Word: unscom
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...UNSCOM's spying activities began in earnest in 1992, when the U.N. 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...
...UNSCOM, which never had an intelligence section of its own, found out how much it still didn't know in 1995, when Saddam's brother-in-law, Lieut. General Hussein Kamel al-Majid, defected to Jordan and laid out for his debriefers the details of Saddam's elaborate concealment system. It was operated, Kamel told the CIA, by the Special Republican Guard and the Special Security Organization, the same outfits that serve as Saddam's personal and palace guards...
...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...
...March 1998, Defense Intelligence Agency agents slipped into Baghdad as UNSCOM operatives to install the devices covertly. The new devices were unmanned, hidden in seemingly benign objects--relieving inspectors of the dangerous backpacks. Signals intercepted by the new hardware were beamed up to a satellite and downloaded to the NSA's headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland. The agency then used supercomputers that were alerted to key words to help "listen" to conversations and edit out irrelevant chatter...
...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...