Word: iraq
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...their jobs, they turned from monitoring to spying to uncover his hidden caches. In interviews with key intelligence and military officials, TIME has pieced together that slow slide into espionage--one that peaked last March when a specially trained operative from the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency slipped into Iraq as part of an UNSCOM team. U.S. officials stressed to TIME that they never misused the inspection agency. Explained an exasperated White House aide: "The whole purpose of UNSCOM was to spy on Iraq...
...sent out a call for help from member states in tracking Saddam's chemical- and biological-weapons activities. In response, the U.S. Air Force lent the U.N. a U-2 spy plane and crew and provided highly detailed photos from its KH-12 spy satellites orbiting above Iraq. According to UNSCOM head Richard Butler, the U.S. was not alone: 40 or more other nations contributed. Many have sent intelligence and weaponry experts to serve on the inspection teams. France, Britain and Russia did so--with Russia even sending a senior KGB officer who had previously served in New York City...
...inspectors decided they needed scanners and recorders that would let them listen in on the security forces as they shuttled weaponry, components, technical manuals and chemical and biological materials around Iraq. Scott Ritter, the former U.S. Marine major who was then a leading UNSCOM inspector, traveled to Israel and persuaded that country's intelligence agency, the Mossad, to provide scanners to tap into the radio and cell-phone frequencies used by the Iraqi security units...
...officials concede that the NSA buglets did record information that could be used to track Saddam's security team and provide details on possible bombing targets. But it provided no more than incremental help. After all, the U.S. was already focusing massive intelligence resources against Iraq, so the contribution of a few small taps was like the patter of raindrops on a lake. Explains a senior intelligence official: "There was useful information, but it helped us only moderately." Anyway, asks another senior spy, if they happened to pick up something interesting, "are we supposed to put our fingers...
Like the inspectors, the tiny bugs are out, carried away in the baggage when the U.N. left Iraq last December (officials wanted to make sure the Iraqis would never find them). They will probably never go back. Clinton Administration officials are convinced that senior members of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's staff, if not Annan himself, leaked statements of his "concern" about U.S. intelligence assistance in order to smear Butler and put an end to UNSCOM as it is constituted at present...