U.N. Inspector Recounts Group’s Eviction

Fernando Conde got the official word at 9 p.m. in Baghdad: The Iraqis were through talking, and they wanted him out of town.

Within two hours, Conde and five other American members of the U.N. weapons inspection team had piled into their cars Thursday, left their fenced-in Baghdad compound and set off on a high-speed drive 300 miles along the empty desert highway to the Jordanian border.

The United Nations had asked Iraq to let the Americans take a regular U.N. flight to Bahrain. Baghdad refused.

“I think it was kind of silly on the Iraqis’ part. That’s just a personal observation,” Conde said of the long drive that had brought him and his fellow Americans to Amman, where they trudged--haggard and bleary-eyed--into a hotel lobby Friday morning. At center stage in an international drama, they were trailed by a crowd of journalists.

The eviction of American inspectors ended one phase of the diplomatic war of wills between the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the U.N. Security Council. The Iraqis had threatened to expel the Americans, and now they were gone.

But the move also shut down the inspections. Richard Butler, the director of the U.N. Special Commission, or UNSCOM, in charge of overseeing the dismantling of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, said inspections will not proceed without the Americans. That, in the words of a U.N. Security Council statement, could lead to “serious consequences” for the Iraqi regime.

Conde, a bearded, athletic-looking 30-year-old, considers himself far from such matters.

With UNSCOM permission, he agreed to speak with a small group of reporters on condition that he not be asked about policy issues, his political opinions or details of the inspection team’s progress.

He made clear his own disappointment at being kicked out.

“It’s an important mission,” stressed Conde, who was the only inspector to speak to reporters. “Getting rid of weapons of mass destruction, that’s one of the most important jobs you can do.”

Conde, a communications technician from Virginia, denied being a spy or having a military background.

He said he began working with UNSCOM two years ago and has been on six to eight missions with various teams looking for clues to any chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs that Iraq may be hiding.

Guarded but matter-of-fact in his answers, Conde said he felt no fear during those last days in Baghdad despite rising international tensions.

He and his team kept up with events on satellite television news. He heard that there were anti-American demonstrations taking place nearby in Baghdad, but he never saw them. There may have been Iraqi security personnel nearby when they went out on inspections, but “the environment was not hostile at all,” he recounted.

Inspectors from other countries kidded the Americans about all the trouble they had caused, but no one blamed the U.S. members, he recalled, saying, “We’re a pretty tightknit group.”

The last normal day of inspections was Oct. 28, the day before Iraq delivered a letter to the U.N. Security Council demanding that the Americans leave the team.

After that, Conde said, their work settled into a ritual: The teams would go out in the morning to sites to attempt inspections. An Iraqi official would inform their team leaders that no Americans would be permitted entry. Then team leaders would scuttle the missions, and they would all return to the U.N. base, in a former hotel near one of Baghdad’s many war memorials.

For Conde, the chief effect of the standoff was “more boredom than anything else--wanting to do a job and not being able to do it.”

Even now, Conde said, he hopes that he and the other Americans will be allowed back in.

Rumors began reaching the inspectors early Thursday afternoon that the Iraqis were going to evict them immediately, but Conde said the news was not confirmed to them until 9 p.m, and they had to be out by 11 p.m. Most of their gear was already packed.

Butler, in New York, wanted all the team members to leave together by plane. But the Iraqis rejected that and sent two Mercedes-Benz sedans, carrying four police officers each, to make sure the Americans got to Jordan swiftly. One of the Mercedeses led the convoy, and the other brought up the rear.

Officials at the United Nations suggested that there may have been an element of payback in the Iraqi refusal to let the Americans leave by plane. They said Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tarik Aziz last week asked for a waiver of restrictions on Iraqi flights so that he could fly directly to New York from Baghdad, but the U.S. objected--forcing him to drive to Amman, the Jordanian capital, to get on a plane.

Leaving Baghdad, Conde said, the one thing on his mind was “trying to stay awake.”

In a display of solidarity, an Australian and a British inspector went with the six Americans--”to keep them company,” the U.N. said. The convoy arrived at the Jordanian border crossing at dawn. There the group got into cars sent from Amman to pick them up.

In rumpled clothes and carrying their own luggage, the weary eight checked into their hotel at 9:30 a.m. and spent the rest of the day lounging, catching meals in a sports bar and dodging reporters.

At nightfall, they boarded a commercial flight to Bahrain to rejoin the rest of the weapons inspectors, 68 in all, who by then had flown out of Baghdad on a U.N. transport aircraft. That leaves only a skeleton UNSCOM crew in Baghdad: seven people to maintain the U.N. base and 12 Chileans who fly and service U.N. helicopters.

For the first time since permanent monitors were sent to the country three years ago, the Iraqi regime was free of its watchdogs. U.N. officials in New York say they are worried about what that could mean in the future.

“Clearly, they could be up to nasty stuff,” said Ewen Buchanan, an UNSCOM spokesman.