In search of Saddam's secret arsenal

A worldwide drive to attract new recruits is urgently under way ? in case a beleaguered Iraq agrees access. David Usborne reports from New York

The UN is set to launch a major recruitment drive for new weapons inspectors as it continues to prepare for the possibility that Saddam Hussein, in the face of the threat of US military action, agrees to allow them back into his country.

In the coming weeks, Hans Blix, chairman of Unmovic, the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, will scour all the continents for 80 new experts to join more than 200 recruits who have already undergone training for the work.

Officials in New York say, however, that Mr Blix is ready to respond in days should a diplomatic breakthrough occur suddenly and Iraq agrees to a resumption of inspections that were ended in December 1998, just before an Anglo-American bombing blitz of Baghdad.

They stress that Unmovic is very different in nature to the predecessor body, Unscom, which was disbanded in 1999. Previously, for example, the inspectors were supplied by governments, in particular by Washington, feeding the perception that the organisation was riddled with American spies. This time, Mr Blix is doing the hiring himself, and those already on board come from 44 different countries, compared to about 12 before.

Aside from a core 67 staff in New York, the remaining inspectors – engineers, military officers, interpreters and scientists – are mostly employed in their own countries, but agree to be available at short notice for three-month rotating stints in Iraq to inspect installations and look for signs of an Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programme.

Mr Blix wants a final pool of about 300 inspectors, with some 130 expected to be in Iraq at any one time. As of now, Americans account for 10 per cent of those already hired, compared to about 20 per cent for Unscom. There are eight Britons in the New York staff and eight more hired as rotating inspectors.

The chairman, a native of Sweden, hopes his new team will prove both less political in nature, but also more sensitive to Iraqi traditions and more sophisticated in its work. All new inspectors go through five weeks of basic training, which includes courses on Iraqi culture, as well as follow-up sessions in specific areas, such as chemical and biological weapons detection.

The first to go into Iraq would be the experts among the core staff in New York. Many have Iraqi dinars stacked in the top drawers of their desks, just in case. The first contingents of the rotating inspectors would follow a few weeks thereafter.

A first port of call would be the old Canal Hotel, in a Baghdad suburb. Mr Blix will inherit a full floor of the hotel that used to serve as the Baghdad base of Unscom before it was disbanded. Outside the building, there are about 50 four-by-four vehicles and five helicopters belonging to the UN that would have to be serviced and dusted down.

There will be much to do. The first inspectors would re-visit sites that were under UN scrutiny in the 1990s. Usually, they are industrial plants where there is machinery that could be "dual-use", suited to both civilian and military production. Expects would have to study equipment and judge if it had been used to manufacture proscribed substances or weapons: whether a margarine plant, for instance, could have been used to produce poison gas.

Iraq would be asked to declare its inventory of potentially dual-use equipment, something that it has been refusing to do. Thereafter, potentially suspicious sites would be refitted with detector gadgets such as sensors and cameras.

Rolf Ekeus, a former Unscom chairman, once said his inspectors were folk "in floppy hats with notebooks". With new technology and tighter discipline, the teams being assembled by Mr Blix should be far from amateurs. Whether they will ever see the inside of Iraq is another thing.