A Futile Game of Hide and Seek

Like other experts on the commission, Ritter found gaps and inconsistencies in Iraq's "full, final and complete disclosure" of capabilities. Using his wartime training and his recent knowledge of highly classified intelligence techniques, he began thinking of methods to test doubtful claims and alternate theories. With permission from superiors he began to play an entrepreneurial role with contributing governments, bluffing and bargaining for access to their most expensive and secret resources.

This kind of work was already beyond the broad consensus that created UNSCOM by a vote of the Security Council. France and Russia, which had supplied Iraq with many of its nonconventional weapons components and had aspirations for future diplomatic and commercial relations with the Baghdad regime, played important roles inside the commission but did not fully support the Anglo-American hard line. Although Ekeus inspired a team spirit that transcended some of these concerns, UNSCOM evolved into a fractious and internally distrustful coalition.

Protecting secrets was difficult at UNSCOM, whose headquarters resided in a 185-nation world body accustomed to access for all. To match and outmaneuver Iraq, with its own layers of secrets behind each public event, UNSCOM gradually came to mimic the Baghdad regime in one respect: It had compartments within compartments to obscure the details of what it knew and how.

In particular, Ritter distrusted the French, whom he came to regard as playing a double game: professing support for the commission, but positioning themselves for future influence in Iraq. Tim Trevan, a close British adviser to Ekeus who admired Ritter, said, "Scott is a Francophobe, beyond the reasonable." But he also acknowledged it was "well understood that the senior French officer always" -- against UNSCOM's rules -- "reported to his embassy. If you bar all Frenchmen from the commission, you'd lose a permanent member of the Security Council's support." Ritter had back channels of his own, but he and his superiors said they were authorized and therefore different from those he criticized.

His suspicion boiled over in the spring of 1993, during planning for a high-technology surprise for Iraq. Based on a CIA estimate and UNSCOM's previous inspection results, the commission suspected Iraq had a hoard of Scud missile engines buried in desert weapons graveyards. Ritter helped lead the planning for Operation Cabbage Patch, which would fly over the suspected sites with ground-penetrating radar, a device Iraq did not know UNSCOM had available to it. The name came from the translation of the Russian town of Kapustin Yar, where UNSCOM hoped the Moscow government would help stage a rehearsal, burying missile components in the manner it had once taught to Iraq.

Cabbage Patch was a closely held secret in UNSCOM, but a French photo interpreter on staff could tell something was up and demanded to know. Ritter reluctantly filled him in but secured his word that he would report to no one. Soon afterward, he came across a letter in French briefing the Defense Ministry in Paris about "le Cabbage Patch."

"I got in his face," Ritter said, in what he described as a loud drill-field voice. "I started using every four-letter word I could think of, called him a coward, called him a dishonorable man, and I told him if he was in the American military he'd be court-martialed."

The secret out, Ekeus asked Ritter to fly to France and request support for Cabbage Patch. Ritter was characteristically blunt: He needed Puma helicopters, he told the French military chiefs, and if Paris would not supply them -- in the end, they did not -- he would ask for their equivalents from Washington.

Adm. Jacques Lanxade, the French chief of staff, complained afterward about "this young American who behaved like a general," according to a French account. And there was worse. Lanxade and his fellow four-stars hosted Ritter for lunch in a linen-and-silver Paris dining room, each selecting a wine and cheese from his home region. Ritter, no gastronome, flagged down a waiter and asked for Diet Coke.

"I just fill up the glass and I chug it and I say, 'Could I get another?' " Ritter said. "I think I drank four in a row, to try to get a caffeine boost. Well, you would have thought I had blown up the Eiffel Tower, these generals were so aghast."

Cabbage Patch went forward in November 1993, after rehearsals staged from Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., over a test site in Yuma, Ariz., on American Bell 412 helicopters nicknamed Beavis and Butt-Head. The operation learned a great deal, mostly in the negative. UNSCOM's estimates for Iraq's remaining operational ballistic missile force shrank from about 200 to two dozen or fewer. But finding the missiles themselves was another matter.

Rare Victories