Defections Uncover a Pot Full of Lies : Iraq is forced to admit deceiving U.N. about its secret arms

The first significant political fallout from the defection of two top-level Iraqi officials has come not from Amman, where they have been given political asylum and where reportedly they are talking with U.S. intelligence officials, but from Baghdad. There Saddam Hussein’s regime has been forced to admit that, well, yes, there may be a few things it never got around to telling U.N. inspectors about Iraq’s clandestine weapons programs.

Lt. Gen. Hussein Kemal Majid, the most important of the defectors, was in charge of Iraq’s highly secret pre-Gulf War effort to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. He was also the lead negotiator in talks with the U.N. special commission that was established by the Security Council to oversee the postwar destruction of all of Iraq’s unconventional weapons. He is, besides, a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, from which familial vantage point he would have had additional access to closely held secrets. Majid knows where the bodies are buried; he himself undoubtedly had a hand in some of the interments. When he led his family caravan across the border into Jordan last week he brought with him information that intelligence specialists are likely to regard as pure gold.

Majid’s prominence as a member of the inner circle, coupled with the personal humiliation Saddam Hussein suffered because two of his daughters, married to Majid and his brother, accompanied the military defectors into exile, is reflected in the heated if somewhat contradictory statements being issued by Baghdad.

One moment Majid is little more than an insignificant “traitor dwarf” who fled the country to avoid prosecution for misuse of public funds. In the next breath he is denounced as the initiator of a destructive conspiracy--kept carefully hidden from his superiors--to deceive the United Nations about the real extent of Iraq’s clandestine weapons projects and what is left of them. With that claim comes the first big payoff from the defections.

Fearing what Majid can reveal about Iraq’s attempts to hide remnants of its unconventional weapons programs, Baghdad is now forced to admit that its past assurances of full cooperation and compliance with U.N. resolutions were lies. Now, it says, it is inviting U.N. officials to come to Iraq to collect all the information it accuses Majid of having withheld. Rolf Ekeus, the official in charge of the special commission, says he will leave for Baghdad “almost immediately.”

It’s of course preposterous to suggest that Iraq’s attempt to hoodwink U.N. officials was solely Majid’s doing. The deception was a matter of Iraqi state policy, a gamble that the U.N. inspection team and the Security Council could be fooled if the government would provide some information and then claim that that’s all there is, there isn’t any more. Such a high-stakes roll of the dice could only have been undertaken on Saddam Hussein’s order.

Iraq’s admission vindicates American suspicions--based, so it seems, on very sound intelligence--that Iraq has consistently tried to evade compliance with U.N. requirements. The United States and Britain are determined that the economic sanctions on Baghdad not be lifted until full compliance has been assured beyond any doubt. They are right, and events of the last few days only emphasize the soundness of that policy.