By Colum Lynch
January 7, 1999
UNITED NATIONS - Despite the US penetration of Saddam Hussein's inner sanctum, the United States faced a difficult task in achieving the stated policy of toppling the Iraqi leader's regime, intelligence analysts said yesterday.
The tools used by the United States to crack Hussein's security fortress - radio scanners, spies, and U-2 photographs - are insufficient to overthrow the government, the sources said.
They spoke a day after the Globe reported that UN weapons inspectors were sharing intelligence with the United States, a report that the State Department confirmed yesterday. The US officials would not detail the precise information gleaned from the UN weapons inspection team, but said it was not intended to be used to topple Hussein's regime.
The analysts say the US intelligence officials seeking to interpret the UN information faced several obstacles: Overhead imagery from U-2 spy planes takes countless hours to interpret, radio intercepts are often degraded by the electronic noise that courses through any city, and it isn't easy for a foreign spy to get close enough to a secretive head of state like Hussein.
The US hunt in 1993 for the Somali clan leader Mohammed Farah Aidid was unsuccessful in catching him, but it did succeed in undermining American goals. In Panama, the US military, with a massive presence in the country, was able to seize General Manuel Antonio Noriega only when he checked into the Vatican nunciature, after days of fruitless pursuit by US troops. Thousands of NATO troops in Bosnia have been unable to arrest the Bosnian officials indicted on war crimes charges, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic.
''This is a very difficult thing to do,'' said William Arkin, a former army intelligence analyst who tracks Iraq's military. ''There is probably no regime that is more security conscious than Saddam Hussein's, because it faces internal and external opposition and attempts by other countries to overthrow it.''
Sources familiar with the US intelligence operation in Iraq said the UN inspectors eavesdropping on the Iraqi military had enormous difficulty penetrating the white noise that clogged their scanners with everything from car radios to chats among military officers.
One source said that the radio intercepts provided coded, elliptical conversations and clues that had to be painstakingly analyzed before they made sense.
''You have to penetrate the noise and find out what you're looking for,'' said Rolf Ekeus, the former executive chairman of the UN Special Commission responsible for ridding Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction. Asked to elaborate, Ekeus said, ''I've already said too much.''
Relying on such information to plan to hit a target in a city twice the size of Paris is pure fantasy, Arkin said. ''You would need a golden BB to hit the target,'' he said.
The news that the United Nations and the United States were sharing intelligence on Iraq has provoked a feud between UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and Washington, which suspects that Annan's aides leaked details of the operation to reporters to undermine the chief UN weapons inspector, Richard Butler. US air raids were launched on Iraq last month after a report by Butler concluded that Iraq had violated its obligations to disarm.
Yesterday morning, after reading the newspaper reports of intelligence-sharing by the UN and the United States, US Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright telephoned Annan ''and read him the riot act,'' according to a US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
After the phone call, Annan released a statement: ''We have no evidence of any kind. We have only rumors'' of shared intelligence.
''Obviously, were these charges true, it would be damaging to the United Nations disarmament work in Iraq and elsewhere,'' Annan said. Aides to the UN chief have been considering a series of proposals that would dismantle UNSCOM and would replace the current economic embargo on Iraq with sanctions directly targeting senior Iraqi officials.
Countering Annan, US officials said yesterday that the Clinton administration would continue to back Butler and UNSCOM.
At the same time, the Clinton administration has urged Hussein's overthrow, and senior US officials have met with Iraqi opposition groups and promised to provide them with surplus American military equipment.
Even so, a State Department spokesman, James P. Rubin, said yesterday, ''At no time did the United States work with anyone at UNSCOM to collect information for the purpose of undermining the Iraqi regime.''
Rubin acknowledged that the purpose of intelligence-sharing was to aid UNSCOM in its efforts to destroy Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Butler, the UN inspection chief, said yesterday that UNSCOM has received assistance from the United States and some 40 other member states. But he denied allowing the United States to use UNSCOM to spy on Iraqis.
''We have never conducted spying for anybody,'' he said. ''Have we facilitated spying? Are we spies? Absolutely not.''
Privately, US officials acknowledged that Washington used the UN information to track Saddam Hussein's movements and to penetrate Iraq's intelligence apparatus.
US officials in the Clinton administration and on Capitol Hill said the incident was likely to damage relations, already chilly, between Washington and Annan, who has consistently favored a more diplomatic approach to dealing with Iraq.
''I think Annan was clearly trying to pull the rug out from us a little bit,'' a congressional aide who closely follows UN policies said on condition of anonymity. ''I'm sure Annan did not support the military strikes. My guess is he was not happy with us going forward.''
The disclosures of intelligence sharing are likely to sharpen divisions in the UN Security Council, which is preparing to debate Iraq's future relationship with the United Nations.
Analysts said it was natural for Washington to take advantage of the UN information. ''I would like to know the country that would do all these things and then not read the results and employ the results for their own ends,'' said Richard Shultz, codirector of the International Security Program at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
David L. Marcus of the Globe Staff contributed from Washington. Material from the Associated Press also was used.
