Chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix said today he could not rule out the presence of spies on the United Nations team due to resume weapons inspections in Iraq.
He did say however that any intelligence agents would be ordered off the group.
Blix, stopping over in Paris on his way to Cyprus and Baghdad, also said any delay in allowing inspectors access to sites in Iraq would be very serious, but did not say whether it would violate the U.N. resolution, which could trigger war.
Iraq has accused some previous U.N. arms inspectors of being spies working directly for the United States, but Blix said he could not be sure that his team, due to resume work in Iraq on November 27, would be free of undercover agents.
He stressed that the group was made up of 45 different nationalities in an effort to ensure it remained impartial.
"People have asked me: 'Can you be absolutely sure we will have no spies in any of the member states?' and I said no, I don't think either the KGB or the CIA can give that absolute assurance," Blix told a joint news conference with French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin.
"All I can say is that if I see someone having two hats, then I would ask them to walk out from us and to be somewhere else," he added.
Blix, a 74-year-old Swedish national, is head of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, which is in charge of accounting for Iraq's chemical and biological weapons and ballistic missiles.
He urged Iraqi authorities to comply with the inspectors, returning to Iraq after four years to search for weapons of mass destruction under a U.N. Security Council resolution that could trigger a U.S. attack on Iraq.
"A denial of access or delayed access or trying to put something off grounds for us, this would be very serious," Blix said. Blix told French newspaper Le Mondein an interview published yesterday that inspectors would report such delays but it would be up to the U.N. to decide whether they constituted a "material breach" of the resolution - a potential trigger for war.