By Barbara Crossette
January 8, 1999
UNITED NATIONS -- Reports that the United States used the U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq as cover for spying on President Saddam Hussein are dimming any chances that the inspection system will survive and that its head, Richard Butler, will remain in his job much longer, officials and diplomats here said Thursday.
Some officials expressed concern that the uproar over the spying reports could jeopardize other U.N. disarmament operations or could rekindle suspicions of some member nations about U.S. intentions within the organization.
Thursday, a spokesman for Secretary-General Kofi Annan tempered the statements of Wednesday that Annan had heard nothing but "rumors" about extensive U.S. spying, including activities aimed at weakening Saddam. "If these allegations are true," the spokesman, Fred Eckhard, said, "it would be damaging to the U.N. disarmament efforts worldwide."
In an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald, Butler, an Australian, said he was thinking of leaving the job when his contract expires in June. "I have always said I don't want this job forever," he told the paper.
Since its creation, the Special Commission has been unlike any other U.N. program. It reports directly to the Security Council, not the secretary- general, who formally appoints its executive chairman but only in consultation with the council.
Created in 1991, UNSCOM had no budget within the U.N. system, but existed on handouts, especially from Washington, until two years ago. When the Iraqi oil-for-food program finally began, money was set aside from oil sales for perpetual weapons monitoring.
From its inception, the commission -- originally a 21-member panel of experts without a permanent staff -- has been an intelligence-gathering operation as well as a disarmament agency. Its experts are not international bureaucrats, but arms specialists and scientists on loan from dozens of countries. A very small permanent headquarters staff is augmented periodically and temporarily with inspectors recruited from more than 40 nations, which also provide the extremely sophisticated surveillance equipment and aircraft used for monitoring.
Teams vary in size, depending on the job at hand. It has always been widely assumed that some of the inspectors had backgrounds in intelligence. Some were drawn from special forces units of national armies, departments of government or occasionally private contractors like ground radar experts.
The commission had no means of checking the experts on loan and no special reason to do so, because its function was to ferret out information Iraq that was unwilling to give voluntarily.
"We'll ask a country to provide three linguists, for example," said Charles Duelfer, an American who is deputy executive chairman of the commission. "We don't say where they should come from. We don't care. Their job is to provide good technical translation.
"When we ask for nonproliferation people, where do they come from? The Red Cross doesn't have chemical weapons experts."
The commission seethed with intrigue from the start, as countries that sided with Iraq expected their experts to influence the work, usually with little success. Advance warnings of inspections were initially passed on to Iraqi, apparently by Russians, before the leaks were found and procedures changed, commission officials said.
Last year Russia and France added "political advisers" to the permanent staff. Citizens of other nations said they advisers had been placed there to monitor and influence activity.
The most intense pressure on Butler has come from Russia, a commission official said. Many of his decisions have been criticized by the Russians and the Chinese because they were not consulted.
The work of the commission, which began in 1991 with extensive destruction of ammunition and weapons, evolved, and with that evolution new problems arose.
Butler, Duelfer and Rolf Ekeus, a Swedish diplomat who was the first executive chairman, agree that 1995 was a turning point. That year information that emerged after the defection to Jordan of Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamal, showed the extent to which Iraq had been lying to the inspectors about its nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, as well as missile projects.
The commission responded by asking nations to upgrade surveillance equipment and by establishing a unit led by a Russian and a Briton to deal with Iraqi concealment. New inspections were created to try to outwit the concealment attempts, especially moving weapons and components around continuously.
Ekeus said in an interview Wednesday that he realized that the anticoncealment effort could lead to friction because the Special Republican Guards and other elite troops in charge of moving the weapons also guarded Saddam. Spying on one activity could lead to charges of spying on Saddam, he said.
Butler succeeded Ekeus in July 1997, and by that fall Butler had his first big test of Iraqi noncooperation. At that point, some Security Council members -- and for differing reasons -- began to question what more there was to learn from Iraq. Led by Russia and France, the critics began to press for an end to active disarmament and a switch to a long-term monitoring and surveillance of Iraq, with only occasional inspections. That would be accompanied by a lifting of sanctions.
Last summer, Iraq demonstrated that it was unlikely to allow any intrusive inspections like those of the past. That defiance snowballed into a total break with the Special Commission in October. Inspectors were allowed back in November. But the Iraqis obstructed their work, and the confrontation ended in U.S. and British air strikes in December.
After the attacks, Iraq, which has always accused the United States of spying, said it would not allow UNSCOM to return unless it had a new leader and structure. This week the Iraqis said that no inspections of any kind would be allowed again.
