Ritter

March 25, 1999
Web posted at: 2:48 p.m. EST (1948 GMT)

(CNN) -- Scott Ritter is a blunt ex-Marine who quit the United Nations arms inspection team when he decided the United States government was no longer backing UNSCOM's work.

In his new book, "Endgame: Solving the Iraq Problem -- Once and For All?", he charges that U.S. intelligence agents who used UNSCOM as a cover for spying destroyed the inspection teams' credibility.

"The United States made it their policy to corrupt the U.N. disarmament process," Ritter told CNN.

Ritter resigned as chief weapons inspector for the U.N. in August 1998, claiming that both the U.N. Security Council and the U.S. government had fatally undermined his team's attempts to locate and eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Ritter says that U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright undermined the only leverage the U.N. inspectors had in Iraq when she announced that the U.S. would keep economic sanctions against Iraq, not just until it had disarmed, but until Saddam Hussein was out of power.

What has been the reaction to his claims? Albright says, "He was a good inspector. I'm not going to criticize him, however he doesn't have a clue about what our overall policy has been."

James Rubin, a spokesman for the U.S. State Department, was blunt and to the point when speaking about the book with CNN's State Department correspondent Andrea Koppel. "I'm sure it belongs in the fiction section," he said. "I don't want to help him sell any books."

Ritter, a fluent Russian speaker who served on the Staff of Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf during the Gulf War, is equally blunt in return: "It's not as though the U.S. has a noble policy towards Iraq that's being sabotaged by Scott Ritter. It is that the U.S. has no policy on Iraq, and what they do put forward is corrupt and meaningless."

In his book, Ritter offers a first-hand inside view of Iraq and Hussein, including how, after the Gulf War, Hussein put in place a concealment program designed to preserve his weapons capabilities. As Ritter and his U.N. team tried to penetrate this concealment mechanism, Ritter inspected some of Iraq's most closely guarded sites, often engaging in face-offs with hostile Iraqi guards and officials.

Ritter also criticizes his former boss Richard Butler, the U.N. chief arms inspector, saying he was co-opted by the U.S. "I can't see how Richard Butler can say he wasn't doing the bidding of Washington," Ritter told CNN.

Ritter on an inspection mission in Iraq

Butler says Ritter is a loose cannon who doesn't know what he is talking about: "The greatest error is to tell people things that are wrong, and he has done a lot of that."

But Ritter challenges his critics to point to any inaccuracies in his book or his public statements. The book urges the West to make up its mind either to overthrow Saddam with military force, or to sit down again with the Iraqi government and give diplomacy another try.