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REUTERS
PARIS, Jan 8: United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq had intelligence-sharing deals with five nations including the United States but not France or Russia, former inspector Scott Ritter was quoted as saying today.
Ritter told the French daily Liberation that the United Nations special commission charged with eliminating Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction had made agreements to provide the five countries with information it collected in return for the sharing of their own intelligence.
In an interview conducted yesterday in New York, Ritter said UNSCOM was not forbidden from passing on the information it gathered to other governments, so long as its head Richard Butler authorised the arrangement.
He said he himself had met officials of the French secret services to propose such a deal with Paris. But France turned down the offer, according to Ritter, concluding that ``by helping us, they would only help UNSCOM discover that Iraq was cheating, and that, according to them, would not takethings any further forward.''
There was no immediate comment on the interview from the French foreign ministry. Ritter, a former US Marines lieutenant colonel, said the United States had agreed to an intelligence-sharing deal but he did not name the four other nations.
Asked whether the same deal had been offered to Moscow, Ritter responded: ``Russia is a hopeless case. The Russians are working for the Iraqis.''
Ritter said the deals were necessary to help UNSCOM, which had few resources, overcome Iraqi efforts to hide information. In making UNSCOM's offer to the French secret services, he said, ``We explained that as a UN agency, we could not provide information relating to Iraqi national security.''
``But if France was willing to agree to a `special relationship' with UNSCOM and give us sensitive information, if the French helped us on a particular matter, all the information we gathered would have been shared with France,'' Ritter said.
Ritter's statements, if confirmed, would complicateaccusations that United Nations weapons inspectors helped the United States spy on Iraq.
The reports have been denied by Butler but Baghdad said they proved what it has said all along -- that the Americans were using UNSCOM as a front for US spying.
UNSCOM was created by the UN Security Council after the Gulf War in 1991. The commission withdrew all its personnel from Iraq before the December 16-19 US and British air strikes. Ritter quit UNSCOM last August in protest at what he saw a UN laxness in conducting the weapons inspections.
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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