Iraq Inspections Set to Enter New Phase

Weapons inspections in Iraq are about to move into a more intense phase, a deliberate and targeted effort involving Iraqi scientists and U.S. intelligence that could prove that Baghdad has not fully disarmed, U.S. and U.N. officials say.

Chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix has formally asked Iraqi authorities for the names of scientists involved in its weapons programs, the first step in preparations for sensitive interviews, a U.N. official said Friday. Further, a U.S. official said the CIA is preparing to hand over “the good stuff,” key information it says could help the inspectors find hidden weapons, although officials say there is no single smoking gun.

The U.S. and U.N.’s early impression of Iraq’s 11,807-page weapons declaration is that it is an empty shell full of recycled material that leaves unanswered important questions about Baghdad’s capabilities.

In Vienna, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammed Baradei, said Friday that most of the 2,400-page nuclear portion of the report “is material we already had before.”

The declaration includes 300 pages of new information in Arabic covering activities from 1991 to 2002 that the agency is still translating and analyzing, he said. Iraq says there have been no prohibited activities in the last four years.

“We cannot take that statement at face value,” Baradei said, adding that further inspections are necessary to assess whether Iraq poses a nuclear threat.

In New York, Blix has also said that much of the document looks familiar.

“Of course there is duplication,” he said this week. “You don’t put out a 12,000-page report in 30 days without something old.”

In Iraq on Friday, inspectors met with their first significant delay during a visit to the Communicable Disease Control Center. The inspection team was allowed into the building but was unable to enter several locked rooms, prompting them to use their special hotline to senior authorities in Baghdad. Iraq’s liaison, Gen. Hussam Mohammed Amin, arrived two hours later but couldn’t open the doors. The inspectors sealed the doors and will return later, perhaps today, to try again.

A team of inspectors also visited the Ibn al Haithem Co., an industrial facility for the military north of Baghdad.

By Tuesday, Baradei and Blix will provide the full U.N. Security Council with “sanitized” copies of Iraq’s declaration, with information about nuclear weapons, the formulas for chemical and biological weapons and the names of suppliers of material that could be used for weapons removed for “commercial secrecy and liability reasons.”

The council’s five permanent members -- the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia -- have received uncensored versions because they already possess nuclear know-how. On Thursday, Blix and the 15-member Security Council will discuss the experts’ assessments.

“It’s a pretty crummy declaration. It’s a pretty bold attempt to mislead us on things we really have a lot of information about,” said a well-placed administration official who requested anonymity. “Iraq should have been red-faced when it handed this over to the U.N. It not only shows that Iraq is willing to lie and deceive, but also that it has no shame.”

U.S. officials are particularly concerned about the status of 550 shells containing mustard gas, weapons Iraq has used against Iran as well as its own ethnic Kurdish population. An additional 150 bombs that may have contained biological agents are also unaccounted for.

U.S. intelligence is still combing through the massive declaration, but the first round of analysis shows that Baghdad hasn’t explained what happened to 20 tons of so-called growth media that can be used for biological weapons and 200 tons of chemicals that can be used in the making of VX, a nerve agent.

Those items are left over from the inspections by an earlier U.N. team, which left Iraq in 1998 on the eve of U.S. airstrikes.

The deeper that U.S. intelligence analysts get into the document, the more glaring the discrepancies they find, leading to a toughening stand by U.S. officials.

Despite the apparent omissions, Washington is not ready to convene a Security Council meeting to declare Iraq in material breach of a U.N. resolution on Iraqi disarmament and set the stage for military action.

“We’re not there yet,” the deputy U.S. ambassador to the U.N., James Cunningham, said Friday.

The U.S. has already provided inspectors with suggestions of sites to visit and people to talk to, said a U.S. official who asked not to be named. But it has been withholding the “good stuff” until analysis of the declaration is complete and intelligence services can determine “what to give and when to give it,” the official said.

Part of the next phase’s strategy will be to focus on Iraqi scientists, who have proved to be the key in the past to finding caches of secret materials and documents.

Resolution 1441 provides inspectors with the right to interview weapons experts and their family members, and to take them out of the country to shield them from intimidation by Iraqi authorities.

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Farley reported from the United Nations and Wright from Washington.