Arms Inspectors 'Shake the Tree'

Sources at the Iraqi National Congress said the INC's intelligence chief, Ahmed Allawi, passed the tip soon after to the CIA's Near East division.

More than three years later, in November 1997, Ritter paid a call on the INC's president, Ahmed Chalabi, at his home in London's Mayfair district. "I mentioned Jabal Mokhul," Chalabi recalled in an interview. "He lighted up and said, 'What do you know about Jabal Mokhul?' I said, 'Didn't you get our report?' He said, 'What report?' I said, 'The report we gave Washington in '94.' " Ritter's reply, Chalabi said, was angry profanity about the Near East division chief.

American officials said any failure to pass the tip was "strictly an accident," one of "the vagaries of the business." For UNSCOM, it was a missed opportunity. In June 1997, inspectors had tried to inspect the 4th battalion headquarters of the Special Republican Guard at the same complex in Jabal Mokhul. The inspectors knew at the time, from an early exercise of Shake the Tree, that they were being held in place while material was evacuated to an adjacent hiding spot. Had they known of the underground facility, they could have moved there next.

More Than Ice Cream

UNSCOM's pursuit of Iraq's security system led it in some surprising directions. There was the trail, for instance, of the Baghdad ice cream trucks.

"The big thing with concealment was movement," Ekeus recalled. "Ritter excelled at his ability to penetrate organizational structures."

What he found, initially with Israeli help, was that the SSO used two dedicated fleets of vehicles to move weapons contraband. By day it used red-and-white refrigerator trucks painted with markings of the Tip Top ice cream company. At night, it used unmarked green Mercedes tractor-trailers from the fleet of Segada Transportation Co., named for the wife of Saddam Hussein.

The essence of the Iraqi shell game was this: The trucks shuttled from "storage sites," which were changed every 90 days in the early years and every 30 days after 1997, to a network of temporary "hide sites" when U.N. inspectors approached. Physical security for the hiding places fell to the 2nd and 4th Brigades of the Special Republican Guard, while other units performed related functions.

Shake the Tree was premised on the assumption that Iraqi guards would never let inspectors into storage sites until the trucks were gone, if at all. Inspectors wanted to put stress on the concealment system, forcing it to react in ways that could be observed. Those observations, in turn, would feed an accelerating campaign of subsequent inspections. Eventually, one UNSCOM official said, "you might get lucky. We tried to design something that would allow us to catch them on the rebound."

But just as UNSCOM tried to penetrate Iraq, Iraq tried to penetrate UNSCOM. Ritter and his superiors learned, to their disquiet, that the Baghdad government showed signs of having six to ten days notice of most surprise inspections. They responded by compartmentalizing information ever more tightly, inventing classifications like "Code Green" to limit access to information.

Shaking the Tree

As early as 1994, after Ritter and Smidovich made informal proposals on Shake the Tree, the United States offered to provide the needed support in what one official called a "U.S. eyes only" operation. Apart from Ekeus, only security-cleared Americans would know of its existence. Ekeus broke that condition immediately in a U.N. rose garden stroll with two of his closest advisers, Trevan and fellow Briton John Scott. The three men considered the plan, but let it die.