Stewart Stogel
Thursday, March 27, 2003

New York--United Nations--"My contract expires at the end of June and I do not propose to stay beyond that," said UN Chief Arms Inspector Hans Blixin in an interview with NewsMax Thursday.

Blix's intention to call it quits later this year first surfaced in a NewsMax Insider Report earlier this month.

Blix joined the UN in March 2000, after serving as Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (the UN atomic watchdog) for 17 years.

Before he left the IAEA in 1998, Blix was noted for uncovering both Iraq's and North Korea's secret atomic weapons programs.

Ironically, it was the same reactor that Blix's IAEA personnel sealed in 1994, that North Korea reactivated last month.

Blix led UN inspectors back into Iraq beginning last December. But the main focus of Blix's agency ended last Tuesday, when UN chief Kofi Annan ordered all UN personnel out of the country, one day ahead of the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

As Blix and company were leaving Iraq, the US was quietly assembling its own team of former UN inspectors to lead a new effort to search for illegal weapons.

NewsMax has learned the new US effort is likely to be headed by Charles Duelfer.

Duelfer, who is now assembling inspection teams in Kuwait, himself headed the UN inspection effort from 1998 to 2000. Before that, Duelfer was deputy to former UN arms chiefs Rolf Ekeus and Richard Butler.

It was in 1998 that Duelfer headed the first UN inspection team into one of Saddam Hussein's presidential palaces.

That inspection did not uncover any secret weapons, but did unearth some "expensive new VCRs" and some rooms made of "expensive Italian marble," so explained one Security Council ambassador who made the trip.

By December of 1998, the Clinton administration had become so frustrated with the UN inspections that Washington ordered UN arms chief Richard Butler to evacuate his personnel from Iraq.

Days later, the US launched Operation Desert Fox, an intensive air campaign aimed at destroying suspected caches and manufacturing facilities of prohibited weapons.

It took four years for the UN to resume the arms inspections, only to be abruptly halted last week, a day ahead of the coalition invasion.

Blix looked back on his term as UN arms chief and hinted at future plans:

"One phase is over and the US decided that inspections were not an avenue through which you could achieve the verified disarmament of Iraq. Later on there may be some long term monitoring of some kind, but that is a new phase. I was in retirement when I came here [in March 2000] for one task and when that is over if they still need someone to run the organization someone else can take over. I can go back and resume my research and writing about international law."