Can you explain your role in the GATEWAY program?
GATEWAY was really a C.I.A. operation. It was set up in Bahrain, the "gateway" to Iraq for all inspectors. Weapons inspectors stayed in Bahrain, came through Bahrain and were briefed and debriefed [by GATEWAY officials] in Bahrain and the U.N. co-operated with this program.
Australia was asked to join the program and I went to set up the Australian aspect of it and for a while there were two British officers also attached to GATEWAY.
The information gathered was used to help the U.S. (and Australia and the U.K.) brief the U.N.. We were the collection point for the information. One could ask why did you need a collection point but [it was necessary] especially in the early days when UNSCOM and U.N. inspectors weren't very well organized and didn't really have such a collection point themselves.
The information GATEWAY collected was then put together with other intelligence collected by other means; by satellites or whatever. So some details that the inspectors thought may not have been important would be added by the GATEWAY team to other information which might [prove to be] quite useful - in fact in some cases very useful — in putting together missions to target particular facilities.
All of the U.N. teams would meet at the GATEWAY headquarters [in Bahrain] and the C.I.A., and myself, would brief the teams before they went in on what to expect and if they going to inspect a particular facility, what to expect of that particular facility.
Wouldn't the C.I.A.'s involvement have compromised the U.N. inspectors?
It did and yes, some of the information that was collected may have been used for other purposes and of course it was the U.S. not the U.N. [who ran GATEWAY]. But it was agreed by the U.N. to co-operate with the program, there was no prohibition in [appearing before GATEWAY].
A lot of countries were interested in what Iraq was doing not just the U.S. The Russians and the French and other countries were up to the same thing it's just the U.S. had this team there called GATEWAY.
Fellow weapons inspector Scott Ritter has accused UNSCOM Chairman Richard Butler of allowing Western intelligence to hijack the weapons inspection process for their own information collection purposes. In particular, Ritter refers to the installation of a "black box" in UNSCOM's Baghdad headquarters. What is your opinion?
It was questionable about whether we should have ever installed the black box. We [the U.N.] collected intelligence on Iraq. We flew U2 spy aircraft — with U.S. pilots but under UN markings — over Iraq collecting intelligence.
That was approved by the U.N. Security Council.
However, when things became difficult, particularly in 1998 in the latter stages of UNSCOM, although we'd already uncovered a lot in Iraq, there were still unaccounted for materials, equipment and even weapons.
As Iraq was not co-operating, UNSCOM — the weapons inspectors — took [the intelligence gathering] one step further and installed eavesdropping equipment in our headquarters, listening devices so we could pick up Iraqi communications.
Unlike the U2 aircraft, this had not been approved by the Security Council.
