IRAQ: Fears by Washington of information leaks to Baghdad have meant that UN inspectors are not privy to top-level US intelligence, report Colum Lynch and Rajiv Chandrasekaran, in Dora, Iraq
As muddy labourers gawked and a mangy dog growled, a team of 13 UN weapons inspectors swooped in on an abandoned farm in Iraq earlier this month and demanded to enter two long brick buildings with padlocked doors.
The inspectors, a UN official said, had received a tip from a Western government that Iraq might have been hiding Scud missiles inside the weather-beaten structures in Dora, a farming community a few miles south of Baghdad. Finding a banned Scud would give the Bush administration the smoking gun it has been desperately seeking, providing clear evidence that Saddam Hussein's government is flouting UN Security Council resolutions mandating Iraq's disarmament.
But when the inspectors finally were let inside, after waiting for the better part of a day for the owner to return from a hunting trip, all they found were the remnants of a massive chicken-farming operation. Because the roof was too low and the doors too small, the inspectors concluded the site likely never was - and never would be - a missile silo.
The January 15th visit illustrates how the inspectors have expanded the scope of their activities in recent weeks as they have received more intelligence from the United States and other nations. The inspectors are no longer confining their searches to ammunitions storehouses, chemical plants, missile factories, university laboratories and other sites that have long been connected to the country's weapons programmes. Their agenda now is sprinkled with visits to new and unexpected places, including scientists' homes, abandoned airfields and chicken farms.
But thus far, UN officials said, the flow of outside intelligence to the inspectors has not led them to clear evidence that Iraq still possesses - or is developing - weapons of mass destruction.
US officials have acknowledged they are not giving their best intelligence to the inspectors because they fear that sensitive information might be leaked to the Iraqis and that intelligence-gathering sources could be compromised. But UN officials who believe Iraq still has banned weapons have grown increasingly frustrated that the tips are insufficient to find evidence of prohibited arms.
The intelligence, said one UN official involved in the inspections, "has not been that great".
"We know the Americans have concerns, but if they want to make their case ... they should be more forthcoming with us," the official said. Another UN official involved in the inspections accused the US and other foreign governments of providing "little actionable evidence".
In the most detailed description of US intelligence-sharing with the inspectors to date, Deputy Secretary of Defence, Mr Paul Wolfowitz, said last week that the US had identified the names of Iraqi scientists and sites associated with Iraq's weapons programmes that US officials believed could lead the inspectors to uncover evidence of ongoing activity to develop banned arms.
"We have provided our analysis of Iraq's nuclear, chemical, biological and missile programs, and we have suggested an inspection strategy and tactics," Mr Wolfowitz told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. "We have provided counterintelligence support to improve the inspectors' ability to thwart Iraqi attempts to penetrate their organisations."
After almost two months of daily searches, the inspectors have been unable to confirm US and British suspicions - outlined last year in a CIA report and a British government dossier - that a host of former weapons sites and industrial facilities have been rebuilt during the past four years to produce banned weapons.
Inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency have cast doubt on claims by President Bush to the UN General Assembly on September 12th that Iraq was seeking to acquire aluminium tubes for use in a secret uranium enrichment programme. The tubes, according to Dr Mohamed ElBaradei, the agency's director-general, are consistent with efforts to reverse-engineer rockets.
"Yes, it's possible that we've been misinformed on some things," Mr Wolfowitz said. "But in a country that has a history of constructing Potemkin villages, there's absolutely no way to know whether what the inspectors were shown were, indeed, those aluminium tubes that we're concerned about, or whether it was a whole facade constructed to substantiate a certain story."
UN officials declined to identify the country that supplied the information about the chicken farm in Dora.
Two days after their visit, the inspectors went to another poultry farm on the outskirts of Baghdad, based on an intelligence report that weaponised biological agents might be hidden there. After inspectors scoured the chicken coops and used ground-penetrating radar to determine whether anything was hidden under mounds of corn, they concluded the report was false.
Such visits have clearly amused the Iraqi government, which insists it no longer possesses weapons of mass destruction.
"If we go on a scale of A to D, it's a D," Gen Amir Saadi, President Saddam's chief adviser on weapons issues, said of Western intelligence reports on Iraq. He said the Iraqi government had been "expecting something really big and momentous" after hearing US officials boast about evidence of Iraq's weapons programmes.
Asked about the visit to the two chicken farms, Gen Saadi said: "If that's their best, we can't be very worried."
A UN official has said inspectors believe Iraqi officials moved materials before inspectors arrived at least one site identified in an intelligence report.
US intelligence-sharing might also be limited because Mr Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector, rebuffed a request by the Bush administration to appoint a senior US official in the UN inspection agency to handle sensitive intelligence. After pressure to step up co-operation - and to test the UN's capacity to keep a secret - Washington agreed to supply some secret information to the UN chief of intelligence, Mr James Corcoran, a former deputy director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Agency.
Washington also has offered to lend U-2 and Predator spy planes to the inspectors. But Iraq has placed conditions on their flight that UN officials deem unacceptable, including a demand that US and British warplanes stop flying into Iraqi airspace to enforce no-fly zones while the UN reconnaissance aircraft are in the air.
UN officials say one of the inspectors' biggest successes so far - the surprise search of an Iraqi scientist's home where they found more than 3,000 pages of sensitive documents - was the result of an intelligence tip from a foreign government.