U.S. Deploys Missiles as Iraq Again Detains U.N. Inspectors : Persian Gulf: Patriot battalions are on way to Saudi Arabia. The move could pave the way for additional forces. Hussein bows to Security Council on helicopter overflights.

The United States announced Tuesday that it was sending two battalions of Patriot missile systems to the Middle East on a day when Iraq again detained a U.N. nuclear inspection team in an action condemned by the Security Council.

Iraq capitulated late Tuesday to U.N. demands that it provide unrestricted helicopter flights for the inspectors. But the Iraqis’ decision to interfere with the 44-member U.N. team in Baghdad angered members of the Security Council.

The Patriot force--roughly 24 launchers with 100 missiles operated by 1,300 soldiers--was sent from Germany and was expected to arrive in Saudi Arabia today. Pentagon officials described the dispatch of the Patriot system, designed to protect military areas against incoming missiles and aircraft, as a step aimed at paving the way for the introduction of more forces into Saudi Arabia, chiefly warplanes.

The American deployment, though anticipated, was yet another sign of the growing resolve to keep the pressure on Iraq to abide by the U.N. resolutions that ended the Gulf War.

The Iraqis accused the U.N. inspectors of being spies. But the Security Council condemned Iraq for preventing them “from carrying out their duty” under U.N. resolutions calling for the destruction of all of Iraq’s capability for producing weapons of mass destruction.

The 44-member team was intercepted by dozens of armed Iraqi guards outside a building in Baghdad after the inspectors copied documents they said provided detailed evidence of Iraq’s attempts to build a nuclear warhead.

As the inspectors remained confined in their vehicles deep into the night, the Security Council, in a statement read by French Ambassador Jean-Bernard Merimee, the council president, demanded that “the inspection team be immediately allowed to leave the site where they are kept without any conditions, and in particular that they can take with them all the documents they deem appropriate.”

In Washington, Pentagon officials said the Patriot missile systems could be operational by late this week. The Pentagon also awaited orders to dispatch as many as 72 warplanes to join about 200 combat aircraft already in place in the Persian Gulf region.

Pentagon officials stressed that for military as well as diplomatic reasons, no new warplanes are expected to arrive in Saudi Arabia until the Patriots are functioning there.

A military official said that having the Patriot batteries in place and operational before any other forces were deployed was “just a prudent step” in light of Iraq’s continued possession of Scud missiles.

One knowledgeable coalition government official said Tuesday that Washington still is uncertain how far it would go if a hostile Iraqi act against U.S. forces were to reopen combat operations.

But Bush Administration officials are considering launching air strikes designed to disrupt normal operations in Iraq and further erode popular support for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the official said. The official added that others in the Administration have argued for a more limited military strike, focused on destroying Iraq’s remaining nuclear, chemical and biological facilities, as well as the command centers from which the government of Hussein rules.

Earlier, Iraq’s ambassador to the United Nations, Abdul Amir Anbari, had said the U.N. inspectors would not be freed until they surrendered the documents and videotapes made during the latest search.

President Bush used stark language to condemn the Iraqi move as “very serious business.” He said of Hussein: “That man doesn’t play by the rules.”

Despite the contrary views of some senior advisers, the President continued to assert confidence that Hussein would ultimately back down. “He’ll get the message,” Bush said during a meeting here with President Carlos Andres Perez of Venezuela.

The accusation of espionage against the head of the U.N. inspection team, David A. Kay, a Houston native, marked a bitter turn in an already tense relationship between the Baghdad regime and those assigned to monitor its military dismantlement.

U.S. government spokesmen in Washington dismissed as nonsense the charge raised in a news conference in Baghdad by Deputy Prime Minister Tarik Aziz, who asserted that the documents sought by Kay and his team were “for CIA purposes.”

Although the Iraqis took a hard line on the inspectors and the documents, Merimee announced that Baghdad had sent the Security Council a letter that council members considered “an unconditional acceptance of resolution 707,” which demands the unrestricted use of helicopters to scour Iraq for evidence of weapons programs.

Council sources said the Iraqis had sent an earlier letter that was deemed unacceptable and was returned. The Iraqis then delivered the second letter that satisfied U.N. demands on the issue of the helicopter flights.

But even before the Iraqi capitulation on the unrestricted helicopter flights for U.N. inspectors, there were signs that a key U.S. ally had looked on Washington’s bellicose talk with less than wholehearted support: British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd said his government felt no sense of urgency about the need again to turn to force.

At a breakfast with reporters, Hurd described the flare-ups of Iraqi intransigence as indications of U.N. success. “Day after day, the U.N. is getting into the guts of their system, and (the Iraqis) are reacting,” Hurd said. “This is a sign that the U.N. is getting where it ought to be.”

An Administration official conceded that the United States accords more importance than Britain to the “timeliness” of the Iraqi disclosures.

With details still unclear about the confrontation over inspectors, Bush himself stressed Tuesday that his Administration wants to “be sure we have all the facts” before mounting any military move.

“You don’t make decisions of this magnitude that affect--could have effect--on human life without having all the information,” the President said as his representatives met behind closed doors with other Security Council members at the United Nations. “I learned that some time ago.”

After reading the Security Council statement condemning Iraq, Merimee refused to reply to questions about what the United Nations would do if Iraq continued to defy it.

At U.N. headquarters here, officials said the new clash had arisen only after earlier signs that the Iraqi officials who detained a U.N. team for the first time on Monday might adopt a more compliant stance.

Iraqi officials, after refusing to permit the U.N. team to take possession of documents they had found in a Baghdad building, reversed field during the night and turned over many of the papers to the inspectors. But the U.N. group discovered that important pieces were missing from that package.

And when the group moved on to a different site on Tuesday and this time attempted to make copies of the documents they found there, they were ordered out of the building and asked to surrender film and videotape, team leader Kay told reporters by satellite telephone.

Kay, the American-born U.N. official, said negotiations between the team and armed Iraqi guards “broke off when the Iraqis demanded, without any compromise, that we turn over all film and videotape that we have taken today, as well as documentation.”

At 3 a.m. in Baghdad, the group had been sitting in their vehicles for more than 14 hours. Kay said 60 armed Iraqi security men were surrounding the U.N. team as it remained confined in six cars and a bus outside the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission building.

U.N. officials said they do not believe the team is in any danger. And Kay, who reported on the confrontation in satellite telephone calls to news organizations and to U.N. offices here and in Geneva, said the team has supplies of water and U.S. combat rations and is prepared for a long stay.

Iraqi officials have insisted the country’s nuclear program has nothing to do with nuclear weapons and have contended that the U.N. helicopter flights represent a violation of Iraq’s sovereignty.

At the United Nations, Iraqi Ambassador Anbari said the documents examined by Kay’s team were merely personnel records and had nothing to do with U.N. business. Aziz, who served as foreign minister during the Gulf War, dismissed as “a flagrant lie” the contention by the U.N. official that his team was being held against its will.

“We told him simply that you have no right to take these documents and no right to photograph them,” Aziz said as reported by the Associated Press.

“He wants the documents not for the purposes of the United Nations, but for CIA purposes,” Aziz said. Asked later by reporters if the inspection team included any CIA representatives, Bush shook his head in disgust and said: “Imagine asking a question like that.”

As his Administration sought to muster new support on Tuesday for a firm stance against Iraq, Bush said he had spoken by telephone with French President Francois Mitterrand. But American allies sounded less upset and less bellicose than the United States itself about the repeated Iraqi defiance.

Whenever the Iraqis try to evade inspections, Hurd told reporters, the U.N. need simply to apply constant pressure. “We just have to be relentless with them,” he said. “We have to press all the time and gradually get there.”

But he had no doubt that even the still-incomplete U.N. enforcement represents an important success. “Week by week, it’s becoming impossible to imagine Saddam Hussein terrorizing the world with his weapons,” Hurd said.

In their speeches to the U.N. General Assembly, neither Soviet Foreign Minister Boris D. Pankin nor French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas mentioned the problem of Iraqi intransigence. After meeting with Secretary of State James A. Baker III, Pankin was asked if they had discussed the Iraqi refusal to allow the helicopters.

“I would like to say that specifically we did not touch upon this,” Pankin replied.

Times staff writer Melissa Healy in Washington contributed to this story.