By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 18, 1998; Page A57

At around 2 p.m. Tuesday, as top United Nations arms inspector Richard Butler labored with a fountain pen over his report on Iraq, White House Chief of Staff John D. Podesta was informing congressional leaders that U.S. forces would launch an attack on Iraq the following day.

Almost four more hours would pass before Butler finished drafting his finding of Iraqi obstruction and walked the first copy up to the 38th floor of U.N. headquarters in New York for Secretary General Kofi Annan. Yet, aboard Air Force One, en route back from the Middle East, President Clinton had already ordered the bombardment of Iraq that would be dubbed Operation Desert Fox.

Because Butler's report is described as the trigger for the American and British air campaign underway since Wednesday night, that juxtaposition has brought fierce attack on the chief of the U.N. Special Commission, or UNSCOM. Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Sergey Lavrov, backed by China and some of Annan's senior advisers, has leveled accusations that Butler drafted his stark conclusions to serve Washington's war aims.

The Australian diplomat, an expert on arms control who has served as his country's delegate to the United Nations, came out swinging yesterday against those charges.

"I want to say it as simply and as plainly as I can," he said in New York. "That report was based on the experts of UNSCOM. It danced to no one's tune. It was not written for anyone's purposes, including, as some of you have suggested, for the purposes of the United States."

Butler said "the simple conclusion that Iraq did not keep its promise of full cooperation" is "honest, factual and objective."

A high-ranking administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, used unusually blunt language to criticize "the source of the accusation here, which is the Russians, who have been, unfortunately, apologists for [Iraqi President] Saddam Hussein for some time." Butler, the official said, informed U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Peter Burleigh over the weekend that "he had concluded there wasn't cooperation and that UNSCOM couldn't do its job. . . . There's nothing mysterious about it."

Among the circumstances cited by those who suspect Butler of coordinating with Washington on a rationale for war, three stand out:

One is that Butler made four visits to the U.S. mission to the United Nations on Monday, the day before finishing his report.

A second is that administration officials acknowledge they had advance knowledge of the language he would use and sought to influence it, as one official said, "at the margins."

The third is that Butler ordered his inspectors to evacuate Baghdad, in anticipation of a military attack, on Tuesday night – at a time when most members of the Security Council had yet to receive his report.

Lavrov and other diplomats also asserted that Butler gave far more equivocal progress reports to them, in the days leading up to his written report, than his final conclusion that he is "not able to conduct the substantive disarmament work" because of the "absence of full cooperation by Iraq."

"What we were told by Butler for weeks was yes, we've hit some roadblocks but the inspections are going on," said one New York-based diplomat.

Ewen Buchanan, UNSCOM's spokesman, said those who "accuse him of being rosy then and gloomy now" overlook "the catalogue of problems that built up over the period."

As early as Nov. 19 – four days after Clinton called off an attack on Iraq – the Baghdad government was telling Butler that documents known to be in Iraqi archives did not exist. That same week, according to two administration officials, U.S. intelligence intercepted orders by the Baghdad government to its military units to destroy the documents Butler had requested.

One senior administration official, acknowledging that American interaction with Butler is a natural subject of interest because "Butler is the trigger" for war, insisted that Washington did nothing to toughen UNSCOM's conclusions.

"I would tell you in the strongest possible terms that we reacted to Butler's conclusions and did not shape his conclusions," the official said. "He did share with us his preliminary conclusions. We reacted to them and asked him questions, and we reacted to his final public report with a decision to use force."

Even had Butler not briefed Burleigh and others, Washington would have had good reason to anticipate a negative report. His nearly fruitless exchange of letters with Iraq's deputy foreign minister, Riyadh al Qaysi, and a series of conflicts in Baghdad over access to inspection sites were well known.

The swiftness of the move from conclusion to bombing was dictated, according to administration officials, by the wish to catch Iraq off guard and prevent any diplomatic impediment to the attack.

"It was the strong recommendation of the [Pentagon's] Joint Staff that once he [the president] made this decision, it should be implemented very quickly in order to catch the Iraqis undispersed, and before they could put their SAM [surface-to-air missile] traps up," said one official involved in the political-military planning.

Based on frustrating experience twice in the past year, the administration also wanted to forestall any third-party intervention, such as the ones made earlier by the secretary general, Russia and France.

"They acted so quickly that there wasn't time for him to get involved, even if he wanted to," said a close ally of Annan.