U.N. Chief Launches Peace Blitz

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has launched an intensive diplomatic effort to resolve the dispute over the right to inspect Saddam Hussein's presidential palaces.

CBS News National Security correspondent David Martin reports that under Iraq's latest proposal, the U.N. would be given 60 days to search eight presidential palaces for evidence of chemical and biological weapons. After the 60 days, the plan stipulates, the inspectors would not be able to return.

Sources have told CBS News that U.N. weapons inspectors may be willing to compromise and agree to the limits, as long as the areas that would be off limits after the 60-day limit do not encompass more than a few specific buildings, such as Saddam's private residences.

Annan says he is prepared to go to Baghdad to negotiate the deal, but U.S. officials remain skeptical. American officials are insisting that any deal must also include an Iraqi agreement to give weapons inspectors unlimited access to the 60 other presidential palaces.

Meanwhile, Annan says he has decided to send a U.N. technical team to Baghdad this weekend, to "work with Iraq to map the presidential sites urgently."

In other developments:

• Iraq claims that it has developed a new missile with a range of 90 miles, according to a London-based Arab newspaper. Such missiles would be incapable of reaching Israel from within Iraqi borders, but they could reach much of Kuwait.
• The U.S. increased its presence in the Gulf Thursday with six F-16 fighters, six B-25 bombers, and one B-1 bomber. That hardware is added to a force of two aircraft carriers, 320 aircraft, and 30,000 troops.
• British pilots have intensified training runs, and a second British aircraft carrier has been ordered to the region.
• The U.N. is telling 81 relief staff on leave from jobs in Iraq not to go back, lest they are held hostage in the event of a U.S. military strike.
• Iraq has started a week-long mourning of its dead in the 1991 Gulf War. Artillery fired 21-gun salutes in the early hours Friday, and Saddam's senior aides laid wreaths on the Martyrs' Monument in Baghdad.
• Foreign journalists in Baghdad have been invited to attend a ceremony commemorating the bombing seven years ago of the Amiriya air raid shelter, in which more than 400 civilians were killed. U.S. military planners mistook Amiriya for an army command center.
  

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