Did US Inspectors Spy On Iraq?

U.S intelligence agents operating under the guise of U.N. arms control inspectors spied on the Iraqi military for three years, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.

Citing unidentified government employees and documents, the newspaper said the U.N. Special Commission was not aware U.S. spies had infiltrated it and did not authorize or benefit from the operation.

White House spokesman David Leavy acknowledged that the U.S. gathered intelligence, but refused to comment on the allegation that UNSCOM was kept in the dark. "Everything that the United States did was to support UNSCOM in its effort to break Iraq's concealment of its weapons of mass destruction," he said.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan insisted at a news conference Tuesday he had no direct knowledge of spying activities by the United States in Iraq. But, he said, he wished all U.N. disarmament officials had concentrated on dismantling Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. "We would have preferred for everyone on the U.N.'s ticket to focus on that," he said.

Clinton administration officials have, all along, acknowledged gaining valuable information about Iraq as a byproduct of its cooperation with UNSCOM in rooting out Saddam Hussein's forbidden missile, nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs.

But Leavy disputed claims that U.S. intelligence directly used UNSCOM to penetrate Iraq's security forces and undermine the Iraqi regime. "No intelligence that was gathered to support UNSCOM was used for Iraqi regime-change activities," he said. "I would just note that not everything that is said by former employees should be taken as sacrosanct on this issue."

The Post report comes in the wake of a Feb. 23 story in The New York Times citing galley proofs of a forthcoming book by former arms inspector Scott Ritter as saying he knew of CIA operatives being placed on U.N. inspection teams.

Ritter, a former Marine officer, resigned last year as a U.N. inspector and accused the Clinton administration of undermining the inspectors' job. He has complained repeatedly that the administration's policy is ineffectual and wrong-headed and in turn has been criticized by White House officials who have attempted to discredit his assertions.

Reversing an earlier stance, the Defense Department recently told Ritter he might need to submit his book for a pre-publication security review, something Ritter's lawyer characterizes as an attempt at intimidation.

The Times reported that Ritter's book, scheduled for publication in April, claims that he and a high-ranking CIA official organized some of the most intricate U.N. inspections and that CIA paramilitary covert operators were placed on the inspection teams.

An inspection team with nine CIA officials was in Iraq during a June 1996 coup attempt against Saddam and might have orchestrated it, says Ritter, who according to the Times dos not provide proof of all his claims.

The Post report said U.S. agents rigged UNSCOM equipment and office space without permission to intercept Iraqi military communications between commanders, infantry and armored forces in the field.

American intelligence agents infiltrated the system when UNSCOM changed the arrangement it used to monitor distant sites in Iraq with video cameras. The U.S. technicians who installed and maintained the system were intelligence operatives, and they hid antennas capable of intercepting transmissions in the equipment, the newspaper said.

At least two other technicians lent by the U.S. government to run the remote camera system for UNSCOM were employees of the Central Intelligence Agency, according to the Post.