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This week on 60 Minutes, Correspondent Leslie Stahl sits down with Rafael Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Grossi is the man tasked with keeping the world from the brink of nuclear war by keeping an eye on countries like Russia, Iran and North Korea.
Twenty years ago, nuclear monitors at the IAEA and the UN were narrowly focused on Iraq. In November 2002, 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Croft spoke with Hans Blix, former head of the IAEA, who at the time headed the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission.
Blix and his team were about to enter Iraq to look for evidence of weapons of mass destruction, or WMD. “What they find, or don’t find, could determine whether the United States goes to war against Iraq,” Croft said at the time.
Croft’s report would document the preparations for the American invasion – though not in the way many expected.
As Croft reported in November 2002, Blix’s team consisted of 280 weapons inspectors from around the world. International experts had access to helicopters, surveillance planes and state-of-the-art detection devices, some of which were specially designed for the mission. UN Security Council Resolution 1441 granted the team unimpeded, unconditional and unrestricted access to any location in Iraq and allowed them to take Iraqi scientists and their families out of the country for interviews.
While previous teams of inspectors faced the Iraqis, anticipating their every move, Blix told Croft he was confident his team would now be able to surprise the Iraqis.
“We’re going to go to a lot of places that don’t expect us,” Blix said.
Two months after Croft’s report aired, Blix made a bombshell announcement. In January 2003, Blix said that after nearly 400 inspections, he and his team had found no “smoking guns” in Iraq.
But later that month, in his State of the Union address, President George W. Bush indicated that he continued to view Iraq’s WMD capabilities as a threat. Hinting that Iraq was still trying to develop nuclear weapons, Bush said: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein has recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
On March 7, 2003, Mohamed ElBaradei, then Director-General of the IAEA, joined Blix in a report to the United Nations. According to ElBaradei, the IAEA has concluded that documents purporting to show that Iraq was shopping for uranium in Niger were in fact forged.
Less than two weeks later, the US invaded Iraq.
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