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Inside UNSCOM: The Inspector

Transcript of interview with Charles Duelfer, Deputy Chairman of the U.N. Special Commission to Iraq

Editor's note: On February 13 1998, CNN interviewed Charles Duelfer, the Deputy Chairman of the United Nations Special Commission to Iraq in preparation for IMPACT's March 4 special report: "Inside UNSCOM: The Inspectors' Story." Here are portions of that interview.

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CNN: Let's start with the Iraqi arsenal. What does it consist of?

CHARLES DUELFER: Well, that's a good question. And if we could answer that,we'd be in a much stronger position. We have enormous uncertainty in some of these areas, and uncertainty is dangerous in our book. We have a fairly good understanding of the missile program, those missiles which were imported from the former Soviet Union. But what we found in the course of our work is that Iraq was able to build its own missiles, and hence, we now have to account for that capability. And we've been doing that over the last couple of years.

Chemical area - there we have accomplished a fair amount, in terms of destroying a vast inventory which Iraq had. However, we find again, there is a problem that Iraq had not admitted that they had produced a very sophisticated agent, called VX, until very late in the game, and now we must account for that.

Finally, in the biological weapons area, we have a complete lack of understanding. Iraq has given us an explanation, a declaration of what their program consisted of. But, unfortunately, it's either inconsistent, illogical, unverifiable, and in many ways just doesn't make any sense. And so we've got an enormous amount of work to do in that area. And, as you know, that is a very, very dangerous weapons system.

CNN: How many "full, final and complete disclosures" has Iraq already made, in the matter of biological weapons?

MR. DUELFER: Well, there have been several. It depends on how you count, but there have been several. They give us versions of these on a basis that, when we demand them and they provide revisions to them, and we demand revisions. But it has been several. I think it's four or five. The most recent one was this past summer, and we gave them an answer on that, that it was unsatisfactory.

CNN: I think the phrase was "not remotely credible", wasn't it?

MR. DUELFER: That's the phrase we used in our report to the security counsel, not remotely credible. It's a problem. It's a serious problem, because in this area what you don't know will not just hurt you, it can kill you. And we have to remove that uncertainty.

CNN: Give me some figures. Let's start with how many SCUDs, one hears all kinds of figures, like maybe 7, maybe 20. Have you got any idea how many? When it comes to doing your own arithmetic, how do you add that up?

MR. DUELFER: Well, I really can't give you a figure. There's a band of uncertainty that we have. And the band of uncertainty is not just in the units of missiles themselves, but it's in the components of the missiles. We have trouble accounting for warheads, for engines, for the various pieces. And how those pieces may be assembled or may not be assembled could add up to, you know, several missiles, or it may add up to nothing. The problem is we can't get Iraq to give us a verifiable explanation of their claim that they've destroyed them all. And what we can verify is that there are inaccuracies. So the problem is uncertainty. And we try to narrow that uncertainty. We have narrowed it substantially over time, over the seven years we've been working on this. But, we haven't gotten to zero yet, and zero is what we have to get to.

CNN: How about the question of VX, of poison gas? I mean, what's the situation specifically on VX at the moment? Give me some figures.

MR. DUELFER: VX is something which the Iraqis denied having produced initially. In recent times, they finally admitted that they produced it. First, only in laboratory quantities, a few grams, but then due to some very imaginative and dedicated work by our inspectors, we came up with this documentation which proves that they actually produced it in much more substantial quantities. We also had more information on the precursors, that is to say, the building blocks of these final agents.

We are now to a point where Iraq tells us that they produced 3.9 tons of the finished agent, and they have now admitted, as recently as last September, that they had a very sophisticated process for achieving this. But, we are unable at this stage to verify that amount. So that's what Iraq has told us. We cannot confirm that.

We've been trying to peel back the layers of this onion, as it were. And last September we had a team of international experts, led by a very prominent scientist from Sweden. And they explored specifically the question of, by what chemical processes they achieved their VX. And there are different ways of building this agent, some of which are more efficient and more sophisticated than others, some of which achieve a more persistent, and a much more viable weaponized agent.

And what we found was that Iraq had a very sophisticated procedure to achieve this weapon. So we're gradually extracting the fuller picture from Iraq. But, it's not an easy process, and it's a slow process.

CNN: Did Iraq actually challenge the finding as a result of the Swedish expert's look at all this, did they concede that, in fact, his numbers are correct.

MR. DUELFER: That's a question, in this stage of the Iraqi's acknowledging something that they have no choice but to acknowledge . It has been a pattern that Iraq will deny something until we can prove that what they are saying is incorrect. And when we provide them with proof, then they will acknowledge a different, and perhaps more real, presentation.

This, of course, is the reverse of what the UN Security Council has in mind, where Iraq is supposed to tell us something and then we're supposed to verify their presentation. But, because of the attitude the Iraqi side has been taking, it's been slowing the process down.

CNN: Give me a little more detail about the present biological picture. I think you just described it as a black hole?,

MR. DUELFER: Well, a black hole has been the term that's been used to apply to it. It is certainly confusing, it is illogical. There is very little that we can get a concrete fix on. Iraq, for example, tells us that they made, you know, X tons of this agent. When we ask them, well, what happened to it, they say, oh well, we dumped it in the ground. How does one verify that? How do we assure ourselves that Iraq is telling the truth, when bearing in mind, particularly in the biology area, they denied its existence, they denied so much for so long, we're not in a position where we're going to take them at their word.

These types of problems are laced throughout Iraq's declaration in the biology area. So that, in totality, it is a melange of uncertainty. And we just need some fixed point to begin our work from.

CNN: After seven years you haven't reached it, right?

MR. DUELFER: We're far from it, at this point.

CNN: At this point, what is to be done?

MR. DUELFER: Well, we still believe that Iraq needs to take a fundamental decision, that they wish to fully reveal these programs. It has always been a very incremental process by them. They have not come forward with a full, you know, release of information, release of people to talk to us, and provide documentation.

I mean, we are convinced that Iraq retains documents that could help us get a more verifiable explanation of the program. We are convinced that there are individuals in Iraq who could help us understand this, should they be able to speak to us freely. There must be tangible evidence in Iraq, after all, they know what happened. If they wanted to fully describe it, we think that they could.