New Iraqi Plan Would Free U.N. Inspectors : Gulf dispute: The Security Council is urged to send Swedish diplomat Ekeus to hear Baghdad’s complaints.

Iraq offered a formula late Wednesday to allow 44 besieged U.N. nuclear inspectors to go free and to take with them documents they had seized--a plan that the Security Council’s president said “could be a breakthrough” in a tense, two-day standoff.

The compromise, proposed in a letter delivered to the Security Council by Iraqi Ambassador Abdul Amir Anbari, reversed Iraq’s earlier refusal to even consider freeing the inspectors, who spent their second night in six cars and a bus surrounded by Iraqi troops in the parking lot of the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission building in Baghdad.

“It could be a breakthrough,” French Ambassador Jean-Bernard Merimee, the council president for September, said of the Iraqi offer. “We hope it will be a breakthrough. The first impression is a good one.”

The letter, couched in hard-line language, despite its conciliatory substance, blamed David A. Kay, the American chairman of the inspection team, for causing the controversy.

Iraq urged the council to send Rolf Ekeus, the Swedish diplomat charged with overseeing destruction of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, to Baghdad within 48 hours to discuss Iraq’s complaints about Kay and his team. It said the inspectors would be freed once Ekeus arrives in the Iraqi capital.

The letter said that if Ekeus does not go to Baghdad, Iraq still would release the inspectors, provided they and Iraqi authorities “jointly draw up a record of all the documents and photographs taken by the team before the team is authorized to remove anything whatsoever from the site.” It said that any papers not included in the inventory must not be considered evidence of any sort of violation by Iraq of the terms of the Gulf War cease-fire.

In seeking to defuse a crisis that had provoked the White House to consider possible military action, Iraq followed its now-familiar practice of first rejecting U.N. demands, then ultimately giving in before the United States and its allies respond with military force.

“The letter gives hope (that) the Iraqis are caving in to massive pressure,” said David Hannay, Britain’s U.N. representative.

Only a few hours before his government delivered the seemingly conciliatory letter, Iraqi Foreign Minister Ahmed Hussein Khudayer had firmly rebuffed efforts by U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar to resolve the crisis. Perez de Cuellar told reporters that the foreign minister had delivered a “restatement of the Iraqi position . . . nothing new.”

But the apparent Iraqi capitulation came almost exactly 24 hours after Baghdad abruptly accepted a Security Council demand for unrestricted helicopter flights by U.N. teams delegated to seek out and destroy Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. That agreement also followed several days of Iraqi intransigence.

The latest compromise was delivered well after midnight Baghdad time.

Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, described the documents as a “gold mine” of details about a clandestine Iraqi nuclear weapons program. Testifying on Capitol Hill, Powell declined to provide other details of the documents.

Iraqi officials, both in Baghdad and at the United Nations, said that, if the personnel records fell into the hands of Israeli intelligence, the workers might be killed.

Foreign Minister Hussein told reporters after his meeting with Perez de Cuellar: “We will not permit anyone to take possession of documents that relate to the personal life of Iraqi scientists and experts. If the personnel file about the life of Iraqi scientists is taken away, we are certain that they will be assassinated by Israeli intelligence.”

Kay, the chairman of the inspectors, seemed to confirm Iraqi claims about the nature of the papers. In one of his frequent calls to Western media outlets from his portable satellite telephone, Kay told British television: “We have the names of the people involved in the Iraqi nuclear program.” He added that the papers also include “financial information on procurement and sources of procurement, both domestic and foreign, for this program.”

The 44 nuclear inspectors include about 20 Americans. The rest are from Canada, Britain, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Morocco, Egypt and Syria. But U.N. officials refused to reveal the identities of Kay’s colleagues.

In its letter to the Security Council, Iraq complained that all the U.N. teams are top-heavy with Americans who, Baghdad charged, harbor hostile intent toward Iraq.

The team is one of a dozen or so that have been directed to find and destroy Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, biological and ballistic missile capability. Under terms of the cease-fire that ended the Gulf War, Iraq agreed to cooperate with the destruction. But, in practice, Baghdad has tried to frustrate the inspectors at every turn before ultimately capitulating.

For instance, after refusing for weeks to permit ballistic missile inspectors to use German-supplied helicopters, Iraq on Tuesday acquiesced in the demand for unrestricted use of the aircraft. The ballistic missile team said it needed the copters to make surprise inspections of sites where missiles were thought to be hidden. Without the craft, the inspectors said, they could not reach suspected sites before Iraqi troops could remove the missiles. The detained nuclear inspectors had not asked for helicopters because they were reviewing files in the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission building.

Perez de Cuellar said the inspectors were uncomfortable but in no real danger: “They are well fed and they have (sanitary) facilities, but they have been in a bus for a long time. We will continue our efforts.”

British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd warned that there would be “grave” consequences if Baghdad refused to back down.

“I don’t think we should underestimate what has already been achieved,” he said of the inspections. “They are getting into the guts of Saddam Hussein’s machinery, and the fact that they are getting into the guts is causing this reaction.”