The Full Story of American Spies Operating Within UNSCOM Mission in Iraq Remains a Mystery

By Richard H. Curtiss

Last year while I was visiting a Middle East country a friend working in that country’s Foreign Ministry told me some intriguing things he and other diplomats had learned in closed conversations with U.N. employees stationed in Iraq. “Your readers would be shocked at some of the stories they tell about problems between the UNSCOM inspectors and U.N. officials administering the oil-for-food programs in Baghdad,” my friend said.

He gave me the name of one such visiting U.N. official and I called and asked if we could talk about things I’d heard. Was it true, for example, that the UNSCOM inspectors were mostly ex-soldiers acting like cowboys on Saturday night—drinking too much, driving too fast, purposely aggravating their Iraqi escorts and publicly ridiculing their U.N. colleagues in charge of food and medicine distribution as naive do- gooders? The U.N. employee laughed appreciatively, noting that probably the way to avoid trouble with the inspectors is to avoid them altogether.

However, he said, U.N. personnel working in Iraq are not permitted to speak to the press except through an official spokesman. Eventually we agreed to meet for a chat on his last evening in town so that at least I would not distort the information I already had picked up.

Then, as usually happens, all hell broke loose in Iraq. U.N. personnel were being evacuated, American aircraft were expected to strike at any moment, and he called my hotel in a panic. “I can’t see you,” he said. “I called my headquarters and asked permission to talk with you, and they categorically refused. I’m packing to leave right now.”

Now I wish I had been more persistent. Since I was leaving later the same night, I could easily have staged an encounter at the airport followed by a casual discussion in the departure lounge. It might have helped me a lot in making sense of what subsequently has been leaked out of U.N. headquarters in New York.

In the strange story of U.S. espionage against Iraq, allegedly carried out under UNSCOM cover, the “where,” “when” and “how” are widely known. But mystery still surrounds “what” black box device was smuggled into and out of Iraq, “why” it was used there, “who” leaked the story and, again, “why.”

The story appeared simultaneously in Jan. 6 issues of the Boston Globe, which is owned by The New York Times, and in The Washington Post. The Post story was by Barton Gellman, who when he arrived in Jerusalem to cover Israel for his newspaper about four years ago seemingly was a committed Zionist. Within six months, however, he was producing highly informative pieces that often gave the Israelis far less flattering treatment than they were used to receiving from the mainstream U.S. press.

Sensitive conversations were fed back to UNSCOM inspectors.

Since his return to the U.S. last year, he has produced several “insider” pieces that have accurately depicted the inner workings of a U.S. foreign policy establishment deeply divided over what to do about Binyamin Netanyahu’s trashing of the peace process. In short, if I were a U.N. official planning to leak a story for a purpose and wanted to make sure the reporter got it right, I probably would choose someone like Gellman.

The leak, according to Gellman, originated not with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who does not want a series of confrontations with the U.S. of the kind that cost the job of his predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Instead, Gellman maintained, the story was leaked by other top U.N. officials who were deeply disturbed at the long-range implications for the U.N. of American misuse of UNSCOM cover to obtain intelligence material, some of which the U.S. was not sharing with the inspectors. Subsequently Kofi Annan has rather unconvincingly denied any knowledge of who leaked the allegations.

The story line, as subsequently elaborated by Gellman and other reporters, started with former U.S. Marine Intelligence Capt. Scott Ritter, who resigned from UNSCOM last August, alleging that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and other Clinton administration officials were withholding intelligence data from UNSCOM in order to make its inspectors less effective and thus reduce the frequency of UNSCOM confrontations with Iraqi authorities. Ritter charged that the U.S. wanted to avoid further public confrontations with Saddam Hussain, which always ended up with the U.S. looking like a bully or a paper tiger.

The Wildest Cowboy

By the time of his resignation, however, the U.S. media had begun to depict Ritter not only as the leader of the UNSCOM cowboys, but the wildest of them all. There may have been some justification, since four years ago UNSCOM inspectors concluded that if they could eavesdrop on conversations within Iraq’s security apparatus, they could anticipate and thwart Iraqi attempts to hide the equipment and files the inspectors were seeking.

After a visit to Israel in 1995, Ritter was said to have returned with an easily procured “off the shelf” scanning device to enable inspectors to find and record such conversations. Three years later, for reasons that are as yet unclear, the U.S. took over the operation in 1998, bringing in much more sophisticated stationary equipment which could pick up such conversations and relay them by overhead satellite to the National Security Agency at Ft. Meade, Maryland. There the conversations were fed into computers which honed in on key words. Sensitive conversations were rapidly identified, translated from Arabic and then fed back to UNSCOM inspectors.

What had become clear in the course of these secret operations, however, was that the Iraqi security personnel responsible for protecting Iraq’s weapons secrets were also the personnel responsible for protecting Iraqi President Saddam Hussain himself. Thus it became theoretically possible for U.S. authorities to feed back intercepted information of interest to the UNSCOM inspectors while withholding and possibly acting upon information pertaining to Saddam’s whereabouts at any given time.

From this point the story breaks down into differing allegations, all probably leaked to the press by competing bureaucracies for self-interested reasons. One such allegation was that the secret U.S. “black box” equipment, which had to be taken in and carried out of Baghdad each time U.N. personnel were evacuated, remained in the custody of American spies who were merely masquerading as UNSCOM personnel.

Another story, presumably originating with UNSCOM director Richard Butler, is that in fact the U.S. was not withholding information from UNSCOM, but that by mutual agreement the U.S. and UNSCOM were withholding it from Ritter. This was because he was married to a Russian and also was under suspicion of having unauthorized contacts with Israeli intelligence.

The most critical allegation, however, is that UNSCOM was setting up confrontations which it knew would prompt a flood of communications between Iraqi security agencies at times when U.S. satellites were configured to scoop up as much of this information as possible.

The question that goes unanswered, of course, is what the U.S. might have been doing with the information it was gathering about Saddam Hussain’s movements as a result of its close cooperation with UNSCOM. Is it possible that the cover the U.N. provided could result in a successful attempt to kill or capture the Iraqi leader?

Such questions remain unanswered. What is certain, however, is that the nature of future U.N.-Iraqi confrontations will change. Before these leaks, Saddam’s newest move barring most of the U.N.’s U.S. and British personnel from working in Iraq would probably have been grounds for more missile and air strikes. But if it becomes generally accepted that U.S. spies have been hidden among the U.N. personnel working in Baghdad, few U.N. member states will elect to pursue this issue.

It is therefore a chance for both the U.S. and the Arab states to rethink their Iraq policies. The U.N. sanctions have failed, literally killing a generation of Iraqi children and forcing the Iraqi people as a whole into ever-greater dependence upon a dictator they fear rather than love.

Ever since World War II, the U.S. government has followed a policy of protecting Iraqi sovereignty and territorial integrity. By contrast, Israel has consistently tried to break Iraq into three ministates, Kurdistan in the north, a Sunni Muslim entity in the center deprived of both Iraq’s northern and southern oil fields, and a Shi’i Arab state in the south.

Now U.S. initiatives toward Iraq seem to have conflicting aims. CIA operatives have been encouraging opposition to Saddam from his Sunni generals. The U.S. also apparently unsuccessfully courted Saddam’s half-brother, Barzan al-Takriti, over the several years he was Iraq’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva.

At the same time, members of Congress now are openly appropriating money to arm and encourage Kurdish and Shi’i separatists, an activity more in line with Israeli than American policy aims. There is no doubt that such congressional initiatives are inspired by Israel’s politically potent Washington lobby, but it is conceivable that they also are being secretly encouraged by political appointees within the Clinton administration’s Middle East policymaking establishment with a pro-Israel agenda of their own.

One thing is certain. U.S. policies toward Iraq have been a massive failure to date. It’s time to go back to the drawing board.

Richard Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.