The Iraqis opted to play lip-service to compliance. They said that they would accept the provisions of the Security Council Resolution, yet at the same time they accepted it, in April, 1991, there were high-level meetings in which Iraq made strategic plans for concealing the existence of their entire biological weapons program, their entire nuclear weapons program, the bulk of their modern chemical weapons production program, and their entire indigenous missile production capability.
Will you describe the Agricultural Ministry incident in July 1992, and the significance of it.
Well, in order to understand the agricultural ministry you have to actually go back in time, to December, 1991, when the special commission, together with the United States, worked in concert to develop techniques for searching for Iraq’s hidden weapons capabilities. And we started what we called the great SCUD hunts, sending large, intrusive teams in, to comb Iraq for missiles, parts of missiles, production capability, and documents, basically trying to replicate on the ballistic missile front the success that the IAEA had on the nuclear front. And we kept running into dry holes, banging our head against the wall, not having great success.
…snip…
the first target we hit, agricultural ministry. Surround it, and the Iraqis say, ‘You can’t come in.’ And we say, Well, you’ve got to let us in. I mean, we’re the United Nations. We’ve been through this already. There was Resolution, 707–you remember, you tried this with the IEA, there was international crises? We don’t want to go down that path again. Now, we want in, let us in. Oh, no. This is a ministry, this is a symbol of our national sovereignty.
And we said,’ All right, you want to play that game? We’re parking. We’re surrounding it. Nobody’s going in and out unless they run through our inspectors. ‘The Iraqis went,’ All right, we’ll play that.’
And we said–‘OK. Security Council, they’re not letting us in.’ Nothing. Day goes by–‘Excuse me, gentlemen, we’re parked out in front of the agriculture ministry. They’re not letting us in. We want to do an inspection.’ Silence. Nothing.
Now the situation starts to deteriorate, because the Iraqis are looking around and nothing’s happening. All right. Let’s jack up the pressure. Demonstrations started occurring. First, small demonstrations. Then, as each day goes by, the demonstrations get bigger, and bigger, and bigger, until we literally have thousands of Iraqis storming the agricultural ministry, egging our cars, stoning us, not stoning but throwing rotten vegetables at us, shaking the cars. And the Security Council’s doing nothing. Zero.
And, ultimately, we got to a situation where the Iraqi security service brought in somebody who tried to stab an inspector, through a window, and at that point the lives of the inspectors were at risk and we had no other choice than to withdraw the team. The Security Council did nothing. It was fascinating.
And, of course, once we were through with the team the Iraqis were through with the archive. So, weeks later, when Rolf Ekeus, the security council and everybody came up with a compromise solution, and a team reappeared at the agriculture ministry, and were let in; of course they found nothing. They did find some rooms where nothing was there, but we found no documents. A very embarrassing situation, and a frustrating one.
And it pretty much signaled that UNSCOM had to start changing the way it did business, because our ability to mobilize these teams–We proved that we had the operational and technical capability of mobilizing the team on short notice and sending it to targets. The problem was, we were echelons ahead of where the Security Council was, in terms of being prepared to deal with that kind of crisis. So we had to scale our operation back and start approaching the Iraqis from a different angle.
So, the agriculture ministry was a watershed event.