It was no accident that I came to join the UN Special Commission. I had experience in the technical aspects of all three weapons of mass destruction categories: nuclear, chemical, and biological. I served as an infantry officer in the British Army engaged in counterinsurgency, counter-terrorism, and UN peacekeeping operations. During that time, I spent periods as a staff officer in scientific and technical appointments related to nuclear, chemical, biological and conventional weapons and their means of delivery. I was also involved in international negotiations on related treaties and agreements, and I knew many of the diplomats, scientists, and engineers from bilateral and multilateral activities in both regional and global settings. This experience gave me a solid foundation on which to draw as the UN sought to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.

I joined the commission in 1993, serving initially as one of 23 commissioners. This gave me an overview of the full range of the commission’s activities and some insight into higher-level political interactions. I also served as one of the chief inspectors, from 1993 to 1997, for the commission’s biological missions known as BW17, BW23, BW31, BW42, and BW48.

There are many lessons that can be drawn from the commission’s experience. In many ways, the political context was unique. Disarmament regimes, such as the ones in Libya and South Africa in the past, and, the more contemporary cases, of Iran, North Korea, and Syria, are fundamentally different from one another; they demand different approaches to the structure and general operation of disarmament and verification processes. Because each regime is different, the lessons that most readily apply from the experience of the UN Special Commission in Iraq are the detailed technical ones relevant to finding, dismantling, destroying, and verifying weapons of mass destruction. Even in this regard, care needs to be taken in recognizing different scientific, technological, and industrial statuses over time.

While I had substantial experience, and was fortunate in my appointments, I do not claim to have complete knowledge of the full range of the commission’s activities and top-level decision-making. The lessons I take from my experience are colored by my personal history and my interactions with those involved. 

The challenges of an adversarial relationship

UN Security Council Resolution 687 required the Iraqis to declare their weapons programs and delivery means in full. In essence, the onus was on Iraq to declare the locations, amounts, and types of all items related to their nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs, as well as all ballistic missiles with a range greater than 150 kilometers, related major parts, and repair and production facilities. These declarations became known as “Full Final and Complete Declarations.” From 1991 to December 2002, the Iraqi government made eight such declarations.

None was full and complete.

As I discovered from my very first inspection, Iraqi officials and scientists only revealed what they estimated UN inspectors might already know and what they judged was likely to be found. This not only applied to the weapons, equipment, and other material, but also to the state of their technical progress and technical knowledge.

An often under-appreciated challenge for any inspection organization—for UNSCOM, and for ones that exist now and may in the future—is one that arises in the case of an adversarial relationship. The Iraqis conducted information attacks on the special commission, throughout its chain of communication from New York, through the staging base in Bahrain, and all the way to the ground level in Iraq. This meant, for example, that it was very difficult to mount surprise inspections and protect assessments. Special measures were necessary when surprise was essential to achieving the mission—for example, when we needed to conduct unannounced interviews of Iraqi scientists at their place of work.

The standard practice was to interview scientists in set-piece interviews. We would notify in advance the Iraqi National Monitoring Directorate and would generally hold the interviews at its offices. This gave officials the opportunity to prepare interviewees in advance, as well as to record and film the interviews in settings of their own choosing. To protect the element of surprise in one case, we did most of our work on laptops, avoiding desktop computers that were vulnerable to information attacks. We also kept those that needed to know our detailed plan to a minimum until just before the inspection team entered the field. It was necessary to conceal the ultimate inspection objective, for example who was to be interviewed, until the last possible moment. In New York, planning discussions were done off-site. These measures, among others, enabled us to carry out a plan with the full knowledge and support of the executive chair, Rolf Ekéus. He knew our detailed plan and if a serious problem was encountered on the ground, I could call him (on an unencrypted satellite phone) and he would know what I was talking about without having to divulge too much information. Rolf’s leadership and personal support was vital in this context.

Organizational structure, leadership, and culture matter

Another important lesson for a process involving more than one type of weapon and varied delivery means is the need for coordination between the different areas of inspection (nuclear, biological, chemical, missile, and other delivery means) to overcome the problem of parallel, and sometimes competing, hierarchies. In the case of Iraq, the disagreements at the top level between commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency, with their respective leaders reporting separately to the UN Security Council, permeated down to the inspection and monitoring teams on the ground.

There were also cultural differences and differences in inspection approaches between the two organizations. The International Atomic Energy Agency had a long-established inspection system and detailed protocols dealing with a material accounting process designed to detect the diversion of radiological material for military purposes. The commission had to collaborate with the agency and had to lead on uncovering the Iraqi programs for the development of warheads and delivery means, while also starting almost from scratch for the search for, and dismantlement of, chemical and biological weapons and all types of delivery means. While some valuable insights on inspection processes had been gained from the final negotiation stages of the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1989 to 1992, most aspects of the chemical and biological inspections had to be approached starting from scratch.

Overhead surveillance—limits and opportunities

The commission broke new ground in the use of overhead surveillance, which proved invaluable to its work. There were three phases in which it assisted our activities: First, when an inspection was in progress; second, in reviewing the results immediately after an inspection; and third, in analysis for longer term planning.

The commission had its own helicopter aerial surveillance team, and this team supplied support by, amongst other things, monitoring sites to be inspected to detect out-loading of equipment. The United States supplied U2 aerial surveillance data to the commission. While the results of this surveillance were not available to inspection teams on the ground, it was valuable for after-action analysis. The lesson here is that the advent of unmanned aerial vehicles could fulfill the shorter-term operational requirements for aerial surveillance for future organizations. Aerial drones, along with their operating personnel, would provide a disarmament and inspection organization with its own aerial surveillance capability making it less dependent on external support from member states. For longer-term analytical purposes, the current availability of open-source overhead aerial and satellite surveillance would also provide an in-house capability and lessen an organization’s dependence on outside support, though it would require properly trained operating personnel. 

The proliferation risk of weapons expertise

The numbers of people who have direct knowledge and experience of the development and production of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons are limited. Although it is true to say that advances in science and technology makes proliferation easier across the board, developing effective weapons requires specialist knowledge.

The focus of the Iraqi biological weapons effort was their development for battlefield use in a conflict with Iran. Unlike their efforts with chemical weapons, however, the commission inspections revealed that the Iraqis had not mastered the engineering required to deliver an effective biological weapon that would have a major impact—as opposed to a limited effect or an individual assassination. But, given more time, they certainly had the technical expertise to overcome the engineering challenge.

The Iraqis were very careful to conceal their level of technical and tacit knowledge and not just hide their weapons and equipment. Even if the material was destroyed, they hoped to hide how far they had reached with the program. In any case, tacit knowledge would remain. This provides an option for political leaders to restart the weapons program. A key lesson is therefore that the concept of irreversible disarmament is not a realistic option.

An embryonic inspection regime

If there is to be a disarmament and verification role for the United Nations, it should be for exceptional cases involving multiple weapons and delivery systems. The United Nations can integrate the expertise required into a single structure, drawing on the skills of single-issue organizations such as the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. It is particularly important to ensure the international community does not lose the expertise and lessons from the disarmament and inspection processes across multiple weapons categories in Iraq. This valuable investment by UN member states could be exploited to great benefit should the United Nations become engaged in future investigations of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs and their means of delivery.

Given the limits of the weapons of mass destruction treaties to address special cases through their mandates and provisions, there is merit in the idea of establishing a permanent organization, at least in embryonic form, under the auspices of the UN Secretary General, to help deal with these situations. To be truly effective it should encompass all the three categories of weapons of mass destruction, and their delivery means. The UN Secretary General should have under his hand a small organization with a roster of experts in all the fields of expertise needed.

There is a real challenge in maintaining a standing organization that is up to date on developments in the relevant sciences and their commercial applications. This is a particular challenge in biotechnology and the life sciences. It would be important to draw on people from private industry or academia so they can be brought into the small standing organization when needed.

If the United Nations is to maintain such an inspection organization, it should be designed to bring expertise under a central direction. A future UN inspection system involving multiple types of weapons and delivery means and, under a mandate to deal with special cases, would operate better from both a technical and a political point of view under one head, drawing on the agencies—the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Organization for the Prohibition Chemical Weapons—as well as any others that might be extant in the future.

An area of expertise that should not be overlooked, and which was important to the commission’s discoveries, is an understanding of the global trading environment. Organizations such as the World Customs Organization, the Financial Action Task Force (and its regional affiliates) and the International Criminal Police Organization have important expertise in legal and illegal exports, imports, technology transfers, and related financial transactions.  This proved important for the commission in uncovering, for example, the full extent of the Iraqi missile program. An understanding of global trade was also critical on the biological side, where the commission was able to trace supplies of growth media for the production of biological agents for weapons purposes by finding the types and quantities of media that had been purchased from overseas suppliers. By documenting Iraqi trade with two private companies, the commission won an admission by Iraq, on July 5, 1995, that it, in fact, had an offensive biological weapons program.

It would be relatively inexpensive for the United Nations to maintain rosters of expertise, databases, procedures, and logistical arrangements. Particularly valuable would be information and data not held by the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons—in other words, information on biological agents, missiles, unmanned aerial vehicle, and other kinds of delivery means. It would, however, be a mistake to view such an arrangement as a surrogate inspection system in the absence, for example, of an inspection protocol for the Biological Weapons Convention, an arms treaty that has no inspection mechanism, or in connection with the proliferation of missile and other aerial delivery technology.

The proposed arrangement is suitable only for special cases for which the Security Council gives a mandate. The structure should not be elaborate, as the technical, geographic, political, and other circumstances could vary significantly from case to case. Only a small permanent staff would be needed, with an additional roster of experts from governments, academia, and private industry available to be called in for seminar and training sessions to maintain appropriate skills and to assess relevant scientific and technical developments.

This extramural expertise would need to be adapted to developments in science and technologies. While a corporate memory is valuable to understanding the necessary bureaucratic procedures and the political dynamics of inspection activities (and best handled by permanent UN staff), staff providing scientific and engineering expertise would need to be turned over to ensure a proper understanding of the implications of such developments for prohibited weapons programs, production, trading and financial transactions.

While still a significant political challenge, a modest proposal along these lines stands the best chance of political acceptance and would be less of a strain on limited financial resources. If the invaluable archived material from commission and the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission that followed are retained, and an ability to quickly deploy a multidisciplinary and properly coordinated inspection group is put in place, this would be an important achievement.

Politics is everything

No matter how well designed and conducted a United Nations or other multilateral inspection and oversight organization might be, its efforts can be nullified by the countries involved, either as members of the Security Council or unilaterally.

In my last inspection in Iraq in 1997, we felt the impact of the increasingly vociferous view of some Security Council members that eliminating Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction would not be achieved unless Saddam Hussein left power. For example, the then newly appointed US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, in a speech at Georgetown University on March 16, 1997, said: “The evidence is overwhelming that Saddam Hussein’s intentions will never be peaceful… Clearly, a change in Iraq’s government could lead to a change in US policy. Should that occur, we would stand ready, in coordination with our allies and friends, to enter rapidly into a dialogue with the successor regime (Albright 1997).”  The impact of this position immediately affected events on the ground and put an end to what limited cooperation existed at that stage.