Hans Blix: The Exit Interview

Hans Blix talks like a diplomat, but he doesn't walk like one. An ardent hiker, he moves stiffly but jauntily, his stocky frame canted forward as though climbing a hill in the antiseptic hallways of the United Nations Secretariat building. He has a freshness that belies his 75 years, and a rustic charm that occasionally seeps through the bureaucratic exterior. Yet as he sits down to talk at the small conference table in a 31st-floor office, there is steel in his eyes, and his features display a degree of calculation and analysis. Hans Blix is inspecting you.

Before his three presentations to the Security Council during those tense winter months, Blix assembled his top staff in the same office-a space former Iraqi Oil Minister Amir Rashid once said was "not even big enough to shout in."

For hours they weighed the words he would use to describe progress in the hunt for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The Sphinx-like inspector, whose riddles could move markets in a manner Alan Greenspan might have envied, wanted no signs of bias. As executive chairman of UNMOVIC, the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, Blix knew every sentence would be scrutinized for signals that could lead to bombs on Baghdad or more diplomacy.

For Blix the result-to borrow a catchphrase from George W. Bush-was like a movie he didn't want to watch again. The U.S. goes to war, leaving the fiercely independent inspector to tread water in a Sargasso of unanswered questions. But history remembers written words, not the passing confusion of the moment. Blix's skill with language and law didn't halt the war, but his conduct may change how the world comes to understand the crisis. The broader truth, like the weapons of mass destruction, is still missing.

America's failure to find WMD already is raising serious questions about British and U.S. intelligence, diplomacy and strategic aims. Is a preemptive strike acceptable if the threat isn't really there? Do the ends justify the means? Blix had little to do with the ends, but he was central to the justification, and he finds these questions troubling. He was keen to go back to Iraq and help look for answers. To his frustration, the U.S. said no.

"Anybody that functions under an occupation cannot have the same credibility internationally as international inspectors would," Blix declared after his final June 5 address to the Security Council.

With his contract and U.N. obligations over as of June 30, he is now speaking even more candidly. He doesn't buy the American and British arguments of self-defense and broken U.N. resolutions. "From the point of view of international law, neither of these explanations is satisfactory," he says.

"If the U.S. or any big power will allow itself to go for this kind of punishing expedition on relatively light grounds, or erroneous grounds, I think that is worrisome? The idea of having a Security Council authorization seems pretty good to me? I feel much more uneasy about an individual country taking it upon itself to be the arbiter and to be the judge."

Ignoring those who believe the U.N.'s ship of nations hit an iceberg in March, Blix spent his last few weeks on the job meditatively cataloging UNMOVIC's vast cargo of information and unresolved disarmament issues-intelligence the U.S. is not using.

As he looks back on his time in the spotlight, he seems to have found some peace of mind.

"I like to coldly weigh these things against each other, and then I am less agitated," he says, gently tapping a thick index finger on the table as though adding sums with an invisible calculator. The signal the U.S. sent by invading Iraq "could be helpful on other nonproliferation issues in other contexts."

Blix is not sorry to see Saddam Hussein gone. "Whether they find any weapons or they do not find any, at any rate an absolutely odious regime has been taken out," he says.

Still, like many observers he has growing doubts that Iraq had WMD. He notes that when Lt. General Amer al-Saadi surrendered in May, the alleged head of Iraq's special weapons programs said there weren't any WMD in the country. "I don't see why he would still be afraid of the regime, and other leading figures have said the same," Blix said at the time.

But the chief inspector was doing more than trying to find weapons. He wanted to set a precedent. "I saw myself as having two major tasks," he says. "One was to perform as effective inspections as we could, and I think they were. And the other was to give a very truthful picture of what we did and what we saw."

He had hoped for a peaceful solution. "I feel sad that we did not have more time for the inspections," he says. The 111 days were not enough, but he didn't explicitly ask for more because that would have implied a solution that was impossible to guarantee.

President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are now in Blix's seat. A May 4 New York Times headline that read "Bush Says It Will Take Time to Find Iraq's Banned Arms" could well have substituted the chief inspector's name a few months earlier.

Blix maintains that his inspections could have worked, but they would have required renewed containment and a continued U.S. military presence-a model that had scant support with an American administration that began insisting on regime change in February.

Lately his continuing calls for U.N. inspectors to return to Iraq have placed him ever more at odds with U.S. foreign policy. A Swedish expert in international law and nonproliferation, Blix is the apotheosis of everything American hawks loathe about Europe and the U.N. He has met Bush and most of the president's advisers, and remains diplomatic in his assessments of them. Relations have always been cordial, he says, despite antagonism from some pundits and lower-level officials, but his views are clearly different.

After hearing Richard Perle of the Defense Policy Board speak against disarmament at one conference in Stockholm, "I asked him whether he by any chance was setting up an International Rifles Association," Blix says dryly. Perle and other neo-conservatives in the administration have "a very extreme way of thinking," Blix believes, and their unilateralist and interventionist agenda is risky. "I think they will probably run into a lot of unpleasant things if they pursue it."

Such views are hardly surprising coming from the head of a U.N. commission, and even now he chooses words carefully. Listening to him and reading his typically dry, legalistic essays, it becomes evident that he has been shaped by his half century in international law and public service. Blix exudes what the French call déformation professionnelle. But there is more to him than diplomatic dogma.

An unlikely celebrity, Blix is the subject of a website, "Hans Blix Superinspector," that wrongly claims he had a side career rally-racing Volvos. In an online computer game called "Dr. Strangeblix," players can guide the avuncular Swede through a maze.

Blix is a private man who avoids discussing his family life. He has a brother and a sister and is married to Sweden's polar ambassador, Eva Kettis, who monitors Arctic and Antarctic issues. They have two sons and a grandson.

"He's a very carefully controlled person, tight-lipped, but he has a sense of humor and smiles and laughs now and then," says Ed Luck, director of the Center on International Organization at Columbia University. The laugh is hearty; the smile is broad and displays large, uneven teeth.

The earthiness in Blix likely stems from his love of nature. In the winter he enjoys cross-country skiing; during summers in the countryside he makes his own marmalade.

"I love picking blueberries," he says. "It's very constructive-you produce something you can eat."

Former U.S. Ambassador to Italy and Spain Richard Gardner says his old friend has a great deal of integrity. "He will not bend under pressure from one country or another, is quite independent-minded and will tell it as he sees it," Gardner says. "He's very informal, relaxed, gregarious, scholarly, intellectual, and never raises his voice. And yet he's tough."

Blix's views are rooted in his history. He was born in 1928 in Uppsala, an old university town that straddles the Fyrisån river an hour northwest of Stockholm. As a teenager in neutral Sweden he watched the rest of Europe tear itself apart in WWII. Inspired by Philip Jessup's A Modern Law of Nations and its hopeful view that international rules and treaties could help build a more peaceful world, he embarked on a career in international law.

Bridging academia and politics, he was a professor at Stockholm University and a member of Sweden's delegation to the U.N. General Assembly for 20 years. Politically a liberal-in the European, anti-Socialist sense-he was briefly Sweden's foreign minister. As an expert on laws governing the use of force, peaceful settlements and non-interventionism, he helped draft the Convention on the Law of Treaties, or "the mother of all treaties," as Blix now calls it.

He worked on development and environmental issues for years at the Foreign Ministry, and became convinced that nuclear power was a solution to air pollution and global warming. He campaigned successfully in favor of completing Sweden's reactor program, and in 1981 was appointed head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N. organization that promotes and monitors the peaceful use of nuclear technology.

Israel bombed Iraq's Osirak nuclear research reactor that same year. Blix sees it as the first in a chain of unilateral interventions. The Security Council condemned the attack, but now Vice President Cheney and others praise it.

"I'd like to see a very close audit of that affair before I go along with that view," says Blix. "It may be that it was justified, but I do not think the IAEA has been able to trace an Iraqi plan to go for a plutonium bomb-because that's what they could have done with that research reactor."

The Chernobyl meltdown in 1986 was the next flashpoint in what proved to be an eventful watch at the IAEA for Blix. He was among the first outsiders invited to inspect the site, and helped quickly draft two conventions in response. But critics charged that in his zeal to promote nuclear energy Blix appeased the Soviets by downplaying Chernobyl's health risks and was too quick to certify the plant's concrete sarcophagus as safe.

Far greater was the outcry after the 1991 Gulf War, when inspectors made the startling discovery that Iraq had enough enriched uranium to make a nuclear bomb. The IAEA had been ready to give Saddam a clean bill of health. Blix was ridiculed in some quarters. "I don't think he has ever owned up to the IAEA's failure on Iraq," says one nonproliferation expert.

Blix counters that he has always acknowledged it, and says that the problem lay in the rules governing the agency, not in a lack of diligence. Regulations only allowed inspectors to visit officially declared nuclear facilities. Moreover, notes Blix, the CIA, British intelligence and Mossad had also failed to detect Iraq's weapons program. Early in 2002 the Pentagon asked the CIA to investigate the reasons for the IAEA's failure. Apparently the report largely absolves Blix of blame.

Under his direction, the IAEA pushed for and got tougher protocols on inspections, which in 1993 helped reveal that North Korea violated the Non-Proliferation Treaty by reprocessing more plutonium than it had declared. Blix began to wonder if other countries were also reneging on their agreements.

He concluded that to halt proliferation we had to build a system that removed the geopolitical threats that create the incentives to arm. Disarmament treaties could create legal thresholds, but more barriers such as export controls and inspections were needed to reassure nations. In 1997, he took those thoughts with him into retirement.

Two years later, while on holiday in Patagonia, he got a call from U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. The Security Council wanted him to head a new task force to disarm Iraq. Blix was not the council's first choice. By some accounts, two dozen others were considered. Top of the list was Sweden's Rolf Ekéus, who had led UNSCOM, the original U.N. Special Commission on Iraq, but France, Russia and Tunisia refused. That left Blix.

"If Kofi Annan phones you and he says that, 'We can't find anyone else, we've tried now for months, your name is the only one,' it's not only flattering, but it's also a certain pressure, since I've been dealing with non-proliferation all my life," recalls Blix.

He also had a new approach he wanted to try. UNSCOM, particularly under its second boss, Richard Butler, had been quite aggressive until the inspectors were pulled out in 1998, and little had been uncovered since 1994. "I often take off my hat for what they did? But this particular aspect of it, the cowboy style, was not a good one," says Blix. He favored a gentler touch.

"While I was not naive enough to think that the Iraqis were going to own up to what they had just because we are courteous, nevertheless I thought there was a chance that one could do better." Blix took office in March, 2000. As he assembled his team, American cries for action on Iraq grew louder. After two years of stalling, Saddam finally agreed to let the inspectors back in. Blix credits U.S. military pressure for the change.

His critics grew more vocal. President Clinton had approved Blix's appointment, but hawks in Bush's team had no faith in him. They didn't want a Swedish diplomat wandering around being polite to the Iraqis. Conversely, human rights activists were disturbed by his seeming support for continued sanctions. Bizarrely, Iraqi sources spread rumors that he was homosexual.

Some former weapons inspectors-including David Kay, who worked under Blix at the IAEA-said the Swede would be a peacenik patsy for Saddam. And in an excoriating November 1 Washington Times column, former Swedish Deputy Prime Minister Per Ahlmark called Blix "easily misled" and "a wimp." Shrugging off the barbs, Blix says he hasn't met Ahlmark since the late '70s and that the attacks stem from a deep difference of opinion.

"His animosity to me goes back to views, a polemic we had about Iran and nuclear activity." Ahlmark saw Iran as a serious threat, particularly to Israel. Blix did not.

As for Kay, Blix credits him with uncovering Iraq's nuclear plans, but says the American inspector wanted a promotion that Blix did not give him. Kay moved to the Uranium Institute in London and began to criticize his old employer. Blix phoned the institute's chairman and told him, "I don't understand this, this guy who worked for us and who I recommended to you is now attacking us all the time."

Though Blix denies pushing for his removal, Kay was edged out not long after, "and he has used all of these years and all his articulate capability and some knowledge of the nonproliferation field, to attack me."

The explanations Blix offers for these rivalries are logical, but one also gets the sense that behind the scenes there has been some careful bureaucratic maneuvering. Is the affable diplomat as straightforward as he seems?

"I'm interested in people, I usually get along with them. There are some bastards like David Kay that I can't tolerate or stand," he says with a rueful chuckle, "but they are very few." Some who know him say he is skilled at playing the political game and imply that he's taken measures to protect his turf when provoked.

"I think diplomacy's often about weeding out unnecessary conflict," says Blix, but "there are points where you have to fight? I do sometimes. I have strong feelings."

That determination was tested on November 18 when Blix entered Iraq.

Unlike UNSCOM's inspectors, who were drawn from governments, most of his people were independent experts under U.N. contracts. "Apparently the CIA was piggybacking some operations on UNSCOM activities," says one former inspector. "That was incredibly misguided." With that track record, UNMOVIC had to be clean and utterly independent if it wanted the international community to trust it. It also meant that it took weeks to assemble teams. Though UNMOVIC had a roster of 300 inspectors, only 11 were in the country for the first inspection on November 27.

That morning they raced off unannounced in their white U.N. jeeps to visit a graphite plant and a missile-engine testing facility. They found nothing, and continued to find little at scores of sites over the following weeks.

Iraq made its grand weapons declaration, which Blix says contained little of interest. Colin Powell and others seized on signs of weakness, calling for Blix to take scientists out of the country for interviews. He resisted, he says, for purely practical reasons. Few were willing to leave, and UNMOVIC was not about to abduct them. Even if they were taken to safe havens, they usually had friends or family the regime could have tortured or killed.

The world kept watching. "Blix's attitude in the next weeks will be of crucial importance," Henry Kissinger told Margaret Warner of PBS in December. Blix was unimpressed, and said so in his January 27 briefing. "Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance-not even today-of disarmament," he told the council.

"This was after we had received this show of 12,000 pages, and this show of the 400 names, which were far too little," Blix grumbles, still annoyed by the memory. "They needed to be roused. If I had any regret about it, it was that we didn't do it earlier."

Some argue that as a bureaucrat, Blix got bogged down with details while ignoring the ticking clock. U.N. Resolution 1441 called for Iraq to comply unconditionally, immediately and actively. Iraq was complying on process, but not substance, and it was hardly immediate. By early February he was warning Saddam that it was "five minutes to midnight." In response, the dictator began to allow U2 spy-plane over-flights and private meetings with scientists-eventually 14 were interviewed.

American observers cheered Blix for taking a surprisingly tough line. But then his report of February 14 seemed more like a valentine to Iraq than a warning. The chorus of criticism returned.

Blix counters that the Iraqis' attitude had changed, and they were frantically trying to cooperate. "If you describe the weather and it's raining the one day and sunny the next day, you don't give the same description," he avers. In his view, the public statements he made were carefully balanced, but so intense was the debate that each side heard the message it wanted to hear. UNMOVIC was dutifully serving a committee that couldn't agree on what it wanted.

"We tried to be independent of individual members," Blix says, but according to insiders, many U.N. diplomats were surprised by his unusual firmness with the U.S.

"When newspapers reported the Americans' anger with me because I was too compliant with the Saddam regime, I think the problem rather was that I had not been sufficiently compliant with the American regime," he says, dismissing charges that he downplayed the discoveries of an aerial drone and a cluster bomb. They were pieces of junk, he insists, not instances of material breach. The Al-Samoud II missiles were another matter. Blix told Iraq to destroy them, and reluctantly Saddam agreed. The inspector regards the episode as a mark of genuine progress. "This is not a breaking of toothpicks, this is disarmament," he told Powell.

In his third report of the year, Blix told the council that even with full compliance the inspections needed time. "It will not take years, nor weeks, but months," he said. Bush said the U.S. had run out of patience and called for military action.

Had Blix been sent on a fool's errand to disarm a dictator who had no real incentive to comply? Many analysts think so. "The rug was pulled out on him very early on, one by the Iraqis and two by the council," Ed Luck says.

"Blix did make some mistakes, but given the constraints I think it was doomed from the outset," says Jonathan Tucker, a former UNSCOM inspector now at the U.S. Institute of Peace. "War was a foregone conclusion, at least from the standpoint of the Bush administration."

UNMOVIC's chief disagrees. He still believes U.S. officials were sincere in supporting the inspections and that war could have been avoided. "There was not anything that in my view was inevitable," he says. For Blix to say otherwise would be to acknowledge that his mission had been a sham.

The British proposed a timetable ending on St. Patrick's Day, based on a set of benchmarks. "I was personally in favor of the UK draft," says Blix, "and I said that explicitly to the French? I thought, if Saddam makes this declaration, and if he succeeds at three [benchmarks] that would be a new situation. So I hadn't given up hope even at that time." Only when Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin made it clear that France would never support the plan or a second resolution did Blix finally, reluctantly, conclude that armed conflict was inevitable.

Perhaps the U.S. had always been bent on making an example of Iraq, and UNMOVIC was at best a distraction. Maybe the result would have been the same with anyone in Blix's job. But he takes some comfort in his own demonstration effect.

"I'd like to be remembered as someone that was independent. We were not on the leash of any member of the Security Council, we did an effective job in terms of inspections, and we reported honestly."

Says Luck: "He has the legacy question. People will judge him over time."

With a WMD threat from North Korea looming, the inspections model he helped define may be tested again soon. Blix predicts that the U.S. will turn to a multilateral solution. When countries seek WMD, it's because they crave security, and guaranteeing it for Kim Jong-Il costs nothing.

"North Korea's is a rotten regime [that] will implode one day, and I think no one is willing to spend a lot of ammunition to change the regime," he says. His least-bad solution would include aid such as oil and food, though he admits that "Christian conservatives may have a hard time swallowing such immoral deals."

The Security Council also should establish an inspections system to verify that North Korea gets rid of its banned weapons. But would the U.S. accept international inspectors? Blix thinks it might be willing to trade control for international legitimacy.

Despite watching the system that was his life's work-the U.N., international law and independent inspections-crumple in the face of American determination, Blix has not fundamentally changed his views. Pointing to the incremental development of law and systems over the past century, he believes that multilateralism is inevitable and that the world is moving inexorably toward a more peaceful, legally defined future.

A realist, he is sanguine about American's superpower status. "If you are to have one world policeman bullying the others by its own judgment," he says, "I could think of many others that would be less pleasant."

Barring any stunning discoveries of weapons caches in Iraq, there will be no dramatic end to this inspector's story, no Sherlock Holmes-style battle to the death with his missing nemesis, Saddam Hussein. A man of peace overtaken by war, Hans Blix will go quietly back into retirement on Gräsö, an island near his birthplace. He will hike and look at the Gulf of Bothnia.

Blix rises from the conference table. He has a lunch date with his wife; the visiting polar ambassador is waiting below. Quickly arranging the papers on his desk, he waves a handful of typed pages-the beginnings of a memoir. The smile and gleam in his eye suggest that in time, a few more questions may be answered.