U.N. Team Flies to Iraq; Copters Are Due Today

A team of U.N. ballistic weapons experts flew to Baghdad on Tuesday, preparing to test Iraq’s willingness to allow U.N. inspectors free use of helicopters in their search for Scud missile launchers and rockets.

Inspectors tracking Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, conventional and biological weapons programs have until now been able to operate only near Baghdad because of the lack of helicopters.

The U.N. Special Commission overseeing the weapons search announced a few hours after the team left that Iraq had given “diplomatic clearance” for the three U.N. helicopters to enter from Turkey.

Alastair Livingston, head of the commission’s regional office in Bahrain, said the helicopters will make the four-hour flight to Baghdad today and should be ready for surveillance flights on Thursday.

The Iraqis gave in to U.N. demands last week and agreed that the three helicopters, supplied by Germany, could be used by U.N. inspectors for unrestricted flights to suspected weapons sites.

Saddam Hussein’s government has repeatedly stalled on compliance with Gulf War cease-fire resolutions set by the U.N. Security Council. One of the conditions is elimination of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

Douglas Englund, an American who leads the 20-member ballistics team, said he will fly to western Iraq and supervise destruction of the 28 Scud fixed-site launchers used to attack Israel during the war.

He also intends to blow up one assembled and one still incomplete super gun halfway between Baghdad and the city of Mosul. Other plans, he said, are to make surprise calls on undeclared Iraqi sites that may still harbor Scud missiles, which also were fired at Saudi Arabia.

Meanwhile, David Kay, leader of the 44-member U.N. team involved in a five-day standoff in Baghdad last week over documents detailing Iraq’s secret nuclear weapons program, was preparing his report for his superiors.

The documents Kay brought out of Iraq with his team--25,000 pages and 19 hours of videotape and more than 700 rolls of film of documents--already have gone to International Atomic Energy Agency headquarters in Austria for study.