Global Policy Forum

By John F. Burns

When the United Nations weapons inspectors who returned here last week after a four-year absence want to discuss the most sensitive issues, they do not trust their office walls.

Fearful of Iraqi bugging, they go for walks in the gardens of their headquarters in a converted Baghdad hotel. Sometimes, they slip one another notes across a table, or use sign language.

And when they set out early each morning for one of the sites where Iraq was found in the 1990s to have been developing nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, or missiles that could carry the weapons beyond Iraq, the inspectors weave through heavy, early-morning traffic at speeds of up to 145 kilometers (90 miles) an hour. They are followed by Iraqi officials intent on figuring out which sites have been chosen for the day's inspections so they can radio a notification ahead.

With little more than a dozen of 1,000 suspected weapons sites checked so far, the inspections have already set a pattern of tension and intrigue that is barely covered over with polite humor and vows of mutual interest.

[President George W. Bush added to the pressure Monday, saying he hoped Baghdad would comply with a UN disarmament ultimatum but that "so far the signs are not encouraging," Agence France-Presse reported from Washington.

["A regime that fires upon American and British pilots is not taking the path of compliance. A regime that sends letters filled with protests and falsehoods is not taking the path of compliance," Bush said at the Pentagon. He also warned the Iraqis to make a "credible and complete" public inventory of any ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction by a UN-imposed deadline of this Sunday or face severe consequences.]

The UN inspectors and the Iraqis entered the process knowing that war would be likely if the inspections foundered, or uncovered a new pattern of Iraqi deceit, and that a generation of iron-fisted rule in Iraq under President Saddam Hussein was hanging in the balance.

For the inspectors, it is a grinding task, burdened by knowledge that hawks in the Bush administration have scant faith in their ability to strip Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction, after the evasion and intransigence with which the Iraqis met an earlier generation of United Nations inspectors in the 1990s. To this, some top officials in the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, or Unmovic, add the suspicion that Washington hard-liners might prefer them to fail, so as to clear a path to a military showdown.

So the inspectors find themselves caught between powerful forces, the Americans and the Iraqis, each pushing in different directions, as they set about a task of huge technical and logistical complexity. One senior inspections official summarized his feelings this way: "Do the Americans want us to succeed? How would I know?" As for the Iraqis, he added: "Basically, they sit across the table from us and tell us, 'We have zero, zero, zero.' And of course, zero, zero, zero is a red flag to our bull."

For the moment, the inspectors are still in shakedown mode, working around the clock to revive an inspection apparatus that has been idle since 1998, when the previous team was withdrawn because of the Iraqis' refusal to allow unhindered access to nuclear sites. A fleet of eight helicopters for aerial surveillance of sites under inspection will begin arriving at the Baghdad airport in crates this week. An electronic de-bugging team will sweep the inspectors' second-story offices at the United Nations headquarters. Monitoring cameras and air samplers installed at many sites years ago, and long since defunct, have to be replaced.

But already, the inspection teams have signaled to the Iraqis that they mean business.

In four-wheel-drive Toyota Land Cruisers, with radiation detectors and the most advanced scanners to detect toxic microbes, the inspectors, in blue baseball caps, head out in the mornings from their hotel on the outskirts of Baghdad - typically going first north, then south, then west, then east, then south again. Their strategy is to delay as long as possible the moment when the Iraqi officials following them can get a fix on where they are heading.

In principle, officials from Iraq's National Monitoring Directorate are in the convoys to cooperate with the inspectors, and to translate. That is especially important at the moment when the United Nations teams arrive at the gates of suspected weapons sites and demand "immediate, unimpeded, unconditional, and unrestricted access," as mandated by Security Council Resolution 1441 that passed unanimously under American pressure last month. The resolution included a stiff warning of "serious consequences" for Iraq - probably war with the United States - if the Iraqis fail to comply.

In practice, the highway chase is part of a grim game of cat and mouse, because the men of the monitoring directorate are there to watch the inspectors like hawks. The Iraqis' first task is to use radios on their dashboards to tell their superiors which military plant, vaccine laboratory or crop-spraying airfield the inspectors are heading for.

For now, the Iraqis' job is mostly one of simple deduction. Until the inspectors set up offices in Iraq's two other principal cities, Basra in the south near Kuwait, and the oil-field center of Mosul in the north, most sites they will choose will be within practicable day-return driving distance of Baghdad. From their initial experiences, inspection officials have concluded that the Iraqis' strategy is to wait until they have a fix on the inspectors' general direction and then to alert all "established" weapons sites in that direction.

So far, at every site the inspectors have visited, the Iraqis have been prepared. The sites' iron gates have been rolled back promptly on the inspectors' arrival. Mostly, plant directors and army generals have been waiting in their offices, and laboratories, workshops, foundries and outdoor testing sites have been staffed, if not always by the engineers and scientists the United Nations teams wanted to see.

Documents, including scientific data, have been quickly provided. No doors have been locked, or kept locked for long after the inspectors have asked for them to be opened.

The contrast with the inspections in the 1990s could hardly be greater. The Iraqis set a pattern then of harassment, culminating in the United Nations' decision to abandon Iraq in 1998, followed by four days of American and British bombing of many of the sites now on the inspectors' list. Inspectors were held for hours at site gates, while scientists and documents were driven away through rear entrances. A trove of documents was found hidden on a chicken farm. Missile parts were discovered at a police station. Senior officials repeatedly denied having weapons programs, until United Nations discoveries forced them to revise.

This time, inspection officials credit the far tougher mandate given to them in Resolution 1441, and American threats of war, for the Iraqi cooperation. "The past is the past; this is a different ball game," said Demetrius Perricos, the Greek-born nuclear chemist who heads the Unmovic field teams that are checking suspected biological, chemical and missile sites. In the 1980s, Perricos, 67, headed the first inspection teams responsible for checking for nuclear weapons programs.

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