Both the IAEA and UNSCOM were given carte blanche “anytime, anywhere” authority to search out and eliminate Iraq’s WMD programs. From an inspector’s perspective, this sounded idyllic. But it worked only because Iraq was a freshly defeated country, with no military recourse. No other country would have accepted such conditions.
The first IAEA inspection team, led by Chief Inspector Demetrius Perricos, landed in Baghdad on May 14, 1991, and headed directly for the Tuwaitha nuclear site. Aerial photographs had led the team to anticipate a scene of destruction, in the wake of the Gulf War. And indeed, every major building at Tuwaitha had received a direct hit from the bombing.
The inspectors’ first objective was to locate and secure the high-enriched uranium fuel designated for the two research reactors. The Iraqi technical experts appeared eager to assist. As it turned out, to the inspectors’ surprise, the irradiated fuel had been moved at the height of the bombing, according to the Iraqis. They had reburied it in hastily constructed concrete pits, in featureless farmland in the nearby Garf al Naddaf district, to avoid the fuel being destroyed and radioactivity dispersed. With the Iraqis’ assistance, the inspectors were readily able to locate and begin verifying nearly all the nuclear material in question, based on the declared prewar inventories.
However, achieving the second primary objective—to uncover any previously undeclared nuclear activities—would prove far less straightforward. It appeared that, beyond the destruction inflicted by the bombing, the Iraqis had done even more to dismantle the buildings. Some appeared to have been stripped of equipment. There were signs that operational records and other documentation had been burned. Verifying the purpose of the Tuwaitha facilities that had not been covered under previous IAEA inspections was difficult.
Similar observations were made at another site, north of Baghdad, Tarmiya, where nuclear activity was rumored. The Iraqis said the Tarmiya facilities were used to manufacture electrical transformers. But in the judgment of the IAEA team, this explanation did not match certain facts: for example, the massive electrical loads Tarmiya had required, and the volume and arrangement of electrical distribution equipment. When these discrepancies were pointed out, the Iraqi counterparts could not or would not offer plausible explanations.
Even during this first inspection, the challenge facing the Agency safeguards inspectors was beginning to take shape.
Here, again, it is important to correct a common misconception. IAEA inspectors are not detectives, nor are they security officers or police. They are accustomed to looking for and pointing out quantitative and qualitative discrepancies—including deliberate cover-ups—and they do not shrink from confronting the party under inspection with the evidence. But their style is respectful, whether the country being inspected is Canada or South Africa, Japan or the Netherlands—or, in this case, Iraq. For my part, I firmly believe that this respectfulness, a hallmark of IAEA inspections, has repeatedly proven to be a key Agency asset.
Furthermore, the IAEA is not a spy agency. Our inspectors do not engage in espionage or use deception to get at the truth. We do not have access to the databases of police forces, Interpol, or national intelligence agencies, unless these organizations choose to make relevant information available. Nor do we provide the confidential results of our inspections to these agencies. The information is disseminated within the IAEA, on a need-to-know basis.
In the early 1990s, in Iraq, North Korea, and elsewhere, the relationships between the intelligence agencies and the international inspection organizations took on the look and feel of an awkward dance. In exchange for sharing their privileged information with the IAEA and UNSCOM, the intelligence agencies wanted as quid pro quo to have privileged access to the inspection results. It was perfectly clear why they might want this: the IAEA and UNSCOM inspectors had much greater on-the-ground access and were therefore able to make highly efficient use of the intelligence, uncovering and reporting the facts in a way that the intelligence agencies could not. But the IAEA would not agree to such an arrangement. The flow of information was, by necessity, one way: to maintain its integrity and legitimacy, the IAEA could not afford to pass privileged information as a favor to a national intelligence organization.
The Agency was adamant about its independence, which sometimes put it at odds with individual states. This was evident during the negotiation of Security Council Resolution 687, when the United States had tried to place UNSCOM in the driver’s seat of the inspections, over the Agency. To me, the motives were transparent. UNSCOM was new; by necessity, it would be an ad hoc body, a subsidiary organ of the Security Council, whose major players would be able to exercise a good deal of influence over its operations. UNSCOM’s inspectors were culled rapidly from national government agencies and laboratories, where the necessary skills (familiarity with biological and chemical toxins and with long-range missile technology) resided. UNSCOM would thus be easier to infiltrate than the IAEA, an established organization with independent nuclear expertise.
As the Agency’s legal adviser at that time, I was in New York during the negotiation of the resolution. I had several meetings with Robert Gallucci, a sharp, smooth American diplomat and academic and future deputy executive director of UNSCOM. The IAEA tried hard to insist on its independence in handling the nuclear file. For the most part, we succeeded. Gallucci later admitted that there was some internal disagreement in certain U.S. government circles where great anxiety was expressed about whether the IAEA was up to the task. Others, by contrast, worried that giving UNSCOM primary authority would damage the IAEA’s credibility.[9] The compromise language in the resolution sounded quite mild: the IAEA was to accomplish its mission “with the assistance and cooperation of the Special Commission.” But in Gallucci’s view, the language ensured that UNSCOM would have its “camel’s nose under the tent” of the IAEA.[10]
Of course it was important that the two agencies cooperate, particularly on logistics. Since many of the facilities we needed to inspect had been bombed, there were safety hazards associated with unexploded ordnance. UNSCOM had hired explosive ordnance disposal experts to accompany teams from both agencies. For its part, it had much to learn from the organization and discipline of the IAEA teams, who had been working together for years and, in some cases, were familiar with their Iraqi counterparts and Iraqi ways of doing business.
The personalities involved undoubtedly influenced the relationship between the agencies. Hans Blix, at that time Director General of the IAEA, was a former Swedish foreign minister. Rolf Ekeus, who was appointed as the director of UNSCOM, was also a Swedish diplomat. In foreign service terms, Blix outranked Ekeus, and he clearly did not appreciate receiving instructions from Ekeus in areas where UNSCOM had been given the lead. Nor did it help that UNSCOM was based in New York, where they received the bulk of the media attention, while the IAEA was rather obscure at that time. Relations were eased, in part, by Maurizio Zifferero, a congenial Italian scientist who served as head of the IAEA’s Iraq Action Team and who was effective at smoothing difficulties between the two organizations.
9
“Reflections on Establishing and Implementing the Post–Gulf War Inspections of Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs,” transcript of an address by Robert Gallucci at the Institute for Science and International Security, June 14, 2001.