Arms Inspectors 'Shake the Tree'

In interviews, Ritter would not discuss the mechanics of the operation he created. The Washington Post agreed to U.S. government requests to withhold publication of operational details on national security grounds. But the broader story of Shake the Tree explains not only Ritter's angry resignation on Aug. 26 but the unraveling of what UNSCOM's leadership regarded as their best hope to complete Iraq's disarmament.

Weaving a Network

By late 1994, as the U.N. inspectors learned the extent of the Iraqi apparatus deployed to thwart their work, each of UNSCOM's subject teams -- chemical, biological, missile, import-export -- was working overtime to devise new methods of catching deception. One team, formed around Ritter, gave exclusive attention to what he called "the concealment mechanism."

UNSCOM had long relied on intelligence provided by sympathetic governments and even dissidents who sought the overthrow of the Baghdad regime. It had an international mandate to find Iraqi weapons under the terms that ended the Persian Gulf War, and it regarded assistance from any quarter as welcome.

"One of Rolf's great strengths and one of his brilliant insights was that from the very first American intelligence brief he realized UNSCOM could not afford to be totally dependent on one source -- or in those days two sources, the U.S. and the U.K. -- because it could be vulnerable to being manipulated on the basis of intelligence handed to it," said Tim Trevan, who was Ekeus's political adviser until late 1995.

Ekeus, who now serves as Sweden's ambassador to Washington, said in an interview that UNSCOM preserved its independence in part by combining information from many countries, not all of which spoke to one another or were willing to have their contributions known. In doing so, UNSCOM took on a role in consuming and acquiring intelligence that was unprecedented for an international organization.

"In the end we became the top guy on the block, knowing about Iraq's weapons, because we could investigate personnel, we could do physical inspection and control the results," he said.

But the story was not quite as simple as that, because mutually escalating efforts -- by Iraq to obstruct UNSCOM and by UNSCOM to pierce the obstruction -- led to growing demands by the U.N. panel on the most sensitive capabilities of its contributing governments. The means UNSCOM embraced to perform its mission entangled it in the agendas -- sometimes overlapping, sometimes not, and often opaque -- of others.

Vanishing Gyroscopes

In August 1995, UNSCOM learned from Israel's Military Intelligence organization, Aman, that Iraq was expecting delivery of Russian-made precision gyroscopes and accelerometers. Salvaged from decommissioned submarine missiles, the components were among the few essentials for ballistic missile guidance that Iraq could not manufacture itself.

The tip was of some importance, if true, because it represented the first demonstrated Iraqi effort to acquire forbidden weapons during the period of U.N. disarmament inspections. The Central Intelligence Agency's Nonproliferation Center, according to U.S. officials, passed a similar tip to the commission.

Ritter and Nikita Smidovich, a Russian diplomat who led UNSCOM's ballistic missile team, worked with Israel to track the whereabouts of a Palestinian middleman and his shipment of gyroscopes through Jordan.