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By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, May 21, 2003; Page A20

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The United States has started discussions with the International Atomic Energy Agency to make arrangements for IAEA teams to return to Iraq to determine what may have been stolen from nuclear sites, a State Department official said yesterday.

The negotiations apparently began one day after IAEA General Secretary Mohamed ElBaradei issued a statement saying he was concerned that "nuclear and radioactive materials may no longer be under control" in Iraq, particularly at the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center 30 miles south of Baghdad. Radioactive materials were stored at the site under IAEA supervision before the war.

ElBaradei said Monday that low-enriched uranium, uranium oxide powder and other radioactive items reported stolen from Tuwaitha may have created "a potentially serious humanitarian situation." He asked the United States to grant immediate approval for the IAEA to dispatch safety and emergency response teams to the area.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday backed a return of the IAEA specialists. At a news conference at the Pentagon, he said he had discussed the issue with Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, head of U.S. Central Command and overseer of military operations in Iraq. "And his attitude is he has no problem with their going in and that's been communicated within our government," Rumsfeld said.

The talks between the United States and IAEA, which are taking place at the U.N. agency's headquarters in Vienna, are being carried out under the IAEA's responsibilities under the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and outside ongoing negotiations in New York over a new U.N. resolution on Iraq, the State Department official said.

An IAEA spokesman said in a telephone interview from Vienna that agency teams in Iraq in January for their last survey had compiled a detailed inventory of what was at Tuwaitha. ElBaradei sent the U.S. government a letter on April 10, a day after the collapse of the Iraqi government, warning about the need to secure the site. The site was at the top of an IAEA list of nuclear sites in Iraq requiring protection.

An IAEA spokesman said ElBaradei was assured at the time by an official at the United States' U.N. mission in Vienna that the site had been secured.

In Iraq, however, a U.S. Marine engineering company a few days earlier had found the site abandoned and reported that looters were already at the facility. On April 10, a U.S. Army unit arrived and measured radiation levels that made storage buildings too hazardous to enter. Videotape of the site showed wrecked offices and storage drums that once contained either uranium oxide or low-enriched uranium. The Army group withdrew from the IAEA area of Tuwaitha after being told it should not break the agency's sealed containers.

On April 29, ElBaradei sent another letter to the U.S. government expressing his concern after news accounts of looting at Tuwaitha. The IAEA spokesman said yesterday that the IAEA teams that were being prepared to return to Iraq were trained to not only examine what remains at the site and what is missing, but also to try to determine where the missing items went.

At his news conference, Rumsfeld defended a new Pentagon intelligence unit being put together by Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, saying it is no threat to Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet. Rumsfeld described Cambone's 100-person organization as a "very small office . . . at a very senior level" that would provide a central interaction point for the Pentagon to the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies "in a more professional and coordinated way."

Another senior Pentagon official said the office would neither collect nor analyze intelligence and thus not threaten the CIA or the Defense Intelligence Agency, an arm of the Pentagon. Its prime roles, this official said, will be to look to possible future needs in intelligence and means of supporting the military units.

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Direct Link:
--http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17225-2003May20.html

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