A Futile Game of Hide and Seek

Ritter became the main figure in this risky enterprise, which he would call by a code name, "Shake the Tree." Its conception reflected his own outsized personality, skills and values. His own long journey into Iraq, which began before UNSCOM even existed and deepened as he rose from a junior UNSCOM hire to chief of its anti-concealment team, therefore became deeply entwined with the commission's.

Ritter brought skills to the job he had refined as a Marine "0202," an intelligence officer. Born in Gainesville, Fla., and schooled in Turkey and Germany during his father's Air Force career, he had helped police one of the last Cold War pacts as a 27-year-old lieutenant assigned to monitor intermediate-range nuclear forces in the former Soviet Union. According to Marine Corps records, Ritter received a classified commendation from the Central Intelligence Agency for his work in Votkinsk, the kind of letter that is presented to a young officer for perusal and returned to a vault at Langley.

Largely on the strength of that experience, government sources said, the CIA twice recruited him for employment, in 1991 and 1996. The agency rebuffed him in the end each time when questions arose about his marriage to a former Soviet interpreter.

Yet a Marine who once had and then lost the highest U.S. security clearances became entangled, at UNSCOM, in some of the more sensitive work of the U.S. intelligence community. And as much as he and UNSCOM came to rely on national governments -- above all the United States, Israel, United Kingdom and Netherlands -- they also struggled with some of those governments to maintain control of the information they needed to act.

Reliance on secret services, made inevitable by Iraq's resistance to full disclosure, held the keys to some of UNSCOM's success but also to its undoing. It raised in the end a subtle question that had gone largely unexplored save in unsubtle Iraqi propaganda over the years: Who was really running the commission, and with what aims?

The diplomatic ripples from that question, and the effectiveness of Iraqi spy craft in holding inspectors at bay, combined by this summer to bring UNSCOM's remaining program to the brink of defeat. On Aug. 3, Iraq announced the end of its cooperation with the inspectors. More than two months later, despite protests by the Security Council and warnings from Washington, there is no prospect in view of the unrestricted access for inspectors that the council demanded of Iraq, on pain of "the gravest consequences," as recently as March.

The Clinton administration saw itself as fighting valiantly, and with skill, to stave off UNSCOM's defeat. Ritter, disillusioned, read acquiescence in Washington's policy choices. His angry departure from the job made him a celebrity, wooed by congressional Republicans and talk show hosts and a speaker's bureau now trying to market his public appearances.

To others, his behavior harmed his reputation and his cause. Stung by criticism she thought unjust, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright charged that Ritter "doesn't have a clue" about the broader horizons of American policy, and she speculated privately that he must be planning to run for office, like Oliver North. His former boss, Richard Butler, accused him of unspecified errors of fact and of breaking the law by revealing confidential UNSCOM data.

Scud Hunter

UNSCOM was a product of the uneven conclusion of the Gulf War, which left the Iraqi regime defeated but still in power. The war also shaped Ritter's eventual role.

Ritter spent the conflict fixed on Iraq's special weapons as an intelligence analyst for the U.S. Central Command, responsible for watching Scud missiles. Like everything Ritter does, he took it personally. As a lowly captain, his stubborn intensity led him into career-endangering disputes with the allies' commander in chief, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf. These foreshadowed later battles in UNSCOM with the French armed services chief, a senior British defense official, the director of the CIA's Near East operations and National Security Adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger.

Ritter "was a man who had not always toed the line," Ekeus said with a smile in the wood-toned office where he now holds court as Sweden's ambassador to Washington. When Ekeus first began recruiting for UNSCOM, he heard about a young Marine who stuck to wartime judgments "that I don't think were popular at the time. I knew he was a man of his own opinions. I liked that. We wanted to have strong personalities, but the very best talent."