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[Anonymous <nobody@replay.com>]

US Spied On Iraq Without UNSCOM Knowledge-Post

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/ts/story.html?s=v/nm/19990302/ts/iraqun_1.html
 
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. intelligence services spied on Iraq for three years without the knowledge of the United Nations arms control teams that it used to disguise its work, the Washington Post reported Tuesday.

The newspaper quoted U.S. government employees and documents describing the classified operation, concluding that the U.N. Special Commission, or UNSCOM, did not authorize or benefit from this channel of U.S. surveillance.

Previously, the Clinton administration acknowledged use of eavesdropping equipment but said it was done solely in cooperation with UNSCOM to uncover Baghdad's concealment of its illegal weapons.

Deputy State Department spokesman James Foley said in a Feb. 23 briefing that charges of U.S. espionage inside UNSCOM are ''unfathomable except as elements which can only serve Saddam Hussein's propaganda machine.''

But now, the Post reported, sources were acknowledging that Washington rigged UNSCOM equipment and office space without permission to intercept a high volume of ordinary Iraqi military communications.

Those communications, carried on microwave channels, were of considerable value to U.S. military planners but generally unrelated to UNSCOM's special weapons mandate, the Post quoted the sources as saying.

Microwave channels are line-of-sight communications, typically transmitting a narrow beam from hilltop to hilltop and difficult to intercept by aircraft or satellites.

U.S. intelligence agencies saw a chance to tap into those signals when UNSCOM changed the arrangement it used to monitor distant sites in Iraq with video cameras, the Post reported.

In March 1996, with Iraq's consent, UNSCOM began transmitting images from the cameras back to Baghdad using radio signals, boosted by relays, known as repeater stations, arrayed along the paths from the camera sites.

The new system gave UNSCOM's inspectors a view of distant facilities in ``near real time,'' but unknown to UNSCOM, the U.S. signals and sensor technicians who installed and maintained the system were intelligence operatives, and the repeater stations they built had a covert capability, the paper said.

Hidden in their structure were antennas able to intercept microwave transmissions, and the U.S. agents placed some of them near important nodes of Iraqi military communications.

The Post said it was withholding the names of the three agents at the government's request.

Iraq has long claimed the United States and its allies were using UNSCOM as a way to spy on Baghdad. Washington and UNSCOM insisted that tough inspection regimens were necessary because Iraq refused to disclose information on its weapons programs.

U.S. intelligence agencies decided to use the microwave transmissions to spy on Iraq because ``we were very concerned about protecting our independence of access'' to Iraqi military communications, one knowledgeable U.S. official told the Post.

``We did not want to rely on a multinational body that might or might not continue to operate as it was operating.''

As a result, Washington decided not to inform Rolf Ekeus, then serving as UNSCOM's executive chairman, or his Australian successor, Richard Butler, although they did notify Charles Duelfer, the U.S. deputy to both men.

``In general our efforts with UNSCOM were focused on how to help UNSCOM, through a number of different means, uncover and track down the mechanisms and the materials associated with weapons of mass destruction,'' State Department spokesman James P. Rubin told the paper. But he declined to comment on the specific issue of the U.S. espionage.