United Nations' chief weapons inspector, says he suspects that Baghdad possessed little more than "debris" from a former, secret weapons program when the United States invaded the country in March.

The Swedish disarmament expert, who has served since March 1, 2000, as executive chairman of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, said the failure to turn up evidence of weapons of mass destruction more than two months after the fall of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has led him to downgrade his assessment of the threat Hussein's government posed.

Blix, 75, who will step down June 30, said there is too much uncertainty associated with Iraqi weapons programs to conclude there are no hidden arsenals in Iraq. He also said he remains deeply puzzled by the former Iraqi government's efforts to deceive and mislead U.N. inspectors for 12 years after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

"Why did they conduct themselves as they did throughout the '90s?" Blix said in an interview last week. "Why deny access if you are not hiding something? What I am groping at now is whether pride was at the root of it."

U.S. officials and some former U.N. inspectors said it is naive to believe the former Iraqi government abandoned its quest for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. President Bush and other senior U.S. officials maintain they are confident that proscribed weapons will be found.

But Blix said assertions by Iraqi officials and defectors that they had destroyed the bulk of their weapons programs might turn out to be true. The claims were long dismissed by U.S. intelligence officials and U.N. weapons experts. Blix added that Iraq's failure to account for arsenals that existed before the 1991 war "does not mean they exist."

Blix said a series of suspicious discoveries during his inspections of Iraq -- including those of a crude, remotely piloted aircraft; documents on a banned nuclear program in a scientist's home; and 12 chemical warheads at a weapons depot -- were likely remnants of a destroyed stockpile. "They could have been the tip of an iceberg, but they could also have been debris," Blix said. "Now as we look back on it and they don't find anything, well, maybe more likely debris."

Under the cease-fire agreement ending the 1991 war, Iraq was obliged to provide a full account of its banned weapons to U.N. inspectors. It later admitted that it had declared only a portion of the weapons in its arsenal, saving the rest in case they were needed to defend the country against a new attack by U.S. forces, according to Ewen Buchanan, a spokesman for the U.N. weapons agency.

Iraqi officials said that as U.N. inspectors closed in on their hidden caches, uncovering dozens of calutrons, a key component of a uranium enrichment program, they decided to destroy the rest of the secret arsenal. The Iraqis would later claim they had destroyed virtually all of their deadly agents, including VX nerve agent and anthrax, and banned weapons at several sites around the country without U.N. knowledge or supervision.

Iraq's assertions were generally dismissed by U.N. inspectors, who could never confirm the exact amount of weaponry destroyed and continued to uncover new evidence of secret programs that Iraq had never declared. Blix said he is now lending greater credence to assertions by senior Iraqi officials and a prominent defector, Gen. Hussein Kamel, that Iraq had destroyed its weapons -- and the bulk agents from which to manufacture them -- in the early 1990s but had preserved the program, hoping to restart production once sanctions were lifted and inspectors left the country.

"The destruction of weapons was largely finished in 1994," Blix said. "Thereafter, [U.N. inspectors] destroyed a number of facilities and installations because they had concluded that these had been active in the production of weapons . . . but weapons, no."

Kamel, the former head of Iraq's weapons program who defected in 1994, told U.N. inspectors and U.S. intelligence officials in Amman, Jordan, in August 1995 that he had ordered the destruction of all Iraq's biological and chemical weapons and components of its nuclear weapons program in the early 1990s. But Kamel, a brother-in-law of Hussein who was assassinated when he returned from exile to Iraq in 1996, said Baghdad sought to conceal documents, computer disks, equipment and blueprints that could be used to restart a weapons program.

U.S. military and intelligence officials at the time credited Kamel with providing invaluable insight into Iraq's programs. But neither U.S. nor U.N. officials put much stock in his claims that the weapons had been destroyed. Blix said it would not be "prudent" to reach a judgment on the basis of one defector's account. But he added that Kamel's claims have been echoed by several Iraqi scientists -- including Hussein's former science adviser, Amir Saadi -- who have surrendered to U.S. authorities and, Blix said, have no reason to lie."Kamel's statement, I think, was discounted for years," Blix said. "The suspicions were that he had not told the truth."

But, Blix said, "The more time that passes without any finds," the more it is "reasonable to begin to ask oneself if there were or not any weapons."

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