Ex-Inspector’s Stance on Iraq Sparks Storm

When former United Nations arms inspector Scott Ritter got home from Baghdad Tuesday night, he was greeted by a flood of e-mail messages.

Some applauded his courage in standing up to the Bush administration’s war rhetoric by telling Iraq’s National Assembly that the U.S. had no “hard facts” that Baghdad possesses weapons of mass destruction. Others, saying he’d been brainwashed by President Saddam Hussein, suggested that he turn in his U.S. passport and move to Iraq.

“People who call me a traitor are disrespecting American democracy,” Ritter said in an interview, one of dozens he juggled in the days after his return. “It’s mind-boggling.”

Mind-boggling is a word often applied to Scott Ritter these days. As a weapons inspector, he pioneered new techniques to ferret out Hussein’s most virulent weapons. When Ritter resigned in 1998, he was hailed by conservatives in Congress for standing up to what he saw as lack of spine in the Clinton administration and the U.N. Security Council.

“Iraq today is not disarmed and remains an ugly threat to its neighbors and to world peace,” Ritter told a Senate committee in September 1998. “Americans who think that ... something should be done about it have to be deeply disappointed in our leadership.”

Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), called him “a true American hero.” Democratic Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware was less kind, faulting Ritter for reaching “above his pay grade” in presuming to tell White House officials how to conduct foreign policy. “That’s why they get paid the big bucks,” Biden said. “That’s why they get the limos, and you don’t.”

These days, Ritter is sounding a different warning. Concerned about the White House’s drumbeat for “regime change,” he argues that 95% of Hussein’s arsenal was disarmed by the U.N. inspection teams between 1991 and 1998. The only way to determine whether Iraq has rearmed in the last four years, he says, is to let inspectors back in.

“There is no hard evidence, no hard evidence whatsoever,” Ritter told CNN on Friday. “I’m not saying Iraq doesn’t pose a threat. I am saying that it has not been demonstrated to pose a threat worthy of war.”

So this former Marine, a tough-guy Republican with a taste for intelligence work and a knack for media splash, has been embraced by the anti-war movement. He says he has little in common with his latest allies--”they’re tree-huggers and I’m for chopping down the forests,” he explains--except for an understanding that war without provocation is wrong.

His passion for inspections is born of adrenalin-pumping days in Iraq. There were the “dog ate my homework” excuses Iraqi officials used to deter detection: Books were missing; documents had been destroyed during the war; the key to the office was lost. There were confrontations in parking lots when inspectors refused to leave after being denied entry to a building. Shots were fired over their heads.

‘Underdogs’ in the Game

“It was a great game, and we were the underdogs,” recalled another weapons inspector, who asked that his name not be used to avoid a personality clash with Ritter. “We were like hotel thieves, cooking up all kinds of creative methods to get in.” Being on the inspection team, he said, “was the highlight of all of our lives.”

If some see Ritter’s obsession with inspections as nostalgic, others ridicule him for taking a 180-degree turn and for demonstrating--as former Marine Lt. Col. Oliver L. North did in embroiling the Reagan White House in an arms-for-hostages swap with Iran--that Marines are sometimes better at “taking the hill” than understanding it.

“This is the classic Marine problem,” said Patrick Clawson, deputy director at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “It’s building a bridge over the River Kwai, when it’s not apparent that a bridge is what is needed.”

Since 1998, Ritter has earned his living as a lecturer. He wrote “Endgame,” which Simon & Schuster is reissuing in paperback. With $400,000 from an Iraqi American businessman, Shakir Alkhafaji, he produced a documentary about Iraq, “In Shifting Sands,” which will also be the title of his next book. Ritter bristles at the comparison to North, who invoked his 5th Amendment rights before Congress granted him immunity. Ritter also insists that he has done no 180-degree turn, being a fan then and now of the power and efficacy of inspections. And he is quite angry about accusations that he has become Hussein’s lobbyist.

“I despise what Saddam has done to his people, I wish ... he’d drop dead,” he said.

The trip to Baghdad--funded in part, he says, by peace groups--was not meant as propaganda for Hussein but as a counter to the White House media blitz against Iraq. “I used the address to the Iraqi National Assembly to put my message before the American public,” he said. “I knew Bush was meeting with [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair. I knew the administration would have its voice on the Sunday talk shows. I decided to launch a preemptive strike.”

A Born Military Man

Ritter is the youngest of four children--and the only son--born into a military family. His father was in the Air Force. His mother was a military nurse. The formative high school years, he says, were spent in Hawaii, Germany and Turkey.

As a kid, he had a special fondness for history, painting Napoleonic toy soldiers in uniforms researched for accuracy. Ritter remembers enjoying the combat simulation games in “Strategy & Tactics,” a military history magazine.

He became a Marine, then a weapons inspector sent to the Soviet Union to enforce the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force Treaty. There he met his future wife, Marina Khatiashvili, a translator from the Soviet republic of Georgia. His marriage raised eyebrows in intelligence circles, where Soviet translators were assumed to be working for the KGB.

Ritter later applied to the CIA but was derailed by a lie detector test in which he admitted sharing intelligence with Israel while an inspector in Iraq--one of his tactical maneuvers to outsmart Hussein, he says. In two interviews before he left for Iraq, Ritter argued that the U.N. teams destroyed all the weapons and fundamentally disarmed Iraq before Hussein barred further inspections in late 1998.

“There was nothing left that we were aware of that we hadn’t destroyed,” he said. “We had suspicions. We had concerns. But we had no hard evidence.”

One reason, he asserts, was his own success as an inspector. “You wouldn’t believe how thorough we were,” he said. “In 1992, I went through Iraq like Attila the Hun.”

He dismisses concerns that Baghdad retains several highly sophisticated devices, called lenses, used to help trigger nuclear explosions. Iraqi troops tossed the lenses into a truck and then onto the ground, he said. “Whatever they had was smashed.”

He challenges assertions that Iraq has reserves of VX, a deadly nerve agent, and the means to make more. “The R&D; is destroyed. The major production equipment is destroyed. The warheads are destroyed. So they don’t have the capability to produce VX.”

And he ridicules fears that Iraq could deliver anthrax, smallpox or other deadly biological agents via a long-range missile. “The only way an Iraqi biological bomb would kill you is if it hit you on the head,” he said.

As for Iraq’s nuclear program, “absolutely nothing is going on in nuclear,” he said. “Everything was destroyed. They’d have to be buying new stuff [from abroad], importing it, installing it, putting in electricity feeds. We’d see it. We’d know it.”

Ex-Inspectors Skeptical

Ritter’s statements have stunned other former U.N. weapons inspectors. Richard Spertzel, the chief biological weapons inspector in Iraq from 1994 to 1998, ridiculed Ritter’s assertions during a Senate subcommittee hearing Tuesday.

“How does he know what 100% is?” Spertzel asked. “I don’t. And how many biological sites did he visit? The answer is none. He has no knowledge of those sites.”

David Kay, the chief nuclear inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1993, agreed. He said Ritter sharply criticized the ability of U.N. inspection teams to disarm Iraq when he testified before Congress.

“Either he lied to you then or he’s lying to you now,” Kay said. “He’s gone completely the other way. I cannot explain it on the basis of known facts.”

So Long, Baghdad

But Ritter says he has been more consistent than critics allow, favoring inspections instead of either war or a shrug of indifference. Sobered by the intensely angry reaction over his trip to Iraq, Ritter says he has no plans to visit Baghdad again.

But he does plan to keep speaking out. This fall he will be in Britain for the Labor Party conference, and in Berlin, Vienna and Copenhagen to talk to anti-war groups.

“People who call me a traitor today cheered me wildly when I resigned,” he said. “But I can’t let them fabricate the facts for war. If we want to sell American democracy, by God we have to live it.”