U.S. Spied On Iraqi Military Via U.N

For years, two conflicting story lines have battled for world opinion as the Security Council debated the future of Iraqi disarmament. The United States and UNSCOM said their use of increasingly intrusive inspections and sophisticated technology was made necessary by Iraq's resistance to full disclosure of its illegal arms. Iraq maintained that the United States and other unfriendly powers were using UNSCOM's access to the country for espionage.

The new disclosures suggest that both claims were true. They come at a delicate moment for those concerned with arms control in Iraq, because the bulk of the U.S. espionage came under cover of the system of "ongoing monitoring and verification" imposed on Iraq by Security Council Resolution 715. Iraq has forbidden arms inspections since the United States and Britain bombarded it in December, and the Security Council is now trying to devise a new system of monitoring to ensure that Iraq does not resume large-scale development of forbidden weapons.

Use of the remote camera system for espionage coincided with another channel of eavesdropping that was known to UNSCOM's top leaders. That channel, code-named Shake the Tree, used commercial scanners to intercept low-powered VHF radio transmissions used by Iraq to direct its concealment efforts against UNSCOM.

The Washington Post and the Boston Globe disclosed that operation in January, and the U.S. government confirmed the stories the same month.

American intelligence agencies elected to pursue a second method of eavesdropping because "we were very concerned about protecting our independence of access" to Iraqi military communications, said a knowledgeable U.S. official. "We did not want to rely on a multinational body that might or might not continue to operate as it was operating."

For that reason, the U.S. government decided not to inform Rolf Ekeus, the Swedish diplomat who was UNSCOM's executive chairman, or his Australian successor, Richard Butler, about the second eavesdropping operation. According to sources in Washington, the CIA notified Charles Duelfer, the American deputy to both men, to help ensure that UNSCOM's headquarters staff did not interfere with the operation. Duelfer did not return telephone calls made over several days for this story.

The remote camera surveillance system has not operated since UNSCOM evacuated all personnel from Iraq in December, immediately before the U.S.-British military strikes. Knowledgeable government employees said the eavesdropping system concealed in it was abandoned before that.

Ekeus, who is now Sweden's ambassador to Washington, said in an interview that he did not believe the United States could have built covert antennas into the video relay system because Iraqi technicians should have discovered them.

"I think it can't be true," he said. "This was stuff that was totally in the hands of Iraq. It was standing out in the rain, so to say. It's really very difficult to believe that anything serious could happen that way. [Iraqi counterintelligence agents] were dismantling these stations all the time, and they would have understood if there was anything that didn't fit" the ostensible task of bringing video signals to Baghdad.

If the United States did use UNSCOM cover for espionage, Ekeus added, "We have always stood against that."

Ekeus cited one of the first controversial inspections, in 1991, when U.S. team leaders reported directly to Washington on what they were finding. "I reacted very strongly against that, and we stopped it," he said.

Until late last week, the U.S. government appeared to deny categorically that it placed covert agents on UNSCOM teams without UNSCOM's knowledge and consent. In a Jan. 7 briefing for six invited newspaper and television reporters, a high-ranking U.S. official said: "We didn't put people on U.N. teams to be agents of the United States. Everyone we put on UNSCOM worked for UNSCOM. There they were part of UNSCOM, not reporting separately. But afterwards, of course," they were debriefed.