-Caveat Lector-
>From http://www.fair.org/activism/unscom-history.html
FAIR Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting 112 W. 27th Street New York, NY 10001
ACTION ALERT:
Spying in Iraq: From Fact to Allegation
September 24, 2002
Nothing makes a newspaper prouder than a juicy foreign-policy scoop. Except, it seems,
when the scoop ends up raising awkward questions about a U.S. administration's drive
for
war.
Back in 1999, major papers ran front-page investigative stories revealing that the CIA
had
covertly used U.N. weapons inspectors to spy on Iraq for the U.S.'s own intelligence
purposes. "United States officials said today that American spies had worked
undercover on
teams of United Nations arms inspectors," the New York Times reported (1/7/99).
According to the Washington Post (3/2/99), the U.S. "infiltrated agents and espionage
equipment for three years into United Nations arms control teams in Iraq to eavesdrop
on
the Iraqi military without the knowledge of the U.N. agency." Undercover U.S. agents
"carried out an ambitious spying operation designed to penetrate Iraq's intelligence
apparatus and track the movement of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, according to U.S. and
U.N. sources," wrote the Boston Globe (1/6/99).
Each of the three news stories ran on the papers' front pages. At first, U.S.
officials tried to
deny them, but as more details emerged, "spokesmen for the CIA, Pentagon, White House
and State Department declined to repeat any categorical denials" (Washington Post,
3/2/99). By the spring of 1999, the UNSCOM spying reported by the papers was accepted
as fact by other outlets, and even defended; "Experts say it is naive to believe that
the
United States and other governments would not have used the opportunity presented by
the
U.N. commission to spy on a country that provoked the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and that
has continued to tangle with U.S. and British forces," USA Today reported (3/3/99).
But now that the Bush administration has placed the inspectors at the center of its
rationale
for going to war, these same papers have become noticeably queasy about recalling
UNSCOM's past spying. The spy scandal badly damaged the credibility of the inspections
process, especially after reports that data collected through UNSCOM were later used to
pick targets in the December 1998 bombing of Iraq: "National security insiders,
blessed with
their unprecedented intelligence bonanza from UNSCOM, convinced themselves that
bombing Saddam Hussein's internal apparatus would drive the Iraqi leader around the
bend," wrote Washington Post analyst William Arkin (1/17/99).
Suddenly, facts that their own correspondents confirmed three years ago in interviews
with
top U.S. officials are being recycled as mere allegations coming from Saddam Hussein's
regime.
The UNSCOM team, explained the New York Times' Barbara Crossette in an August 3 story,
was replaced "after Mr. Hussein accused the old commission of being an American spy
operation and refused to deal with it." She gave no hint that Saddam's "accusation" was
reported as fact by her Times colleague, Tim Weiner, in a front-page story three years
earlier.
"As recently as Sunday, Iraqi officials called the inspectors spies and accused them of
deliberately prolonging their work," the Washington Post's Baghdad correspondent wrote
recently in a story casting doubt on the Iraqi regime's intentions of cooperating
(9/8/02).
Readers would have no way of knowing that the Post's Barton Gellman exhaustively
detailed
the facts of the spying in a series of 1999 articles.
"Iraq accused some of the inspectors of being spies, because they remained on their
host
countries' payrolls while reviewing Iraq's weapons," the Boston Globe's Elizabeth
Neuffer
wrote recently, in an oddly garbled rendition of the charges (9/14/02). She could have
boasted that her paper's own Colum Lynch (now with the Washington Post) was widely
credited with first breaking the story of UNSCOM's spying in a January 6, 1999
front-page
expose. But she chose not to.
It's hard to avoid the impression that certain media outlets would rather that UNSCOM's
covert espionage had never been exposed in the first place. The day after Barton
Gellman
of the Washington Post first reported the spying charges, in a story sourced to Kofi
Annan's
office, his own paper ran a thundering editorial denouncing Annan's "gutless ploy"
("Back-
Stabbing at the U.N.," 1/7/99) and instructing the U.N. leader that instead of
providing the
information to a Washington Post reporter, he and his aides should have "raised their
concerns in private."
ACTION: Please remind these leading newspapers that espionage by U.N. weapons
inspectors, now being treated as an allegation made by Saddam Hussein, was previously
reported by these papers as a fact.
CONTACT:
New York Times
Howell Raines, Executive Editor
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Boston Globe
Helen Donovan, Executive Editor
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Washington Post
Phil Bennett, Assistant managing editor, foreign news
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
As always, please remember that your comments are taken more seriously if you maintain
a polite tone. Please cc [EMAIL PROTECTED] with your correspondence.
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