To this end, the United States suggested that the IAEA should wait to report the completion of its work until UNSCOM could do the same. Of course there was no logic to this—as Blix argued in his discussions with the United States. He said they should think of UNSCOM and the IAEA as two horses running, and that there was nothing wrong with one reaching the finish line before the other.
Blix made his final report to the Security Council as the outgoing Director General in October 1997. He felt that since he was leaving, he would have an easier time resisting pressure from the United States, and he reported to the council that the IAEA had pretty much completed the “disarmament phase” in Iraq and had moved to the next phase. The report stated that the Agency was now dedicating most of its resources in Iraq to “ongoing monitoring and verification,” with only a few minor disarmament issues remaining.
The UNSCOM situation was considerably more complicated. From the outset of the Iraq inspections, the IAEA and UNSCOM had diverged sharply in both their composition and their styles of inspection. But a more disturbing difference emerged later in the 1990s. The Iraqis charged that UNSCOM was a de facto spy agency of U.S. and Israeli intelligence, trying to collect information outside its mandate—in effect, using WMD disarmament as a cloak under which to gather and pass along information regarding conventional weaponry and military capabilities, which Western governments could then use to develop military targets.
These charges from Baghdad intensified after Richard Butler, an experienced arms control diplomat from the Australian Foreign Service, took over from Rolf Ekeus as director of UNSCOM in 1997. Butler, Scott Ritter, one of the chief inspectors, and other UNSCOM officials were specifically accused by the Iraqis of cooperating with the CIA to spy on Saddam Hussein’s military apparatus. Not only were accusations coming from Iraq, but Butler and Ritter themselves began to take potshots at each other.
Two years later, both the Washington Post and the Boston Globe wrote that members of UNSCOM had cooperated with a U.S. electronic eavesdropping operation that allowed intelligence agents to monitor military communications in Iraq.[23] And Scott Ritter himself admitted how much UNSCOM was being manipulated.[24] In 2002, in an interview with Fox News, he said:
Richard Butler allowed the United States to use the United Nations weapons-inspection process as a Trojan horse to insert intelligence capabilities into Iraq, which were not approved by the United Nations and which did not facilitate the disarmament process, but were instead focused on the security of Saddam Hussein and military targets…. Richard Butler facilitated American espionage in Iraq. Richard Butler facilitated American manipulation of the inspection process…. On four occasions, from March 1998 until my resignation in August 1998, I wrote Richard Butler a memorandum saying, “Boss, if you continue down this path you are facilitating espionage. This is not what we’re about and you can’t let this happen.” He received this memorandum and disregarded my warning and ultimately, in the end, let’s ask ourselves why the inspectors aren’t in Iraq today.
Butler strongly denied these accusations, saying that Ritter’s claim “that I sold the store to the CIA is dramatically untrue.” Butler said he had actually scaled back on the degree to which UNSCOM used intelligence, because of concerns about reputation and the need to protect “the independence of multilateral disarmament activities.” He admitted that UNSCOM members had, on occasion, reported back to their home governments, but he categorically denied that UNSCOM had been dominated by the United States, calling Ritter’s charges “quintessentially ludicrous.”[25]
What seems clear is that Butler had very decided preconceptions about Iraq and about the intentions of Saddam Hussein’s government. Before Rolf Ekeus left his post in 1997 as the first director of UNSCOM, he had reported that most of the UNSCOM mandate—as it related to disarming Iraq of its chemical and biological weapons—was near completion.[26] Richard Butler disagreed. He routinely insisted that Iraq had undisclosed WMDs. His report to the Security Council on December 15, 1998, presented a harsh picture of Iraq’s lack of cooperation. It was perceived by many as imbalanced and unfair.
Butler’s report became the justification for the 1998 U.S. bombing campaign known as Operation Desert Fox. Notably, the United States suggested that UNSCOM withdraw its inspectors, for safety considerations, on the very same day that Butler delivered his report—a not-so-subtle indication that the United States knew what it contained.[27] Butler gave his order to withdraw the UNSCOM inspectors on December 15, at midnight New York time. By the time the diplomats woke up in the morning, the withdrawal of the inspectors was a fait accompli.
At this point, I had taken over from Hans Blix as the IAEA Director General. Early on the morning of December 16, Vienna time, I was woken by a call from John Ritch, the highly regarded U.S. ambassador to the IAEA. Ritch told me of his government’s advice to withdraw the IAEA and UNSCOM inspectors and noted that Butler had already moved to take that advice. Because the IAEA relied on UNSCOM for logistical support, we really had no option but to leave.
After talking to Ritch, I called the UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, who was in Morocco, waking him up to discuss Butler’s action. I was shocked to learn that Annan was not aware of the decision.
The inspectors left that day. The four-day bombing campaign commenced immediately, reportedly targeting various Iraqi military sites, including weapons R&D installations. Officially, the bombing was characterized as a response to Iraq’s continued failure to comply with UN Security Council resolutions and its interference with the work of the UN inspectors.
UNSCOM was discredited. The Butler report was decried as patently unfair. The Chinese, French, and Russian governments were angered by the undue U.S. influence on UNSCOM as an international inspection body. UNSCOM was no longer trusted to serve the international community as a credible representative of the United Nations.
In January 1999, I wrote a non-paper[28] entitled “Arms Inspections in Iraq” for the Security Council, laying out the parameters of how to restore and maintain the integrity and credibility of a WMD verification system. I spelled out the need to decouple the inspection body from the Security Council, to avoid politicization. I recommended staffing the organization with international civil servants, rather than relying on “experts” on detail from their governments, who might put their national loyalties first. I recommended clearer rules for the inspections, with more defined technical objectives. I explained the importance of a geographically diverse technical inspection staff. And I explicitly called for the organization to respect the religious and cultural sensitivities of the inspected country, on which UNSCOM in many cases had trampled in Iraq.
Kofi Annan congratulated me on the non-paper, as did the Russians and others. The U.S. State Department, however, was furious that I had not consulted with them before circulating it. John Ritch came to warn me that some U.S. officials were threatening to ask William Safire, Charles Krauthammer, and other conservative columnists to launch an attack on my credibility.
With regard to Iraq, though, UNSCOM’s standing no longer mattered. The damage had been done. Within the year, the Special Commission was dismantled by the Security Council, to be replaced by UNMOVIC,[29] a new agency with different rules of operation. But following Desert Fox, Saddam Hussein would not agree to readmit the IAEA and UN inspectors for four years. That absence laid the groundwork for suspicion that Saddam Hussein was reconstituting his WMD programs—which, in turn, would form the pretext for another war.
23
Barton Gellman, “U.S. Spied on Iraq Via U.N.,”
24
Ritter would later become known for his criticism of U.S. foreign policy. In March 2003, he would argue publicly that Iraq possessed no significant WMDs.
25
“The Lessons and Legacy of UNSCOM: An Interview with Ambassador Richard Butler,”
26
S/1997/301, report by the executive chairman of UNSCOM, April 11, 1997. In his conclusions to this report, Ekeus wrote, “The accumulated effect of the work that has been accomplished over six years since the ceasefire went into effect, between Iraq and the Coalition, is such that not much is unknown about Iraq’s retained proscribed weapons capabilities.” Ekeus wrote further that the efforts from October 1996 to early 1997 were focused on getting the “major outstanding issues to a manageable quantity” and cited overall satisfaction with missile and chemical weapons issues. He noted that Iraq’s presentation in the biological weapons area remained “rather chaotic.”
27
In Butler’s book
28
In diplomatic parlance, a non-paper is a written proposal or set of ideas put forward informally, without commitment and often without formal attribution, as a way of engendering discussion or suggesting a basis for negotiation.
29
United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, created by Security Council Resolution 1284 in December 1999.