Washingtonpost.com: Iraq Special Report
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 Ritter headed for the Baghdad airport after Iraq blocked inspections last December. (AP) |
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UNSCOM was a product of the uneven conclusion of the Gulf War, which left the Iraqi regime defeated but still in power. The war also shaped Ritter's eventual role.
Ritter spent the conflict fixed on Iraq's special weapons as an intelligence analyst for the U.S. Central Command, responsible for watching Scud missiles. Like everything Ritter does, he took it personally. As a lowly captain, his stubborn intensity led him into career-endangering disputes with the allies' commander in chief, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf. These foreshadowed later battles in UNSCOM with the French armed services chief, a senior British defense official, the director of the CIA's Near East operations and National Security Adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger.
Ritter "was a man who had not always toed the line," Ekeus said with a smile in the wood-toned office where he now holds court as Sweden's ambassador to Washington. When Ekeus first began recruiting for UNSCOM, he heard about a young Marine who stuck to wartime judgments "that I don't think were popular at the time. I knew he was a man of his own opinions. I liked that. We wanted to have strong personalities, but the very best talent."
Ritter had been on his way out of the Marines when war came. He resigned in 1990 to try to save a troubled first marriage to the former Heidi Evans, politely rebuffing a phone call to reconsider from the commandant, Gen. Alfred Gray. But Ritter changed his mind when President Bush began dispatching troops. "I can't leave the Marine Corps when my country's getting ready to go to war," Ritter said. "That's a dishonorable thing to do."
As the war began, Schwarzkopf was eager to claim success in the Scud hunt, for fear that Israel, the missile's main target, would enter the conflict. At a Jan. 30, 1991, news conference, the general displayed gun camera tape from an F-15E attack. "We knocked out as many as seven mobile erector-launchers in just that one strike," he declared.
Alarms rang immediately for Ritter, who was bomb damage assessment officer in Centcom's J-2, or intelligence directorate. He told his colleagues – in Centcom and at the Defense Intelligence Agency – that the targets looked like fuel trucks. Frantic work ensued among analysts at the CIA and the Joint Imagery Production Center. Before long, Rear Adm. Mike McConnell walked into Gen. Colin Powell's Pentagon office and told the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff he had a problem.
"We don't think those were Scuds," McConnell said, according to Powell's memoirs. When Powell asked his source, McConnell replied, "A captain, an analyst, on Schwarzkopf's staff."
The following morning, when he prepared the daily bomb damage report for Schwarzkopf, Ritter refused to mark the Scuds as "confirmed kills." According to Brig. Gen. John A. Leide, Centcom's intelligence chief, Schwarzkopf "didn't want to hear" he had made a mistake. Three members of the intelligence staff said in interviews that Schwarzkopf sent word down the chain he wanted Ritter to rewrite his report.
"I said, 'I'm BDA [bomb damage assessment] officer, and there is no criteria that says if the commanding officer says it's so, it's so,' " Ritter recalled. "They took it back, and Schwarzkopf blew up and they came back again and said, 'You have to change it.' I said I couldn't do that."
Ritter, meanwhile, had written a memorandum arguing that the allies were consistently striking decoys and not real Scuds. Even Delta Force commandos, running risky but, they thought, productive Scud hunts behind Iraqi lines, were blowing up the wrong targets, he wrote. Postwar analysis proved he was right. But when Maj. Gen. Wayne A. Downing heard the report, the former joint special forces commander said, "it made me irate."
"It probably took some personal courage, some intellectual courage and moral courage, to stand up and take that on because it certainly wasn't popular with the Air Force, it wasn't popular with General Schwarzkopf and it sure as hell wasn't popular with me," he said.
In another foreshadowing of his later role – combining intelligence with secret operations and, some critics argue, overreaching – wartime sources recounted that Ritter traveled to Ar Ar, a commando staging base in western Saudi Arabia. He proposed a plan to Col. Jesse Johnson, Centcom's special forces commander, for a covert team to infiltrate southwestern Iraq. Ritter would come along to select the debris of a bombed decoy, in hopes of developing a radar "signature" that could be used by Air Force bombardiers to distinguish fake Scuds from real ones.
Ritter refused to discuss Ar Ar or special operations in an interview. But he acknowledged that he was out of Riyadh one night, planning a reconnaissance mission, when an officer from Centcom headquarters arrived with a direct order from Schwarzkopf to abort his work and depart. "He said I was a defeatist, trying to ruin the morale of the operators, and two, I was trying to start my own war," Ritter recalled.
 An unidentified Iraqi official, right, turned away inspectors for the ninth time in 10 days last November. (AFP) |
Ritter got his own war at UNSCOM, or part of one. Hired in September 1991 as a U.N. employee and paid for his UNSCOM work at various stages by the Marine Corps and the Pentagon's On-Site Inspection Agency, he received the assignment of writing a complete history of Iraqi ballistic missile development.
Like other experts on the commission, Ritter found gaps and inconsistencies in Iraq's "full, final and complete disclosure" of capabilities. Using his wartime training and his recent knowledge of highly classified intelligence techniques, he began thinking of methods to test doubtful claims and alternate theories. With permission from superiors he began to play an entrepreneurial role with contributing governments, bluffing and bargaining for access to their most expensive and secret resources.
This kind of work was already beyond the broad consensus that created UNSCOM by a vote of the Security Council. France and Russia, which had supplied Iraq with many of its nonconventional weapons components and had aspirations for future diplomatic and commercial relations with the Baghdad regime, played important roles inside the commission but did not fully support the Anglo-American hard line. Although Ekeus inspired a team spirit that transcended some of these concerns, UNSCOM evolved into a fractious and internally distrustful coalition.
Protecting secrets was difficult at UNSCOM, whose headquarters resided in a 185-nation world body accustomed to access for all. To match and outmaneuver Iraq, with its own layers of secrets behind each public event, UNSCOM gradually came to mimic the Baghdad regime in one respect: It had compartments within compartments to obscure the details of what it knew and how.
In particular, Ritter distrusted the French, whom he came to regard as playing a double game: professing support for the commission, but positioning themselves for future influence in Iraq. Tim Trevan, a close British adviser to Ekeus who admired Ritter, said, "Scott is a Francophobe, beyond the reasonable." But he also acknowledged it was "well understood that the senior French officer always" – against UNSCOM's rules – "reported to his embassy. If you bar all Frenchmen from the commission, you'd lose a permanent member of the Security Council's support." Ritter had back channels of his own, but he and his superiors said they were authorized and therefore different from those he criticized.
His suspicion boiled over in the spring of 1993, during planning for a high-technology surprise for Iraq. Based on a CIA estimate and UNSCOM's previous inspection results, the commission suspected Iraq had a hoard of Scud missile engines buried in desert weapons graveyards. Ritter helped lead the planning for Operation Cabbage Patch, which would fly over the suspected sites with ground-penetrating radar, a device Iraq did not know UNSCOM had available to it. The name came from the translation of the Russian town of Kapustin Yar, where UNSCOM hoped the Moscow government would help stage a rehearsal, burying missile components in the manner it had once taught to Iraq.
Cabbage Patch was a closely held secret in UNSCOM, but a French photo interpreter on staff could tell something was up and demanded to know. Ritter reluctantly filled him in but secured his word that he would report to no one. Soon afterward, he came across a letter in French briefing the Defense Ministry in Paris about "le Cabbage Patch."
"I got in his face," Ritter said, in what he described as a loud drill-field voice. "I started using every four-letter word I could think of, called him a coward, called him a dishonorable man, and I told him if he was in the American military he'd be court-martialed."
The secret out, Ekeus asked Ritter to fly to France and request support for Cabbage Patch. Ritter was characteristically blunt: He needed Puma helicopters, he told the French military chiefs, and if Paris would not supply them – in the end, they did not – he would ask for their equivalents from Washington.
Adm. Jacques Lanxade, the French chief of staff, complained afterward about "this young American who behaved like a general," according to a French account. And there was worse. Lanxade and his fellow four-stars hosted Ritter for lunch in a linen-and-silver Paris dining room, each selecting a wine and cheese from his home region. Ritter, no gastronome, flagged down a waiter and asked for Diet Coke.
"I just fill up the glass and I chug it and I say, 'Could I get another?' " Ritter said. "I think I drank four in a row, to try to get a caffeine boost. Well, you would have thought I had blown up the Eiffel Tower, these generals were so aghast."
Cabbage Patch went forward in November 1993, after rehearsals staged from Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., over a test site in Yuma, Ariz., on American Bell 412 helicopters nicknamed Beavis and Butt-Head. The operation learned a great deal, mostly in the negative. UNSCOM's estimates for Iraq's remaining operational ballistic missile force shrank from about 200 to two dozen or fewer. But finding the missiles themselves was another matter.
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