U.N. Inspectors’ Work, Ties to U.S. Shrouded in Mystery

It was a familiar image in the international campaign to destroy Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction: A U.N. weapons inspection team was cooling its heels in a Baghdad hotel, barred for three days from visiting a military site suspected of containing damning evidence of President Saddam Hussein’s crusade to build a nuclear bomb.

But at that moment, thousands of miles away and far from the eyes of the outside world, there were other images as critical as they are now controversial quietly appearing on a monitoring screen:

A U.S. spy satellite high over Baghdad was filming a shell game in the Iraqi desert. Dozens of giant discs were emerging from under Gargantuan dunes in the military compound that the Iraqis had placed off-limits to the inspectors. Then, the discs were dangling from towering cranes, landing on scores of flatbed tank transporters and, finally, sliding across the blistering June sands to another military camp six miles away.

Hussein was hiding something. And Washington was watching.

Within hours, a coded message was sent from Washington to Baghdad to the U.N. team’s leader, David A. Kay, via the inspection team’s logistics headquarters on the small island state of Bahrain.

Not surprisingly, the next day the Iraqis permitted Kay’s team to visit the first site. But, rather than stopping there, the U.N. team forced its way on to the second compound, which the interpreters of the satellite photos had pinpointed near the Iraqi town of Fallouja. And there, despite the best efforts of Iraq’s security personnel, who even fired gunshots over a U.N. vehicle, the team finally spotted and photographed the giant discs at close range for the first time.

It was a watershed event in the U.N. inspectors’ painstaking crusade to destroy Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction--if not for what they had found that day, then certainly for how they found it.

The 12-foot discs were calutrons, 40-ton magnets used to manufacture weapons-grade uranium for nuclear bombs--the first solid proof that Hussein did, indeed, have a nuclear weapons program so aggressive, advanced and clandestine that arms experts later concluded that his regime was just months away from owning an atom bomb.

But the discovery by the U.N. sleuths more than a year ago--one of hundreds of such persistent inspections by a mysterious crew of technicians, scientists, bomb-disposal crews and nuclear, chemical and biological arms experts assembled from nations throughout the West and the East--set a far more important, long-term precedent in the U.N.-sanctioned effort to cripple Hussein’s war machine.

It broke ground for a unique flow of information between the international intelligence community and the largely civilian technicians charged with seeking out and destroying Iraq’s lethal weaponry.

“This was the day when we were establishing our bona fides with the intelligence community,” Kay, a civilian nuclear expert who left the U.N. commission last January after leading three separate missions into Iraq, explained last week. “This was really the beginning of a unique relationship. They were giving raw intelligence data to people who didn’t have security clearances.

“But it is that relationship that has made this whole operation work.”

Swedish diplomat Rolf Ekeus, chairman of the U.N. Special Commission in charge of the search-and-destroy missions into Iraq, has publicly praised the unprecedented assistance that U.N. arms sleuths have received from U.S. intelligence agencies. The agencies regularly have fed U.N. crews leads obtained from satellite photos, U-2 spy planes and Iraqi defectors--data the United Nations has used to break through many of the obstacles Iraq has placed in the way of the disarmament effort.

But the relationship remains, like many members of the U.N. teams, shrouded in mystery. It is a relationship that, in many ways, lies at the heart of the latest crisis, the confrontation between two U.S.-led inspection teams and Iraqi authorities that pushed the United States to the brink of war.

Iraqi officials barred the U.N. teams from entering Baghdad’s Agriculture Ministry on July 5 and later organized hostile street demonstrations to harass the inspectors.

The Iraqis asserted that the two American team leaders--army Maj. Karen Jansen and Mississippi native Mark Silver--were the latest in a stream of CIA agents disguised as inspectors whose real mission in Baghdad was to engineer the overthrow of Hussein’s authoritarian regime.

The accusation was an old one. Three months after Kay’s nuclear weapons team unearthed the calutrons in Fallouja last summer, he was branded a CIA agent by Tarik Aziz, Iraq’s deputy prime minister.

That occurred after Kay’s inspectors, while inside Iraq’s atomic energy commission, reported their findings via satellite telephone to the U.S. State Department; this happened during the four days the team was under Iraqi detention in a bus in the commission’s parking lot. The United Nations later officially apologized for the inspectors’ giving the information directly to the Americans.

Iraq’s longstanding demand that Americans be removed from inspection teams appeared to have triumphed for the first time last week, when Ekeus agreed to a compromise that let a team of Germans, Swiss, Swedes and Finns enter the Agriculture Ministry.

The agreement to remove team members from nations that had taken part in the Gulf War--including Americans--was roundly criticized by many U.S. Congress members and several Bush Administration analysts.

But with Ekeus insisting last week that American experts will take part in future missions in Iraq, the potential for another, worse clash between U.N. inspection teams and Iraq remains high.

And, just as potential for renewed conflict persisted throughout the week, so did the question behind it: Who are these inspectors and what are their ties, if any, to Western intelligence agencies?

Officially, the United Nations refuses to answer such questions. In a policy that has deepened the mystery surrounding the inspectors and fueled Iraqi conspiracy theories, officials of the U.N. special commission will not reveal background information on any of its 900 technicians, scientists and analysts. They are volunteers from more than 35 nations who, in some cases, have risked their lives during their 40-plus missions.

As a result, and in marked contrast with the candor of Kay--a Houston-born nuclear weapons expert who now heads a London-based international trade group called the Uranium Institute--virtually all present inspection team members and even the support staff of drivers, secretaries and doctors remain under a cloak of U.N. secrecy.

Even the site for the operational headquarters for the commission could not be more appropriate. Bahrain, a moderate though little-known Persian Gulf emirate just off the coast of Saudi Arabia, is one of the most secretive spots on the globe.

The island’s southern sector, home to a sprawling military facility called the American Support Unit, has been off limits to all but members of the Bahrain Defense Forces and U.S. military personnel who manage and lease it from the emirate as a supply depot for U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf.

Bahraini newspapers, tightly controlled by the emir and his Cabinet, never write about the base. And the media here almost never carry stories about the U.N. inspectors.

“This is a very, very, very low-key place,” said one Western diplomat. “It’s not just the U.S. military presence or the U.N. inspection teams. It’s everything, and it’s in the culture. The Bahrainis are quite pleased that the world doesn’t really know exactly where they are or what’s going on here.”

The inspectors and their aides are all under explicit orders never to speak to the media or publicly reveal anything about their personal backgrounds; the United Nations says this protects the inspectors and their families.

It is a policy rigidly followed. During a briefing at Bahrain’s Holiday Inn for the team that searched the Agriculture Ministry last week, Ekeus reminded inspectors not to reveal to the Iraqis any details of their training, backgrounds or personal lives. When he was asked such a question during an earlier news conference, Achim Biermann, a German and the team’s leader, smiled and said only, “I do not like to go much into my personal background.”

But through interviews with present and former inspectors and a review of 15 months of U.N. mission reports, a picture emerges of this international force of detectives. They are a diverse group of highly trained weapons specialists for whom secrecy comes naturally.

Many of them are, or were, attached to defense research facilities in the United States, Russia and Europe. They include fearless, dedicated German army sappers who have spent their lives hunting, disarming and destroying the lethal chemical weapons that Adolf Hitler’s scientists left behind.

There are Soviet and American nuclear disarmament experts who have spent weeks, months and years opening boxcars, trucks, nuclear stockpiles and missile silos to monitor compliance with Strategic Arms Limitation treaties.

There are communications wizards, high-tech operators from as far away as New Zealand; they can repair a satellite telephone with crude tools in the middle of the desert. And there are scientists and technicians trained and employed at top-secret defense installations throughout the world.

As Kay put it: “To disassemble a chemical weapon or a nuclear weapons research facility, you have to have worked in one or known how to build one. If you need someone to photograph documents, at some point in his career, he’s operated a camera photographing documents. You’ve got to use some people like that because they have the knowledge. . . .

“But these people are not spies. . . . No one is engaging in activities that would be considered spying against Iraq.”

Kay conceded that previous teams have included technicians on loan from intelligence agencies. But he and others said such technicians were among the most valuable components of what they insist was an otherwise one-way relationship between intelligence communities and the commission.

Kay and other analysts conceded that, in the eyes of the Iraqis, the line between espionage against Iraq and the U.N. mission of ferreting out clues to a vast, clandestine arms program is so fine it blurs easily. This is particularly the case in the view of a regime that constantly fears a CIA-inspired plot to overthrow or assassinate Hussein.

“There is this built-in contradiction for the Iraqis, who are now being forced to reveal and destroy a top-secret weapons program that this regime has worked so hard to build up and protect,” Kay said. “So it isn’t really surprising that this fine line between spying and inspecting is perhaps lost on Saddam Hussein.”

Kay, who left the U.N. commission partly because he felt that Iraqi claims that he was a CIA spy had so compromised him that he could not return to Baghdad, says the U.N. commission’s policy of secrecy for its inspectors has done more harm than good. It has served to confirm the Iraqis’ worst fears and has done little to counter their charges, he believes.

“A lot of people have gotten the wrong impression” of the inspectors’ roles and duties, he said. “By remaining silent, you simply confirm what everyone already believes on the street.”

Few agree more than Abdallah Akrouk, the Jordanian director of the U.N. Information Center in Bahrain and supposedly the official spokesman for the special commission. “It is very embarrassing to my position,” the 17-year U.N. veteran said. “The (commission’s) driver knows more about the mission than I do.”