Undermining Scott Ritter

Tuesday, May 11, 1999

After months of false starts and aborted attempts, United Nations Arms Inspector Scott Ritter had begun to succeed where other UN weapons inspectors had failed, organizing a unique intelligence operation that exposed how Iraq was blocking UN weapons inspectors from discovering illicitly stockpiled weapons of mass destruction.

Ritter, thirty-seven, a gung ho retired Marine Corps officer and Persian Gulf War veteran, began his career as an intelligence officer with the On-Site Inspection Agency, a U.S. government agency set up to monitor the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty between the Soviet Union and the United States. For a time he was posted to the remote Russian city of Votkinsk, where Moscow made its most modern missiles, including the world's only road-mobile operational ICBM, the SS-25. He served with distinction for the inspection agency, and his experience would serve him well after joining the newly formed United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) in 1991.

UNSCOM was set up after the UN Security Council, on April 3, 1991, approved Security Council Resolution 687 to end the Gulf War. It said Iraq must unconditionally accept, under international supervision, the "destruction, removal or rendering harmless" of its weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles with ranges of more than ninety-three miles. In June UNSCOM carried out its first inspection of an Iraqi chemical weapons site. Eventually, however, it became apparent that Saddam Hussein was keeping weapons technology in reserve for the day when he would be free to pursue nuclear, chemical, and biological military technology without UN interference. By 19" it was impossible to ignore the suspicious regularity with which a team of UN inspectors would arrive at a suspected weapons site only to find that the Iraqis had cleaned it out.

Scott Ritter changed that when, in his words, he "took a look at the information that was recently made available to UNSCOM from Israel." Israeli military intelligence, Aman, had uncovered Iraq's "concealment mechanism"--essentially a highly efficient security task force that included Iraq's Special Security Organization, the Special Presidential Guard Units, and the Special Republican Guard, who were given the job of deceiving UN weapons inspectors. The force was run by Saddam's son Qusay. In response, Ritter set up a special UN intelligence-gathering and covert action group called the Capable Sites Concealment Investigation Teams, or CICI.

Until 19" UNSCOM had had some success in dismantling weapons, but the international inspection teams could not verify Iraq's 1991 claim that it had destroyed all its banned weapons. Ritter recalled, "We uncovered a lot of inconsistencies in their story, and I think everybody knew there was something wrong, but we didn't have a smoking gun. So that's where we were in 19"; we could show the Iraqis were lying to us, but could not show that they still had weapons."

According to Ritter, the Iraqis were lying about all four areas of the weapons program banned by the UN: nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, biological weapons, and missiles with ranges greater than 186 miles.

By 1995 Ritter had been working with UNSCOM for four years and knew what he was doing. "I knew UNSCOM, I knew Iraq, I just knew this situation," Ritter said. He was also able to win the trust of the Israelis, a prerequisite for winning their cooperation. In July Ritter went to work on uncovering the Iraqi method for hiding prohibited arms. His game plan consisted of a program to be carried out over six months - he needed the entire period to smoke out the Iraqis. He called the intelligence plan "Shake the Tree."

"It's basically a stimulate, collect, and assess program," Ritter said. The idea was to use UN weapons inspections by UNSCOM to trigger specific Iraqi responses. Then, using a combination of U-2 surveillance aircraft and special electronic monitoring of communications as well as new -and in many cases still secret - intelligence collection techniques, Ritter and his team could monitor how the Iraqi concealment operations responded. The plan was ambitious, but Ritter was absolutely convinced it would work. The only problem was that the support promised by the U.S. government never materialized. "They knew exactly what I was up to, they agreed to it, but they never really supported it," Ritter said. "The Israelis did their deal, and we got really good cooperation, but the Americans never followed through."

Bill Gertz is national security correspondent for The Washington Times and the author of a new book, "Betrayal: How the Clinton administration undermined American security from which the above is excerpted.