WASHINGTON, November 9: President Bill Clinton met with his top aides on Saturday over how to force Iraq into complying with UN arms inspections as Washington prepared to resume spy flights that Baghdad vowed to shoot down.

A three-member UN delegation was en route to New York from Iraq after talks there failed to resolve a crisis over Baghdad's refusal to let Americans participate in UN inspection teams charged with dismantling Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The group was to meet on Sunday night with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who was to take up the matter with the full Security Council on Monday.

Clinton huddled at the White House for some two hours with senior military and foreign policy advisers and weighed option designed to bring a swift end to the latest cat-and-mouse game set in motion by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Senior officials said the United States will go ahead with plans to resume flights by its U-2 spy planes over Iraq on Monday -- even though Iraqi officials yesterday renewed threats to shoot down such reconnaissance missions.

The flights were suspended temporarily to avoid fueling tensions while the UN delegation was in Baghdad.

In Baghdad, CNN reported that Deputy Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz vowed that Iraqi anti-aircraft gunners were in ``standby mode'' to fire on US spy planes over its territory.

``We are in a dark tunnel,'' the network quoted Aziz assaying. The Iraqi official was to attend the Security Council session in New York on Monday.The White House meeting included Vice President Al Gore, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Defense Secretary William Cohen, CIA director George Tenet, UN Ambassador Bill Richardson and National Security Adviser Samuel Berger.

It was ``a discussion about the state of play and some planning for the Security Council meeting,'' said spokeswoman Anne Luzzatto, who declined to discuss details of the meeting.

Meanwhile Iraq on Sunday blocked UN arms inspectors from weapons sites for a seventh day in a row by barring access to US experts, a UN official here said.

Alan Dacey of the UN arms monitoring centre in Baghdad told AFP that US members were denied access, leading to four inspections being called off.

``Four teams went out. One reached its site but was turned back because of the presence of US personnel, and the other three which hadn't yet reached their sites were called back,'' he said.

Germ warfare

A leading British newspaper said Iraqi scientists had adapted crop duster planes to carry out germ warfare by remote control. The Sunday Times quoted Iraqi and western intelligence sources as saying the planes, modified versions of a Polish M18 Crop Duster, could carry up to a ton of anthrax bacteria -- enough to kill tens of thousands of people. It said Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's determination to hang on to the crop-duster system, which it said he calls his ``doomsday option'', led him to take his current stand against the United Nations and the United States. The planes were believed to be radio-controlled and capable of flying hundreds of miles, Times said, adding such planes could operate with an unsophisticated delivery system.