The Trouble With Inspections

(2 of 4)

It is the U.N.'s responsibility to assess Iraq's report. Officials there said they would not even share the declaration with Security Council members until they had purged any sections that serve as manuals for making illicit weapons. In any case, the highly skeptical Bush Administration will make its own judgments, looking at what is on the list — such as what the Iraqis did with tons of mustard-gas materials that have not been accounted for — and, just as important, what is not on the list. It will measure Iraq's veracity by comparing its list with the one the CIA has in its pocket. Administration officials, from the President on down, continued to insist last week that they had "solid" evidence — which they had never made public — that Saddam did too have an extensive armory for mass murder. U.N. officials have repeatedly asked Bush to make that intelligence available to help the inspectors. The U.S., which preferred to let Iraq come forward with its inventory first, says it will begin sharing its intelligence to help inspectors undermine Iraq's declaration. But the Administration wants to choose its own gotcha moment.

WHAT THE INSPECTORS SAW. In their searches last week, the inspectors found nothing illegal. But that's what everyone expected in the early days of a process that will start to get serious once Iraq's declaration has been processed. The inspectors have 1,000-odd known sites to scour, and the 23 experts on the ground have so far managed to visit two dozen. To carry out more than one inspection at a time, they need additional manpower: 35 more inspectors are to start working this week, and 100 are supposed to be in Iraq by year's end. They are also awaiting eight helicopters to extend the area they can cover. Their main office in Baghdad still needs to be debugged, leaving inspectors to communicate sensitive information by note. Each day they play a game of chase, zigzagging their route to keep Iraqi officials from figuring out the chosen destination before they get there.

The targets last week ranged from the presidential palace to a military base for Iraq's Chemical Defense Battalion to a factory for animal vaccines to three distilleries, where they found workers making 75 gin but no nuclear devices. When the inspectors determined that a fermenter the U.N. had tagged as suspicious years ago was missing, Iraqi officials quickly led them to another veterinary complex, where it was located. At al-Muthanna, the chemical base, the U.N. team unearthed some dusty shells filled with mustard gas, but they had been previously tagged and sealed in past inspections. Only at the Karama missile-design plant in northern Baghdad did the inspectors discover a small violation: several pieces of suspect equipment were missing. Iraq made sure worldwide television crews recorded it all: how punctiliously the regime complied with the U.N. crew, how empty-handed the inspectors came away.

Yet visits alone rarely produce dramatic moments of discovery. In the past, arms were tracked down mostly by piecing together complex mosaics from satellite pictures, surveillance cameras, export-import data, painstaking air and soil tests, and intelligence from defectors. Although Resolution 1441 gives inspectors stronger powers than they have ever had, it's still a struggle to turn up evidence that Iraq wants to hide. Chemical bombs may be buried in wells or stored in residential basements. The Iraqis could be shuffling tiny quantities of biotoxins around as if playing three-card monte. Labs can be kept in movable, undetectable vans. Saddam doesn't even have to stockpile lethal weapons if he can just hold on to the know-how for brewing them.

The entire inspections exercise from 1991 to 1998 allowed Baghdad to perfect ways to thwart the hunters. "We taught them what we could find," says David Kay, a former nuclear inspector, "and they learned how to conceal a program that is going to be a lot smaller but a lot harder" to find now. One example, from the 1999 U.N. report: in 1991, a major in Iraq's Special Republican Guard, Izzadine al-Majid, was ordered to take critical components from Iraq's missile program and hide them at a villa. After nine months, the materials were moved by the Special Republican Guard to another location. The U.N. learned about this only in 1995 while interrogating Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel al-Majid, who famously defected with critical information. He fingered Izzadine al-Majid, who confessed.