Arms Inspectors 'Shake the Tree'

In November, Ritter flew to Amman and met with Ali Shukri, private secretary to King Hussein. He set up a secure telephone link, and Ekeus asked the king's confidant to find and seize the gyroscopes on UNSCOM's behalf. Jordan did so the same night. In New York, the U.N. panel's weapon scientists prepared for a treasure trove.

Accounts diverge on some of what happened next, but U.S. and UNSCOM officials agree that the CIA's Near East division chief dispatched a team to Amman to take the gyroscopes. Ritter later accused the agents of giving Jordan the impression they worked for UNSCOM. Ekeus, in an interview, said only that he never received the gyroscopes as expected. He professed to have no idea why.

U.S. government officials described the CIA and UNSCOM efforts on the gyroscopes as parallel and essentially complementary. One knowledgeable official said Washington feared Iraq would steal the shipment back. "We wanted to get those gyroscopes out of Jordan as quickly as possible, and as I remember at that time we were in a better position to get them out than the UNSCOM people were," he said. A second official said the results of the U.S. government's "exploitation" -- or analysis -- were conveyed to the disarmament panel.

That raised the question of who did the exploiting and for what purposes. American analysts certainly shared an interest in disarming Iraq, but they may have had other interests as well, such as enhancing their knowledge of Russian missile guidance or black market military sales. Ritter always -- and his supervisors usually -- took the position that UNSCOM should control the analysis of information acquired on its behalf.

"Ritter feuded with virtually everyone in the intelligence community," Trevan said, "because he's so passionate about things. He doesn't always know when to give up. If he's managed well, he's entirely a positive."

Over corn muffins and seven Diet Cokes, Ritter put it differently in a long interview last month at a coffee shop near Rockefeller Center.

"If somebody puts a roadblock in my way, I'll try to talk my way around the roadblock, but if I can't move the roadblock I'm going to run right through it," he said. "Now if that's a bull in a china shop, tough luck. It's about getting the job done. It's about mission accomplishment. I won't apologize for it."

Colliding Interests

By all accounts, the U.S. government gave unsurpassed support -- financial, technical, military and otherwise -- to UNSCOM. But there were also conflicts, and the gyroscope episode set the tone for what some people who know both men called a running feud between Ritter and his CIA Near East counterpart. By policy, The Post does not name covert agents.

Ritter told colleagues at UNSCOM and confidants in the U.S. government that the CIA's operations directorate seemed to fear he would get in the way of efforts to foment a coup against Saddam Hussein, which came to a failed crescendo in 1996. The same secret services protected the president and his weapons programs, and Shake the Tree amounted to a competing operation.

A senior official with knowledge of both programs denied this, saying Ritter's analysis had "only a passing plausibility." There was "no perception of conflict in any part of the U.S. government between whatever else the U.S. government was doing and what UNSCOM was doing."

Another source of tension was a misplaced -- or withheld -- piece of intelligence. It described an underground storage facility at Jabal Mokhul, one of Saddam Hussein's presidential complexes on the west bank of the Tigris River north of Tikrit. In the summer of 1994, the opposition Iraqi National Congress received a defector who had been site engineer at Jabal Mokhul. The defector said Iraq had built an underground hiding place at the junction of two tunnels there, and great quantities of weapons parts and documents in crates had arrived.