Inspectors Face Iraq’s ‘Dark Years’

U.S. intelligence analysts were alarmed when spy satellite photos last month suddenly showed dozens of trucks near a former Iraqi biological weapons facility on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Was Saddam Hussein again producing botulinum toxin, which causes botulism, at the Taji military base? Was he moving Republican Guard equipment in fear of a U.S. airstrike? Hauling animal feed?

“It’s open to interpretation,” said a CIA official.

Similar photos last spring showed trucks carting steel tanks to Falluja, a former chemical weapons facility. Had the so-called “devil’s kitchen” resumed production of deadly sarin, cyclosarin and mustard gas? Or was it, as Iraq claims, producing pesticide to fight an infestation of white fly?

Commercial satellite pictures last week showed new buildings at several sites once used for Iraq’s nuclear weapons program. Was it evidence that Baghdad had resumed illegal nuclear activity?

Not until someone looks inside, a U.N. official said.

These and other troubling questions will form the backdrop when President Bush addresses the U.N. General Assembly on Thursday. He is expected to declare that Iraq has illegally built or is pursuing weapons of mass destruction, and to warn that the United States will act alone unless the world community moves quickly and decisively to disarm Iraq.

After months of threatening war against Iraq, Bush administration officials now say they will consider a final U.N. effort to force Baghdad to immediately accept highly intrusive weapons inspections. If Hussein refused, or failed to cooperate, he would face military attack.

Iraq has barred the U.N. inspectors since December 1998. If they now return, their task will be daunting.

U.N. officials have identified about 700 potential sites for initial inspection, including up to 100 places where clandestine weapons work might have begun over the last four years. Just checking the known sites could take a year, officials said.

The priority now is “to tackle the ‘Dark Years,’ ” said Ewen Buchanan of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission in New York, which is responsible for ferreting out evidence of chemical weapons, biological agents and ballistic missiles in Iraq. “What has happened since the 1998 withdrawal of inspectors?”

The answer is far from clear. After being gone for four years, inspectors not only would need new cameras, computers and cars--they also would need a mop. U.N. officials say a flock of pigeons has taken roost in the former inspection chief’s Baghdad office, laying eggs on the sofa and soiling the desk and floor.

Established after the U.S.-led coalition forced Iraq from Kuwait in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the U.N. Special Commission was created to verify Iraq’s commitment to get rid of chemical weapons, biological agents and most missiles and warheads. The work was expected to last about a year.

Seven years later, teams from the U.N. and International Atomic Energy Agency had uncovered far larger quantities and far more dangerous weaponry than anyone expected, including a previously unknown nuclear weapons program that appeared within months of building a crude atomic bomb.

Iraq’s fierce resistance ended the inspections. By the time the last U.N. teams withdrew in 1998, just before a punitive bombing campaign by U.S. and British forces, they had dismantled or destroyed hundreds of ballistic missiles, huge stores of chemical and biological warfare agents, and sophisticated nuclear laboratories, factories and equipment, according to U.N. reports and inspectors.

But dozens of disarmament issues were left unresolved. Evidence suggested, for example, that Iraq still possessed stockpiles of liquid anthrax and up to 17 tons of growth media for other biological agents. Also apparently missing were reserves of VX, a highly lethal nerve agent, and up to 4,000 tons of precursor chemicals.

More important, most experts believe that Hussein could have resumed production of biological and chemical weapons on a modest scale any time after the inspectors left.

“There’s no doubt that he has a lot of chemical and biological weapons,” said Lawrence Freedman, a military expert at King’s College in London.

Iraq’s nuclear program was largely dismantled by 1998, and although Baghdad reportedly has tried to buy black-market plutonium or highly enriched uranium, no evidence indicates that it has obtained the fissile material needed to build a bomb.

But U.N. inspectors never found parts of a centrifuge cascade, a series of subcritical gas centrifuges that could be used to enrich some forms of uranium. If the system is working, some experts fear that Iraq by now may have produced enough fuel for a workable nuclear device.

“In 1998, there was a broad consensus that they could build an enrichment plant in two to seven years,” said David Albright, a former nuclear inspector who now heads the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington think tank. “But when did they start? Where are they in the process? We don’t know.”

Similar questions dog Iraq’s missile program. After the Gulf War, Baghdad was barred by the U.N. from building missiles with a range of more than 150 kilometers, or about 90 miles. Some experts are convinced that Iraq hid 12 to 18 longer-range missiles as well as numerous warheads. Such missiles, if they exist, could conceivably reach U.S. forces or allies in the region.

Smuggling is another problem. Inspectors discovered covert transactions between Iraq and more than 500 companies from 40 countries between 1993 and 1998 in violation of U.N. sanctions.

Since then, U.S. officials say, Iraq has used a complex global web of front companies and proxy agents to smuggle in machines and materials, including aluminum alloys, special tubes and high-strength steel that could be used for missile or nuclear weapons programs.

“There are credible reports that illegal procurement is ongoing,” said Timothy McCarthy, a former inspector who specialized in missile searches. “I don’t see any reason to think it would have stopped.”

Most analysts say the U.N. mission that ended in 1998 might have achieved greater success if it had targeted Hussein’s weapons experts in addition to his weapons. The commission had personnel rosters with thousands of names of Iraqi scientists and technicians but never tried to arrange asylum, fellowships or other opportunities that would have taken them out of Iraq and thus out of its weapons programs.

If allowed back in, the U.N. will use a U2 spy plane for aerial mapping and a French Mirage jet for airborne sensors, as it did in the 1990s. Nuclear experts would test the water for radioactive pollutants and use vehicle-mounted gamma ray detectors to test the air. Other sophisticated equipment would look for telltale chemical emissions.

Teams would fan out across the country with helicopter-borne ground-penetrating radar to look for underground sites. Similar efforts in the 1990s, backed by geologists and other specialists, found nothing.

Few who have dealt with Baghdad over the last decade believe that Hussein would fully cooperate with new inspections. U.N. reports say Iraqi authorities regularly lied about their weapons, secretly moved equipment, hid or forged documents and used armed troops and angry mobs to block inspections of key facilities.

Similar confrontations are inevitable if inspections resume, warned Robert Einhorn, who retired last year as assistant U.S. secretary of State for nonproliferation.

“It will be passive at first,” Einhorn said. “They’ll say they can’t locate the scientists we want, or say, ‘Sorry, we can’t provide an escort,’ or ‘The road’s washed out,’ or ‘It’s a religious holiday.’ Eventually, it will become more active obstruction.”

Robert Gallucci, who once was trapped for four days in a Baghdad parking lot because he refused to surrender an Iraqi nuclear weapons document he had found, agreed. “The Iraqis will do whatever they can to impede inspections of sensitive facilities,” said Gallucci, now dean of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service.

Counterintelligence will be crucial. Several former inspectors say Iraq used spies and electronic surveillance at inspectors’ offices or hotels in New York, Baghdad and Bahrain in the 1990s to obtain notice of impending inspections and other intelligence.

Another former inspector said Hussein’s security forces learned to hide equipment from satellites and the U2 spy planes, which were operated by U.S. pilots from a base in Saudi Arabia. They also began to encrypt communications and use fiber-optic cable instead of radios to hinder electronic intercepts by U.S. and other intelligence agencies.

“They knew when our satellites moved across the sky,” he said. “They had their own jamming stuff. They were very good at it.”

While waiting to return to Iraq, U.N. and IAEA experts have relied on news reports, intelligence gathered by various government agencies, and high-resolution color photographs taken by commercial satellite. U.N. officials announced last week that they had evidence of new construction at former Iraqi nuclear sites after studying overhead photos.

“From time to time, we see changes on the ground--a new building here or there or a renovation,” said Mark Gwozdecky, spokesman for the IAEA. “But we have no conclusions to draw. The only way we can tell what’s under the roof is to have inspectors on the ground.”

A steady stream of defectors and informants also has provided tips. Defectors have said, for example, that a secret weapons facility now sits in a women’s dormitory at Baghdad University. Another allegedly is under a downtown Baghdad hospital.

Some former inspectors are skeptical. In the past, they say, Iraq tried to plant bogus information to embarrass the U.N. One group of inspectors was repeatedly told that nuclear material was in a Baghdad cemetery.

“It was an attempt to lure us into digging up the central cemetery,” recalled David Kay, an early member of the nuclear inspections team. “Can you imagine how that would have played out on CNN?”

Several defectors also have warned recently that Iraq has built mobile weapons laboratories, disguising them inside refrigerated trucks and other vehicles. Former inspector Scott Ritter said he chased similar reports from 1993 to 1998 without success.

“I launched raid after raid,” he said. “We intercepted their radio traffic. We ran roadblocks. We never found anything. It was just speculation.”

Other defectors appear more legitimate. The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency last year sent a team to Bangkok, Thailand, to pick up and debrief Adnan Saeed Haideri, an Iraqi engineer who said he had helped build clandestine chemical and biological weapons sites. Haideri also said Baghdad had resumed its nuclear weapons program in underground facilities.

Nabeel Musawi, a member of the London-based Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group in exile, said Haideri and other defectors have made clear that the Iraqi dictator has sought to disguise and disperse his secret weapons factories, hiding them near homes, office blocks and other civilian sites.

“He mirrors every program three times around the country,” Musawi said. “So if one is bombed or discovered, you just move the programs. Only bits of the program are done at any given moment at a site. Nowadays, you have tiny little sites spread all over the country. Instead of huge complexes in the desert, you now have them in residential areas.”

Former inspectors say that some of the uncertainties about Iraq’s weapons programs may never be cleared up. Some of the evidence may be misleading, and some of the suspicions unfounded.

“I laugh when I hear people say we know this or that about what Iraq is doing,” said McCarthy, who was an inspector for four years. “Those of us who have spent a lot of time in Iraq are much more humble.”

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Drogin reported from Washington and Farley from New York. Times staff writers Sebastian Rotella in London and Robin Wright in Washington contributed to this report.