Blix attacks Washington ‘bastards’

UN Chief Weapons Inspector Dr Hans Blix yesterday hit out at the “bastards” in Washington, who he claims ran a smear campaign against him.

The out-of-character outburst comes as the normally diplomatic 75-year-old is due to retire as head of the UN Monitoring, Inspection and Verification Commission (Unmovic), which oversaw the hunt for biological, chemical and nuclear arms programmes in Iraq.

In an interview with The Guardian, Dr Blix said: "I have my detractors in Washington. There are bastards who spread things around, of course, who planted nasty things in the media. Not that I cared very much. "It was like a mosquito bite in the evening that is there in the morning an irritant."

He told the newspaper he was sure he had been the target of a deliberate smear campaign by some at the Pentagon's "lower level".

At the same time he was being branded a homosexual and a puppet of the Bush administration by the Iraqi regime.

The Swede, an international lawyer and former foreign affairs minister, also claims the US put pressure on the inspectors in Iraq to "make more" of their findings in the hope of winning greater backing for the war in the UN Security Council.

"By and large my relations with the US were good, but towards the end the Bush administration leaned on us," he said. The inspectors searched more than 200 sites over three-and-a-half months but failed to find any weapons of mass destruction, though they did find cluster bombs and drones.

The agency pulled out of Iraq on March 18, just before the US-led attack on Iraq.

Dr Blix believes the rift between the US and the UN which developed over the conflict in Iraq may persist.

He said the UN is viewed as an "alien power" by some in the Bush government and he is convinced "there are people in this administration who say they don't care if the UN sinks under the East river, and other crude things".

Having agreed to come out of retirement to head Unmovic for a limited period after a telephone plea from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan three years ago, Dr Blix said he is now looking forward to returning home to his wife Eva in Stockholm. Since the fall of the Iraqi regime, the US and British governments have come under increasing pressure to prove intelligence vaunted before the war claiming to show Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was not wrong.

The coalition's failure in more than two months to find any weapons of mass destruction the reason cited for the war has triggered a storm of criticism across the world. Last Friday, Dr Blix said he was shaken by the poor quality of the intelligence on Saddam's alleged weapons programmes provided by the US and Britain.

Dr Blix made his comments as it emerged that a pre-war Pentagon intelligence report concluded there was "no reliable information" that Iraq had chemical weapons and no firm evidence it had biological weapons either.

"Only in three of those cases did we find anything at all, and in none of these cases were there any weapons of mass destruction, and that shook me a bit, I must say," he said.

"I thought my God, if this is the best intelligence they have and we find nothing, what about the rest?"

At the same time, Downing Street faced fresh claims about its role in the preparation of a controversial dossier on Iraq's WMD, with an allegation that British intelligence services were asked up to eight times to rewrite the document.